Tuesday, December 27, 2011

Oceans



 
This week we learned that Tig's mom is non other than Aqua Girl!

We also learned that whales are smarter than humans. The day may soon come when their whimpering shouts will be deciphered and reveal that the Earth is a giant space whale egg waiting to hatch, and we are but tiny parasites feeding off it's shell. But then I guess the tiny whales in the space whale egg shell's wet spots would also be parasites, and why would there be parasites floating around that resembled the larger organism they were feeding off of?

Are you following what I'm saying here, cause I have a feeling the whales totally get me. And by the way Tig, aka Aqua Girl's daughter, speaks whaleish. Every episode she opens the show by saying, "Beep boop bop boop", which translates to mean, "Hey friend. High five friend!" Of course instead of giving high fives, whales smack their flappities together.

One last thing about whales and then I'll move on. This week we also spoke with our special guest and student of Oceanography, Taylor Semingson, about the ocean and where waves came from. He didn't know for sure but he said most believed that it was due to the moon, and David played devils advocate and said that maybe it wasn't the moon that caused waves at all, that there was a documentary about not needing the moon. Well let me suggest that waves could be caused by all those ginormous whales swishing around in there! Which makes sense, because most of the people fighting to rescue the whales on the Whale Wars tv show love to surf!

Next I would like to take a moment to state that it is gravity, not God's hands, that is keeping the Earth's water down. Also, I believe there is a protective electromagnetic field/shield that keeps the water vapor from escaping our atmosphere, or something like that.

Now that I have that off my chest, I'm excited to say that I was able to find the lost clip of the week! We tried to show this during the episode but it was taken down by the internet police. It was sunken, like the lost city of Atlantis, if you will. The clip talks about ancient underwater aliens and how more books have been written about the lost city of Atlantis than any other subject. Well, I call BS on that! Why just the other day I went into the bookstore and asked the fine lady at the checkout counter if she could point me to the lost city of Atlantis section. She said she couldn't because it was lost...then after laughing at her own joke she said that they did not have a section dedicated solely to the lost city of Atlantis! They did however have sections dedicated to hundreds of other fantasy topics, including teen vampire and zombie romance novels. Anyway watch this:




I found that video to be rather nuts you guys. The fact that all these scientists are still trying to uncover the mystery of Atlantis even after that Awesome Michael J. Fox cartoon came out, baffles me. That movie was pretty cool, so lets just accept that as what happened and move on. There is no point in obsessing about a city who's records are most likely soaked by now. And unless the lost city of Atlantis had magical ink and paper that could withstand thousands of years of water damage, then... oh wait. I guess they could have written things down on stone or Gold or something. So I suppose it makes sense to look for that. Whelp, carry on scuba-diver archeologists!

Check out professorblastoff.com for clips we aired and my website aaronburrellcomedy.com

Listen to episode #34 " Oceans"

Wednesday, December 21, 2011

Greed

If your "true love" gives you 12 partridges in 12 pear trees within 12 days time, along with hundreds of other song-inspired gifts - red flag - they might have a little OCD! And if you're taking advantage of their serious mental meltdown by accepting those gifts, you may have neediness issues. Or just be one greedy S.O.B. I must point out I grew up with a pear tree in my back yard, and we never ate the fruit. Nope, we just let 'em fall to the earth and rot. Guess who's job it was to clean 'em up every year? Needless to say, I now hate pears. Can't stand the sight of them.

Then if you were to add the droppings of a dozen flying devil eyed rats to that festering compost heap...well, there's just no way that "classic" song is getting me into the Christmas spirit!

What ever happened to "a little goes a long way?" In a season where it is easy to go overboard, the most meaningful gifts I have ever received were true heartfelt letters of appreciation accompanied by loads of cash. I hear the love of money is the root of all evil. So, I always tell my folks, if do you ever give me money, I probably won't love your gift. For righteousness purposes.

