Truth be told, evolution hasn’t yielded many practical or commercial benefits. Yes, bacteria evolve drug resistance, and yes, we must take countermeasures, but beyond that there is not much to say. Evolution cannot help us predict what new vaccines...
[In a TV commercial] Dr Ray Stantz: Are you troubled by strange noises in the middle of the night? Dr. Egon Spengler: Do you experience feelings of dread in your basement or attic? Dr. Peter Venkman: Have you or your family ever seen a spook, spectre...
Jeffrey Goines: There's the television. It's all right there - all right there. Look, listen, kneel, pray. Commercials! We're not productive anymore. We don't make things anymore. It's all automated. What are we *for* then? We're consumers, Jim. Yeah...
Oompa Loompas: Oompa Loompa doo-pa-dee do / I've got another puzzle for you / Oompa Loompa doo-pa-dah dee / If you are wise you'll listen to me / What do you get from a glut of TV? / A pain in the neck and an IQ of 3 / Why don't you try simply readin...
The range and variety of Chaucer's English did much to establish English as a national language. Chaucer also contributed much to the formation of a standard English based on the dialect of the East Midlands region which was basically the dialect of ...
We keep coming back to the question of representation because identity is always about representation. People forget that when they wanted white women to get into the workforce because of the world war, what did they start doing? They started having ...
Music is crucial. Beyond no way can I overstress this fact. Let's say you're southbound on the interstate, cruising alone in the middle lane, listening to AM radio. Up alongside comes a tractor trailer of logs or concrete pipe, a tie-down strap break...
In societies reduced to blur and glut, terror is the only meaningful act. There's too much everything, more things and messages and meanings that we can use in ten thousand lifetimes. Inertia-hysteria. Is history possible? Is anyone serious? Who do w...
music is the worst of them - roiling and boiling - overly emotionalized on the one hand, overly intellectuallized on the other. Bach and Mozart indeed! Bach inevitably makes me think of fish in a barrel! round and round and round they go and nothing ...
Women's liberation is one thing, but the permeation of anti-male sentiment in post-modern popular culture - from our mocking sitcom plots to degrading commercial story lines - stands testament to the ignorance of society. Fair or not, as the lead gen...
But surely the commute that defines the era was Noah's voyage aboard his eponymous ark, and to this day it remains the most epic commuting story ever told. As most people know, God felt that Earth had essentially "jumped the shark" (or "raped the ang...
But he had always believed in fighting for the underdog, against the top dog. He had learned it, not from The Home, or The School, or The Church, but from that fourth and other great moulder of social conscience, The Movies. From all those movies tha...
Music has become more pervasive and portable than ever. But it feels less previous in the bargain. I don't want to confuse artistic and commercial value, but it's just a fact that some kid who rips an album for free isn't going to give it the same at...
Museum architectural search committees have invariably included the Kimbell in their international scouting tours of exemplary art galleries (a practice pioneered by Velma Kimbell, the founder’s widow, in 1964). Those groups no doubt respond to the...
Kessler depicts his developing intimacy with a handful of dairy goats and offers an enviable glimpse of the pastoral good life. Yet he also cautions, "Wherever the notion of paradise exists, so does the idea that it was lost. Paradise is always in th...
They knew where they were headed but they didn’t know where they were going. Retina shrugged the thought. Roma complained about the possibility they were walking into a trap. After all, he was one of the scientists that decided Solstice’s fate. R...
Jack Walsh: I can't keep you cuffed on a commercial flight, and I gotta check my gun with my luggage, but you fuck with me once and I'm gonna break your neck. Jonathan Mardukas: I can't fly. Jack Walsh: What? Jonathan Mardukas: You heard me, I can't ...
Michael Dorsey: Are you saying that nobody in New York will work with me? George Fields: No, no, that's too limited... nobody in Hollywood wants to work with you either. I can't even set you up for a commercial. You played a *tomato* for 30 seconds -...
[M]y mother read a horror novel every night. She had read every one in the library. When birthdays and Christmas would come, I would consider buying her a new one, the latest Dean R. Koontz or Stephen King or whatever, but I couldn't. I didn't want t...
The point is that television does not reveal who the best man is. In fact, television makes impossible the determination of who is better than whom, if we mean by 'better' such things as more capable in negotiation, more imaginative in executive skil...
This is the lesson of all great television commercials: They provide a slogan, a symbol or a focus that creates for viewers a comprehensive and compelling image of themselves. In the shift from party politics to television politics, the same goal is ...