Post Year-and-a-Month Analysis, Day V

The World:

The T-800® Memorial Award for Excellence in the Field of Future Deadliness For Humans:  A tie between SARCOS’s military exoskeleton and BEAR (Battlefield Extraction-Assist Robot).  Both machines came into public view last year, both have been applied towards military applications, and both will probably try to crush one human child before the end of next year.  SARCOS, a company with a name that sounds only a little bit like CyberDyne, developed a mechanical exoskeleton that allows a soldier to move hundreds of pounds around like nothing and virtually eliminates fatigue.  What it doesn’t do is prepare the soldier for the psychological trauma that will arise once the exoskeleton starts ripping into its own battalion and flinging its fellow troops around like rag dolls while the soldier inside the exoskeleton struggles to get free.  One bright spot to look forward to when the SARCOS exoskeletons start hunting us down is that we’ll be able to smell the decomposing corpses of soldiers still inside the exoskeletons before they get into strangulation range.

The BEAR takes a unique approach to robot deadliness by combining the single-minded efficient killing abilities of a robot with a bear, which as far as I can tell is the animal we invented the word “maul” for.  Among the BEAR”s attributes are the ability to carry up to 500 pounds for almost an hour.  That’s roughly 4 full grown people, or one Harry Knowles, that a BEAR will be able to deliver to the liquefying factories at a time.  Another aspect of BEAR’s true evil is its head.  It’s supposedly designed to calm fallen soldiers as it carries them off the battlefield, but in all actuality the soulless eyes reflect the distress you would feel while being carried by it and knowing that at any second it could easily flip its amazing arms towards its body and squeeze the life out of you in record time.  You can currently get the same experience by putting a clown mask on the foot of one of those recumbent hospital beds.

You can visit the websites for SARCOS and Vecna Robotics, the makers of BEAR, and see how each company is marketing the future oblivion of mankind.  SARCOS seems to know what could possibly happen with their creation, and don’t readily mention it on their site.  I assume this is to keep our future selves from finding out firsthand where humanity went wrong and sending pack freedom fighters back in time to bomb their complexes, which would really take focus off of exoskeleton production.  Vecna Robotics, on the other hand, seems to revel in its bearbot producing ways, even going so far as to showcase their future plans in destroying humanity.  Imagine my horror when I saw this image in the BEAR section:

Creating a robot that can clear a battlefield of its fallen human foes is one thing, but here Vecna has crossed a line.  That BEAR is stealing that amputee!  And for what nefarious purpose?  I’m guessing it’s planning on installing robotic limbs onto him and using him as a scout to test the effectiveness of our human weapons before sending the SARCOS exoskeletons into battle.  I don’t know about you, but I was sleeping a little sounder before I knew that bear-headed robots were wheeling into hospitals and pilfering our amputees and elderly. I also find it disturbing that you can donate money to the BEAR project, which as far as I’m concerned is like putting the gun you plan on killing yourself with on layaway.  And could there be a more evil-sounding robotics company name than Vecna?  God, I need a drink. 

Best Advancement in the Field of Science That Won’t Kill Us All:  Genetically modified chickens bred in Scotland.  I rank this as number one because Science has finally taken a Macintosh/iPhone approach to its crazy experiments and started making its results do it all.  As it turns out, the eggs that are laid by these chickens fight cancer.  So that’s a little bit awesome.  I’m for anything that makes the animals I eat juicier and all-around more delicious, and if they start fighting deadly diseases, all the better.  One can only hope that their corpses are self-marinating. 

I was excited when it was announced that scientists had found a way to convert skin cells into stem cells, which could end the debate on the subject and finally let people get around to curing shit, but I’ve been taking a cautious wait-and-see approach to the subject of stem cells because it potentially means clones, and everything we've seen and heard about clones says they're evil and only live to replace the original...by any means necessary.  So it just barely loses.  However, when it turns out that all the people we’ve cloned from stem cells don’t have souls and begin killing us all mercilessly, it may comfort you to know that while you’re huddled in your warbunker and eyeing the man sitting across from you and wondering if he’s one of them, this is one battle they’ve already lost.

