Wanted: Another Giant Leap For Mankind
NASA's new goal: make Anderson Cooper cry
I’m pissed off at NASA.
Yes. I felt exceptionally let down after their horribly anticlimactic LCROSS impact earlier this month. One 5AM retweet still reverberates in my mind: “Only NASA could make blowing up the moon boring”.
But I’m not pissed off about that. Novelist and scholar Issac Asimov once appropriately quipped “The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not ‘Eureka!’ but ‘That’s funny …’”.
The fact that the impact’s plume was less than expected yields new insight and discussion. Why didn’t this behave the way we expected it to behave? What didn’t we account for? Do we need to modify our models? Or is it Neptune’s fault?
The reason I’m actually pissed off is that I believe NASA is failing (or at least slipping in their attempts) to inspire and ignite the dwindling scientific interest of our youth. And as Fountains of Wayne struggled to repeat their success of “Stacy’s Mom”, NASA too has struggled to surpass its Moon landing.
53 Predictions for 2010
"I see ... spackle and a ceiling fan."
No lie.
A while back, I said to a friend, “You know what they should do? Have Tim Burton redo Charlie and the Chocolate Factory with Johnny Depp as Wonka.”
Years later, after my Wonka reboot surfaced and fueled by my own sense of self-importance, I said to the same friend, “You know what else they should do? Have Tim Burton redo Alice in Wonderland with Scarlett Johansson as Alice.”
Okay, so I got half of that last one.
But my amazing clairvoyance was more than proven in my mind. And today I will demonstrate that my power extends beyond future Tim Burton projects.
So before everyone makes their end-of-the-year predictions for 2010, I’m going to make this more difficult on myself and make 2010 predictions two months in advance.
What will we find in 2010? Here we go:
- Michael Jackson’s secret song library leaks onto the Internet. Kanye samples using stupid pitch-correction effect. Jackson post-humorously wins Grammy.
- Twitter viruses galore. Ellen inadvertently infects millions of house-wives; husbands forced to fix the damn computer again.
- Windows 7 fails to impress; Apple gloats in increasingly unfunny ads.
Tell Your Friends
