Astrophysicist and science educator Neil deGrasse Tyson is notorious for advocating Pluto’s demotion from full planet status, something a lot of people intensely disliked, especially when the International Astronomical Union voted to formally reclassify it as a “dwarf planet” in 2006. (You can read IAU’s page on Pluto at this link.)
Here Tyson amusingly reads and responds to complaints and even issues a joke threat. I hope it’s a joke, anyway…
As an aside, it seems to me there’s a pretty big difference between gas giants (Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, the last two sometimes distinguished as “ice giants”) and the rocky planets (Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars). If we’re going to have “dwarf planets” (Ceres, Pluto, and some spherical trans-Neptunian objects), why not “giant planets” as well? Then we could cut the count of plain old planets to just four…
You might remember the Brazilian television program’s fake elevator prank I posted a little over two years ago at this link. Here’s an even more elaborate one from the same folks, this time apparently done with the cooperation of a subway system.
As with the elevator version, the lights flicker off, and when they come back on, there’s a pale little girl in white dress standing there holding a dolly, with no obvious place she could have come from. Then the little girl screams, and grown men cower (or, in the earlier clip, flee from the elevator at a run with the little girl and her dolly in hot pursuit).
This reinforces the impression I formed watching the tricycle scene in Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of Stephen King’s The Shining: Little girls are just scary.
John Oliver and HBO’s Last Week Tonight take on another important subject, this time patent trolls. These are outfits that buy up patents (often overly broad ones handed out too carelessly by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office). Patent trolls as a rule don’t actually use the patents to make anything; their sole source of income is lawsuits, or rather the threat of lawsuits. Defending against patent lawsuits costs millions, so the target of a patent troll lawsuit will often save money by settling for hundreds of thousands, even if they have an excellent chance of winning at trial.
Eleven minutes likely to leave you entertained, informed, and severely enraged:
This film has a lot in common with Pretty in Pink (reviewed here), coming from the same writer (John Hughes) and director (Howard Deutch) and some similar themes.
Mary Stuart Masterson is brilliant in a role vaguely similar to Jon Cryer’s in Pretty in Pink (but far less goofy). That is, she’s a bit of a social outcast secretly in love with her best friend of the opposite sex. Her character is a lifelong tomboy who plays drums, dresses in masculine clothes, and is rumored around school to be a lesbian.
The best friend (Eric Stolz) is a quiet, good-looking fellow student with a talent for art who works nights at a service station and annoys his father by putting off seriously planning for college. He’s infatuated with Lea Thompson, a beautiful girl from his working-class neighborhood but who’s so attractive she runs with the popular kids and dates one of the richest guys in school.
Thompson, hugely popular after Back to the Future, was approached by Deutch early on, but she disliked the part and initially turned it down.
At about this time, if I’m not mistaken, her new big-budget film was released, one that like Pretty in Pink featured a character called (at least by Thompson), “Duckie.” The film in question was a pet project of executive producer George Lucas, who expected it to be a tremendous hit that would pay off the mortgage on his Skywalker Ranch complex. But as you may recall, Howard the Duck didn’t quite work out that way. (Lucas reportedly told people at the time that in 20 years Howard the Duck would be hailed as a masterpiece. Well, it’s been over 20 years, George.) Lucas’s friend Steve Jobs helped him out financially by buying the Lucasfilm computer animation division, which Jobs later renamed Pixar.
After Howard the Duck, Thompson was more receptive to a role in Some Kind of Wonderful, especially since Hughes had in the meantime rewritten the script to make her character more sympathetic, and director Howard the Deutch still really, really wanted her for the part, as for that matter did co-star Eric Stolz.
Stoltz had already co-starred with Thompson in Back to the Future, in which Stolz played Marty McFly. If you don’t remember it that way, it’s because after more than a month of shooting he was replaced by Michael J Fox. Thompson and Stolz were still friends, which turned out to be helpful since Stolz and Howard Deutch didn’t get along and Thompson was able to mediate.
