I just gave up entirely. I never tell your wife her ass is hot.

Is there a name for this phenomenon?

A lot of modern popular culture was invented in the 60s, 70s and 80s, and so us millennials born in the 80s and 90s emerged into a world where all the adults had Star Wars and Star Trek and Indiana Jones and Jaws and such on their minds, so the adults making kids shows wrote them as references to media we didn’t have time to watch yet. So by the time I was old enough to sit down and watch Star Wars, I knew the plot already. We kinda got pop culture backwards.

I didn’t grow up with Care Bears, I was raised on a steady diet of Sesame Street and Eureka’s Castle, so this specific instance is news to me but this kind of thing happened a lot. Does it still?

I haven’t seen anything Trek made since 2009. You’ll be okay.

No I don’t.

This is a discussion between Andy Weir and his book editor Julian Pavia. At the 6 minute mark, he talks about how both he and screenwriter Drew Goddard wanted the scene to be in the movie, but “It would have added about 6 minutes of runtime, and it’s like aaah, we’re getting pretty long, so.”

Wait! How’d they wrangle that? They…oh wait it’s parody.

Muppet Babies would occasionally use actual Star Trek and Indiana Jones footage, they could get the rights because 20th Century Fox. I doubt Paramount let them use actual TNG footage.

I have a direct answer to that question! The oral history on how the Care Bears made a Star Trek parody can be found in a recent video by Allison Pregler: https://youtu.be/t_pYuglkn84

People sell them on Etsy.

It is my understanding that German vehicles were designed as advanced, high performance machines with impressive capabilities…but that meant they required intensive maintenance by specialized technicians and thus not easily replaced. A German truck, new or well maintained, would kick a Jeep’s ass. Except the US made and transported 1.73 frillion of them plus parts and tools.

Is that the one where Rock “The Dwayne” Johnson bodyslams Seven of Nine, or is that the one with all the glimpses?

I’ve heard that story told a lot. Germans marveled at the Willy’s Jeep, not because it’s a particularly good truck, a German truck was a work of art compared to a Jeep, but America had so many of them we didn’t need to give a damn about them. Blow one in half with a mortar and the yanks’ll just go to the motorpool and get another. Plus the bougie assholes leave their engines running! They act like they got plenty of gas.

The Japanese were disheartened to learn the US Navy operated ice cream barges. They were struggling to come up with tires, we had pineapple sherbet.

I haven’t seen the movie, I’ve read the book and seen interviews with Weir.

A couple details in the book that aren’t in the movie: To farm astrophage, they pave over the Sahara desert with solar powered breeders. This, among other things, starts throwing the climate out of whack even faster. Stratt, Grace and a climatologist character who isn’t in the movie muse about how manmade global warming was erased in a month. No, check that, global warming bought them an extra month. Well, if we were able to get that accidentally, imagine what kind of global warming we could do if we really set our minds to it. So they nuke Antarctica to break off a giant ice sheet, to release huge quantities of methane trapped in the ice.

Weir often mentions regret that he didn’t get to add that scene. It was written in the screenplay, and would have been relatively cheap to make because there’s no compositing. Just a dialog scene with no special effects, cut to a pure special effects shot. No editing puppeteers out of the set or layering a live action astronaut in front of a CG planet.

It got cut for time, and I don’t think the scene even got filmed, so I don’t know if a future special Weir Edition blu-ray will include it.

I’m a woodworker. I have a small hobby shop on the back of my property, looks like a garden shed from the outside, I produce 8 or 10 barrels of sawdust a year. That’s probably enough to heat my house through the winter. It all goes to the dump. Here’s why:

There’s nobody who wants to work with me. There are places that make fuel pellets at industrial scale in my area, they want nothing to do with a guy bringing them 2 or 3 rubbermaid trash cans full of sawdust a few times a year, they want regularly scheduled semi truck delivery. There are farmers that have more modest sized hammer mills and extruders necessary for the job, but they don’t want to take the time to run a tool for some guy. I could buy the tools myself, for several times what it cost to heat my house with gas for a year.

So who produces sawdust or other fine wood chips at industrial scale? Sawmills, but they often use their own sawdust to make particle board. Furniture factories maybe? The few remaining that don’t mostly use particle board?

Edit to add: There is a source of kinda free wood matter: Branches. The structural or furniture lumber industries don’t use limb wood; it’s too unstable. Trunks grow roughly parallel to gravity, branches grow more or less perpendicular, so they have a tendency to warp when milled, plus they’re smaller and just not worth trying to saw into boards. So they tend to get ground up for wood chips or paper pulp or whatever would be convenient to the business.

Stirrup jeans are a thing.

Don’t think cuttin’ knife, think spreadin’ knife.

You can pour cheap, bad wine into an expensive looking bottle and people will like it more. Marketing is pretty much all wine has going for it.

Chicken Parmesan is what happens when you take Italian people and put them in America. You take Italians, with the cooking methods they know, their tastes, and set them down in 19th century New York, they make Chicken Parm. This is a well-tested hypothesis.

What’s your point?

Yeah, but Clem didn’t know that.

That right there is called a dammit. You can have inside or outside dammits. They make special dammit pliers.

Reminds me of a script I wrote for an episode of Popular Crime Procedural about a decade ago.

“What have we got?”

“Some hiker in the cold open noticed a dead body congruent with your trademark brand of vaguely autistic gimmicky ‘talent’, Tha Chief.”

It turns out that Federal Agent With Speaking Role is Mr. Diddit. The raid on his own house was a clever bit of misdirection.