Let's stop feeding the squirrels!

Yikes, did you see this? There was a Schmonald Schtrump rally-huh? Yeah, remember? I have a paranoid theory that whenever we say his name he gets a dollar. It's irrational, so just humor me, is that so much to ask? Anyway, he held a rally in Costa Mesa California yesterday and things got smashy:

Pictured: Angry mob.

A choice to be orange and
goon-like. Also sleazy.

Hundreds turned out to throw rocks, jump up and down on police cars and make up chants about how racist that sleazy, leathery orange goon is. The whole thing was-huh? Yeah, I realized I just called him a sleazy leathery orange goon, but that's not a race, that's a choice. Fortunately there were no injuries and almost everyone (except the 17 that got arrested) went home in time to catch the Late Show with Stephen Colbert. And then today he was speaking in Berlingame and again, protest, angry chants...

The protestors even blocked the entrance to the hotel where he was speaking forcing him and his staff to walk up an embankment.

An embankment! Like a common...uh, wait, what
scuttles up embankments? Goats? Like a common goat!

So like, the protesting is cool and completely understandable. I mean, Donald Tru-Shmonald Schtrump is objectively awful and running for president entirely on a campaign of racism, misogyny, anti-immigration and terrifying jingoism. Here, check this out:

Finally, a retired, elderly college basketball
coach is weighing in. This contest is over.

"I'll tell you who they said wasn't presidential...Harry Truman. And Harry Truman, with what he did in dropping and having the guts to drop the bomb in 1944, saved billions of American lives."

-former basketball coach and adult 

who calls himself Bobby, Bobby Knight

Um, leaving aside the fact that Harry Truman dropped the bomb in 1945 and that the population of the United States was no where near a billion much less billions with an 's,' what the shit?

I think we all think President Schtrump would drop the bomb. Like, all the time. On anyone. That's why we're all terrified that he might one day be handcuffed to the nuclear football.

Above: The Football is a briefcase full of nuclear codes lugged around by a
military aide just in case the President needs to vaporize someone. No really, it's a real
thing and the former host of The Apprentice might soon be in charge of it. Fuuuuuck.

"Perimeter Breach! The stanchion is
down! Fall back! Repeat, fall
back to the concierge's desk!"

But whatever, smashing up cop cars and throwing rocks because you don't like the guy isn't cool either and it's not going to change anything. He's not suddenly going to call off his preposterous bid to run America into the ground because a bunch of 20-somethings knocked over a police stanchion at the Hyatt. If anything, I think he feeds on the attention. This is not someone who understands the difference between good attention and bad attention. This is someone who just likes that people talk about him.

I think there's probably an Oscar Wilde quote that applies here. The one about how the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about? I don't know, it seems weird to apply it to Schtrump. He doesn't seem like much of a reader. Clive Cussler or Tom Clancy maybe. I don't know, something about submarines, but I'm getting off topic.

He's like Danielle Steel but for old white guys.

C'mon, he used to be on Fox news
and worked for Lehman Brothers.
Let's smash some windows about that!

The point is that if Schtrump wasn't so ridiculous and hate-filled we wouldn't talk about him and he'd probably go away. All the outrage and brick-throwing is like feeding the squirrels; it just makes him come back for more. We're all guilty. I used to talk about nerd stuff and complain about NASA not inventing a warp drive quickly enough and here I am, going on about Schtrump. And what's with the other ones, Ted Cruz and whatsisname? John Kasich? Let's start getting outraged at them. They're terrible too, but we're all so focused on the L.O.G. (leathery orange goon, keep up) he gets all the airtime.

Today in disappointing robots...

Look, I don't want to pick on the hip, young roboticists of China's National Defense University, but they're not so great at inventing robots. I mean, neither is the rest of the planet, but seriously check this out:

Ta-da...wait, what is that, an ATM?

So like, reboot Robocop.

It's called AnBot and it was unveiled at the Chonqing Hi-Tech Fair last week. Can you guess what it's for? If you said police patrols and urban pacification you'd be correct. You'd also have probably read ahead because there is nothing about this gleaming white plastic egg on wheels that says 'freeze creep, dead or alive you're coming with me.' Yet that's what AnBot is according to China's People's Daily Online, it's a goddamn real-life Robocop. Well, Robocop if he was awkward, ineffective and kind of lame.