Post Year-and-a-Month Analysis, Day IV

I just thought of one more award for movies I’d like to give out:

Best Musical of the Year:  Ghost Rider.  I believe Ghost Rider was as much an exploration and expression of The Carpenters as it was a movie based off of the Ghost Rider comics, especially because by the time you get fed up with the movie and turn it off (about thirty minutes in), you’ll hear more from and about The Carpenters than Ghost Rider.  I would’ve given it to Across the Universe but unfortunately Bono was in it.  Sweeney Todd was also lackluster, but it does win the award for Best Film Wherein One of the Lead Males Looks Exactly Like Milla Jovovich.

Other Jokes About Ghost Rider in 2007: 

Last year I went with a buddy of mine to pick up his comics, and one of the issues he got was Ghost Rider.  On the cover, Ghost Rider was wrapping his chains around the Hulk's neck.  That’s right, Ghost Rider was fighting the Incredible Hulk.  I can only imagine the issue started with Ghost Rider staring at the Hulk and thinking “What the hell am I doing?  I’m Ghost Rider.  Do they really expect me to fight the Hulk with my chains and my exposed skull?  That’s like fighting Ed Gein with an already-peeled baby.  Aren’t there souls I can be damning?  I need to just get on my motorcycle and ride away.  This is bullshit.”  I also imagine the rest of the issue is Ghost Rider at the café, enjoying a biscotti and not being pummeled all to hell.

The World:

In trying to keep this half-assed analogy between the year 2007 and this year’s Super Bowl going, it’s important to look at the actual game.  Unfortunately, this year’s game blew.  And not just because it was incredibly boring until the very end, where it became sadly anti-climatic.  It was because…actually, those were pretty good summaries of why it was disappointing.  And I’m not even going to get into the commercials, since I’m not a crazy sonuvabitch who cares about what crazy, stereotype-laden nonsense Bud Light can come up with.  I actually use the commercial breaks like God intended:  taking shits and cleaning lint out of my belly-button.

I think what I’ve proven with this is that, no matter how much you try to lazily shoehorn two events together, sometimes you just can’t compare Super Bowl XLII with the year 2007.  Sure, both started off well enough, with a couple of quick scores on the board for offense and special teams, which I believe can describe the troop surge in Iraq and astronaut Lisa Nowak’s cross-country attempt at kidnapping, but only if we use the right definition of “special” in “special teams.”  For example, “That special boy makes me laugh.”  Still, last year stayed pretty tame throughout, I’d have to say.  While my personal life was crashing and burning, much like the Patriot’s dreams, or a drunk Dale Earnhardt piloting the Hindenburg while Princess Di gives him head, nothing too spectacular happened in 2007.  The President never removed his face while giving a speech and revealed himself to be a bipedal goat who could mimic our language, for one, and our world was safe from both angry alien forces, diabolical mole-people, and all the other things that M. Night Shyamalan puts into his crappy films, of which we were also spared.  That being said, let’s take a look back at the headlines of last year.

Late Night Talk Show Joke Fodder of the Year:  Britney Spears shaving her head.  I know that TV producers are looking back on this and thinking “If only it had happened during the writer’s strike!”  I’d like to make some sort of joke, but they’ve all been made, rehashed, stolen by Carlos Mencia, and then they've crawled off to die the way most of these jokes do:  by being combined with a Chuck Norris fact.  Instead, I’m going to offer an explanation of how this came to be by explaining a pattern in the headline cycles.  It first started when a Family Guy joke came to life and astronaut Lisa Nowak attempted to kidnap a rival astronaut after driving from Texas to Florida while wearing a diaper.  This incident also spared the talk show hosts from having to think of material for a couple of weeks, so it’s probably a close second in this category.  However, what the Gods of Tabloid Journalism giveth, the Gods of Tabloid Journalism taketh away, and it was barely 4 days later when Anna Nicole Smith died under “mysterious circumstances.”  I put “mysterious circumstances” in quotations because we’ve all seen at least a few minutes of how she lived either on TV or magazine covers; she was surviving on what basically amounted to pills and radio waves from a distant planet.

Now, after two such incongruous events happened within days of each other, it may be hard to imagine what Fate could possibly do to top them.  As it turns out, it was fairly obvious, and eight days later Fate simply combined the two events to create a sad yet absolutely insane affair starring a young woman whose talents have long been forgotten.  And while Britney Spears never really had any achievements on the level of going into space, or even Skyscraper, she serves as a precious reminder that money doesn’t buy happiness.  Or sanity.