Now to the cut clip of the week. We were going to talk a bit about the NBA and NFL lockouts but ran out of time, thank goodness though that the NBA players and owners didn't run out of time to tip off this season on Christmas day! This of course made Charlie Brown very upset...lets watch.


Thanks for the guilt trip, Charlie Brown. Well Happy Holidays everyone!

Check out professorblastoff.com for clips we aired and other cool extras and my site aaronburrellcomedy.com

Listen to Episode #34 "Greed"

Competition

Thirteen hours into my online Risk binge I began to realize something. My friend Luke does not know how to give up. I am not a competitive person. I just constantly find myself surrounded by competitive people, and I can't help that!

Our guest this week was comedian Chad Daniels. We learned Chad is not a competitive comedian. He doesn't see the point in competing with other comedians, and frankly neither do I. However, I've found roided out comedians usually are the funniest.

There is no better punchline indicator than a strategically timed forehead vain burst. Can you imagine the Incredible Hulk gracing the stage while holding the mic like a tooth pic between his two fat fingers, ranting about how he had to pay for 16 seats on an airplane but only got one meal? I would laugh. I'd be too scared not to.

During the gladiator days I wonder if they ever had comedy death matches, perhaps tickle fights. Saying you killed during a show wouldn't be just a figure of speech, it would be on your resume.

We were going to show a clip about gladiators and how Christianity had to come along and put a negative spin on the sport calling it "murder," but we ran out of time. So I thought I'd share it now as our cut clip of the week.





While watching this clip I couldn't help but notice the option they give you to give the video a thumbs up or a thumbs down. How odd that this sort of barbaric practice still continues today. Does YouTube realize how Roman they are being? Or is this just an abstract way for us to go around the internet killing people's confidence? For those of you who are Christian out there you had better stop thumbing people...be it up or down. Even if you're not Christian, thumbing people just doesn't sound right. Thumb wars are all right though, but only if they are declared properly, preceded with a count to four.

Finally I must issue an apology to David. I did some research - and by research I mean I typed a couple words into Google search - and found out I indeed played Excite Bike as a kid. I rode my real bike to the arcade to play it. Then I rode back home to play a real man's racing game, Mario Kart.

Thanks for reading everyone, as always you can check out more of my comedy here, and ProfessorBlastoff.com for links to clips we used on the show and other Professor Blastoff extras!

Listen to Episode #33 "Competition."

Tuesday, December 6, 2011

Power

How many more Zelda games must there be before we learn, power falling into the wrong hands makes an excellent formula for story telling that never gets old, ever?!



Without any villains like Ganondorf to overcome, Link would have nothing to challenge his heroism! He'd probably let himself go, move back into his mom and dad's and end up killing a lot of time playing video games, powered by fairy magic and sucking on his fingers for comfort. This fan art, I believe, is of gamer Link running out to the store for some Red Bull.

This week in the professor's hatch we welcomed special guest Aurora Nibley to speak with us on the topic of power, and more specifically dictators. She also made us cookies! Which was a very subtle power play to get on everyone's good side. Well played.

One of the discussion points that stood out to me was the importance of who leaders are before their rise to power. Going back to the Link example, every sequel the fairies recruit a hero. They look for some pure in heart, seemingly innocent, GREEN clothes wearing, kid that always has three hearts...one more than Doctor Who, if you're counting. The fairies give the boy special powers because they trust him and they all hate the evil Ganondorf because he keeps stealing the enchanted triforce as well as princess Peach, er Zelda...sorry.

The take home message is you should never allow a kidnapper into power. And the triforce obviously represents the three branches of the U.S. government we learned about in this weeks podcast. Link represents some kid who will one day be president, the fairies represent the checks and balances and Ganondorf represents the devil.

