Steve is the Sheriff. Clint is his deputy. Tony is the Blacksmith. Natasha runs the Saloon. Bruce is the physician with a split personality and Thor gets into a hell of a lot of tavern brawls.
Together, however, they manage to bring order to the once corrupt town of Triskelion.
Magician/actor/comic Harry Anderson has passed away. He was best known as the eccentric, magic-loving Judge Harry Stone on Night Court. Anderson started his showbiz career as a street magician, which eventually led to him performing his tricks on variety TV series like The Mike Douglas Show, The Late Show With David Letterman, and Saturday Night Live. His prestidigitation landed him a role on Cheers as lovable conman Harry “The Hat” Gittes, which in turn got him the Night Court lead that would make him a household name. Anderson’s quirky humor and mastery of magic shine in almost all of his performances.
Anderson also had a few macabre achievements to his name. His version of “Needle Through Arm” is still the go-to trick for any magician who wants to add something ghastly to their act. He also had a prominent role in the the original IT miniseries as the adult Richie Tozier. Harry would also go on to work on two different Tales From the Crypt episodes, one as an actor and the other as a screenwriter. The episode he wrote showcases his fascination with cons and deception.
Harry Anderson was a favorite of this site. We are deeply saddened by his passing and our hearts go out to his family.
Thank you for all the magic moments, Mr. Anderson.
Another shoutout to the demons and monsters that lived under your bed/in your closet and actually obeyed all the arbitrary rules you invented to keep yourself safe, like “if light is touching me at all I can’t be harmed” or “if I’m stepping on carpet I am untouchable” or “if I move my hand in a particular pattern while I walk, I’m off-limits during my voyage through the dark house to the bathroom”.
That was really considerate of them, especially given how biased in your favor those rules were.
2. you know, we have fun here, with the word “meme,” but according to meme theory, which is an actual thing pioneered by reptilian human impersonator Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, most of what we call memes are very unsuccessful memes. A meme, in the scientific sense – if one is generously disposed to consider memetics a science on any particular day – is an idea that acts like a gene. That is, it seeks to replicate itself, as many times as possible, and as faithfully as possible.
That second part is important. A gene which is not faithful in its replication mutates, sometimes rapidly, sometimes wildly. The result might be cancer or a virus or (very very very rarely) a viable evolutionary step forward, but whatever the case, it is no longer the original gene. That gene no longer exists. It could not successfully reproduce itself.
The memes we pass around on the internet are, in general, very short lived and rapidly mutating. It’s rare for any meme to survive for more than a year: in almost all cases, they appear, spread rapidly, spawn a thousand short-lived variations, and then are swiftly forgotten. They’re not funny anymore, or interesting anymore. They no longer serve any function, and so they’re left behind, a mental evolutionary dead end.
This rendition of Freddie Mercury’s immortal opera Bohemian Rhapsody is about the most goddamned amazing demonstration of a successful meme I’ve ever seen. This song is 42 years old, as of 2017. FORTY TWO YEARS OLD. And it has spread SO far, and replicated itself across the minds of millions of people SO faithfully, that a gathering of 65,000 more or less random people, with nothing in common except that they all really like it when Billie Joe Armstrong does the thing with the guitar, can reproduce it perfectly. IN PERFECT TIME. THEY KNOW THE EXACT LENGTH OF EVERY BRIDGE. THEY EVEN GET THE NONSENSE WORDS RIGHT. THEY DIVIDE THEMSELVES UP IN ORDER TO SING THE COUNTER-CHORUS.
“Yeah, Pyrrhic, lots of people know this song.”
Listen, you glassy-eyed ninny: our species’ ability to coherently pass along not just genetic information, but memetic information as well, is the reason we’re the dominant species on this planet. Language is a meme. Civilization is a collection of memes. Lots of animals can learn, but we may be the only animal that latches onto ephemera – information that doesn’t reflect any concrete reality, information with little to no immediate practical application – and then joyfully, willfully, unrelentingly repeats it and teaches it to others. Look at how wild this crowd is, because they’re singing the same song! It doesn’t DO anything. It’s not even why they showed up here today! If you sent out a letter to those same 65,000 people that said, “Please show up in this field on this day in order to sing Bohemian Rhapsody,” very few of them would have showed up. But I would be surprised to meet a single person in that crowd who joined in the singing who doesn’t remember this moment as the most amazing part of a concert they paid hundreds of dollars to see.
And they’re just sharing an idea. It’s stunning and ridiculous. Something about how our brains work make us go, “Hey!! Hey everybody!! I found this idea! It’s good! I like it! I’m going to repeat it! Do you know it too?? Repeat it with me! Let’s get EVERYBODY to know it and repeat it and then we can all have it together at the same time! It’s a good idea! I’m so excited to repeat it exactly the way I heard it, as loudly as I can, as often as possible!!”
This is how culture happens! This is how countries happen! Sometimes a persistent, infectious idea – a meme – can be dangerous or dark. But our human delight at clutching up good memes like magpies and flapping back to our flock to yell about them to everyone we know is why we as a species bothered to start doing things like “telling stories” and “writing stuff down.”
“That’s a lot of spilled ink for a Queen song, Pyrrhic.”
Man I just fucking love people.
I’d argue that the common modern understanding of the term ‘meme’ involves the idea that in order for a meme to be good isn’t how long it lasts, but that it has to be able to mutate efficiently. Which is to say, it has to be applicable to multiple societal ideas and still be funny/relatable. That said, more often than not something gets lost duing this process. For instance, I’m still not sure which direction an expanding brain meme should go, because it commonly goes both directions.
That said, given Richie’s original description, the timelessness of certain ideas is also incredibly encouraging and interesting, rather than just how easily it can be tweaked to fit certain ideas. Most of today’s memes
And sixty-five thousand people sharing Bohemian Rhapsody is just great.
Adaptability is great, I mean, we’ve developed to be adaptable.
But something has to be said for the success of something that doesn’t need to, so fit for purpose that it endures despite the odds, despite the time, like the jawless fish that never knew the air. It persists and perhaps becomes thoroughly ingrained and unchanged. They don’t need to adapt, the only need to continue for the memetic and genetic survival amount to reproduction and persistence.
What you’re hearing is mitochondria, the power ballad of the social cell.
I feel like this is a bad paraphrasing of Lincoln’s Lyceum Address of 1838. The actual quote is so much better.
“Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant to step the ocean and
crush us at a blow? Never! All the armies of Europe, Asia, and Africa
combined, with all the treasure of the earth (our own excepted) in their
military chest, with a Bonaparte for a commander, could not by force take a drink from the Ohio or make a track on the Blue Ridge
in a trial of a thousand years. At what point then is the approach of
danger to be expected? I answer. If it ever reach us it must spring up
amongst us; it cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot we
must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen we
must live through all time or die by suicide.”
T-Mobile didn’t want its rural users to know how shitty its service was,
so when the company couldn’t connect a call, it would play fake “ring
tones” to the caller that made it sounds like the person on the other
end wasn’t picking up. It did this “hundreds of millions of times” per
year.
The FCC has fined T-Mobile $40,000,000, but will not require the company to issue refunds to the customers it scammed.
T-Mobile had engaged in this practice for years, and then the FCC banned it, but they didn’t stop. Hence the fine.
