Search Results for: overlords

Never More?

September 8, 2017 by Bill McCormick

I’ve written before about how some of our simian cousins have entered the Stone Age. Simply put they are using stone tools and planning for events that haven’t happened. Those are definable signs of sapience. I have also noted that octopuses, those yummy tasty octopuses laden in garlic and butter, are also developing along the same lines. Before they meet the garlic and butter, natch. The point is that life is not some stagnant thing. It wasn’t plopped here to never grow. On the one hand life adapts to its surroundings. People who live in the mountainous regions of Peru have larger lungs than the rest of us simply due to the thin air. No large lungs equals no breathing. At least not easily. Polar bears have different furs than grizzlies simply due to environment. I could go on, and on and on and on …., but you get the idea.

On the other hand, life develops intelligence if it’s faced with obstacles that basic cunning can’t overcome. For humans that was finding food in the veld. They had to learn to hunt and cook if they were to survive. Other proto-humans learned those skills as well. Then our ancestors hunted, and killed, them. They may have eaten them too. Either way, they eliminated the competition.

That last sentence is the one you need to remember.

Sarah Chodosh, over at Popular Science, notes that ravens are joining the party and moving up the evolutionary ladder.

Ravens can solve puzzles, trick other animals into helping them out, and communicate with each other at a level even apes can’t match. And now we know they can hatch plans. These aren’t dastardly plans to overthrow humans in a battle for control of the Earth (we hope)—they’re plans to get better food for themselves. It’s like the marshmallow test—more on that in a minute—but for birds that have more self control than most children.

This latest revelation comes courtesy of two cognitive scientists at Lund University in Sweden who literally put ravens to test. They published their findings on Friday in the journal Science. Up until now, we knew that ravens had some ability to plan ahead for their own food needs because they hide caches of food to dig up later. Then again, squirrels store food in the ground for later and they’re, well, not the smartest. They forget about 75 percent of their nuts, planting millions of trees in the process. They’re accidental environmentalists. And if moronic squirrels can be biologically programmed to cache food for later, maybe ravens aren’t as smart as we thought.

Except obviously they are.

Ravens, as it turns out, will often choose to forgo a tasty morsel now in favor of getting access to a better treat later. Faced with a food tidbit and a tool that they know can open a box containing more tempting food, they will generally choose the tool—even if they don’t have the box yet. They’ve learned that when researchers present them with the box in 15 minute’s time, they can use that tool to unlock their prize. That’s forethought right there. Even small children often choose to eat one marshmallow immediately rather than wait a few minutes for more marshmallows, and all that experiment makes the participants do is sit there being cute.

This shouldn’t come as such a shock. Ravens also steal from each other by watching competitors hide food, noting the location, and returning later to dig up their spoils. And because they get stolen from, some ravens will actually pretend to hide food to throw thieves off the scent. What’s more, they can tell other ravens where to find a juicy, rotting carcass and team up to scare off their competitors. That ability—to communicate information about a distant location—is shared only by ants, bees, and humans. Note that great apes and monkeys are not on that list. Plus, ravens can apparently deceive one another if it means keeping a food source a secret. They can also call wolves over to a carcass that hasn’t broken down enough yet so that the canines can rip it apart, leaving more convenient scraps for the birds to scarf down.

If all that doesn’t make you love and embrace our raven overlords, nothing will. These birds are geniuses in their own right—so what if their look is a little goth? Their intelligence isn’t to be feared, it’s to be revered. Ravens for President 2020.

Okay, so super smart birds that can plan, like some horror movie creatures shambling into your home in the dark, may not make you happy. But, as I noted above, it’s only when faced with direct competition that one species wipes out another.

Humans, ravens, and octopuses, have very few areas where they need the same resources. They could, much like the creatures in David Brin’s Uplift series, be brought up the evolutionary ladder to be our partners. To be a boon rather than a bane. In other words, the exact opposite of what happens when I write about it.

The simians, however, might be a different issue. They are similar enough to us that they may, at some point, want what we have. And history has shown us that rarely goes well for someone.

All that said, none of this is a concern for today. In fact it may all be moot. according to David Wallace-Wells global warming could make Earth uninhabitable in before 2100 AD. In other words, if he’s right, your teenage kids will live just long enough to see the end of the world.

There’s your happy thought for today.

Listen to Bill McCormick on WBIG (FOX! Sports) every Friday around 9:10 AM.
contact Bill McCormick
Your Ad Can Be Here Now!

Catching Up

July 28, 2017 by Bill McCormick

Getting home from a WNC staff meeting is always a challenge.

