Today in Pop Culture: Can We Trust the Robots?
Published on January 25th, 2016 in: Science and Technology, Science Fiction, Today In Pop Culture |
A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.
Some readers may recognize the above conditions as Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics. They were first published in 1942 and they formed the basis for all of his stories about robots (and there were a lot).
Today in Pop Culture: Louder Than Bombs
Published on January 22nd, 2016 in: Culture Shock, Today In Pop Culture |
Ever since Humankind figured out how to make things explode, we’ve been doing it at the most inappropriate times around people who weren’t expecting it. That’s an abuse of power, as far as I’m concerned, a perversion of knowledge. A sudden explosion is the meanest prank imaginable.
Let’s go back to this date in 1957. A man named George Metesky is arrested in New York. He’s a mild-mannered guy. Heck, before he got arrested, he changed clothes and went to jail wearing a natty double breasted suit. Nobody called him George, though.
His nickname was “The Mad Bomber.”
Today In Pop Culture: America, Meet Patsy Cline
Published on January 21st, 2016 in: Feminism, Music, Today In Pop Culture |
Country music has always been a male-dominated genre, from Hank Williams to Hank Junior to whatever the hell you want to call Florida-Georgia Line and Locash. You can hear a strong female voice every once in a while, but in a ratio comparison to men, those ladies are few and far between. But it is far to say that there was a female revolution in country, starting in the late 1950s when one of the most distinct female voices the world has ever known got her start on a national television show.
Today In Pop Culture: Eat Fresh With Ozzy Osbourne
Published on January 20th, 2016 in: Metal, Music, Today In Pop Culture |
Modern-day 21st century heavy metal is boring. Yeah, I said it. Boring. There’s no flair, no theatricality, no sense of something greater than itself. Bland long-haired boys with guttural voices and quadruple-kick drums, honking and snorting their way through what they loosely refer to as “songs” while the audience punches each other and waits for the breakdown.
The Eighties, though? That was the time. That was the Golden Age of Heavy Metal. Bands were real bands, and wore codpieces without shame or cause. There were pyrotechnics and crazy visual effects. The stage was a giant Satanic playground, with pentagrams flying like boomerangs everywhere. It was goofy and joyous, and sometimes it went a little too far.
Today In Pop Culture: Scrabble Hits The Shelves
Published on January 19th, 2016 in: Gaming, Today In Pop Culture |
The best board games are the ones based on timeless concepts. Monopoly is based on greed and capitalism. Candy Land is all about sweet yummy things and matching colors, all essential parts of being a functioning pre-schooler. It should come as no surprise that one of the most popular and enduring board games is based on language.
On this date in 1955, Scrabble hit the shelves, eventually becoming one of the best-selling board games in history.
Today in Pop Culture: Pink Floyd Builds The Wall
Published on January 18th, 2016 in: Music, Today In Pop Culture |
Take a dreadful story about alienation, fascism, war, childhood trauma, and drug addiction. Now, set it all to music. What do you get? One of the biggest-selling albums of all time.
It’s 1980, and the happy-go-lucky Seventies are executed in grand fashion when Pink Floyd’s double album, The Wall, hits number one on the Billboard charts on this date.
Today In Pop Culture: The Black Dahlia Is Discovered In Leimert Park
Published on January 15th, 2016 in: Books, Movies, Today In Pop Culture |
Trigger Warning: graphic descriptions of murder
Leimert Park is a funky little neighborhood in South Los Angeles. It was planned in the 1920s, and the architecture is mostly Spanish Colonial Revival. Now, it is known for its music, its food, and its embracing of African-American culture. But Leimert Park is known for something else, too: one of the greatest unsolved mysteries in American history.
Today In Pop Culture: Elvis Gets A Promotion
Published on January 14th, 2016 in: Music, Today In Pop Culture |
Back when military service was mandatory in the United States, no male was immune from getting called up. There were ways around it, if you had the stroke to pull some strings, but most men at that time ended up in the employ of the Armed Forces. Some people looked forward to it, having a real desire to serve their country. It was an honorable thing, not just a career or a last chance to make something of themselves before going to jail. They yearned to give something back, to defend the country with their lives, if necessary.
Today in Pop Culture: Ernie Kovacs Exits, Stage Left
Published on January 13th, 2016 in: Comedy, Today In Pop Culture, TV |
A rainy morning in Los Angeles. A man loses control of his Chevrolet Corvair and hits a telephone pole. He is thrown halfway out of the passenger side, dying almost instantly from the impact. The year is 1962, and the man is Ernie Kovacs.
Today in Pop Culture: Holy Debut, Batman!
Published on January 12th, 2016 in: Comics, Today In Pop Culture, TV |
He is vengeance. He is the night. He is the darkest of all the superheroes, borne of family tragedy, driven by vengeance and personal demons he cannot exorcise. He faces psychotic enemies and triumphs through sheer force of will.
He is, of course, the Batman.
But the Bat wasn’t always the tortured soul, hiding in the shadows. He was, at one point, a goofball.