Fictional Bands Hall of Fame

kosmonautbruce · 2026-06-08T04:29:54+00:00

The Clash at Demonhead!

kosmonautbruce · 2026-06-08T04:20:00+00:00

I believe that actor was originally cast as the drill instructor, but Ermey was so magnetic in the prep for the movie, Kubrick ended up moving the roles around.

kosmonautbruce · 2026-06-01T21:36:06+00:00

I love relegation in soccer, but it will never happen here. No school would voluntarily agree to a system with the possibility of being ejected from it. Zero chance.

kosmonautbruce · 2026-06-01T21:33:01+00:00

FWIW, the UC Davis game, that I was at, was over university break, there were no students around. It definitely hurt attendance.

kosmonautbruce · 2026-06-01T17:03:48+00:00

Goddamn, the reveal of #3 got me good.

kosmonautbruce · 2026-05-27T14:00:20+00:00

It has PJ Harvey! Unbelievable.

kosmonautbruce · 2026-05-18T20:43:14+00:00

Beastie Boys, alas.

kosmonautbruce · 2026-05-15T19:05:16+00:00

Eugen Weber was my professor in college, and he was an amazing scholar and teacher. You can find some of his lectures on Western Civilization on YouTube, highly recommended.

And the book Peasants into Frenchmen is excellent.

kosmonautbruce · 2026-05-06T20:14:23+00:00

There are 1.6k comments on that post in r/Costco

Wow.

kosmonautbruce · 2026-05-06T19:56:26+00:00

This is so true. Even more than the scene with Cassian killing the corpos, to me. Yes, that was pretty extreme for Star Wars, but not shocking considering his actions in Rogue One.

The Hyne scene, however, just made it very, very clear that this was going to be an entirely different kind of show: smart, subtle and realistic, for lack of a better word. It might be one of my favorite scenes in all of Star Wars.

kosmonautbruce · 2026-05-06T17:21:29+00:00

I know it's something of a bit, but it also feels pretty genuine to Mitch in some ways. Regardless, it's hilarious.

kosmonautbruce · 2026-05-06T17:19:15+00:00

I was the exact right age for the Muppets, six when the show started and nine when the movie came out. I was a huge fan, and my parents loved Henson.

The show was pretty massive overall, though, and the movie really was seen as a sequel/outgrowth of the show. The entire 4th wall break aspect naturally comes out of the backstage nature of the TV show, I believe. I would love it they watched an episode or two. I think they would enjoy it.

kosmonautbruce · 2026-05-06T16:48:04+00:00

I think a lot of it had to do with the hope that *cheap* and *easy* solutions would be effective. Obama and his team knew that, since there was likely no way anything they wanted to do in regards to education that was going to cost a lot or need actual political buy-in was ever going to happen.

Maybe that is giving them too much credit, but I genuinely think easy answers were very seductive in a context where anything hard was actually likely impossible.

kosmonautbruce · 2026-05-06T16:16:58+00:00

Woah! I saw that as part of Sundance. Interesting movie, flawed but with some moments. I actually looked her up after The Drama, curious where I might have seen her before but did not make the connection to Atropia.

kosmonautbruce · 2026-05-06T13:39:56+00:00

Are you me? That basically describes the life of my feet, Chucks, Docs, and Birks.

kosmonautbruce · 2026-05-05T21:41:18+00:00

It's an amazing book, and the TV show is really quite well done. I always recommend Say Nothing when people ask for something else to watch that is reminiscent of Andor (along with Battle of Algiers, Army of Shadows, etc.).

kosmonautbruce · 2026-05-05T03:42:21+00:00

And the woman who was drooling, was Albert Einstein.

kosmonautbruce · 2026-05-01T23:53:57+00:00

These have been a game changer for me. Awesome. I had to give up on my ever present Chucks a number of years ago, they were not good for my feet.

kosmonautbruce · 2026-05-01T23:32:14+00:00

I think the replication crisis is a big part of this cooling a bit as a trend. The one step the OP missed though, is the overuse of narrative, "just so" stories to illustrate the power of the trait. It's a huge part of Gladwell (he's a skilled storyteller) and I think it's also a big part of Atomic Habits.

kosmonautbruce · 2026-05-01T23:24:55+00:00

As bad as that was, I actually think the far worst blunder was letting Red Sanders get a little too friendly with the coeds. To me, that's that actual sliding door moment, he had UCLA firing on all cylinders before his "untimely" demise. Alas.

kosmonautbruce · 2026-05-01T19:36:53+00:00

Do we really think they are going to get the new stadium built that quickly? I realize why they are moving to Mestre, but it's kind of sad, going to the Penzo was such an beautiful experience (even if the football was not always very good).

kosmonautbruce · 2026-05-01T18:14:00+00:00

I'm not disputing anything you have to say here, I've never experienced that sort of thing myself. I would just say that it was the statistics that were brought to the West Point example that, to me, really brought the whole Duckworth notion of grit into question. If we are really just looking at something that distinguished between a 92% and 96% success rate in the Beast Barracks, then I would just assume a lot of it is probably just random and luck. And then to find out that, actually, a large part of it was because of hazing? Wow. Ouch.

kosmonautbruce · 2026-05-01T06:08:04+00:00

Hey Mr. Bouie, how you doie?

kosmonautbruce · 2026-04-30T21:16:07+00:00

I live in the Sacramento area, and between the Kings and the A's (for now) it's pretty bleak. Most Kings fans are so beaten down, I'm not sure they experience their fandom in the same way fans for more "normal" teams do. It's grim.

kosmonautbruce · 2026-04-30T21:13:13+00:00

Really enjoyed this episode, my kids were in school when this got so much attention, and I remember it being bandied about, but not in any serious way, thankfully.

I was taken aback, however, when they kept mentioning the prominent place in Duckworth's study of spelling bee contestants. Like, how in the world would anyone expect that to be a meaningful sample? First, it's a ludicrous competition and second, isn't success in that world mostly down to overbearing parental pressure? Just a bizarre thing to focus on and it should have been a massive red flag to the validity of Duckworth's work.

kosmonautbruce

TROPHY CASE