this channel rules
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The other day, my gf and I were smoking weed and thinking about the classic Ballard quote:
Well, access is NOT a problem any more! We decided to make Ballard’s dream a reality, and searched out a series of Marine Biology conference presentations on YouTube. This sort of stuff is easier to find than ever, as academic institutions are forced to run conferences online. It turns out Ballard was right, we were captivated.
We wanted to get that real shit, so we started with Beyond the snapshot: what we can learn from capturing the broader picture around perturbation events in marine invertebrates
Despite being absolutely off our heads, we were surprised at how well we were able to follow the talk. Certainly, a lot was going over our heads, but the advantage of Marine Biology for this kind of viewing is that much of the subject matter is very concrete – we were learning true facts about real-life starfish.
The talk was pretty depressing though! We ended up having to tune out after an extended explanation of an effect where climate change is causing certain species to evolve extremely rapidly because human activity has led to the selection pressure on them shifting much more quickly than it typically would in nature.
But I wanted to share one bit that really stuck with us. POP QUIZ: Can you find the part of this screenshot that made us two shitheads completely fall apart with laughter?
The answer is in the next post!
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I was certain it was going to be Strongylocentrotus purpuratus
either that or “Yessotoxin” as in, "Maybe they should try “Not so toxin”
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lol, maybe that would have helped them avoid such an ochraceus pisaster
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I also want to shout out the second marine biology conference presentation we watched stoned that night, Trophic relationships in the benthos: feeding morphology and ecology of macroinvertebrates
This one was much more fun. The speaker was very charismatic and the information was pretty approachable. Learning too-detailed information about mantis shrimp morphology is a good, weird time.
Plus her slides had some pretty funny moments too.
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I love watching shit like this while wfh, I’m gonna check this out! Thanks!
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This video is such a pleasure to watch
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a zoom-conversation-as-gameshow that i’ve been enjoying a lot. posts weekly. three middle-aged men naming celebrities (most of whom are unknown outside of the UK) for half an hour. i think the charm should come through without knowing the names, though.
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oh my, i should watch this
tim key is such an asshole, i love it
(at least he is in taskmaster)
taskmaster is the only panel show i like, and this feels like the group dynamic from taskmaster but more genuine bc its obvious that horne watson and key have known each other for decades
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taskmaster is the best panel show, and it’s by such a long distance that it’s hard to see why the rest of them even bother (it’s because they’re incredibly cheap to make and they always turn a profit because there are entire tv channels in the uk whos business model is buying the rights to show old episodes of panel shows and then doing that 24/7)
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GF and I have started a new initiative where we get profoundly stoned and watch late-series episodes of sitcoms we’ve never seen. We started with season 8, episode 3 of Perfect Strangers: Lethal Weapon.
This had a much stranger energy than we were expecting. We seem to have a dual-family household where one patriarch is an uptight straight man (Larry) and the other is an ambiguously European goofball (Balki).
Larry the straight man’s face is intolerable. He’s been playing this role for 7 years, and by this point he is completely phoning it in. There are a limited set of poses and expressions this character can make, and the actor has done them so many times that they’ve become, in the parlance of animal cognition research, stereotyped behaviors. Like the mammalian chewing cycle, or a frog’s croak, his expressions are perfectly rigid and repetitive, subject to little-to-no possibility of variation. His facial muscles hyper-extend into a painful rictus, and he’ll just stand there, holding those muscles perfectly still, locked into his pose for minutes at a time while action happens around him. It’s horrible to watch.
In this episode, Greek-but-not cousin Balki has found his ant farm (which he keeps outdoors?) ravaged. All of his ants are dead. He is now convinced that he has contracted an ancient curse that will cause everything he touches to die instantly. He rushes into the house and spends fully a third of the episode on an excruciatingly long routine where he pantomimes giving an ant CPR.
Larry’s reaction is very interesting. He condescends to Balki and then tries to reason him out of his belief in the curse. It’s clear that this is a common dynamic between these two: Balki comes up with a fantastical idea, and Larry tries to use logical argument to talk him down. However, applying this template to this episode’s contrived scenario results in upwards of two minutes of Larry walking Balki through all the different possible (realistic!) natural scenarios that can result in ant colony collapse.
Now, there is something very troubling going on here. Larry is protesting too much. His rigorous takedown of Balki’s curse is more effortful than this silly situation warrants. His face is, again, far too intense for this conversation. It’s clear that he actually believes that Balki is cursed to kill anyone he touches, but he is terrified of this truth and refuses to accept it. He’s not trying to convince Balki, he’s trying to convince himself.
He does the unthinkable. He tells Balki that the curse is not real, and he suggests that Balki prove this by touching his pregnant wife. Larry could simply grab Balki’s hand, but instead he directs Balki to use the curse to kill his wife and unborn child.
TO BE CONTINUED.
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Perfect Strangers ran for 8 seasons?
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i would like to read more confused episode summaries of sitcoms i’ve never heard of
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Incredibly, it ran from 1986 to 1993!
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always felt sorry for cousin larry, bronson pinchot managed to have a weird little career that was eclectic enough to make him memorable long after the relevance of perfect strangers evaporated, and cousin larry is basically just “wait that wasn’t albert brooks???”
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in 1989, a bank advert took the form of a fake broadcast interruption from the future
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Here’s some bleeding edge experimental television for you:
During the COVID-19 pandemic, a lot of teachers have been teaching lessons online. Sometimes these lessons take the form of prerecorded videos.
If you look up some of your teachers from your childhood and adolescence, you can sometimes turn up videos of them teaching a lesson within a classroom setting.
The other day, my gf found a video of her elementary school music teacher doing the exact same dance activity she remembered him doing for her class over 20 years ago. Total time portal stuff, it really blew her mind.
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