Now that I've cleared that up, I'd like to share our cut clip of the week. This clip features a young, working class man named Dennis discussing the intricacies of his self-perpetuating autocratic government, in which the people take turns as executive officers every other week. This is juxtaposed by another man claiming to have inherited the right to lead from a divine source.

here's the clip


Dennis rationally contradicts King Arthur's claim to power. He argues authority should be given by those who are being led, and that it is too easy to contrive a fantastic story of divine appointment. King Arthur and Link both are called on by non-human guardians and are given special swords to represent their power. When we play the Zelda games, we see that the fairies are really there giving Link the powers so we go along with the story. Also it's just a game. But in the real world we don't get to see any fair and balanced clips of Angels attending political fundraisers.

There are many people, including presidential candidates, who claim to have a divine call to lead. Even though I believe in inspiration, that's a bit of a red flag for me. Where is your Excalibur governor? If you are inspired to lead that's great, then show us you are inspired with a pure heart and good intentions, let us see how you've dealt with a little power before you get the whole enchilada? Let us judge you by your fruits, not just your words. Let us hear how well you sing "Rainbow Connection." That's right, I believe that Kermit the Frog is the standard character model to which all politicians should be held.

And with that I will end this weeks blog. Thanks for reading.



Check out ProfessorBlastoff.com for more on Power and also check out my comedy website here.

Listen to Episode #32 Power

Friday, December 2, 2011

Fear

This week, keeping with the theme of Black Friday, we decided to discuss the topic of Fear! Last week we learned that you can never trust an over fed, sleep deprived, tryptophan laden, mob of discount shoppers, desperate for an excuse to get away from the very same extended family members they are being socially pressured into shopping for. Who new?

A very special thank you goes out to our guest this week, Lauren Malhoit. I was truly inspired by her story. It made me think of the close call I had with death when I was younger. I was late for work, stopped at a red light. Being late, I usually would have gunned it the second the light turned green, but this time some jerk/guardian angel cut me off right before I got to the stop light and prevented me from getting hit by a red light running 18 wheeler. Me and my Honda CRX were spared...wow what a boring story! My point here is you can never one up a plane crash survival story. The ONLY people who have any chance at getting more high fives at a party are those Apollo 13 guys.

This brings me to my greatest fear...kid with chainsaw.



As a retired chainsaw guy at a professional haunted house, let me tell you, we go through weeks of intense training with those machines, and that's with the teeth removed! If it weren't for those pesky child labor laws I would open up my own haunted house and recruit a dozen or so of these mini lumberjacks, hype 'em up on candy corn and let 'em loose! Imagine a small toddler platoon waddling towards you, armed and untamed with assorted cutlery.

Speaking of things getting cut, this week we had to pass on this most informative clip on the Amygdala. Basically it explains how your brain can become stuck in a state of high anxiety if stress levels remain high for an extended period of time. So...high school for example. Here's the clip.



I followed some of the links to the Linden Method, as well. Apparently the Linden Method is a way to get your brain back to calm and healthy stress levels, as long as paying good money to learn how to do it doesn't stress you out. I think the important take away message here is you should never judge a book by it's cover. Clearly the parents of the above chainsaw kid were overstressed. And, as step one in their personal de-stressing method, chose to delegate a little of the tree trimming responsibilities over to the child.



Thanks for reading and remember to visit the professorblastoff.com website for more fun extras as well as my website.

Gratitude

Hello from the time out corner in professor Blastoff's hatch, and thank you for joining me today. Our topic this week is on gratitude, Thanksgiving and Penn State. We also wanted to share a little history on the first Thanksgiving. Which had something to do with King James the first...and clams. But more importantly what does Thanksgiving mean to you!? What are you grateful for?

