The Westphall Hypothesis

Beginning its six season run in 1982, St. Elsewhere garnered little critical acclaim and virtually no viewer response as a sleepy medical drama set in a dilapidated teaching hospital in Boston. In all respects, it would have been an easily forgettable hour-drama if not for the series finale, which has become the stuff of nerdy legend. In the final episode, a main character's autistic son, Tommy Westphall, is shown staring at a snow globe with a tiny version of the teaching hospital inside. Given that the final moments of the show are completely at odds with the rest of the show's 100+ episode run, it is generally assumed that all events depicted in the show were a figment of Tommy's imagination.

In our crazy modern times, such a gimmick seems interesting, but not too outlandish. I mean, just watch more than three consecutive episodes of LOST to get what I'm talking about. But the story gets better. Some bright spark assumed that if St. Elsewhere was just the figment of a character's mind, then every crossover episode it ever had must have also occurred inside little Tommy's head. The main lynchpin of this theory rests with Homicide: Life On The Street, a crime drama produced by Tom Fontana (St. Elsewhere's creator). In more than one instance, doctors from Elsewhere appear on the show, presumably making the entire Homicide run similarly a product of Tommy's psyche. One of Homicide's main characters was a cop by the name of John Munch. Yeah. This guy:

For those not in the know, John Munch later appeared as a main character in Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. Since L&O:SVU belongs to the same universe as all of the Law & Order universes, Tommy is also responsible for one of television's longest running franchises. It doesn't stop there, either. Munch appeared in an X-Files episode, an episode of The Wire, and in an episode of The Beat (also the series finale of Arrested Development. Shit yeah). Also, let us not forget his brief stint on Sesame Street.

If your mind isn't fully and thoroughly blown yet, let me just cut to the chase. Through an extremely tenuous and unlikely series of connections, over two hundred and eighty television shows currently compose what has come to be known as the Tommyverse. Or I might have just made that name up right now. Either way, think of it. A lot of minor shows, but a vast majority of stuff you've probably seen. Stuff like Cheers; Alf; M*A*S*H; Las Vegas; Heroes; I Love Lucy; The Office (both versions); Crossing Jordan; Buffy The Vampire Slayer (therefore Angel) and Firefly; Doctor Who (all incarnations); Friends; Seinfeld; The Brady Bunch; Home Improvement; Matlock; The Fresh Prince Of Bel-Air; Boy Meets World; Gilligan's Island; King Of Queens; Malcolm In The Middle; Alias; Knight Rider; Touched By An Angel; the entire Star Trek universe; the entire Crime Scene Investigation universe; and Moesha. In the unlikely event that you still care, just check out the full map below (click to enlarge), courtesy of this site. Tommy bless you, good sir.

If you want a key to the whole thing, you'll find it here. There's something else that gets me though. As a Buffy fan, I was instantly reminded of the season six episode "Normal Again", in which it is suggested that the entire Buffy universe may be the hallucination of a troubled teenage girl (who can't really kill vampires and prevent multiple apocalypses). What could this possibly mean? Are insane Buffy and little Tommy Westphall the only "real" characters on TV? I'd say: "Sure, why not."

World's Ugliest Dog

This year's Ugliest Dog competition is over, and a boxer named Pabst is the new champion. But there was some serious competition.

Pabst is the first one. And let's not forget my personal favorite, Squiggy:

Composed entirely while clearing my hard drive of unneeded pictures of ugly dogs.

Optical Illusion

This is perhaps the most visually impressive optical illusion I have ever seen.

While it may look like alternating spirals of blue and green, you're actually looking at a spiral of one color. Go ahead and take a closer look. I pulled it up in GIMP and everything. Same color. (via Discover Magazine.)

Joker Boner

No, seriously. I don't even want to explain. Just click here.

Gene Simmons' NPR Interview

If you ever had any reason to think that the frontman of KISS wasn't a complete ass, allow me to change your mind. Download the MP3 of his interview here. Trust me on this, you'll want to listen to it. It's almost as good as the infamous Billy Bob Thornton interview for Q Radio:

If you cringe at episodes of The Office, watch that. He puts Michael Scott to shame.

Saddest Thing

There have been many suggestions as to what may constitute the saddest thing. As an exercise, I asked many of my friends, and a young woman as kind-hearted as any I've met suggested that the saddest thing was a three-year-old girl with no arms, falling off a swing on a lonely hilltop. Needless to say, the game ended shortly thereafter. Clearly there was no topping her response; there was also the frightening quickness and clarity with which the answer came to her mind.

