Tag: The Breakfast Club

Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungover  we’ve been bailed out we’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:30am (ET) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.

This Day in History

Mongol ruler Genghis Khan dies; Women in U.S. clinch right to vote; James Meredith graduates from Univ. of Miss.; Vladimir Nabokov’s ‘Lolita’ published in U.S.; Actor-director Robert Redford born.

Breakfast Tunes

Something to Think about over Coffee Prozac

Freedom is the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.

George Orwell

Look, let’s be clear.  The fact that Han shot first is absolutely essential to understanding the Solo character and his actions and motivations for the rest of the trilogy and you Lucas bootlicking naysayers probably liked Jar-Jar.

Oh, yeah, I’ll go there.

But today we’re talking about another Solo, much cooler and more black and white.

I must confess I had a mad English teacher that thought The Magnificent Seven was the best picture ever and devoted 6 weeks of independent study to it’s intricacies (which I could bore you with, but I got a 98 so whatever).  Among his favorite story arcs is Robert Vaughn’s Lee, the gunslinger that has lost his edge and lives in constant fear of both dying and being exposed as a coward.

“There was a time when I would have caught all three.”

Vaughn’s career has sunk so low that his must memorable current stuff is standups for Mall Lawyers, but there was a time when he was the next Bill Shatner (I remember the 5th season of The A-Team).  You’d be surprised to know he was a recurring character on Coronation Street as Milton Fanshaw.

Number One of Section Two was a mini-Bond created by Ian Fleming for the show.  Looking at the episodes is instructive in an early ’60s Feminist sense of demonstrating many of the common tropes and memes of that time.  Remember, while tongue-in-cheek, the character is supposed to exude an inescapable charm of wit and elegance.  Vaughn brought a perfect edge of arrogance, ennui, and superficiality.

If you were a brainiac like me though the one you totally dug was Illya.

He holds a Master’s degree from the Sorbonne and a PhD in Quantum Mechanics from the University of Cambridge, though he admits to not keeping up-to-date with the field. He appears to have been an undergraduate at the University of Georgia in Tbilisi, where he practiced gymnastics. Kuryakin is a polymath. He is well-read in English literature, he has an in-depth knowledge of music and plays the bass viol, the English horn and guitar. He also sings, and he speaks many languages, including French, German and Japanese.

His technical skills are also well honed. He is an explosives expert who stayed on at the U.N.C.L.E. Survival School a month after he graduated to teach a class on the subject.

David McCallum is now known as “Donald ‘Ducky’ Mallard” from NCIS which is just as ridiculous a name as I can possibly imagine but he’s still a heart throb at 80, which is not so bad for the guy they used to call “the blond Beatle”.

Now neither the cinematic reboot’s box office or critical reception are as bad as you might think although it’s already generating negative buzz so it’s unlikely to be Warner’s summer blockbuster.  I’ll probably watch it as I did the Avengers (no not that one) on free TV when it comes around.

Zaki’s Review, not the worst one, from Huffington Post

The Man From U.N.C.L.E. is less about any particular surprises the script (by Ritchie and Lionel Wigram) may offer — though, admittedly, there are a few. Instead, it’s similar to the Bond formula in that it’s all about the simple pleasure of knowing things have to come to a preordained conclusion, and watching it done well. Stylistically, U.N.C.L.E. is very much of a piece with Ritchie’s two Sherlock Holmes flicks (the first of which I enjoyed quite a bit, the second less so), so I suspect one’s appreciation for it will depend greatly on their tolerance for the Snatch helmer’s specific tics.

Of course, the real joy of the film is in watching the game cast (which includes Hugh Grant and Jared Harris) go through their paces. Cavill in particular is a lot of fun as Our Man Solo, adopting an exaggerated affect to his delivery that neatly mimics Vaughn’s staccato style and also feels like the character’s sly commentary on the genre itself, as if he’s standing to the side and winking at the audience. Hammer arguably has the tougher job: trying to make his character seem sympathetic and understandable all while speaking in a Russian accent that could very easily tip into Boris Badanov territory. Luckily, he manages to pulls it off admirably.