While you think of all those things, pay attention to your happiness level. Does thinking about all the things you are grateful for make you a happier person? Some neuroscientitsts believe gratitude triggers the happy centers in the brain. In this clip a neuroscientist walks us through one of his daily gratitude rituals. (He gets to it at about the 10:21 mark.)
Here's the clip.
Well, I don't know about you but this clip triggered the depression centers in my brain. Maybe it's my A.D.D., but I once he started talking about all the people he met who didn't have running warm water, or hands, it put me in a funk. I couldn't stop thinking about all the needs in this world, all the arrears, if you will. But then, to get out of my funk, I began to think of all the compassionate people out there trying to fill those needs. And that again triggered the happy center. So, thank you to everyone who donated time, money, food or horses to those in need.
Word of the Day: Arrears



I would like to start my ritual by saying that I am immensely grateful for spell check. Before having it, I did not use words larger than five letters long. Spell check does not, however, help with those nasty homophones. For years homophones were the bane of my existence. I used to write many sentences like this:
I whoosh their was a weigh to Czech four the write home phone in witch too use.
But not anymore! Because I went to college!
I am also very grateful for my wife, Carah, who always has my back and is constantly overlooking my imperfections, while standing in amazement over my dazzling perfections. Like my top row of teeth! Thanks to 3 years of braces, which were paid for by my parents. I am very grateful to my parents for doing a fine job of raising me.

It's easy as a kid to take for granted all things your parents do for you. That's why I will be keeping a flow chart of everything I do for my kids. I will also make them watch this following clip bi-weekly to remind them kitchens don't clean themselves, unless they do in the future. Then I will make them watch this so they can appreciate what life must have been like before robots.
Here's the clip.
This video is shockingly cold to me. I mean why not just shatter all of Tommy's fantasies and tell him Santa Clause is really fat uncle Frank? Again, why not go with a flow chart? Wait till they're old enough to have a fair amount of expendable income and then spring it on em! Guilt them into paying for your 20th anniversary getaway and thank me later.

Finally, David was grateful for speed humps. For those of you who have never seen a road hump, here you go.





Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

Check out aaronburrellcomedy.com and professorblastoff.com.

Listen to Professor Blastoff #30 "Gratitude."

Tuesday, November 15, 2011

Atheism

First of all a special thanks goes out to this week's guest Marty Yu for calling into the hatch! I would like to begin today by recapping an important point that was brought up on the podcast. Douglas Adams had this to say in an interview with American Atheists:

"I don't accept the currently fashionable assertion that any view is automatically as worthy of respect as any equal and opposite view. My view is that the moon is made of rock. If someone says to me "Well, you haven't been there, have you? You haven't seen it for yourself, so my view that it is made of Norwegian Beaver Cheese is equally valid" - then I can't even be bothered to argue. There is such a thing as the burden of proof."

Which brings me to exhibit A...


The Norwegian Beaver. Look at her, filled to the brim with self confidence, yet shorter than a blade of grass. Now, the moon's mass is roughly 1/81 that of the Earth's, and a beaver weighs, what..maybe 5 pounds and the moons mass = (1/81) X 5,973,600,000,000,000,000,000,000 kg.
Now I am not even going to waste my time converting pounds to kilograms here because it is easy to see that even if we managed to coerce the entire known population of these NBs into a cheesary and gave them 15 billion years to lactate, we would still fall short of our Moon mass quota. And imagine the chaffing of their tiny little beaver nipples after 15 billion years of milking, not to mention the smell. It would literally stink to high heaven. And who would want to live in a Universe created by a God who would allow such a thing?

Then again beavers have been through much worse... consider Exhibit B



The Beaver (2011). Perhaps there is no God.

But just for the sake of argument let us burden ourselves a bit longer. On the podcast we ran out of time before we had the chance to introduce a key witness in the debate over the existence of God, Gordon Shumway, also known as ALF. In the episode called "Can I Get a Witness?" Gordon sites the Adam and Eve Story in court as a precedent to his case that he did not break the neighbor's window, therefor if an Alien Life Form with the ability to fly across the universe and into our hearts believes in God. Well Q.E.D.

here’s the clip
(I started watching at 8:58 plus there is a 30 second commercial)

May I point out that Shumway looks suspiciously similar to the Norwegian Beaver? Do ALFs make cheese?