I sincerely hope that the taser is activated
by rapidly tapping the punch button.

AnBot is 1.49 meters in height (so like an un-intimidating 4'8'), weighs 78 kilograms (a buck seventy) and can go up to 18 kph which-holy shit, I was about to make fun of that, but that's eleven miles per hour which actually seems pretty fast for Segway with a taser, so I'll give it that. Oh, didn't I mention? This thing has a taser. AnBot is usually autonomous, but it takes a human remote operator to activate the robot's riot-stoping electro shock super-move. I guess because nobody wants the decision to tase a crowd left up to a glorified Roomba running Windows XP.

AnBot is also equipped with a robotic arm that can grasp a suspect's leg and hold them until they can be apprehended which I'm going to have to call bullshit on. Robots are just not good at grabbing things, it's a stereotype I know, but stereotypes often have a basis in fact. If you've ever played the grabber machine at an arcade, you know what I mean.

Above: AnBot demonstrating its ability to apprehend suspects who are
patiently waiting for AnBot's operator to properly line up the grabber arm.

To be clear, AmBot's most useful
feature is its ability to call the real cops.

Probably less prone to failure is AnBot's built-in call button that will automatically call the Chinese equivalent of 911 which I suppose could come in handy. Say you're the victim of a crime and don't have a cell on you-huh? I don't know, you got mugged? Let's also assume the the streets of Shanghai are completely empty and there's no one around to help. So you're the phone-less victim of a crime at 4 a.m. but don't worry, you've spotted an AnBot. Under those narrow circumstances, you'd totally be glad that AnBot was around.

"C'mon everyone, let's crap all over it!"

-The Internet

Critics, and by critics I mean everyone in the world with a Twitter account, were quick to point out that AnBot is objectively ridiculous. They compared it to a Dalek, a trashcan on wheels and one jerk even referred to it as Voltron's suppository. Full disclosure: that last one was me, but I'm not sure that we're being entirely fair. A least they're trying something new. Clumsy-looking and entirely impractical as a law enforcement tool, yes, but new. And how many robots have you built, hmm?

Thought so. Sure, AnBot would be completely useless should a suspect flee up a flight of stairs or over uneven terrain and yeah, a couple of drunk college kids could easily shove it over rendering it immobile but...sorry, forgot where I was going.

Researchers in Japan meanwhile are lightyears ahead of AnBot with RoBear,
an eldercare robot that uses an innovative cuddly design to mitigate the crushing
guilt you should feel for pawning off your elderly relatives onto a robot bear. 

Happy Conjectural Birthday Shakespeare!

By my troth and yea verily, today is Shakespeare's birth and death day! Oh yes, believe it or not, the not-so immortal bard had the poetic foresight to die on his conjectural birthday.

"Suck on it, Christopher Marlowe..."

-William Shakespeare

"Still with us? Splendid.
We shall call you Cuthbert."

How's that? Yeah, conjectural birthday. Really, nobody knows if today is his actual birthday, but we do know that he was baptized on April 26th and traditionally you waited a few days before naming your offspring. This was, after all, the sixteenth century and medicine wasn't so much a science back then as it was a crap shoot. Since there was a decent chance that your new bundle of joy might be carried off by wolves or the plague or something, it was usually best not to get too attached right away. So scholars all sort of agreed that the 23rd is as good a day as any for Talk Like Shakespeare Day. Oh yes, like how I snuck that in there? Yes, today is Talk Like Shakespeare Day, which for a lot of us is not on a work day making it much harder to annoy our coworkers with a lot of zounds, s'blood's, fie's and a poxes, but whatever, there's always Facebook.

Why don't they just
stage Cliff's Notes?

Anyway, the last year or so has been surprisingly active for a guy that's been dead for four centuries. And by active I mean, his headless corpse has probably been spinning in his grave. Huh? Yeah, we'll get to that. So the Oregon Shakespeare Festival has been busy re-writing his plays in contemporary English, you know, for lazy people, Lifetime is making an American Horror Story-rip off out of A Midsummer Night's Dream cleverly titled a Midsummer's Nightmare and oh yeah, his head might be missing.