Incidentally, I suspect one reason Deutch was so persistent in trying to get Thompson for the part is that he had a crush on her. If so, it worked out well for him, because she dumped Dennis Quaid to start dating Deutch and later ended up marrying him.
Thompson won an award for her acting in Some Kind of Wonderful, but I was more impressed by Mary Stuart Masterson. Of course, it helped that she played such an interesting character, one with flaws (she’s unnecessarily cruel to a male classmate who’s attracted to her, for example) but who cares so much about Stolz that she ends up trying to help him make a good impression on Lea Thompson even though it’s breaking her heart.
Several other actors and their roles merit mention, including John Ashton (whom you’ve likely seen in several movies playing a cop) as Stolz’s father, Maddie Corman as his little sister, and in particular Elias Koteas as a skinhead bully who ends up being not such a bad guy after all and pretty funny besides. He routinely ignored the script and direction and made up his own lines and actions, but he was so hilarious he got away with it. At one point he surprised Lea Thompson by laying his head on her shoulder to her obvious amusement, and they kept it in the film.
Incidentally, Maddie Corman had auditioned early on. When she was called back for a meeting her mother had just been diagnosed with terminal cancer, and because her mother so wanted her to get the part, she came back from the meeting saying, a bit prematurely, that they’d given it to her. Her mother was delighted by the news. By the time she was cast for real, her mother had died. Corman is really good in the role, funny, cute, believable, and likable.
I won’t describe the ending except to say that I liked it a good deal better than the one for Pretty in Pink, so I don’t have to bore the dickens out of you describing how I’d rewrite it.
Since enjoying 16 Candles, a very funny mid-80s teen romantic comedy written and directed by John Hughes and starring Molly Ringwald, I’d been meaning to watch this film, also written by Hughes and starring Ringwald, though directed by Howard Deutch since Hughes was tied up in other projects.
What I found most interesting about it was the ending, or more precisely how it came to be as a result of test screenings. More on that in a minute (and don’t worry, I will warn you before I give any surprises away). Incidentally, Ringwald was only 17 at the time the film was made, but Hughes respected her so much that he involved her in some of the casting decisions. It was her input that made him choose McCarthy over the sort of muscular jock he had assumed high school girls go for.
Ringwald plays a quiet and intelligent high school student whose father (Harry Dean Stanton) has been depressed since his wife abruptly deserted them a few years back. Ringwald has pretty much become the adult in the relationship, waking Stanton up in the morning and affectionately nagging him to get motivated and apply for full-time work. She has an after-school job at a record store owned by an eccentric and very appealing free spirit played by Annie Potts, only about 10 or 15 years out of high school herself. Potts has become one of Ringwald’s two best friends, the other being her childhood pal Duckie (Jon Cryer), who’s even weirder than Potts.
Most of Cryer’s and Ringwald’s high school classmates are richer than they are and look down on them not so much because of their lack of money as because they don’t dress in the accepted styles. Cryer is the bigger outcast, being even poorer and more ostentatiously eccentric.
Ringwald won’t date a rich classmate who clearly just wants to bed her, but when another, nicer rich guy (Andrew McCarthy) asks her out, she discovers she rather likes him. Cryer, on the other hand, is devastated. He’s long been in love with Ringwald and afraid to tell her. The ending isn’t a shock but isn’t what Hughes originally had in mind. More on that below, but first here’s a trailer:
Presumably in part to make up for his dissatisfaction with Pretty in Pink Hughes wrote another film (also directed by Deutch) on a similar theme (though it was by no means a remake), the following year’s Some Kind of Wonderful (reviewed here).
Spoiler alert, as they say: If you haven’t seen the film you may want to skip what follows since it discloses the ending, but I wanted to explain why I didn’t like it and suggest what could have been done to fix its problems while still making audiences happy (or happier, I suspect).