The more discerning among you may have noticed we have been offline for a moment. A variety of factors came into play. Someone crashed into our cyber-universe and sent seven years worth of posts spinning into the digital universe, un-tethered to here or anything we knew. Our highly trained, and staggeringly good looking, IT support crew was able to piece it all back together again, but it took time. Add in the fact that they, and I, had other stuff to do (i.e., earn a living), and you can see the problem. Nevertheless, we are up and running and all the cool shit that used to be here is back again. If you were worried you could never do your Master’s Thesis on impending robot overlords, think again. It’s all back. If you were terrified you may never be able to shut up that one asshole who keeps insisting aliens built the pyramids, quit worrying. Your main source of useful logic and examples is happily tucked in its cubby hole on this interweb thing.

Plus, as you may have quietly become aware, the site has been redesigned. While all the cool stuff happened behind the scenes, we took a moment to address some issues people had with content clarity. Now, all quoted content is clearly segregated. We thought it was before but, for some people, it seemed difficult to separate what I wrote from what I quoted. That issue is now dead.

Still, while the site may have been down, we weren’t. Almost every Friday, at 9:10 AM (CT/US), I would join Ryan Gatenby on WBIG for an edition of The Big Wake Up Call. And each and every episode was saved for your karmic elucidation.

Don’t Play With Squirrels is our most recent effort and it has almost nothing to do with squirrels. I’ll let Ryan’s highly trained PR staff fill you in.

Bill McCormick from the World News Center joined the show in his weekly Friday segment to talk about a variety of topics, including how not to play with squirrels, why we won’t see a bridge or a chunnel across Lake Michigan, rebooting Spider-Man again, losing one’s mind over Dr. Who, and an update on the Thor & Hulk buddy comedy.

On Ruins Your Weekend, I called in live from the World News Center on what began as a bright and beautiful day but soon turned into a dark day of impending doom. After a brief chat about Spider-Man Homecoming, (listeners) soon learned about self-aware artificial intelligence that is likely to overtake and consume humanity.

One of the things we looked at in that fun episode is why Elon Musk thinks that Artificial Intelligence will overtake humanity and render it extinct. His reasoning is based in real world examples of AI simply creating new languages, and logic pathways, to get around human intervention. MIT has shown that to be the case time, and time, again. On the one hand that has led to programs such as Deep Patient, which is frighteningly accurate at predicting disease in patients (like in a way science can’t even come close to), it has also led to a program that simply removed humans from the decision making process. Yes, you will not be shocked to discover that Facebook was behind that atrocity.

On Live in Person we laid out some solid guidelines about how to be safe on the Internet. If you know someone who might be susceptible to such scams, like paying FBI fines online or settling with the IRS via a gift card or anything like that, have them take a minute to listen to this.

When we got done with that we took a few moments to discuss who Mary Magdalene really was. As noted at the Smithsonian Museum she was a woman who had a servant, Veronica, and there were many issues with the translation from Aramaic, to Greek while taking one set of social mores and trying to make them fit into radically different mind sets, led to some confusion.

Two things of note are implied in this passage. First, these women “provided for” Jesus and the Twelve, which suggests that the women were well-to-do, respectable figures. (It is possible this was an attribution, to Jesus’ time, of a role prosperous women played some years later.) Second, they all had been cured of something, including Mary Magdalene. The “seven demons,” as applied to her, indicates an ailment (not necessarily possession) of a certain severity. Soon enough, as the blurring work of memory continued, and then as the written Gospel was read by Gentiles unfamiliar with such coded language, those “demons” would be taken as a sign of a moral infirmity.

As one last fun tid-bit we tackled the whole “making women dress conservatively.” I have dove into that before when I teed off on the Pope.

The martyring of Peter, which I wrote about, sums it up nicely.

Wives…do not adorn yourselves outwardly by braiding your hair, and by wearing gold ornaments or fine clothing; rather, let your adornment be the inner self with the lasting beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit… It was in this way long ago that the holy women who hoped in God used to adorn themselves by accepting the authority of their husbands. Thus Sarah obeyed Abraham and called him lord.
1 Peter 3:1-7

Before every feminist in the world hits send on that vitriolic email they’ve got t-ed up, remember this; wives could be beaten or killed for not wearing makeup and clothing pleasing to their husbands. Now go read that again in historical context. Peter was telling the entire Roman civilization to fuck off. That is why they killed him.

Yeah, old Pete wasn’t some repressive prick, he was a died in the wool feminist who was willing to die for what he believed. More specifically, he was willing to die for what Jesus taught by example and parable.

Anyway, that’s a brief overview of what you missed. Head on over to my spot on The Big Wake Up Call to catch up on the rest.

Welcome back, ya’ll!

Listen to Bill McCormick on WBIG (FOX! Sports) every Friday around 9:10 AM.