Above: I mean look at this fancy idiot.
Age of Reason indeed. (source: history)

Missing! An archeologist investigating the long-held legend that Shakespeare's head was stolen back in the day, says that damage to the tomb dating back to the 18th century backs up the story that the grave was robbed and that if they were to crack it open today they'd find just an empty neck ruff. So why the hell would anyone want the skull? Get this, people in the 1700's were like super into phrenology and might have stolen Shakespeare's skull so they could figure out how he got to be so smart.

So happy Shakespeare's Birth/death-day! And if you have today off, why not crack open that copy of the collected works you have sitting on your shelf to make yourself look smart? Then give up, because it can be kind of chore and who are you trying to impress? Maybe watch the David Tennant Hamlet on PBS instead. Patrick Stewart is in it too so you can pretend The Doctor landed in Denmark to find Professor X sleeping with his mom.

Hey Oregon Shakespeare Festival, have I got an idea for you!

Today in not by a long shot...

"I hope you enjoyed using my word,
incidentally, I take Paypal now."

Well of course he's not happy with Harriet Tubman on the $20 bill. It's like his job to be dissatisfied and to complain about things that are awesome. Who am I talking about? Why that hateful leathery goon running for the GOP nomination. I'm not going to mention his name anymore, because I'm starting to wonder if it doesn't help him. Like, every time someone types his name on the internet he gets a dollar, sort of like how George Lucas owns the word 'droid.' It might sound paranoid, but I wouldn't put it past him.

Anyway, the Tubman twenty thing. Smonald Schtrump came out and accused Treasury Secretary Jack Lew of bowing to political correctness when he finally announced that Harriet Tubman would be replacing Andrew Jackson on the bill:

The $2 featuring Thomas Jefferson.
Sure, he wrote the Declaration of
Independence, but what's he done lately?

"Harriet Tubman is fantastic, I would love to leave Andrew Jackson and see if maybe we can come up with another denomination. Maybe we can do the two dollar bill or we do another bill. I don't like seeing it, yes, I think it's pure political correctness..."

-Smonald Schtrump on how Harriet Tubman is

worth about one tenth of Andrew Jackson 

Pictured: Some guy.

Which, ok, first of all, let's be clear: no one cares what Schtrump thinks about this. He's not the President, he's not in charge of the Treasury. He might be running to run for President but right now he's just some guy. A rich guy with a distressingly huge following. Sure, he's managed to cobble together a coalition of Axe Bodyspray college bros and elderly white men who watch Fox News but he's not someone who's ever been elected to anything and he's not an historian so whatever.

Like most sausage festivals, women
 are disproportionately underrepresented. 

That said, he does have something approaching a point. Yikes, right? Putting Tubman on the twenty is kind of a political move. Of course it is, I mean, no matter who it is, the portrait on the money is going to have implications, that's the whole point. We could just spend paper rectangles with the dollar value printed on them, but that's boring so we stick important historical figures on them. Go ahead, open your wallet, it's like Schoolhouse Rock, and by that I mean it's a educational trip through the sausage fest that is accepted American history.

It's not political correctness, it's more like a political correction. That's why we're kicking Jackson off the twenty; we're trying to balance things out a little and frankly he was kind of an asshole. Nobody's talking about replacing Lincoln, everyone loves Lincoln. We're just taking a small, but important step towards recognizing that people who weren't landed white males also contributed to American history.

"This is an honor really, thank you, but you know it doesn't make up for centuries of slavery,
genocide and treating women like baby-making servants, right? Like, not by a long shot."

-Harriet Tubman (actual quote)

So long Andy-J!

Finally, right? Huh? Finally what? You know, you could just agree with me, it's not like I've ever steered you wrong. But if you must know, it looks like Treasury Secretary Jack Lew might be announcing this week that noted slave-holder and President Andrew 'Trail of Tears' Jackson's days as the face of the twenty dollar bill might be numbered. Well, numbered very high or maybe not at all, but hang on, well get to that.

Booooo!

Well it's about time some white male
Presidents got some recognition...

You might remember that a while back there was a grass roots campaign to kick Andy J-yeah, that's what I'm calling him now-off the $20 and replace him with an historically important woman. It was called Women on 20's which, while not super imaginatively named, got right to the crux of it by saying hey, how come there's a slaveholding genocidal maniac on the twenty and not say a notable American woman? After all, there's like six commonly used American bills and not one of them features a woman. Yeah, ok, Sacagawea was on the dollar coin and so was Susan B. Anthony but now they put the presidents on those as well.