If you’re still with me, it’s pretty obvious early on that the film is going to come down to which guy Ringwald ends up with, which is not to say that a surprise ending was impossible. She could have hooked up with Annie Potts, say, or entered into a three-way relationship, or become a nun. But probably not in a 1980s John Hughes film. So the only major surprise about the ending is that there were two of them.
Test audiences hated the original ending so much they actually booed. The studio was of the opinion that the love that mattered most was their love for box office receipts, so they pressured Hughes to change it, though he and a lot of other people who worked on the film hated the idea except, interestingly enough, Ringwald.
What happens in both versions is that peer pressure, especially from his obnoxious best friend, gets to McCarthy, and he abruptly breaks off contact with Ringwald without telling her why. When she finally corners him in a school hallway and demands to know if he’s still going to take her to the prom, he invents the transparent lie that he can’t because he’d already asked someone else first and forgot.
So she goes to prom by herself, runs into the likewise-solo Duckie in his predictably eccentric version of a tux, and in the original ending they end up dancing in the moonlight. There was some ambiguity whether this meant they were now a couple or simply that he was supporting her as her best friend.
Either way, test audiences absolutely hated it. They wanted Ringwald to get the rich, good-looking, non-nerdy guy, no matter what an ass he’d been and despite Jon Cryer’s character’s complete devotion to her.
Ringwald, though, didn’t think it was credible that her character would end up with Cryer because she thought him too goofy to be boyfriend material. It might have worked, she said in a later interview, had the role of Duckie gone to Robert Downey Jr (who had in fact auditioned) since he struck her as a lot more attractive than Cryer.
Hughes reluctantly rewrote the ending and brought back Ringwald, Cryer, McCarthy, and some other principal actors to reshoot the prom scene. (McCarthy had in the meantime shaved his head for a play, so they had to put a wig on him.)
In the revised ending McCarthy is at the prom by himself, and when he sees Ringwald and Cryer come in together, he goes over to them and delivers a short speech to her, the gist of which is that he’ll love her forever and had never stopped believing in her, but she stopped believing in him, whatever that means, and then he leaves. Cryer sees how she’s looking at McCarthy and rather than saying “Seriously, after he tried to lay all the blame on you, you still want this lying clown?” he nobly urges her to go after him, which of course she does, not caring that she’s rather publicly humiliating her best friend.
As she recedes into the distance Duckie looks away and suddenly realizes he’s being eyed by a hitherto unseen hot young woman. He doubtfully points at himself for confirmation and she nods, managing to put a lot of sexual suggestion into it. Duckie and the audience look at each other.
You might recognize Duckie’s new admirer as Kristy Swanson, who later played the title character in the original movie version of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The end credits giver her character’s name as, and I’m not making this up, “Duckette,” so one can infer that Cryer will enjoy his consolation prize ex machina, as long as he doesn’t give her reason to think he’s a vampire.
This ending was a bigger hit with audiences, but I found it dumb. It’s not so much that Duckie doesn’t get the girl but that McCarthy is such a jerk and Ringwald goes after him anyway. Life has taught me that this is entirely believable, but it still sucks. Hughes could have at least given her a reason to forgive him, not to mention giving a hint why Kristy Swanson finds Duckie appealing.
For example, suppose McCarthy comes up to Ringwald and Cryer and says he’s sorry for being an idiot and treating her so badly and that he’ll regret it for the rest of his life. He’s glad she now had someone who really loves her and and will never hurt her. He tells Duckie he’s a good man and leaves.
As he walks away Ringwald looks at McCarthy with an expression Cryer has no trouble interpreting, so he pulls her around to face him and says,“OK, you know what? Everything he just said is true. I do love you, and more than anything in the world I want you to be happy. So go. Go after him. Right now. He’s got a really good car and you’ll never catch him in that pile of crap you drive if you don’t get to him before he leaves the parking lot, so hurry.” She gives Cryer a look of affection, gratitude, admiration, maybe even awe, and whatever else comes to mind (which is a stage direction that might lead even Ringwald to mayhem), kisses him quickly but emphatically, and scurries off. Duckie watches her leave the same way she watched McCarthy and keeps looking until she’s out of sight.
