CNN:
Gene Wilder, who brought a wild-eyed desperation to a series of memorable and iconic comedy roles in the 1970s and 1980s, has died, his lawyer, Eric Weissmann, said.
He was 83.
...Wilder died due to complications from Alzheimer's disease, which he struggled with for three years...The death of Gene Wilder forces a reflection on what makes a great comic actor. The obvious answer is "be funny". While Wilder was funny on his own, what made him great was the ability to make the people around him funnier. When a scene called for someone else to deliver the punchline, Wilder could add to it, making a funny line even more hilarious.
A few examples, from Young Frankenstein:
Even though Young Frankenstein was a satire of the old Frankenstein movies, it stands up as its own story, transcending the satire label. I would rank it among the top 5 comedies of all-time.
In other news...
The Atlantic:
Before I begin this story, I should explain I quit watching football three years ago, when I got rid of my satellite dish. While I could still happily sit down and watch a game, I haven't missed it. So when I heard about Colin Kaepernick's protest, I shrugged.
Here is the story:
San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick’s refusal to stand for the national anthem before games as a protest against recent high-profile incidents of police brutality and racial injustice have been met with criticism and protests, but is an important step for a league where professional athletes rarely speak out on such issues.So now some other overpaid and pampered football players are going to protest too. The problem with this is football players live their entire lives in a football bubble. By the time they reach college, they are nearly immune from the law, much like our politicians (i.e. Hillary Clinton). Basically, people who live without consequences for their actions are going to lecture the rest of us about what is wrong with this country?
My response to Mr. Kaepernick and his hypocritical buddies: Step out into the real world boys! When we get stopped by cops, we don't get to drop our own names and ride off. We get tickets, and sometimes much worse.
Don't lecture us about how bad this country is that pays you 7 and 8 figure salaries to play a game, while the rest of us work like slaves in dead-end jobs, if we are lucky enough to have jobs. Note those large salaries paid to football players go to a lot of black people too. In fact, the majority of players in the NFL are black. You don't even live in a world of racial injustice.
Finally, if you are going to make a protest over police brutality, be prepared to talk specifics. I have looked at these cases thoroughly, and except for two of them, most are either justified or borderline enough to give the police the benefit of the doubt.
Rant over.
UPDATE 9:00 am EST: David Harsanyi has a great take on this story over at the Federalist.
CNN:
I love astronomy news, and it doesn't get much bigger than this:
Astronomers engaged in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) are training their instruments on a star around 94 light years from Earth after a very strong signal was detected by a Russian telescope.But here is the neat takeaway from this story:
An international team of researchers is now examining the radio signal and its star, HD 164595 -- described in a paper by Italian astronomer Claudio Maccone and others as a "strong candidate for SETI" -- in the hopes of determining its origin.
"The signal from HD 164595 is intriguing, because it comes from the vicinity of a sun-like star, and if it's artificial, its strength is great enough that it was clearly made by a civilization with capabilities beyond those of humankind," astronomer Douglas Vakoch, president of METI International, which searches for life beyond Earth, tells CNN.
Paul Gilster of the Tau Zero Foundation, which conducts interstellar research, said that if the signal was artificial, its strength suggested it would have to come from a civilization more advanced than our own.
Such a civilization would likely be Type II on the Kardashev scale, an attempt by the Soviet astronomer of the same name to categorize various technological stages of civilizations.
"The Kardashev scale is based basically on the energy that that civilization might be able to funnel for its own use," says Maccone.
At present, our own species is somewhere near Type I on the scale, whereby a civilization is able to harness all the energy available to it on its own planet, including solar, wind, earthquakes, and other fuels.
A Type II civilization would be able to harness the entirety of the energy emitted by its star, billions of billions of watts.So what is beyond Type II? According to Wikipedia:
Doing so would require a colossal undertaking, likely the construction of some kind of superstructure, such as a giant sphere or swarm of super-advanced solar panels popularized by astronomer Freeman Dyson that could catch and store all radiation put out by the sun.
A Type III civilization can control energy on the scale of their entire host galaxy.I love days when I learn something new.
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