On a whim, I wondered what the internet had to say on the subject, and with the help of my friend Google, I found The Saddest Thing, an online user-generated pit of despair. Check out the Saddest Of Them All. These are the ones that were voted saddest, and they are SAD, people. Fun stuff. These are found among the much more numerous sad-but-still-sorta-funny things, like this story, or this picture:*

The brutally honest webcomic Achewood has an excellent (read: heart-shattering) suggestion to add at this point:
(click to enlarge)

I, sadly, do not have a definitive answer to offer you. Perhaps one day I'll stumble upon something so sad I instantly fall into a coma from how bummed out I'll be, and then I'll know. Until then, dear readers, I remind you that you're free to comment below with your contribution to this ongoing dialogue. I would also implore you to consider this video in your own deliberations.

*I know EXACTLY where he got that photo. This spectacular website has been a favorite of mine for a while now.

Al Leong

So I was watching Lethal Weapon, a movie that taught us, among other things, that you could shoot a car until it caught fire (if Gary Busey is driving, it just keeps going), white sneakers are a bold and dashing fashion accessory, and that you can just shake off a shotgun wound in seconds if you're wearing a vest. On the other end of the spectrum, it gave us such lines as "You're one psycho son of a bitch, but you're good," and the always appropriate "I'm too old for this shit". Anyway, I'm watching it and I see this fellow (the movie also teaches us that ethnic slurs are okay if the guy is evil).

I knew that I had seen him before, so I look him up. A cursory glance at his IMDb page reveals that he has been in dozens of films in the past thirty years. He's just one of those guys. However, there is a much deeper significance to his career. He's not just one of those guys, he's one of those guys that people (for some reason or another) just fall in love with. Hence the phenomenon of AlLeong.com. Seems to be a straightforward, if extensive, fansite. But no; there's a fanfic page and everything. I refuse to read it on principle, but you can be my guest and have at it. Enjoy people's weird fascinations.

P.S.: Fans of other guys known as "that guy" may enjoy Cracked's "20 Best 'That Guy's", featuring the likes of William Fichtner, Stephen Toblowsky, John Heard and my personal favorite, James Cromwell.

Above: James Cromwell, who you've seen in pretty much everything.

Brains Are CRAAAAAZY

In the rare cases of extremely severe epilepsy, a surgery may be considered to alleviate the pain. This procedure involves severing the corpus callosum, an area of the brain allowing cross-hemisphere communication. A side effect of this is best described in the form of an experiment. A woman with a severed corpus callosum was told to focus on the center of a monitor where images would briefly flash. She was then asked to identify these images. If the images appeared to the right of the screen, she was able to identify them with no problem. This is because images on the right were registered in the left hemisphere of her brain (where speech centers are). Therefore she was able to say aloud "cat", "dog" or "sailboat" depending on what images were shown to her. But when images were flashed on the left side of the screen, she was unable to vocalize what it was she had seen. The right side of her brain was unable to communicate to the left side what it was she was seeing, so her speech centers couldn't verbalize anything. Here's where it gets AWESOME. When asked to write down what it was she had seen, she couldn't, because she was right-handed. The right hand is controlled by the left hemisphere, and since the left hemisphere still had no information, the right hand could not write down the image. When she picked up the pen in her left hand, she was able to write it down with no problem. Brains Are CRAAAAAZY.

Doomsday

Upon seeing the excremental film Doomsday, I felt it was my civic duty to write up a list of alternates to its official tagline, "The End Is Nigh."

• Doomsday: Makes no freaking sense at all.
• There are about three gimps in this film, which is three too many.
• Tact? You must be confusing me with a competent director.
• If we want to show a man being run over by a tank, that's our business.
• Vehicles can just explode whenever.
• Yeah, she has a removable robotic eyeball. We think it's a cool concept that we decided to use exactly TWICE during the first ten minutes.
• The editor called in sick. It was cool though, we got a howler monkey to do it.
• If we want to show a rabbit being shot into pieces, that's our business.
• Subtlety is for pussies.
• Rhona Mitra makes Milla Jovovich look like Meryl Streep.
• There's nudity in the first five minutes. Never a good sign.
• We're sorry.
• If we want to show a decapitated head flying into the camera, that's our business.
• Come on down and see Bob Hoskins phone it in.
• When you get a disease, just go ahead and lose control. You know, kill a security guard, cut off his hands and head, attempt to assassinate the Prime Minister. That's totally justified.
• Why is everyone in the second half of the film wearing medieval armor? You don't know, and neither do we.
• Yeah, that's a gladiator battle. Yeah, this is set in the future. What you gonna do about it?
• Cell phones can totally get reception, even though it's been fully established that there isn't any power or cell phone towers.
• All that awesome stuff in the trailer? That's about it. The rest is talking. That, and people being burned alive and eaten. For real.
• If we want to show a man being cooked and eaten by a mob of Mad Max lookalikes, that's our business.

And then comes the cannibalism. Again, totally justified.

Remember Animorphs?

So, I... uh, I finally got around to listening to The Beachles. Wow. That was easily the worst sound to ever make it into my earholes. I apologize.

