dimland radio 11-17-18 show notes

Someone Is Trying To Kill Me

Not literally, of course. Well, hm, maybe.

We received a couple bills in the mail. One that presents its own set of problems, which I won’t get into here, the other was something that nearly did me in. It was a bill for our property taxes from our mortgage company.

“WHAT?! We have an escrow account! Why the hell are we getting a bill?”

It turned out not to be a bill, so I was pulled back from the brink. No far from the brink, though, because there’s still that other bills which presents its own set of problems.

It’s always something.

OK, Let’s Try This Again, Shall We?

Nothing’s wrong. Each state gets two senators. Them’s the rules.

I listened to last week’s show. My Pedantic Moment about the number of senators and representatives per state in America didn’t go quite as smoothly as I intended. It was a math thing that I thought I had worked out earlier. Actually, I had, but I got snagged on a number that I couldn’t pull out of the recesses of my brain and I started stumbling from there. I think I was still able to make my main point in the end though.

Still, the pedant in me just needed to go through it again and do it right. Hey, I need to be able to sleep at night, don’t I?

I’m OK With This

A cousin of mine posted the above image to his Facebook page. My initial reaction was to point out that schools may not close on Veterans Day, but they do on Memorial Day. My cousin claimed that some schools stayed open on that Memorial Day. I suggested that maybe some private schools might, but that I was fairly certain public schools would close to observe the day. And that if there were any public schools that didn’t those would be rare.

He claimed that some schools in California and Pennsylvania didn’t close for Memorial Day. That may be, but I couldn’t find any public school schedules in either state that didn’t show the day America honors the military men and women who gave there lives serving our country as a day off from school.

Look, one day for MLK, one day for the American military. I’m OK with that.

A New Car For Mom And Dad

I hadn’t done an impression of my mom in a while, but this week I had an excellent opportunity to bust it out. My impression of her is a favorite of at least one of my listeners, all twenty of them.

About a year ago, Mom announced to the family that if Dad ever cracked open his wallet and decide to buy a new car she wanted a red one. She had always liked red cars and had never owned one. “I want a red car!”

Well, they got a new car. It’s a 2018 Mitsubishi Outlander Sport. Click here to see the color they got.

FilmStruck Isn’t Dead

Netflix is great. It’s wonderful. I love it. But, its streaming catalog has a decided lack of classics, independent, art, and foreign films. You know, the stuff film snobs like. Their DVD branch does have a pretty deep selection, but you have to wait for it the come in the mail and on those night when you want to watch it now, it would be nice if there was a streaming option other than paying separately to watch through iTunes, Amazon, youTube, etc.

I lamented that fact a couple months ago to my wife and she told me there was subscription streaming service that offer exactly what I was looking for.

“Oh? Tell me more?”

That’s when I found out about FilmStruck, a streaming service that offers the kinds of movies film buffs crave. It sounded perfect and we were considering signing up. Then last month, WarnerMedia announced they were shutting down FilmStruck at the end of this month. The decision was due to lower than hoped for subscriptions.

Well, shit.

However, Hollywood didn’t like this news. Just about every big time filmmaker raised a protest and signed a petition asking WarnerMedia to reconsider. This art needs to be readily available.

Well, good news, FilmStruck (sort of) will back in the spring of 2019 as The Criterion Channel. As I understand it, it will be available as a stand alone service, but also be offered in a streaming package service offered by WarnerMedia. This is good, but even at just 10 bucks a month we might not be able to afford it. Remember, there’s that other bill that is presenting its own set of problems.

But, we’ll see.

The Conspiracy Theorists Are At It Again

There just doesn’t seem to be an event that happens in the world that conspiracy theorist can’t twist into some nefarious plot against humanity. The latest that I’ve seen is the massive wildfires in California aren’t really forest fires. They’re an attack by “them” using directed energy weapons ate select neighborhoods in that west coast state.

Seriously, they think there is some death ray (probably controlled by the evil Dr. X) firing from space. Why? To make way for a high-speed railway?

Those of us without a conspiratorial mindset can look at this latest conspiracy to see excellent examples of anomaly hunting and the Dunning-Kruger Effect. These people just don’t know that they don’t know enough about wildfires to know they shouldn’t make declarations such as there is a death ray in the sky. They don’t understand why houses made of dry materials would burn, while living trees filled with water wouldn’t. Huh. It’s a head scratcher.

Mick West of Metabunk gives a quick demonstration to explain why houses burned while trees didn’t.

Here are a couple memes created by the anomaly hunters to suggest a great conspiracy:


Just ignore the burnt trees. And do you see the above ground swimming pool (center, lower half of picture)? Why didn’t it burn?

And why didn’t those two houses on the lower left not burn? They most belong to the conspirators!

Three Cool Things

1) Stan “The Man” Lee died this past week. That’s not what’s cool. I blogged about my reaction to the news of his death, touching on how he changed comic books (and the world). Stan’s legacy is very cool.

Crow? Cat? Hmmmm

2) Is it a crow? A cat? It’s a cat. This photo (above) was shared by mentalist/skeptic Mark Edward. I don’t know if he took the picture or just shared it on Facebook, but it certainly looks cool.

3) A friend clued me in on this take by CollegeHumor on the long running TV ad campaign of Chevy. The “real people, not actors” campaign has been running long enough that one would think people would recognize the fellow asking the questions.

“Which truck has the best…”

“Chevy!” It’s Chevy. You’re the guy in the ads that have been running for the last – what? – five years? You guys really need a new ad campaign.”

CollegeHumor has a cool take.

Music heard on the show…

Dimland Radio opening theme song: ‘Ram‘ by The Yoleus
First ad break bumpers: ‘Next Position Please‘ by Cheap Trick & ‘Epic‘ by Faith No More

Second ad break bumpers: ‘Seen And Not Seen‘ by Talking Heads & ‘Only In America‘ by Naked Raygun

Closing song: ‘Angler’s Treble Hook‘ by $5 Fiddle

That’s it! See you next Saturday night for Dimland Radio 11 Central, midnight Eastern on www.ztalkradio.com you can also download my show from the z talk show archives page. You can email your questions and comments to drdim@dimland.com

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Images used under Fair Use.

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