From Kingsman earlier this year and Mission: Impossible last month to the 007 epic Spectre in November, 2015 is proving quite the fertile year for big screen spying (and that’s not even mentioning Melissa McCarthy in Spy!). Though The Man From U.N.C.L.E. lacks the wit of Kingsman and the spectacle of Rogue Nation (any comparisons to the new Bond will have to wait, natch), it nonetheless sits comfortably alongside its spy movie siblings.

Entertainment

• Straight Outta Compton: Black Lives Matter, By Deborah Nesbit, Crooks & Liars
• This New TV Show About The Robot Uprising Reminds Us How Complicated It Is To Get Out Of Housework, by Kay Steiger, Think Progress
• ‘Key & Peele’ Ends While Nation Could Still Use a Laugh, By DAVE ITZKOFF, The New York Times
• NBC Confirms Plans For ‘Xena’ Reboot, by Kevin Melrose, Comic Book Resource
• Exclusive: George R.R. Martin Says ‘Game of Thrones’ Ending Will Be ‘Bittersweet’, By Sean T Collins, The Observer
• Orlando Bloom Is Officially Back In ‘Pirates Of The Caribbean’ 5, by Bill Bradley, Huffington Post
• ‘Frozen 2′ Details: Director Teases a Different Side of Elsa, by Angie Han, Slash Film
• Hannibal Recap: season three, episode 11 – And the Beast From the Sea, by Eric Thurm, The Guardian
• Beetlejuice 2 is really happening, confirms Winona Ryder, by Nancy Groves, The Guardian
• Syfy’s new “Childhood’s End” could be the perfect show for our quasi-populist, government-hating times, by Scott Timberg, Salon

Sports

On Thursday Little League Baseball starts its World Series (which is really worthy of the name involving, as it does, other countries).

Thursday

• Caribbean (Los Bravos de Pontezuela, DR) vs. Europe-Africa (AVRS Secondary School, Uganda)
• Southwest (Pearland West, Pearland, TX) vs. Northwest (Wilshire/Riverside, Portland, OR)
• Latin America (Cardenales, Barquisimeto, Venezuela) vs. Australia (Cronulla, Sydney)
• Great Lakes (Bowling Green Eastern, Bowling Green, KY) vs. West (Sweetwater Valley, Bonita, CA)

Friday

• Canada (White Rock South Surrey, BC) vs. Mexico (Seguro Social, Mexicali)
• New England (Cranston Western, Cranston, RI) vs. Southeast (Northwood, Taylors, SC)
• Japan (Tokyo Kitasuna) vs. Asia-Pacific (Tung Yuan, Taipei)
• Midwest (Webb City, MO) vs. Mid-Atlantic (Red Land, Lewisberry, PA)

Saturday is the Semi-Finals (two teams will emerge) of the National and International Championships, I’ll probably tell you about the finals next wee.

• All Blacks Rout Australia to Retain Bledisloe Cup, By EMMA STONEY, The New York Times
• ‘We’ll Be Back,’ They Vowed, and They Are, By CHRISTOPHER CLAREY, The New York Times
• Top Spanish matador gored by bull, AFP
• Brazil prosecutors find Olympic village workers living in squalor, Reuters

Mets 4.5 games up after a miserable series.

Damn Yankees, still half a game in front.

Bonus Baseball- We’re in a golden age of hitters who can pitch – but some guys are better than others.

The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.

–Aristotle

Obligatories, News and Blogs below.

The 3 Rules of Opera–

1. It must be long, boring, and in an incomprehesible foreign language (even if that language is English).
2. The characters, especially the main ones, must be thoroughly unsympathetic and their activities horrid and callous.
3. Everyone must die, hopefully in an ironic and gruesome way.

Ballet is the same, but with more men in tights and without the superfluous singing.