You Can Be Your Own Robot Overlord

February 19, 2016 by Bill McCormick

I’ve written about the perils of our impending cybernetic overlords on several occasions. Sometimes in terror, sometimes in fun. Often for the same reasons. Let’s face it, relationships are hard. And, sometimes, the thought of having a sexbot around to take the edge off after a hard day of World News Centering doesn’t sound that bad. Having that same sexbot become self aware and end up controlling my life, however, seems problematic. Even if it would, probably, be for my best interests. But the one thing that keeps all of this simple thought experiments instead of being something to seriously consider are three limitations. (1) There is no viable storage device for all the data required for sentience; (2) Stored data can provide many library like functions, HI SIRI!, but it can’t reason; and (3) There is no viable way (yes, I used the same word twice, sue me) to have such data interact on a social level in any case.
[Read more…]

INVENTIONS!

January 15, 2016 by

Oddly enough today I am not going to be writing about the joys of sexbots. Not that I have anything against them, other than the fact that they are the first step is allowing our cybernetic overlords to enslave us. Instead I’m going to talk about stuff that has actual human benefits. The kind of stuff that can help you live longer, healthier, more productive lives. Even better, not one word of this blog will involve the consumption of kale. Nor will it involve you taking a survey of any kind. You can just sit there naked, eating Cheetohs, being all 50 Shades of Passive, and allow me to pour knowledge into your brain, much like they did in THX-1138. Only without the cattle prods. Or leather clad officials with thigh high boots and helmets.

I’m sorry if you’ll miss that part.

While Japan, naturally, is working on a variety of sexual aids that will have artificial intelligence, think SIRI with a whole new purpose, other scientists have been looking for more practical applications. Nothing wrong with sex but you can’t eat or breathe it. At least not literally.

There is a thing called the Turing Test which is what scientists use to detect sentience. There is a visual aspect and an aural aspect. Each requires cognitive recognition by the subject. Natalie Zutter writes that a cybernetic mind just passed the first part.

In 2014, artificial intelligence experts at the University of Reading celebrated as their AI program managed to pass the Turing test. Coined by Alan Turing in a 1950 paper, the test requires that a computer convince testers that it is human at least 30% of the time through keyboard conversations. Now, this apparent triumph has since been disputed, with opponents pointing out that the AI program was designed to act like a 13-year-old Ukrainian boy, putting certain constraints on the conversation at the start. Now, a new research article in the latest issue of Science claims that an AI program has passed the Turing test—but a visual test, not a conversational one.

The test was fairly straightforward: Both a human and the computer system were shown a character that doesn’t belong to any of the world’s alphabets but looks like it could be part of a fictional language; i.e., it shares features with preexisting letters. Each was then asked to redraw the character, but with subtle differences; you can see below that that means changing the proportions while maintaining the original form. In other tests, both the software and the person were given a set of unfamiliar characters (again, not real letters) and asked to create a new one that matches the others in the series.

A team of human judges were then asked to guess which set belonged to the human, and which to the AI. Here’s the kicker: They could identify the AI’s characters only about 50 percent of the time, the same as chance.

The fact that this visual test is deceptively simple actually supports the scientists’ reasoning. As the researchers explained in the Science paper,

People learning new concepts can often generalize successfully from just a single example, yet machine learning algorithms typically require tens or hundreds of examples to perform with similar accuracy. People can also use learned concepts in richer ways than conventional algorithms—for action, imagination, and explanation. We present a computational model that captures these human learning abilities for a large class of simple visual concepts: handwritten characters from the world’s alphabets.

Rather than approach the problem like a computer would, the AI mimicked humans’ elasticity of learning, including the ability to learn new concepts from just a few patterns. This computational model is called a probabilistic program, the researchers further explained in a press release from MIT. Josh Tenenbaum, one of the system’s co-developers who comes from the MIT Center for Brains, Minds, and Machines, lays it out: “In the current AI landscape, there’s been a lot of focus on classifying patterns. But what’s been lost is that intelligence isn’t just about classifying or recognizing; it’s about thinking.”

Go ahead and try it yourself. It’s not as easy as it seems. But, it’s also what your mind does naturally every day. You can extrapolate concepts from limited data. You don’t need to have a full data set of meteorological research in front of you to know it feels likes it’s going to rain. It’s the basis behind what we know of as sentience.

And that balance we maintain can be disrupted in the most unusual ways. T.J. Raphael writes about how reading digital content can cause your mind to be unable to process real world content, such as newspapers and books.

Manoush Zomorodi, managing editor and host of WNYC’s New Tech City, recalls a conversation with the Washington Post’s Mike Rosenwald, who’s researched the effects of reading on a screen. “He found, like I did, that when he sat down to read a book his brain was jumping around on the page. He was skimming and he couldn’t just settle down. He was treating a book like he was treating his Twitter feed,” she says.

