The Weekend Edition

What's Friday night for you these days? Date night? How about Saturday evening? Another night doing shots at the bar with your friends, or perhaps a tasteful grown-up party, complete with canapé and chardonnay? But it wasn't always that way. There was a time when, once the weekend rolled around, that meant it was time to pop the popcorn and settle in for a long night of quality television. Two of them, in fact. I am, of course, talking about ABC's TGIF and Nickelodeon's Snick.

TGIF started first, way back in 1989. I was 4, and probably not watching a whole lot of Full House quite yet. The iteration I know best began in the 1993 season with Family Matters, Step By Step, Boy Meets World and Hangin' With Mr. Cooper (which I don't actually remember ever watching-- maybe 9:30 was my bedtime at 8 years old). In the following years, the line-up fluctuated, introducing us to classics and one-season wonders alike: Sabrina The Teenage Witch, Dinosaurs, Teen Angel and several more that lasted such a short time that I can't even name them.

According to ABC's fall schedule, Friday nights in the 2010-2011 season will be filled by a show called Secret Millionaire (sounds like an instant hit, what with "millionaire" in the title), another hour-long called Body Of Proof (let me guess-- it's about dead bodies and evidence and justice and some law and maybe a little order, too, if there's time), followed by everybody's grandmother's favorite show, 20/20. Sounds like a party. No wonder our generation drinks a lot-- our weekend TV choices have gone significantly downhill. To be fair, though, 20/20 has filled the 10 o'clock hour of ABC's Friday night since 1987. We just stay awake a hell of a lot later these days. ABC can't really be blamed for our skewed sleep schedules.

So Friday night, oh what a night. But I always looked forward even more to Saturdays. Snick premiered in 1992 with Clarissa Explains It All, Ren & Stimpy, Roundhouse and Are You Afraid Of The Dark. Favorites, all. I loved the shows that began in the ensuing years, too-- The Adventures of Pete & Pete, The Secret World of Alex Mack, The Mystery Files of Shelby Woo (somebody got a little formulaic with their titling, eh?), All That, Kenan & Kel, Space Cases (starring a pre-Firefly Jewel Staite on-- you guessed it-- another spaceship). And who could forget that iconic orange couch?

(Incidentally, Nickelodeon ran a contest in 2002 and apparently gave away the couch in question, filled with $25,000 and 6000 cookies, which means that I definitely quit watching Snick a few years too early, because that would have been totally awesome to win. However-- think of the crumbs!)

Based on sheer number of quality (or at least, nostalgia-inducing) shows alone, Snick wins by a landslide. Boy Meets World really carried TGIF for me. Would anyone from our generation pick our childhood Fridays over Saturdays? I defy you to find that person and bring them to me, so I can sit them down and make them watch my Pete & Pete DVDs until they see the truth.

In any case, our grown-up weekends will never really compare. I love drink specials and dancing as much as anyone, but I'm not sure if it would quite get the approval of the Midnight Society. They're a tough crowd to please, you know.

Nickelodeon Cartoons

Remember the good ol' days of Nickelodeon cartoons? We do, too.

Take a trip down Nostalgia Lane with us while I explain to Mikey why he chose all the wrong cartoons.


Download on iTunes or find us here.

You Know What I Hate?

Even if you haven't played it, you're probably at least passingly familiar with Words With Friends-- the no-copyright-infringement-intended app version of Scrabble for the iPhone. It's a great game, in which you play real people on a whenever-you-get-around-to-it basis, and the competition can get a little bit fierce. The rules, however, can get a little bit iffy.

The game apparently utilizes the Enhanced North American Benchmark Lexicon (or ENABLE-- though really, ENABL) for its database of acceptable words, and when you try to play a word not included in the lexicon, the game will let you know with a "Bitch, please" message about your word being unacceptable. Now, I don't know exactly who is responsible for compiling the word list in ENABL, but their vocabulary leaves something to be desired. Often, sometimes several times a game, I'll try to play a word that is totally a word, but that Words With Friends thinks is not, in fact, a word.

"Aren't," for instance. Probably other contractions, as well. The internet informs me that you can't use contractions (or hyphenates, for that matter) in real Scrabble, but that's just lame. They're real words. What else? "TV." Ridiculous. It's a word. I'm watching one right now. "Exwife." I know, I know-- hyphenates, like I said, are unacceptable. "Quo," (as in, "The status is most definitely not quo,") seems to be on the blacklist. "IQ." Abbreviations, at least common ones, should count, if you ask me. "Pogo." Who didn't want a pogo stick as a child? Did the word exist then? I think it did. "Zoltar." (Okay, not allowing the name of the psychic machine from "Big" is probably legit-- but it would've gotten me an awful lot of points.) "Zesto." It's a fast food restaurant; there's one down the street from my house, and it would have made me win the game, damn it. I realize proper nouns are verboten. Whatever; I want to play a game of Scrabble using ONLY proper nouns. That's right; I'm a rebel like that.

All I'm saying is, if you're going to host an off-brand Scrabble game in the internet age, your dictionary is non-tangible. You can add new words all the time. If the Oxford English Dictionary can add "bromance," "frenemy" and "chillax," then I think Words With Friends can handle adding a few words of its own. Seriously, these things need to be taken care of. We can get pretty competitive about this. I know Michael knows what I'm talking about, because I beat him at the game pretty much every time we play. Surely he knows this affliction as well as I do.

P.S. If you just feel like finding out if a word is or isn't allowed in WWF, there's a Word Validator here. There's some weird stuff that's perfectly acceptable.

Spooky Action at a Distance

You know what I don't get? Quantum entanglement.

Okay, sure, lots of people don't. Quantum mechanics in general is just a clusterfuck of physics nonsense to most people, probably. But I consider myself reasonably open to quantum ideas, whether or not I truly understand them.... but quantum entanglement is just fucking weird.



This is the description from Wikipedia:

Quantum entanglement, also called the quantum non-local connection, is a property of the quantum mechanical state of a system containing two or more objects, where the objects that make up the system are linked in a way such that one cannot adequately describe the quantum state of a constituent of the system without full mention of its counterparts, even if the individual objects are spatially separated.

Buuuh, let's rephrase that a little. If two particles are entangled, measuring the state of one particle, whatever that means, tells you what the result of measuring the state of the other particle will be, and it doesn't matter when or where the measurement is taken.

This is the easiest way I have ever been able to think of it: If two children are on a see-saw -- even if it's a thousand miles long -- you know that if one kid is down, the other has to be up. But no communication has to occur between the children for this to be the case; they are still connected and act as one single system. The concept of quantum entanglement is one of the reasons Einstein began to dislike quantum theory (as it was formulated), and he derisively referred to it as "spooky action at a distance."



Here's the kicker: entanglement occurs at roughly 10,000 times the speed of light. And that's a lower bound.




(The above article does a decent job explaining a little more of why entanglement is so damn weird, so I recommend reading it over. It's short, don't worry.)