My life is hardship and misery thanks to this opera. Everything about it is wrong for me.  (It is) totally at odds with all that I dream about, demanding a type of music that is alien to me.

Now to be fair, Debussy was talking about another opera he attempted but never finished- Rodrigue et Chimène, a sort of El Cid knockoff.

He was probably unhappy with the upbeat Hollywood ending where, mortally wounded, El Cid dies wishing only for one more crack at the Muslims so they (the Spanish) impale him on a stick like a corn dog, strap him to his horse, point him (the horse, El Cid is dead) at the Moors and give him a kick in the ass (the horse again, they could hardly give El Cid a kick there, that’s where the stick was).

From beyond the grave, El Cid tastes victory again, saving us from those civilized not us.  God and the Holy Roman Catholic Church be praised!

The fact is that his father was a greedy bastard and wanted some of that hot Opera money.  Our Claude however was all artsy-fartsy and gave it up as a bad job, opting instead for Pelléas et Mélisande.

Prince finds mysterious forest girl (that would be Mélisande) and marries her.  He brings her home and she falls in love with his brother (that would be Pelléas).  After years (maybe it only seems like years, it is Opera) of restraint and denial they confess their love in range of the stalking paranoid Prince who kills his brother Pelléas in a fit of jealousy.  Mélisande dies shortly after, in childbirth, never saying if the girl is from the Prince or Pelléas.

And how would she know anyway even if she’d been dinking them both?

As you see it has all the essential elements and sex besides.  You might expect it to be an unmitigated success but it took several years (1895 – 1902) to even find a venue and while regularly performed the reviews were mixed and the box office not boffo.  After the Great War it faded from public conciousness almost entirely.

The other thing about it is that it’s a conscious rebuke to Wagnerian bombast-

“It is customary, and in the main correct, to regard Pelléas et Mélisande as a monument to French operatic reaction to Wagner.”

…

Debussy strove to avoid excessive Wagnerian influence on Pelléas from the start. The love scene was the first music he composed but he scrapped his early drafts for being too conventional and because “worst of all, the ghost of old Klingsor, alias R.Wagner, kept appearing.”

…

(T)he way Debussy writes for the orchestra is completely different from Tristan, for example. In Grout’s words, “In most places the music is no more than an iridescent veil covering the text.” The emphasis is on quietness, subtlety and allowing the words of the libretto to be heard; there are only four fortissimos in the entire score. Debussy’s use of declamation is un-Wagnerian as he felt Wagnerian melody was unsuited to the French language. Instead, he stays close to the rhythms of natural speech, making Pelléas part of a tradition which goes back to the French Baroque tragédies en musique of Rameau and Lully as well as the experiments of the very founders of opera, Peri and Caccini.

Which is a big plus in my book.  Without further adieu-

Obligatories, News and Blogs below.

Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungover  we’ve been bailed out we’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:30am (ET) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.

This Day in History

Truman announces Japan’s surrender in World War II; Blackout hits Northeast U.S., Canada; FDR signs Social Security; British troops arrive in N. Ireland; A strike in Cold War Poland; Steve Martin born.

Breakfast Tunes

Something to Think about over Coffee Prozac

I actually credit Twitter with fine-tuning some joke-writing skills. I still feel like I’m working at it. Steve Martin

One of the enduring questions of Physics is baryon asymmetry, or more popularly- ‘Where’s the Anti-Matter at?’

Technically a quark’s properties are-

1. Electric Charge (ElectroMagnetic Force)
2. Spin (Angular Momentum)
3. Mass (Gravity)
4. Position (Weak Force) and
5. Color (Strong Force)

An anti-Quark has exactly the opposite qualities for anything (except Spin and Mass) and I’m not talking not Green in the sense of Blue or Red, or not Top in the sense of Bottom, I mean the -1 times whatever it is.

