The way we rate movies in America is confusing and arbitrary at best. The stranglehold the Motion Picture Association of America has over artists and the way they present their art is unconscionable. It is an outdated, lopsided system which falls apart when you apply even the least amount of thought to it.
There may not be any expression of emotion purer than the act of dance. Whether it is a formal kind of dance, like ballet, or a child dancing awkwardly in circles for no reason than being alive, the act of dancing wells up from inside and explodes in a flurry of limbs and happiness. Obviously, the best thing to do with something like a dance is ban it, right?
The year was 1962, and the Catholic Diocese in Buffalo, New York, decided to ban the Twist from all Catholic schools in America.
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).
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.”
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.
Many people believe that horror fiction begins and ends with Stephen King. It’s easy to see why. King has sold 900 gabillion books, and they keep coming out. The man could publish a phone number scribbled on the back of a receipt and the New York Times would drool all over it.
That’s fine, but that means that a lot of readers aren’t taking full advantage of their resources. There are a plethora of small presses publishing quality horror. Self-published authors are also creating some fantastic work. It’s not all dinosaur erotica and woodworking books.
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.
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.
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.
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.