I'm getting sick and tired of people trying to make "comedy" by appealing to things I loved when I was ten years old. Don't get me wrong, I love Captain Planet reruns as much as the next guy, but there's a difference between simply alluding to The Magic School Bus ("Seatbelts, everyone!" Ahhh, that was fun) and making a pointed comment on the relative values of Dinosaurs versus, say, Doug. I just hate it when people are like "Beetlejuice" and you start laughing just because you remember it. At least comment on the fact that the haunting theme song was composed by Danny Elfman, who also did the childhood-regressing bit of LSD-fueled mayhem that was Pee-Wee's Big Adventure. At least have something to say. Otherwise, it's just sad. Hey, remember the Bailey School Kids?

That robot cat in the Rugrats intro terrified me both as a youth and today.

Stuff I Know

Here's some stuff I know.

Niccolò Paganini was an Italian violin virtuoso, famous for being so good that people supposed that he had sold his soul for his talent. The reason for this was his flamboyant stunts. My personal favorite involves learning a popular, complex song on only three strings instead of all four. Then before the concert he would saw partly through the fourth string so it would break halfway through the piece. Undeterred, he would simply complete the piece on the three remaining strings, presumably causing people to go "WHAAAAA?!"

In the past, the small country of Bhutan has been one of the few examples of a functioning aristocracy, based on the central tenets of Buddhism. Unfortunately, the country's youth has been influenced by the creeping specter of MTV and other such side-effects of globalization. The king, realizing that his time had come to an end, decided to implement democracy (instead of flipping out and becoming a dictator. Good move, sir). Interestingly enough, the first election saw the king in power again. While not originally considered for the position, almost everyone voted for him, not wanting anything to change. Only the future will see what's going to happen to that place.

A psychology experiment done in the 1980s revealed that when someone threatens to commit suicide by jumping from a great height, the crowd that inevitably groups below is likely to discourage the jumper. However, as it gets darker or as the crowd gets bigger, the mainstream view tends to drift into the opposite direction, the direction of "JUMP! JUMP! JUMP!" This phenomenon is known as deindividuation, where the individual loses his sense of self, becoming one with the crowd. Why a hivemind is so favorable of suicide is a mystery for the ages.

And that's some stuff I know.

No More MCR? Alright Then.

FINALLY! Russia knows what's going on.

Real-life Superheroes

I was shocked and astounded to discover that Wikipedia has an entry for so-called "real-life superheroes". That was nothing compared to the shock I received when I read it. There are apparently actual people who feel, I don't know, a civic duty or something to dress up in spandex and run around the local scene preventing crimes and getting press coverage. Quite frankly, that doesn't seem very superheroesque, getting interviewed. But when you have no powers aside from the ability to "organize labor rallies and protests, and file petitions", you got nothing else to go on but the fleeting fame television offers. That particular civil servant is Superbarrio, seen here getting into what he presumably calls his "Superbarriomobile."

Not too inspiring. Superbarrio looks like he let himself go a bit. Perhaps the most compelling read is this article from the Washington Post. Aside from that, the closest thing to a superhero I would cheer on is the guy who destroys wheel clamps.

Eyescapes

We are the music makers,
And we are the dreamers of dreams.
Wandering by lone sea-breakers,
And sitting by desolate streams.
World-losers and world-forsakers,
On whom the pale moon gleams.
Yet we are the movers and shakers,
Of the world forever, it seems.

Yeah. For some reason, that always reminds me of eyes. HUMAN EYEBALLS. Probably that "pale moon gleams" line. Anyway, check this out!

Wicked. You can see the rest here. Oh, and props to Piers for the link. I think it was Piers.

Black Browed Albatross

Today I bring nothing but news of the world's most evil bird, the black browed albatross.

Gaze into the eye of wickedness.

Here he is, looking characteristically smug.

Here we see two older birds, presumably selecting the most tender and juicy parts of their offspring.

And here he is... OH SHIT HE SAW ME.

The Guy Has A Mullet

I found this on my hard drive, and I cannot stop laughing. I can't find out where it's from, but I've been periodically opening it up over the past day or two whenever I need a laugh.

I also just realized I have no labels for this post. It's simply too epic.

"In My Pants"

Really sleepy, but just thought of something hysterical. Flying all over dozens of internet forums, you can find the "in my pants" phenomenon. Simply take any song title and add the phrase "in my pants" to the end of it. Instant comedy. Take for instance, The Beatles' Fixing a Hole... In My Pants. Or perhaps Billy Joel's We Didn't Start The Fire... In My Pants. Here are a few more to get you started (please post any good ones in the comments):

Dashboard Confessional's Hands Down In My Pants
The Smiths' I Started Something I Couldn't Finish In My Pants
Linkin Park's Numb In My Pants
Brendan Benson's What I'm Looking For In My Pants

For the record, I found most of those on a forum. Not my work.

Heh... They Might Be Giants' Now That I Have Everything In My Pants. OK, that was weak. I'm going to bed.