Monthly Archives: October 2016
Happy Monday!
That Awkward Engagement: Round 2.
Donna Laura Prepon and Kelso Ashton Kutcher were not only fictional best friends in that famously non-famous Wisconsin suburb of Point Place, but they are best friends in the non-fictional world.
Or so they thought…
Humorously, Laura and Ashton are strikingly similar when it comes to dealing with their real world engagement announcements. As a fan of the late ’90s-early ’00s sitcom about the ’70s, it’s great to see the cast members are still friends after all these years. One can tell if the chemistry on screen is genuine and the friendly back-and-forth between the two was reminiscent of their magic from That ’70s Show.
They’re still hanging out, down the street, just not doing the same old thing that they did last week.
Have an Awesome Week!
Thank You for Being a Trend
Superman, Batman, Ninja Turtles and the almighty…
Golden Girls?
Yes, you read that right. Rose, Dorothy, Blanche and Sophia are entering the super club of superheroes by way of action figure alley.
(Funko)
“The response to our ‘Golden Girls’ products has been wild.” Funko marketing director Mark Robben told ABC News. “We almost weren’t prepared for the excitement. We created these as a passion project initially, and were blown away when it started trending on social media.”
The four-figure set costs $25 or ships to the UK for £21.50, which converts to about AU$35. It’s only available from participating Target stores and New York Comic Con.
–Bonnie Burton, CNET Gadgets
When you consider the Millennial outpouring of a nostalgic persuasion for Betty White (which was a leading driver for her TV resurgence in recent years), molding Ms. White and her fellow “Golden Girls” into pop-culture icons as action figures was inevitable. Perhaps not foreseeable, but inevitable all the same. A sitcom about elderly women living in the same house in Miami, FL has generated enough of a cult following and place in the hearts of those young and old that these four women continue to positively influence our lives 24 years after the show’s series finale on May 9, 1992.
That’s a golden legacy.
Most of all, this toy set is yet another reminder that great friendships impact us forever.
For that, we’re thankful to Rose, Dorothy, Blanche and Sophia.
No Strings Attached
Remember when anybody who was anybody had a fast-talking, lookalike puppet?
The ’90s was an insanely awesome decade for many reasons, least of which was because the NBA was actually fun to watch. Michael Jordan, Scottie Pippen, Steve Kerr, Dennis Rodman, Toni Kukoč and the Chicago Bulls were led by “The Zen Master” Phil Jackson. The Seattle Supersonics was a real team with Gary “The Glove” Payton, Shawn Kemp and one of the greatest sports names ever: Detlef Schrempf. And let’s not forget about Hakeem Olajuwon firing up the Houston Rockets.
Even so, the real magic of the NBA in the ’90s went down in Orlando. Anfernee “Penny” Hardaway is one of the league’s all-time greats, including his nickname. Along with his immense talent was his prowess for marketing and nobody talked a big game like Penny’s small friend who sounded precisely like comedian Chris Rock:
“Lil’ Penny.”
This blissful commercial is why “Throwback Thursday” is such a fantastic phenomenon.
It’s just a nice coincidence that Penny happened to throw the ball through the back of the hoop.
This Wasn’t a Small Step and It Wasn’t Made By Mankind
Hold on to your butts…
Some of the largest footprints known to science were made 70 million to 90 million years ago, when a type of dinosaur believed to be a titanosaur galumphed across the muck in central Asia.
—, The Washington Post
And that enormous foot left quite the impression.
“The footprint is one of the biggest known footprints in the world,” said Shinobu Ishigaki, a researcher at the Okayama University of Science in Japan and a member of the joint Mongolian-Japanese expedition to the Gobi, in an email to The Washington Post. The researchers announced their discovery of the footprint, roughly the size of a popular IKEA kitchen table, on Friday in Japan.
(Courtesy Shinobu Ishigaki/Okayama University of Science. Professor Shinobu Ishigaki lies next to a dinosaur print in the Gobi Desert)
As I’m writing this blog post on a kitchen table from IKEA, the picture above really hits close to home.
Joyous discoveries like the one made by Professor Shinobu Ishigaki is a great reminder of the wonder of this world, particularly with what roamed the Earth long before us. Thankfully, Michael Crichton and Steven Spielberg brought dinosaurs to life beyond the dusty pages of a book sitting on the shelf in 1993. Our minds have been blown ever since. Yes, being hunted by two velociraptors in a kitchen would be absolutely terrifying. Still, there’s a significant part of you that wants to be in Jurassic Park when watching the movie. The adrenaline to understand the known (and ironically unknown) characteristics of dinosaurs is what fuels our universal love and curiosity for the prehistoric creatures. That feeling is clearly expressed in Professor Ishigaki’s face in the picture above from a footprint left tens of millions of years ago.
What would it be like to witness a footprint the size of an IKEA kitchen table being made at the point of impact?
Jurassic World: You’re up.
Clever Owen.
Jimmy's Daily Planet 