Observed in the wild you say?  Oh my yes, constantly.  A Meson is specifically a Quark/anti-Quark package of Space-Time.  They last briefly as the by product of high energy collisions in nature and are regularly observed by particle colliders, sometimes reaching energy levels not seen since the Big Bang.  There is some evidence of Mesons made entirely of Quarks which may relate to the cause or effect of our central question but we’ll ignore it for now because basically it makes my main point which is that nobody has a clue.

It is a fact though that given a neutral environment (one in which no unaccounted for factor contributes to the result) there should be exactly as much anti-Matter as Matter in the Universe, and we’re just not seeing it.

I don’t know exactly how you would detect an anti-Photon and it would be hilarious if the amount of Dark Energy and Matter (essentially missing in that we can detect its gravitational influence on the expansion of Space-Time but not much else) equaled the amount of missing anti-Matter (remember Mass and Spin don’t change).

But that’s pretty tin foily and I don’t propose it except as a nerdy joke.

Mystery Deepens: Matter and Antimatter Are Mirror Images

by Charles Q. Choi, Live Science

Matter and antimatter appear to be perfect mirror images of each other as far as anyone can see, scientists have discovered with unprecedented precision, foiling hope of solving the mystery as to why there is far more matter than antimatter in the universe.

Everyday matter is made up of protons, neutrons or electrons. These particles have counterparts known as antiparticles – antiprotons, antineutrons and positrons, respectively – that have the same mass but the opposite electric charge. (Although neutrons and antineutrons are both neutrally charged, they are each made of particles known as quarks that possess fractional electrical charges, and the charges of these quarks are equal and opposite to one another in neutrons and antineutrons.)

The known universe is composed of everyday matter. The profound mystery is, why the universe is not made up of equal parts antimatter, since the Big Bang that is thought to have created the universe 13.7 billion years ago produced equal amounts of both. And if matter and antimatter appear to be mirror images of each other in every respect save their electrical charge, there might not be much any of either type of matter left.

…

Theoretical physicists suspect that the extraordinary contrast between the amounts of matter and antimatter in the universe, technically known as baryon asymmetry, may be due to some difference between the properties of matter and antimatter, formally known as a charge-parity, or CP symmetry violation. However, all the known effects that lead to violations of CP symmetry fail to explain the vast preponderance of matter over antimatter.

Potential explanations behind this mystery could lie in differences in the properties of matter and antimatter – for instance, perhaps antiprotons decay faster than protons. If any such difference is found, however slight, “this will of course lead to dramatic consequences for our contemporary understanding of the fundamental laws of physics,” study lead author Stefan Ulmer, a particle physicist at Japan’s Institute of Physical and Chemical Research (RIKEN), told Live Science.

In the most stringent test yet of differences between protons and antiprotons, scientists investigated the ratio of electric charge to mass in about 6,500 pairs of these particles over a 35-day period.

…

The scientists found the charge-to-mass ratio of protons and antiprotons “is identical to within just 69 parts per trillion,” Ulmer said in a statement. This measurement is four times better than previous measurements of this ratio.

In addition, the researchers also discovered that the charge-to-mass ratios they measured do not vary by more than 720 parts per trillion per day, as Earth rotates on its axis and travels around the sun. This suggests that protons and antiprotons behave the same way over time as they zip through space at the same velocity, meaning they do not violate what is known as charge-parity-time, or CPT symmetry.

CPT symmetry is a key component of the Standard Model of particle physics, the best description to date of how the elementary particles making up the universe behave. No known violations of CPT symmetry exist. “Any detected CPT violation will have huge impact on our understanding of nature,” Ulmer said.

Science Oriented Video

The law that entropy always increases holds, I think, the supreme position among the laws of Nature. If someone points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement with Maxwell’s equations – then so much the worse for Maxwell’s equations. If it is found to be contradicted by observation – well, these experimentalists do bungle things sometimes. But if your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation.

–Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World (1927)

Science News and Blogs

I really encourage you to read the science links today.  There are some mighty fine stories.

