Baked Potato? Not yet.

“This one commercial said ‘Forget everything you know about slip covers,’ so I did. And it was a load off my mind. Then the commercial tried to sell slip covers, but I didn’t know what the f**k they were.”

Buzzfeed offers up a ranking of every single Mitch Hedberg joke. RIP. “I find that a duck’s opinion of me is very much influenced over whether or not I have bread.”

Everyday I’m Hustlin’ (and Doublin’.)

Happy Easter. Quiet here at the Ghost, I know. Chalk up 65% of it to an extremely busy month of work — one of the busiest I can remember — 25% to the usual existential malaise that accompanies blogging these days, and 10% to the sheer addictiveness of 2048. In any event, the schedule is clearing some now, so I expect the posts will pick up around here in short order.

Immutantable Time.


The second trailer for Bryan Singer’s X-Men: Days of Future Past is now online, starring both the original and First Class crew of mutants.

Hrm…I could still see this one going either way. Next to the Dark Phoenix saga, Days of Future Past is probably the quintessential X-Men tale, but this seems overstuffed, and screenwriter Simon Kinberg’s work on X3 does not inspire confidence.

Update: The third trailer has now dropped as well, along with this spiffy “25 Moments” sites chronicling the recent milestones in mutant history, a la Watchmen.

A-Hole With a Heart of Gold.

“Jim was fortunate enough to earn his living doing what he loved. He was a professional actor. His unions were always there for him, and he will remain forever grateful for the benefits he gained as a result of the union struggle…He was a lucky man in every way.”

Character actor James Rebhorn, well-known for playing doctors, lawyers, and other sinister/officious/aggravated bureaucratic types, 1948–2014.

A Boy and His Dog.

Fortunately, Charlie Brown and Snoopy seem to be themselves in the first teaser for Steve Martino’s Peanuts, executive produced by Paul Feig of Freaks and Geeks and Bridesmaids. “[T]here’s a big effort to preserve Schulz’s ‘sweet optimism’…’Snoopy will not be rapping, no one will be twerking, we’re in good hands.’“

Kill Me Again.

“Imagine Zelda and Link et al. being brutally, graphically murdered, over and over, and there’s nothing you can do about it. Now you’ve basically got it: The Souls games are like 50-hour playable Red Weddings in which you are the victim. These are, to put it mildly, games in which you die…The jokesters at From Software, the Tokyo company that makes Dark Souls, have put in the new game’s central hub an obelisk on which is written a constantly updating count of the global number of deaths. As of last Wednesday night, the count was 4.3 million. The game came out on Tuesday.”

At Buzzfeed, Joseph Bernstein sings the praises of the highly deadly Dark Souls games. “Basically, the Souls formula is to put a very difficult boss at a very far distance from a checkpoint with many difficult enemies in between who come back to life every time you save or die. It’s devious.” He spends entirely too much of the piece fretting about gaming’s respectability, and I think he oversells the uniqueness of the Dark Souls franchise, but still worth a read nonetheless.

Stretch Marks from the Dawn of Time.

“Primordial gravitational waves remain one of the outstanding untested hypotheses of inflation, the most popular model that explains the incredible uniformity of the CMB. According to inflationary theory, the Universe expanded very rapidly in the first fraction of a second, filling the cosmos with gravitational ripples. While inflation so far seems to explain a lot about the Universe, we have no direct evidence for it.”

Until now? With help from the South Pole’s BICEP2 observatory, astrophysicists announce they have detected the first possible direct evidence of cosmic inflation after the Big Bang, in the form of “distortions in the cosmic microwave background light…Those distortions take the form of twisting of the light’s polarization created by gravitational disturbances from inflation.” “‘This has been like looking for a needle in a haystack, but instead we found a crowbar,’ said co-leader Clem Pryke.”

Update: 5 Sigma, R of 0.2. WHAT? Also another good explanation here: “Punchline: other than finding life on other planets or directly detecting dark matter, I can’t think of any other plausible near-term astrophysical discovery more important than this one for improving our understanding of the universe.”

Update 2: “The problem: the signal predicted by inflation is something called polarization, a sort of twisting of electromagnetic radiation. And while it can come from inflation-triggered gravity waves, microwaves from the early universe are altered en route to earthly telescopes, and if you don’t allow for the alteration, you can mistake local dust for a signal from billions of years ago.” Wait a tic: Princeton scientists cast doubt on the discovery.

Ryan’s Slaughter.

“[Y]ou can’t help noticing the deep historic irony that finds a Tea Party favorite and descendant of famine Irish using the same language that English Tories used to justify indifference to an epic tragedy…Ryan boasts of the Gaelic half of his ancestry…But with a head still stuffed with college-boy mush from Ayn Rand, he apparently never did any reading about the times that prompted his ancestors to sail away from the suffering sod.“

In the NYT, historian Timothy Egan notes Paul Ryan’s rhetorical debt to those who helped perpetrate the Great Hunger in Ireland. “You never hear Ryan make character judgments about generations of wealthy who live off their inheritance, or farmers who get paid not to grow anything…Dependency is all one-way. ‘The whole British argument in the famine was that the poor are poor because of a character defect,’ said Christine Kinealy, a professor of Irish studies and director of Ireland’s Great Hunger Institute at Quinnipiac University. ‘It’s a dangerous, meanspirited and tired argument.'”

Just One More Thing.

“No dour, cocaine-addled super-brain is he; no arch and upwardly mobile cocktail-swiller, no Belgian. He is as American as American can be in the best possible sense. There is — unlike almost every other detective in the canon, from Marlowe onward — a moral lightness and an untroubled heart at the core of him, an innate goodness that resonates outward and either puts people at ease or deeply unsettles them, as their own consciences dictate.”

By way of Cryptonaut-in-Exile and LinkMachineGo, why Columbo should be the American Doctor Who. “[D]o not allow yourself to believe for even one second that there are not deeply classist, capitalist reasons Sherlock abounds in this day and age of ours, while Columbo does not. Sherlock is more often than not nowadays played as relatively young and good-looking, self-aggrandizing and mercurial and aristocratic, a troubled genius too good for the idiotic plebes that surround him; Columbo is blue-collar and humble.”