Then he turns and yells “Augh!” because Kristy Swanson is standing not yards away as in the current ending but right in front of him. She says, “That was the most romantic thing I’ve ever seen. Ever. Are you sad? Do you want to go somewhere and talk? Or whatever?” Then we’re back to the revised ending as shot.
Once again John Oliver and the staff of HBO’s Last Week Tonight offer up a segment that’s entertaining, informative, and even important. This time he talks about the Internal Revenue Service, the part of the federal government tasked with enforcing the tax laws passed by Congress, not to mention taking the blame for them and for the other problems Congress causes for the agency by slashing its budget. Here’s the clip, which runs 20 minutes including a song from a Grammy winner, after which I’ll add my own two cents plus tax.
As Oliver says, the IRS doesn’t make tax law, and its employees suffer more than anybody from the laws’ complexity, not to mention the constant changes coming from Congress, which lately average, no kidding, almost a dozen revisions every week. When taxpayers call for help and can’t get it, the culprit is less the IRS itself than the fact that the Republicans in Congress have succeeded in slashing its budget by about 20 percent in the past few years.
Reducing the IRS budget doesn’t even save the government money, because each $1 cut from the IRS results in the loss of about $6 in taxes that would otherwise be collected. If you really care about shrinking the deficit, not to mention going after tax cheats who don’t pay their fair share, it doesn’t make sense to cut funds for enforcing the law and helping taxpayers deal with the complicated rules.
I do have one quibble with what Oliver says: Yes, it’s true that the Cincinnati office of the IRS investigated a number of organizations applying for 501(c)(4) tax exempt status, some of the aggressively, and most of those organizations were affiliated with the Tea Party movement or other conservative political positions. What Oliver doesn’t say is that that 501(c)(4) status is explicitly for non-political organizations such as neighborhood associations, volunteer fire departments, and the like. The Tea Party groups were applying for this status primarily to be able to conceal the identities of major donors, which political groups are generally supposed to make public. From what I’ve read, it seems true that some of the information demanded from some of the groups was ridiculous, but it shouldn’t be overlooked that the groups really shouldn’t have been allowed to get away with claiming 501(c)(4) status. In the end, the IRS was far too generous toward them.
(Updated as I often end up doing in a effort to fix typos, poor wording, and the like.)
More than ten years ago Thomas Frank wrote a book called What’s the Matter with Kansas? (later made into a documentary film) that pondered how so many working people have been persuaded to vote against their own self-interest.
The same question might come to mind when you learn that the state’s economy and budget are in dismal shape following big tax cuts promised to lead to the opposite, that the minimal requirement for eight hours’ training for a concealed-carry gun permit has now been eliminated, and that comically ridiculous restrictions have been imposed on welfare recipients for no real purpose other than to pretend that lots of impoverished people on public assistance are using the tiny amount of money they get to eat expensive meals and go on cruises.
As usual, Jon Stewart goes after this in a commentary that’s both informative and hilarious. I can’t easily embed the clip in this post, but it’s just as easy to click this link and go straight to it on Comedy Central’s website.
Here’s a 30-second video clip captured in March in the Czech Republic. Presumably this started with the boy taking the St Bernard dog for a walk, but admittedly that’s not quite what the video shows.
Here’s yet another John Green clip I found entertaining (though I’m old fashioned enough that it annoys me that he says “lay” when he means “lie”), this time revealing some interesting facts about that under-appreciated noble animal, the pig.
Update: I just realized that I should have included a link to this earlier post on New Jersey Governor Chris Christie’s veto of a bill regulating the use of gestation crates for sows, despite the overwhelming support of both the legislature and voters for that bill. I also fixed the link to John Stewart’s story on the veto, which is funny but conveys how awful those crates really are.
by 