Ridiculous News Round-Up

This is going to be another decent length blog post, as I catch up on several small stories that I felt all deserved to be looked at through the eyes of Brawny, beginning with an idiot, moving through some more idiots, and ending with... well, you'll have to read all the way to the end to find out won't you! (But I wouldn't rule out it being more idiots...)

So apparently there's an American Professor called Sidney Perkowitz has been making suggestions to Hollywood. He says that he is "... not offended if they make one big scientific blunder in a given film... But after that I would like things developed in a coherent way."

Yeah. Because that's the problem with most Hollywood films today. The science is wrong. Never mind all the re-makes, re-imaginings, returns and re-boots populating the release schedules (and yes, I know a better word for return would have been sequel, but then I'd have lost the rhythm of the writing using the prefix 're' in each word in the list. So there.) if we get the science right then that's the way forward.

What an idiot.

Whats worse is when you keep reading through the article, the films he cites are Starship Troopers, The Core, and Angels and Demons. His issue with the Core is fairly reasonable from a scientific point of view (although I still don't think it should stop people from making such films), as it's about the geology of the earth. With Angels and Demons he bemoans the use of a small battery powered forcefield to keep safe an anti-matter bomb. Would he have been happier, one wonders, if they had just made up a new name for the bomb, so that it didn't relate to any scientific reality?

But the one that bugs me the most is "Perkowitz said he liked Starship Troopers, but criticised its giant insects, saying if you scaled up a real bug to that size it would collapse under its own weight." Yes, this is probably true. But bear in mind that the insects in Starship Troopers are not earth bugs, they are ALIENS! With a physiology that no-one knows about! SO IT DOESN'T MATTER!! Talk about picking on a pointless reason for films being bad nowadays.

Oh and the other thing that made me laugh hysterically. This man who is suggesting films and TV should be more scientifically realistic has apparently had an impact as the article states "the exchange has advised on the Watchmen movie and the TV series, Heroes."

Let's for a moment ignore the bad grammar, wondering how an exchange can have advised on something, and just laugh outright at the concept that Heroes obeys any form of scientific law. Other than the law of diminishing returns....

In other recent news, the Tories got in trouble for misplacing a decimal point, and therefore proudly announcing that 54% of teenagers in deprived areas are pregnant. 54%. That's more than half. I live in a deprived area, and work in an all-girls school, and if half of them are pregnant, then they're hiding it very well! What makes me laugh more is that this error wasn't someone reading it in a speech, it was published. Which means whoever proof read the report thought that it was an accurate representation of the truth... Out of touch much?

Talking of idiotic teenagers (well we weren't, we were talking about idiotic Tories believing that all teenagers are idiots, but it seemed like a good link at the time) there's a scandal going on in Germany at the moment around the teenage author Helene Hegemann. Apparently, her cult teen bestseller Axolotl Roadkill contains passages "that are plainly lifted wholesale from another novel, Strobo". However, the writer of the Guardian news article (Robert McCrum) seems to think that she "a child of the internet age, simply does not understand, or recognise, the charge of plagiarism. To her, coming from the cut-and-paste world of blogs and Facebook, what she's done is no more than "mixing"

Um, OK... except I come from the cut and paste world of blogs and Facebook, and I understand right from wrong... I'm not passing judgement because I haven't read either book (as I don't read German. I can say the word for Pedestrian Zone and claim to be a doughnut, but that's as far as my German education in year 9 went) but if the plagiarism is as obvious as Mr McCrum states, then she deserves to be brought up on whatever charges are suitable. And don't say she didn't know it was wrong, I bet she did. (Oh look at that, I said I wasn't going to judge, and now I'm being judgemental. Oh well, that's my right as an internet blogger, I can criticise anything I want, and who will stop me? No-one!! Hahahahahahahahah..... (Continues evil laugh for a while, realises I am alone, and stops, sheepishly) )

And on a final, slightly lighter hearted note, I watched the first episode of The Bubble on BBC iPlayer the other day, and while it was a perfectly respectable time-wasting show (made all the funnier this week by having the brilliant Reginald D Hunter on it), there was a point in it that made me laugh.

The Bubble (for those of you who don't know) is basically a comedy show where they lock three guests away for the week so they don't see the news, and then they show them various news reports and newspaper headlines and the guests have to guess which are real and which are made up. So far, so humorous (I particularly liked the news article about introducing a gay character into Thomas the Tank Engine. That's right, a gay engine. That was made up, but still amusing) . However, this BBC-produced, BBC-aired show has been told that they cannot use any BBC reporters to create the fake news reports, because the BBC don't want to undermine them.

So the news reports on this BBC show are being provided by their direct competition, ITV, Channel 4 and Sky News.

Seriously, could the BBC be any stupider?