Anyway now that we have incontrovertible proof of the existence of God, let us move on to another subtopic from Professor Blastoff's syllabus on Atheism that did not make it into the discussion.
When Man or woman Plays God.

My research led me to an interesting scientific breakthrough in the field of bio engineering. Scientists have manufactured a living organism from scratch, meaning they took some dirt, coded some DNA, and put the DNA into the dirt and it woke up... or something like that. Basically they made something not living, live. It is just a bacteria so don't get too worked up, and I'm sure as soon as the scientists finished God was like, "hey buddy get your own dirt", and the scientists were like "oh there you are."

Anyway here is that clip. (God's part was edited out.)

 


To wrap this up might I just say, there is a lot I don't know. That is what has drawn me to this job as researcher, and even though I am a believer I am also a raging I don't knowian and it gives me great joy to learn new things. I hope that this life isn't all we get because when I look up at the stars, I long for a chance to join the Professor and Captain Kirk and explore strange new worlds and civilizations and more importantly hunt down a moon made of Norwegian ALF cheese! It will be my white whale...or white dwarf, if it goes nuclear. I feel like this life is just too short for whoever created this place to tease us with the stars.

Thanks for stopping by! To comment or view comments please visit aaronburrellcomedy.com/pbafterthoughts 

Also if you have chanced upon this blog without listening to this weeks episode of Professor Blastoff on Atheism here is that link!

Tuesday, November 8, 2011

Creativity

This week in the hatch we discussed the finer points of creativity and wood with Harvard alumni named Paul F Tompkins. We learned that he had magnificent hands! Take all the time you need to stare at them. Because these are hands that create... words on a note pad! 




Now onto something we did not get to cover on the episode. The healing power of music. As we all know, a good lullaby can send us right to sleep. My wife does not sing lullabies to me because she says I am too old for them, which really gets me angry and makes it so I can't sleep, so I don't ask her anymore.

The research I did on the healing power of music lead me to the story behind that movie with Iron Man and Jamie Fox where Jamie Fox played a schizophrenic musician named Nathaniel Anthony Ayers and Iron man played a Los Angeles news paper reporter who discovered how classical music seemed to have a pharmaceutical effect on Nathaniel Ayers.

Here is that clip


Pretty cool huh? As for me, creating music is very therapeutic... for me. Not so much for everyone else within earshot. I love to sit down at the piano and just play. I could play for hours and feel like a million bucks after words, but as soon as I try using my left brain to formally compose something I become agitated. It's like my right brain telling the left brain "stop crashing the party man!" or woman, in case Tig reads this. Piano lessons always gave me anxiety. Any attempt at taming that wild raw musical exploration always killed my buzz. I wonder if others are the same way. Maybe that is why people love free form art. There is something sooo relaxing when you can turn off your brain and use muscle memory to play a few chords or paint completely abstractly, not worrying if other people find your creation pleasing. True bliss is when you just play.

But creating something that is therapeutic to other people's eyes and ears is hard work, you're not so much playing anymore when you get caught up with music theory or whether your first act in your three act play is overly expository, whatever that means. I like to know that the creator really put some work into their creation, but not while I'm consuming it the first time. I like to sit back and take it in, and then think about all the work that must have gone into putting me into this pleasurable trance. Sometimes though I like to just remain in ignorance and pretend that the magic is real. Other times I can't rest until I find out how something was made, like how did they make all those dinosaurs look so real in Jurassic Park?! And how much of that realism was due to my 11 year old imagination filling in the gaps? And how skeptical will I become when I'm 81, will I allow myself to suspend any disbelief then? I really hope so, because looking back, being able to get lost in the same movie 29 times made life seem so much more adventurous. Now it seems like I have to see 29 movies before I can allow myself to turn off my critical mind.

Thanks everyone for reading. This first post is extremely free formed due to my limited time to edit. But writing this was very therapeutic, I apologize if reading it was not.

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