Pictured: Jack Lew reminding
women to keep expectations low.

Women on 20's gave supporters the opportunity to vote for who should be the new face that comes spurting out of ATM's and Harriet Tubman won. People got excited, it made the news and even the Treasury Secretary took notice. Lew's response: 

'Great idea ladies, but instead of the twenty, what if it was the ten? And instead of a woman on all the tens, how about just some. They'll be more special that way.'

-Jack Lew, Secretary of the Treasury

Yeah, ok, I'm paraphrasing here, but the gist was that the $10 was the next one up for a redesign, so since we're changing it anyway, let's throw half the population a bone and put a woman on a portion of the tens. Yeah, some of them. Alexander Hamilton, first Treasury Secretary and man, would still be on the rest.

"Are you kidding me? This is bullshit."

-Harriet Tubman-what? 

Yes, paraphrasing agin* 

Pictured: The cast of Hamilton not
singing about Andrew Jackson.

So why the sudden change of heart? I wish it was because Lew saw what a lame-ass consolation prize a few $10 bills were to the Women on 20's campaign, but it could just as easily be because of the pro-Hamilton backlash. Yes, there are apparently a ton of Hamilton fans out there and they were outraged that the guy that invented the U.S. Department of the Treasury would lose his spot on the money while the asshole that invented the Indian Removal Act gets to keep his. Also, it doesn't hurt that Hamilton is the subject of a super-sucessful Broadway musical staring a multi-racial cast and that Jackson, you know, isn't.

Or some kind of barter system using
canned goods and recycled urine?

Ok, finally. We get a woman on the twenty-dollar bill, the anti-slavery Alexander Hamilton gets to keep the front of the $10 and in a surprise move, Secretary Lew announced that reverse of the ten-ski will be replaced with a mural celebrating the suffrage movement. Good job! Everybody's happy right? Yes....except no. It turns out the $20 with a woman on it won't be issued until at least 2030. Yes, 20 goddamn 30 also known as the future. I mean, will we even have paper money then? Won't we all use space credits or something?

Hmm...pretty weak...it needs
something, maybe more balls?

As for the 'mural on the back of the $10' idea, Susan Ades Stone and Barbara Ortiz Howard from Women on 20's have sent an open letter to Lew expressing how incredibly weaksauce his plan is:

"...we fear that you believe the public will be satisfied with giving women nothing but a cameo role on the back of a minor bill. It will take a microscope to see who those individuals are, and we'll be left with another decade or more of woefully inadequate representation of women and their worth."

A microscope? That's preposterous. Everyone could simply carry
around a powerful magnifying lens or a jeweler's loupe if they want see
how much we value the contributions of women in American history.

"A woman? On the money? Impossible! It'd take
years just to work out the lipstick shading."

-The U.S. Bureau of 

Engraving and Printing

They go on to compare the back of the bill to the back of the bus as in Rosa Park's bus which, while I'm both a man and white, sounds about right. So what's the problem here? According to the CNN article, someone at the Treasury says that the long wait for the new twenty is due to the time it takes to design the bill with adequate anti-counterfeit measures. A decade? Seriously? We built the entire Hoover dam in four years, but you mean to tell me we can't start cranking out Tubman twenties and Eleanore Roosevelt tens before the new Star Wars trilogy is over? Poppycock I say. Poppycock and balderdash. 

*fine, not an actual quote...that I can prove. She lived to be like 91, she must have said something like that at some point in her life.

It's the past of yesterday's future!

Hey did you see this? According to this internet site, the new Star Trek TV series (yes there is, where have you been?) will be set in the original Trek universe, after Star Trek VI, but before TNG. Yes, the series will be set in the past of yesterday's future, pre-history altering temporal incursion and yes, we're  about to talk about Star Trek, so as always, either bail out now or buckle those nerd belts.

In quantum mechanics, this is known as the multi-Worf theory of reality.

From left to right: dead, dead, bald,
Shatner (also bald), alive, dead, alive.

