THE BARBIE-COOKIE CONFLATION

We have already learned about "Growing Up Skipper" and "Slumber Party Barbie." There is still yet another disaster in the Barbie pantheon. In 1997, Mattel teamed up with Nabisco and produced "Oreo Barbie." You would have thunk that someone in these two companies, before they released the African-American version of the doll, would have realized that "Oreo" is a modern derogatory term for what used to be called an "Uncle Tom" and refers to a person who is black on the outside but white on the inside.

Oreo Barbie copyrighted by Mattel.
Image via Wikimedia

WERE VIKINGS HORNY?

Despite numerous cartoons and other depictions to the contrary, there is no evidence that Vikings ever wore helmets with horns on them. While some pre-Viking cultures possibly had individuals who sported headgear with antlers or horns attached thereon, the wearers were generally priests who donned such a cap for ceremonial occasions and not a warrior who would prefer to avoid having his helmet catch on tree branches or other objects when he is running or fighting an opponent.

The horned helmet stereotype sprang primarily from the minds of creative Scandinavian artists in the 19th Century. The imagery became ubiquitous as a result of the costumes used in Richard Wagner's  “Der Ring des Nibelungen” opera in the 1870s.

For more information on Norsemen cerebral fashions, please click on the History Channel website.

RATTLESNAKE LUNCHTIME RITUALS

A rattlesnake, like other pit vipers such as the cottonmouth and copperhead, has pits on the sides of its head which detect infrared radiation which is produced by potential warm-blooded prey. Normally, when dealing with a juicy rat or other mammal, the snake will strike, inject its venom, and then withdraw so that the animal can go through its death throes without biting or scratching the serpent. Once the victim has shuffled off this mortal coil, the reptile will leisurely ingest it.

Birds, however, are another problem. If the snake bites the bird and then releases it, the bird could easily fly an inconvenient distance far away before it dies. Therefore, if the snake has struck avian prey, it will hold onto it firmly for dear life (or more accurately, for dear death) until the bird is deceased and ready for swallowing.

The ability to distinguish between the best methods for swallowing mammals and birds is instinctive, not learned. Rattlesnakes raised from birth in captivity, on the first time they encounter a fowl, display the same savvy behavior as their companions in the wild.

If you like rattlesnakes (and how could you not!), you have got to make the trek to Albuquerque sometime in your life to see the American International Rattlesnake Museum. It is definitely cool.

Oh, and with respect to the attached image? Don't try this at home. It isn't very sanitary.

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THE STAR WARS HOLIDAY SPECIAL--AND YOU THOUGHT THAT JAR JAR BINKS WAS BAD...

Chewbacca from Star Wars has a wife named Malla (short for "Mallatobuck"), a son named Lumpy (short for "Lumpawarrump") and a father named Itchy (short for "Attichitcuk").  

These intimate personal details of Chewbacca's life were revealed to the world in the infamous November 17, 1978 TV broadcast of the two-hour Star Wars Holiday Special, which featured Harvey Korman, Bea Arthur, Art Carney, and all of the principals of the first Star Wars movie, including "Darth Vader and his Raiders." You get a whole new perspective on the Star Wars universe when you see a Dark Lord of the Sith and his Imperial Stormtroopers prancing around the stage in a song and dance number. My wife and I watched the show over 45 years ago on our little Zenith black-and-white portable, and I still have flashbacks to that traumatic experience.

David Hofstede, who authored the scholarly treatise of  What Were They Thinking?: The 100 Dumbest Events in TV History ranks this program as "the worst two hours of television ever." Nathan Rabin, noted film and music critic, opined that it may have been "ultimately written and directed by a sentient bag of cocaine."

The show was mercifully never rebroadcast and never released on any recorded media. Any copies available to the public are the pirated products of nerds who had access to what would have been very expensive videotaping equipment at the time. Carrie Fischer (Princess Leia) compelled George Lucas to give her a copy in exchange for her narration of a commentary for a DVD of Star Wars films. She played the tape of the Holiday Special at the end of parties at her house when she wanted to hustle the guests out to go home.

Photo via Wikimedia

ALL DEEP SPACE MISSIONS BEGIN WITH A PORKCHOP

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A "pork chop plot" is used by aeronautical engineers to compute when a given spacecraft should be launched to intersect a particular planet or other destination in space at a specific time. It requires consideration of multiple factors including the time required for the mission, the consumption of fuel, and the depth and angle of orbit required to complete the tasks of the spacecraft at its arrival point. For reasons beyond my ken (no, I am in fact definitely NOT a rocket scientist), the shortest and most direct way to the destination is not necessarily the one which consumes the least fuel. 

The plot is called a pork chop because the resulting graph is shaped, well, like a pork chop, as can be seen within pages 8  through 10 of this analysis of a pork chop plot for a Mars landing.

The Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California is the facility which does most of the brainwork for NASA in planning NASA's deep space missions. In planning a trajectory for one of the Voyager missions, JPL ran over 10,000 porkchop plots and finally settled on about 100 possibilities. 

A major consideration in the planning was to insure that no planetary encounters occurred near Thanksgiving or Christmas. Perhaps the motivation for this restriction was so that members of the public could appreciate a planetary flyby without a major holiday competing for their attention. A far more likely reason is that the space agencies did not want hordes of employees having to come to work on December 25 voicing opinions concerning the ancestry or sexual habits of supervisors who would schedule a flyby on Christmas.

The photo is, of course, of Pluto, the smallest and outermost PLANET (up yours, International Astronomical Union!) in our solar system, and was taken by NASA's New Horizons spacecraft.

POT PARTIES IN THE OLD SOUTH

During the American Civil War, one popular social event of patriotic Southern belles was the urine drive. They would go from house to house and collect hundreds of gallons of "chamber ley," also known as "pee." The liquid gold was refined to make saltpeter, which, along with charcoal and sulphur, is one of the three components of gunpowder.

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THE SUPERMAN SARTORIAL STAGNATION

In the 1950s TV series The Adventures of Superman, each principal actor wore the same costume throughout each whole season in order to save production costs. The segments of each show would be shot out of sequence, where one week of production might be spent just shooting all of the scenes in a season which were set in a particular location. For example, one week would be consumed doing the scenes which took place in Editor Perry White's office at The Daily Planet for a season, while the next week might be expended filming a season's worth of scenes which occurred in Inspector Henderson's cubicle at police headquarters. This process sped up production, saved the costs of using multiple sets at any one time, and sometimes enabled the insertion of the same scene in different episodes, such as the standard clip of Perry White yelling on the phone for Jimmy Olsen to come to his office.
  

Due to the lack of continuity, the actors generally had no idea of the story lines behind any of the scenes they were shooting nor why their characters would be uttering any particular segment of dialogue. These limitations purportedly resulted in less than stellar performances. However, as part of the target audience for this program, I can assure you that I found the portrayals of Superman and his myrmidons to be authentic, witty, and riveting.

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