The Next Hit Show
Guess what lovely group of people came back to protest an injustice? If you said Westboro, you would be right… but I’m here to chat about One Million Moms – which only has a tiny fraction of that purported million. They are a pet project of the American Family Association (AFA) which aims to be your religious morality police. You might remember them from a couple months ago when they took to calling for a boycott against JC Penny since they were paying Ellen DeGeneres – a *gasp* lesbian – to be their spokesperson.
Well, after shuttering their facebook page for a while, they came back to help society yet again. This time they are supporting Chick Fil-A and protesting a new show on NBC titled “The New Normal”. The premise of the show is deceptively simple – a woman becomes a surrogate mother so a gay couple can start a family. A show like that could subvert a weak minded person & be very dangerous to the general population.
The cities of Boston and Chicago took an anti-business tact when they told Chick Fil-A they are not welcome in those cities. However, the One Million Moms is taking a much more reasonable stance by boycotting NBC and the advertisers on “The New Normal” TV show and trumpeting their new poster boy, Chick-fil-A President, Dan Cathy.
Yes, I can troll my readers a bit if I want to. I get source material on a daily basis. It helps that in my small office, I have two seriously fundamentalist Christians, four Mormons, and one gent that remains fairly neutral. They provide me with hours of entertainment every day. And, by entertainment, I usually mean bleeding from my eardrums.
I rather hoped that the AFA would let the Moms (and dads) group die unceremoniously. But no. They feel the need to protest things that need not be raged upon. As for the premise of the show, I’m happy to see NBC take it on, but I do not see it lasting long anyway. OMM will take credit for the show’s demise – of course. Then again, what do I know? Two and a Half Men has been around for 8 seasons longer than I thought it would.
The Master
Just a quick update on Paul Thomas Anderson’s movie The Master. If you don’t recall, the film is all about the early days of Scientology – um, but isin’t – has a great cast to back it up. It was supposed to be released on October 19th but is now getting moved ahead to September 14th. This is great for the public, but the fewer critics that get to see the film, the less press it will receive. Hopefully, Bob and Harvey Weinstein will put the movie out for wide distribution.
Graphene, My Love
I took an interest in graphene quite a while ago. Back in the heady days when scientists were able to build honeycomb sheets of it just one atom thick. It seems that the team at University of Manchester have taken a giant step in bringing the allotrope of carbon material into your house and mine.
Granted, it was discovered back in 1962 – if wiki serves correctly. Rome was not built in a day and neither were the crystalline graphene structures that 2010 winners of the Physics Nobel, Geim, Novoselov, and their team built in Manchester.
Better samples and new techniques in isolating the graphene have made this lattice of carbon easier to work with and do some pretty kewl shit. Using a beam of ions, the team was able to dig a trench into the material. This could be a great way to lay down circuits for computer chips in coming computers. At room temperature, graphene has a million times the current density of copper while holding the world record for heat dissipation, and if I understand it, has the ability to conduct electricity with almost zero resistance. One more tidbit… The atoms are so tightly bonded that not even helium atoms can pass through – which only leaves hydrogen atoms to pass unscathed – making a good filtration for the first atom on the Periodic Table.
Graphene is the new sherrif in town and it will uphold the law. Moore’s Law, that is.
~Wesley