Day: July 18, 2014

There’s a lot of NASA-related stuff out there lately. Of course, it’s the 45th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, but also, NASA officials said this week that they expect to find some sort of extraterrestrial life in the next 20 years. Here’s a question for them: How do they know? NASA isn’t exactly the best at keeping things on schedule. We should have been to Mars a dozen times over by now. But how can anyone possible estimate when mankind will find evidence of life on other planets? That’s like saying 200 years ago that we’re close to discovering indoor plumbing. If you were busy getting meatballs thrown to you in the All-Star game this week, odds are you missed it.

Passing the time in an airport
Authorities say a man decided to get a little drunk at a San Francisco airport, which led to other problems. He happened to be wearing a blue shirt and khakis, and decided he looked enough like a TSA agent to give it a whirl. He gave two woman pat-downs in a private area he set up for himself before he got caught. It’s getting harder and harder to tell the security people from the molesters.

Didn’t they kill Captain America already?
This week, it was announced that there will be a new Thor, who is a woman, and a new Captain America, who is a black man. Also, the much anticipated issue where Archie dies was finally released. In all, it was a bad week for white guys in comic books. Naturally, a lot of people who don’t read comic books had very strong opinions about the choices the writers made.

Also wanted: Anne Hathaway
It was announced this week that a few years ago, Russian hackers got into Nasdaq’s system, snooped around, and planted a “digital bomb” that could damage the trading system. Fortunately, it never went off. Experts believe that this was largely because Bane and his henchmen got out as soon as they had what they wanted.

Japan’s population is shrinking. It’s one of the few countries that can say this. While they are doing their part to avoid overpopulating the world, it’s also a bad thing, because someone needs to take care of all the old people.

So Japanese researchers came up with a very Japanese way to solve the problem: more robots. They said in a white paper that robots could even be applied to agriculture and construction jobs, because everyone wants robots in charge or your food or making cat calls at you when you walk by.

Does Japan ever have good ideas?

Remember how it felt that in the 80’s and up to the mid 90’s, every other movie had a land developer as the villain. He (and yes, it was a he) may have been trying to get his hands on the land for the purposes of bulldozing it over and building, or perhaps he was trying to build a new community for yuppies. No matter what, a group of spunky kids got together and beat the odds, typically through skilled traps, paint and a competition exploiting a long forgotten law.

Now, in the year 2014, people fighting land developers just use horny farm animals. Because Florida.

Things sure have changed.