It just keeps getting better

Ridiculously giddy about Arrow and of course Stephen Amell. A superhero/murderer/vigilante/"Robin-Hood-wannabe" with ptsd and no (whatsoever) super powers except parkour and mad archery skills. Definitely making my fall brighter.

Amell doing parkour, completely fascinated with the ladder pull-up stunt:

And also new on tv this fall is Last Resort, which gives me Battlestar-class-shivers.

Eppur si muove

Whether or not Galileo actually said it, doesn't make it any less true. I stumbled across this awesome video, Temporal Distortion by Randy Halverson (http://dakotalapse.com/)

The Universe truly is infinite and we live on this tiny rock floating in space, it's amazing! And Bear Mccreary's music is, well, it just doesn't get much better.

You'll never leave Harlan alive

Well that is the million dollar question when it comes to Raylan Givens...

My latest tv-obsession is FX series Justified, sweeping in, grabbing a spot at my top-ten-list of tv shows ever made. The show is centred around Givens, played by Timothy Olyphant, a deputy US Marshal who gets reassigned back to Lexington, Kentucky where he grew up. Lots of baggage makes interesting tv... Smart, mainly character driven plot and some kick-ass acting, from Olyphant but also from the rest of the cast, not the least Walton Goggins (from The Shield). Season three is currently airing in the U.S.

Season 1 trailer:

Another short promo, featuring Olyphant and Goggins:

And a clip with a Han Solo reference, just for the fun of it:

The fine line between humorous and unpleasantly awkward

What makes you laugh so hard you cry and your abdominal muscles aches the day after? Or maybe just makes you smile and think: “well, that was kind of funny”? How come it differs between different individuals, yet some things almost all of us find humorous? Why is it some of us find some things extremely funny but others frown and think it is mostly unpleasantly awkward?

The Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary defines humor as:

• that quality which appeals to a sense of the ludicrous or absurdly incongruous
• the mental faculty of discovering, expressing, or appreciating the ludicrous or absurdly incongruous
• something that is or is designed to be comical or amusing

According to John Cleese, walking the line between amusing your audience or making them uncomfortable is the key to success when it comes to making people laugh. And he should know, shouldn’t he? A while back I had the opportunity to listen to Mr. Cleese give a sort of lecture about the nature of humor. Very interesting! The other major point he made, besides the one about the fine line, was that Monty Python‘s success largely depended on always pushing the limit of what was (or is) considered tabu. He used a clip from Monty Python and the Holy Grail to illustrate the tabu point.

The Black Knight:

He also showed this short sketch, which I think is one of the funniest things ever – The fish slap dance:

There are many more examples, like The Ministry of Silly Walks - “the right leg isn’t silly at all” and of course The Dead Parrot sketch.

And once again the universe is a vast emptiness

No FTL, no time travel, no new frontiers for mankind – it looks as though neutrinos can’t travel faster than light and Einstein probably still is right, and the universe is once again infinite. I am a tad bit disappointed.

According to CERN, new test has been conducted that contradicts the results from OPERA last year:

http://press.web.cern.ch/press/PressReleases/Releases2011/PR19.11E.html

Perhaps the name ICARUS is extremely fitting – wasn’t he the one who flew to close to the sun and lost his wings?

Big Things Have Small Beginnings

This is looking absolutely stunning, I get goosebumps. Summer is too far away! The only question is: am I going to be disappointed or will it live up to the extreme expectations?

New acquaintances

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UHxqO-FhbcI