• DNA Is Said to Solve a Mystery of Warren Harding’s Love Life, By PETER BAKER, The New York Times
• Tomb of Nefertiti, Egypt’s mysterious ancient queen, may have been found, The Guardian
• England to Test Roads That Charge Electric Vehicles, by Angela Moscaritolo, PC Magazine
• Cheers! Yeast’s Evolutionary Journey Gave Beer Its Flavor, by Elizabeth Goldbaum, Live Science
• During mass extinction, no species safe: study, By Marlowe Hood, AFP
• Medieval Sword Carries Mysterious Inscription, By Elizabeth Palermo, Live Science
• How We Could Detect an Alien Apocalypse From Earth, by George Dvorsky, io9
• The Roanoke Island Colony: Lost, and Found?, By THEO EMERY, The New York Times
• Cutting-edge science as you’ve never seen it before, by Kit Buchan, The Guardian
• Attack on the pentagon results in discovery of new mathematical tile, by Alex Bellos, The Guardian

C’mon, we’re talking an obtuse polygon with 5 vertices.

Obligatories, News and Blogs below (also pretty good).

Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungover  we’ve been bailed out we’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:30am (ET) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.

This Day in History

Last U.S. combat troops leave Vietnam; Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr. killed in World War II; N.J. Gov. McGreevey to resign after declaring he’s gay; Russian sub Kursk explodes; Director Cecil B. DeMille born.

Breakfast Tunes

Something to Think about over Coffee Prozac

This world is but a canvas to our imagination.

Henry David Thoreau

Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungover  we’ve been bailed out we’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:30am (ET) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.

This Day in History

Start of the Watts riots in Los Angeles; President Ronald Reagan’s joke causes a Cold War flap; The Mall of America opens; ‘Roots’ author Alex Haley born; Painter Jackson Pollock killed in auto accident.

Breakfast Tunes

Something to Think about over Coffee Prozac

Our prime purpose in this life is to help others. And if you can’t help them, at least don’t hurt them.

Dalai Lama

We’re trying a new piece today based on sports and entertainment because by Sunday there’s not much left.

This will mean nothing at all to most of you but does illustrate the kind of sensibility I’m trying to bring to the post.  There is a show I like called Girl Meets World and it’s a silly Disney ‘tween comedy.  What makes it interesting to me is that in some respects it breaks almost every rule.

It was just a matter of knowing the secret of all television: at the end of the episode, everything is back to normal.

Things change.  In a way it’s like a 30 minute Gilmore Girls except that Cory and Topanga are Cory and Topanga, a power couple that make Ward and June look like the Bundys (the Gilmores, as you are well aware, have their own kind of family dynamic).  This year’s primary story arcs have been about Maya’s damaged family hooking up with Shawn, and Riley dealing with her feelings about Luke (see, Gilmore Girls!).  It’s not without its charms.

So what made this episode, Girl Meets Yearbook so interesting?  Well partly because it’s about acting and partly because it’s about change.

The change thing first.  Farkle Minkus is the son of Stuart Minkus, one time suitor of Topanga now filthy rich which he never tires of reminding you.  Stuart is whip smart and charming in that Lex Luthor kind of way.  He’s also a total dweeb.  Farkel is his mini-me.

Both of them have suffered the normal harassment which being an individual in that environment entails.  Farkle is lucky enough to have fallen into Riley’s circle and they’ve stood for him.  In this episode, Farkle is disappointed he’s become an adjective in the yearbook (despite editing it apparently, because that’s just the kind of dweeby job he and Riley like), so he rips off his distinctive Farkle outfit and emerges as Donnie Barnes, regular guy.

Riley is not unhappy with her description- ‘Most likely to smile herself to death’, even though her friends tell her it’s a total dis’.  That is until she finds out that she and Luke are not the cutest couple, it’s Maya!

And here we branch-

There is no resolution for the change plot (so far).  At the end Farkle Minkus admits to Luke and the gang that he still knows stuff but is not interested in conforming to previous expectations and pre-conceptions.  It makes one wonder what is going on at Casa de Minkus and if Stuart shows up with a Topanga clone wife I’m thinking we’re going Twin Peaks with the plot.

