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James Earl Jones on Sesame Street scaring the shit out of little kids long before he had Darth Vader to do it for him.

In a documentary by Michael Cockerell on ex-Prime Minister’s reflections on leaving 10 Downing Street, John Major, successfully channeled the spirit of Donald Rumsfeld in his answer on the loss of access to intelligence data:

“People ask you questions and you’re about to answer and you think to yourself, ‘hang on, I’m about to express an opinion on this and I haven’t seen the papers. I don’t know what it is that the prime minister knows that I no longer know’.

“So here am I about to say that I think he should have handled this differently, but he may know something that I once would have known that nobody else knows.”

BBC News

According to National Geographic, nearly two-thirds of Americans can’t find Iraq on a map, while 75% of Americans can’t find Israel on a map of the Middle East! The solution? A new companion to the pledge of allegiance (with the added bonus of music):

…all to the tune of Jarabe Tapatío. Oh sweet, delicious irony!

Oh I don’t care if people are seeing it elsewhere. Highest cute-to-drama ratio you’ll ever find–short of Alfred Hitchcock in a bikini.

And a .gif:

One of comedy’s greatest moments.

I knew Rolls-Royce’s habit of painting those hypnotic wheels on the turbines didn’t affect just me!

Now seating Death, party of five…

Back in 2003, I had the opportunity to hear Raymond Gilmartin, then-CEO of Merck, give a lecture on Corporate Social Responsibility. I asked him how he reconciled giving away millions of dollars in free medication with the bottom line. His answer was so full of hot air that I felt the entire auditorium rising through the troposphere. In citing their giveaway of a drug which cured river blindness as their proudest achievement, a one-minute Google search after the lecture revealed that Merck only donated the drug after no government proved willing to pay the asking price.

Now comes Michael Moore’s new film, SiCKO, “a comedy about 45 million people with no health care in the richest country on Earth.” Indeed, after seeing his film, it becomes obvious that the health insurance and drug industries are playing catch up to the old black sheep of business–you know, those that have to pay a premium for leaving your conscience at home. In these industries, you either rationalize it (“It’s okay to use radioactive uranium in cannon shells rather than pricey tungsten–we’re defending our country!’) or use ideology (“Personal responsibility–people should smoke if they want to”) against your own conscience. Otherwise stay at home.

Moorisms aside, the movie is much less strident than its predecessors. Just as Lou Dobbs says that he can get away with what he preaches because he’s an “activist journalist”, so can Michael Moore–he can praise the NHS and Canada’s medicare all he wants, but he doesn’t have to address the negative aspects of socialized medicine. Despite this, the movie works exactly as intended–a humanizing, humbling thought-provoking example of cinema. Leave the real documentary work to PBS Frontline.

It’s kind of interesting. In Brazil, I’m a right-winger. In the US, I’m a left-winger. It is, in fact, the dichotomy between plan and execution. Brazil has universal healthcare for everyone, but it doesn’t work. The US has the best healthcare system in world, but only for a select few. If one country has the right ideas, but can’t execute it, and the other can execute anything it sets its mind to but with the wrong principles, whose system is best? My grandfather got a quadruple bypass at Unicamp in Brazil and didn’t pay one cent (“Best bypass I ever had!” was the quote). Austin broke his foot and got a hospital bill in the thousands.

The movie is perhaps one year too early to make the loud noises Fahrenheit 9/11 was supposed to have made in the last presidential elections. And while I am tempted to yell out “say it ain’t so”, I believe universal health care will tread, along with global warming and Darfur, that all-too-familiar complacency path in the US. If the US is to change that, it will take more than a Tommy Douglas, more than an Al Gore, to push those changes through. As Bill Maher once said:

Recently, it was discovered that bees won’t fly near cell phones. The electromagnetic signals they emit might screw up the bees’ navigation system, knocking them out of the sky. So, thanks, big mouth guy in line at Starbucks. You just killed us.

It’s nature’s way of saying, “Can you hear me now?”

Last week, I asked, if it solved global warming, would you give up the TV remote and go back to carting your fat ass over to the television set every time you wanted to change the channel. If it comes down to the cell phone versus the bee, will we choose to literally blather ourselves to death? Will we continue to tell ourselves that we don’t have to solve environmental problems, we can just adapt? Build sea walls instead of stopping the ice caps from melting. Don’t save the creatures of the earth in the oceans; just learn to eat the slime and the jellyfish that nothing can kill; like Chinese restaurants are already doing.

You know what? Maybe you don’t need to talk on your cell phone all the time. Maybe you don’t need a bag when you buy a keychain. Americans throw out 100 billion plastic bags a year, and they all take 1,000 years to decompose. Your children’s children’s children will never know you, but they’ll know you once bought batteries at the 99-cents Store because the bag will still be caught in a tree. Except there won’t be any trees.

Sunday is Earth Day. Please educate someone about the birds and the bees. Because, without bees, humans become the canary in the coal mine. And we make bad canaries, because we’re already such sheep.

By nature, it seems, we need a pack of dogs to herd us into place. If they have to bite our ankles to get us there, so be it.

You can watch SiCKO online right now at one of his nemesis’ websites.

William Shatner is now doing a random personal injury lawyer commercial playing all over the country. To celebrate it, I’d like remind everyone that while we may lampoon him often, we have to recognize that at the very least he affords us precious revisionist humor gems such as the video below: Stewie Griffin performing Bill’s infamous 1978 rendition of Rocketman.

I couldn’t have said it better myself: “Oh yeah, that’s the good stuff.”

Freeze-dried ice cream, often consumed by NASA astronauts and 7 year-olds visiting Space Camp, was invented on the request of NASA during the Gemini project. The food’s inventor, however, was not Nestlé or any other food company which was then supplying the space program, but rather the Whirpool corporation, more famously known for its dishwashers.

(via NASA)