If you're not at least a journeyman or higher Star Trek geek, that requires some explanation and nerds love to explain things because pedantry. Despite being watchable by non-fans, the recent J. J. Abrams movies were set in an alternate version of the Star Trek universe created by Eric Bana having access to a magic time hole. Here, I did a whole thing about it. This allowed Abrams to cast younger, sexier (and alive) versions of the original crew and to use sets that don't look like they use vacuum tubes and a Lite-Bright to navigate at faster-than-light speeds.

This re-booted universe was similar to the original series from the 1960's but effectively overwrote it. Now Kirk is into the Beastie Boys, Spock and Uhura are totally doing it and Khan, originally an Indian Sikh played by an hispanic actor, is Benedict Cumberbatch.

"Because science Kirk, because science."

-Kahn on why he no longer

looks like Ricardo Monttalbán

"Puny Hew-mons! Tremble before
our strong third quarter earnings!"

But whatever, you can forget all that now, because according to this rumor the new show will be set in the original, un-re-booted continuity, but will be an inbetween-quel, specifically picking up sometime after Star Trek VI-the last movie to feature the entire original series cast-but before Star Trek: the Next Generation. Supposedly this is because Bryan Fuller wants to use the Klingons as adversaries and by the time TNG rolls around they've made peace with the Federation and nobody ever found the capitalism-obsessed Ferengi menacing.

While this is all still a rumor it does seem to jibe with the involvement of Nicholas Myers who directed both Star Trek VI and the action-y Wrath of Khan which is like everyone's favorite.

Above: Pew-pew!

Parallel Captain Archer fighting the Gorn
on the Defiant. It's a fan-service smoothie.*

Anyway, as a big huge nerd I obviously have an opinion about this and while it'll be nice to see a new Trek series, I would have preferred a next, next generation. If Enterprise, the Star Trek prequel series from a few years ago showed us anything it's that prequels (and inbetween-quels, whatever) have a tendency to rehash and remix rather than come up with anything new. But the good news is that the new show is also supposedly going to be an anthology, sort of like American Horror Story, so season two might well pick up after TNG or even further into the future of the future.

Yup, there's still hope that we might still get to see The Adventures of Captain Worf or a medical drama where the pompous Doctor from Voyager teams up with the arrogant doctor from Deep Space Nine.

And they start a band.

*if that reference made sense to you, pat yourself on the back. And then go outdoors, get some fresh air or something. You're looking a bit pale.

Oodles of Roubles, yet worth every Kopek!

At $.015 per rouble this extravagant-
looking cash fan is barely enough to
settle the bill at Olive Garden.

Say, how much would you pay to preserve the ninety year-old corpse of Russian Revolutionary Vladimir Lenin? Fifty thousand dollars? A hundred? If you said two hundred thousand dollars, which is thirteen million roubles, you win! Also, you're really good at working out the exchange rate. However you, like the Russian government, might not be really good at coming up with great uses for large sums of money because that's how much they'll spend on repairs and cleaning for Lenin's body which had been on display in Red Square since 1924.

Wait, wah? Yeah. So why and how the shit are they spending $200,000 to keep Lenin's body looking Revolution-fresh after nine decades?

He smells Revolution fresh as well...revolutions
smell like formaldehyde and paraffin wax, right?

Or teaming up with re-animated Stalin
for a wacky Odd-Couple-like comedy
TV series. Coming this fall on ABC!

The how is science. Lenin, despite his dedication to Marxist principles and stylish balbo is still just a man-shaped pile of tissue and bones and as such is prone to mold and decay just like his decadent capitalist pig contemporaries in the west. Understandably, Weekend at Bernie's-ing him requires a lot of work, so the government has put together a team of five corpse-preserving specialists to re-enbalm the body every two years, slathering on liquid latex and stitching on replacement skin as needed in order to keep Lenin looking like he could climb out of his tomb at any moment and start redistributing Russian land.

The why they're doing this is a little more complicated because according to an online survey, Russians also think this is creepy and pointless and overwhelmingly favor just burying the guy. I suppose it's not that much money when you're talking about a national budget but it's still 100% more than we spent stuffing Woodrow Wilson.

Here in America we use advanced imagineering techniques to recreate our leaders as
edutaining animatronic mannequins who bring history to life. Well, as close to life as
you can get with a bunch of dead-eyed glorified Teddy Rukspins in powdered wigs. 

Because Bruce Springsteen, Bryan Adams and porn can be very persuasive...

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