I’ll add this.  In some ways the character resembles my personal experience, but my image was exactly what I expected and cultivated.  Once I had made my connections I didn’t really have to behave in any particular way at all.  Study Hall?  I work at the Library, see you.  I got away with some atrociously massive crap that would have had me expelled if I wasn’t labeled and categorized.  I had a key to my own office!

Which brings us to acting.

The McGuffin on the second arc is that Riley is set off by Farkle’s rebellion and her non-pairing with the one she thinks is her dream Corey guy so she dramatically adopts the gothic character of Morosia M. Black (the second ‘M’ stands for Morosia too).  Maya is upset that Riley is not around to help her fix Farkle (that’s what Riley does, and she smiles all the time).

The details don’t count, but they end up carrying this dispute into the cafe Riley’s mother owns and Maya’s mother, an out of work actress, manages.  Maya asks her mother how she can be Riley.

Alright, but before you become another person understand you may learn things about them you didn’t know before.  You may learn a secret even they don’t know about themselves.

And then Katy Hart delivers a spot on Riley.

I love today!  Today is even better than yesterday and yesterday was the best Day EVER!!!  I’d think about tomorrow but I am afraid I would burst into sparkles!

Maya is supposed to be the rebel tomgirl but she’s grown a lot less dark since her mom and Shawn seem to be getting along.  Next day in class she shows up as Riley, fooling even Cory momentarily.

She is likewise a virtual clone of Riley, exposing the artifice of the character, in fact all of them.  Maya’s classmates tell her that they’re happy she’s playing the role, that they need a Riley and don’t care who does it (with the implication that they don’t much need a real Maya, or a Riley either).

Maya throws herself into the role until…

When you become someone else, even though you’re just acting, it’s impossible not to discover something you didn’t know before.

In this case Maya is reacting (in character as Riley) in defense of Luke and Riley being the perfect couple ‘it’s like we’re brother and sister’.

Oh.

Now do it again for the cameras.  Action!

My point has multiple layers, multiple layers has my point.  ‘Kid’s’ programming tackles some scary stuff in ways that are unexpected, especially by adults wedded to their tropes.  The actors are talented, some of them.  The writing and direction can be good.  I don’t expect you to like it.

And the final layer is that this spot shall oscillate between discussions of TV and Movie Trivia and Sports of varying popularity.

Sports

• How about them Mets? (1 1/2 Up)
• Damn Yankees

Rethinking an Olympic Format in Light of Katie Ledecky’s 1,500 Feat

By KAREN CROUSE, The New York Times

AUG. 9, 2015

Ledecky charmed her hosts last week on her way to becoming the first swimmer to sweep the 200-, 400-, 800- and 1,500-meter freestyles in a major competition.

…

Ledecky broke her 1,500-freestyle record on consecutive days in front of crowds that enthusiastically cheered her on. She had to strike while she was rested because she will not race the event again in a major meet until 2017, at the earliest. After Ledecky’s performance, the exclusion of the 1,500 freestyle from next year’s Olympic program has never seemed more ridiculously retrograde.

Entertainment

Yes, Fantastic Four is really just as horrible as you heard.

• Doctored doom: Reshot ‘Fantastic Four’ gets clobbered at box office with dismal $26M debut, By Michael Cavna, Washington Post
• “Fantastic Four is an unmitigated garbage fire,” and 15 other terrible reviews director Josh Trank is not responsible for, by Anna Silman, Salon
• Fantastic Four review – a dawdling indie drama dressed up in superhero garb, by Henry Barnes, The Guardian
• Here’s the Bigger Problem With the Failure of ‘Fantastic Four’, By Kate Erbland, Indiewire
• Fantastic Four, By Peter Travers, Rolling Stone

Not the Fantastic Four

• Hannibal Recap: season three, episode 10 – And the Woman Clothed in Sun, by Brian Moylan, The Guardian
• True Detective: place your bets on the identity of the killer, by Sarah Hughes, The Guardian
• We Mapped True Detective’s Wildly Implausible Road Trips, by Jordan Crucchiola, Wired
• True Detective Season 2 Finale Recap: ‘Omega Station’ Was a Satisfying Descent Into Chaos, By Jacob Hall, Esquire
• ‘The Mindy Project’ gets Hulu premiere date — and Kaling is ‘grateful’, By Yvonne Villarreal, Los Angeles Times
• Now that Jon Stewart has stepped down, does anyone have his edge?, by Edward Helmore, The Guardian
• Doctor Who Season 9 News: Reece Shearsmith Guest-starring in Gatiss Episode, Den of Geek
• Steven Moffat on why he hasn’t cast a female Doctor yet: “I think it would have been a disaster”, by Sonia Saraiya, Salon

That last is not as bad as it sounds.  Moffat really wanted to write for a Peter Capaldi Doctor, there was never any serious second choice.

Obligatories, News and Blogs below.

I don’t make a really big deal about it and I’ve spent a lot of time in other places, but in terms of media culture I’m totally a creation of the New York metropolitan area.  I had two of every network, including PBS as well as about 5 independent channels and that was just TV.

On the radio side there were 2 News Radio stations and WCBS 880 remains my favorite.  I don’t listen to much music at all, just news and sports.  I have also gone though periods where I was a fan of the Hard Rock and Alternative formats and I listened to Howard Stern’s final day at WNBC live.

However one that’s stuck with me is WQXR.  Until 2009 they were owned by The New York Times and it’s been on the air broadcasting classical (or what we now call Art) music in one form or another since 1929.  Oddly enough it started as an experimental TV station in a now abandoned format.

The format hasn’t changed much over the years though there is a little more concentration on 20th century composers of whom Francis Poulenc is one of my favorites mostly based on this one piece, his Sonata for Horn, Trombone, and Trumpet which he composed in 1922.

As a Brass player let me tell you all the parts are fiendishly difficult with contrapuntal rhythyms, tricky fingerings, and immense range, yet despite its complexity it’s extremely pleasant to listen to, kind of light and frothy.

Anyway I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.  This particular performance is by the faculty of Michigan State University.

Obligatories, News and Blogs below.

“There is no dark side of the moon really. Matter of fact it’s all dark.”

Jon done, Republican Debate, Hiroshima, ‘You’ve covered your ass’.  Not really that much more to say today.

Science Oriented Video

The law that entropy always increases holds, I think, the supreme position among the laws of Nature. If someone points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement with Maxwell’s equations – then so much the worse for Maxwell’s equations. If it is found to be contradicted by observation – well, these experimentalists do bungle things sometimes. But if your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation.

–Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World (1927)

Science News and Blogs

• Dark side of the moon captured by Nasa satellite a million miles from Earth, by Oliver Milman, The Guardian
• Why the long face? Researchers compile directory of horse facial expressions, by Tim Radford, The Guardian
• Are you smarter than a Japanese schoolchild?, by Alex Bellos, The Guardian
• Can we reverse the ageing process by putting young blood into older people?, by Ian Sample, The Guardian
• Mathematical déjà vu, and Coffee, by Jon Butterworth, The Guardian
• Nasa says Congress cuts mean $490m is needed to buy rides on Russian rockets, by Reuters
• Generation game: earliest evidence of reproduction in complex species found, Tim Radford, The Guardian
• ‘Magnetic’ Discovery May Reveal Why Earth Supports Life and Mars Doesn’t, by Charles Q. Choi, Live Science
• Lexus’ New Hoverboard Is Cool, But Will It Fly?, by Elizabeth Palermo, Live Science
• Lion ‘Factory Farms,’ and the Dark Side of Wildlife Tourism, by Nicole Paquett, Live Science

Obligatories, News and Blogs below.