Neuroscience, in fact, has revealed that humans use different parts of the brain when reading from a piece of paper or from a screen. So the more you read on screens, the more your mind shifts towards “non-linear” reading — a practice that involves things like skimming a screen or having your eyes dart around a web page.

“They call it a ‘bi-literate’ brain,” Zoromodi says. “The problem is that many of us have adapted to reading online just too well. And if you don’t use the deep reading part of your brain, you lose the deep reading part of your brain.”

So what’s deep reading? It’s the concentrated kind we do when we want to “immerse ourselves in a novel or read a mortgage document,” Zoromodi says. And that uses the kind of long-established linear reading you don’t typically do on a computer. “Dense text that we really want to understand requires deep reading, and on the internet we don’t do that.”

Linear reading and digital distractions have caught the attention of academics like Maryanne Wolf, director of the Center for Reading and Language Research at Tufts University.

“I don’t worry that we’ll become dumb because of the Internet,” Wolf says, “but I worry we will not use our most preciously acquired deep reading processes because we’re just given too much stimulation. That’s, I think, the nub of the problem.”

Deep reading is also what inspires your imagination and other cerebral attributes that allow you to process data more thoroughly. Not that the internet will make anyone dumb, just that it could limit your ability to survive outside of a well controlled environment.

Like the ones your robot overlords are preparing.

And, as with any venture by humans into any new realm, there can be unintended consequences. Josh L. Davis writes about how global warming is postponing the next ice age.

It appears that through the burning of fossil fuels and filling the atmosphere with carbon, mankind has caused the world to “skip” an ice age, potentially postponing the next one by between 50,000 to 100,000 years. The new research came to this conclusion after modeling the conditions needed to tip the planet into a glacial period. They found that while Earth is at the right point in its orbit around the Sun, the level of carbon dioxide currently in the atmosphere is far too high.

The study reports that the onset of a major glaciation, in which ice sheets would cover most of Europe, North America, and Russia, was prevented at the start of the Industrial Revolution, as the burning of coal caused the amount of greenhouse gasses being emitted to rise above threshold levels, at 240 parts per million of carbon. Since then, as the amount of carbon in our atmosphere has been steadily rising (currently sitting at around 400 parts per million), the researchers calculate that we’ve probably pushed the event back by around 100,000 years.

“The bottom line is that we are basically skipping a whole glacial cycle, which is unprecedented,” explains Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research’s Andrey Ganopolski, the lead author of the study. “It is mind-boggling that humankind is able to interfere with a mechanism that shaped the world as we know it.”

The new paper gives further weight to the notion that we have entered a new geological epoch – the Anthropocene – in which the Earth and its climate is impacted by humanity, to such an extent that it will still be affected tens of thousands of years into the future.

Before you break out the cargo shorts in celebration, keep in mind that we have arable soil, that stuff that grows stuff, thanks to the last ice age. Also keep in mind that without the regular cooling there are many other bad things that can happen to our planet. Rising water levels, expanded deserts, less land for agriculture, and so on. Since we need land to live on and food to eat, those are things worthy of your concern.

So, do I have any good news? Actually, yes. Chris Matthews reports that Ghana has started a space program.

Ghana?

Yes, Ghana. And for a series of reasons that should make you want to grow ours.

Nestled on the top floor in between university classrooms and engineering laboratories, the epicentre of ANUC’s space initiative is a small, unassuming room. Multiple monitors on one side make up its ground station while a prototype of its CubeSat and a white board of ideas draw your attention at the other.

“I remember the very first day we heard a voice,” said Bennett. “We were here one evening just tracking satellites… and we turned it on and we could hear a voice. [It’s] not very common in our region to hear a live voice signal. We were very excited and jumping around the place.”

This excitement for space science was spurred by Ghana’s government, which in 2011 launched the Ghana Space Science and Technology Institute (GSSTI). It follows in the path of several other African nations in promoting space science and looking to the final frontier to help address on-the-ground issues and local problems.

Approaching the gates of Ghana’s Atomic Energy Commission in Accra, where two guards stand in front, I enter and pass down the long driveway and a cluster of concrete buildings hidden from the roadside come into view.

Individuals in white coats and suits walk around the well-kept lawns as staff from the GSSTI drive me around the complex. Here, development work for the government program is underway, but is kept under wraps during my visit. GSSTI’s conversion of a 32-metre satellite antenna into a telescope as part of its radio astronomy project is off limits, although GSSTI said it should be completed in June.

In addition to unveiling a telescope and astronomy centre in collaboration with the South African government, GSSTI has designs to send its first satellite to space by 2020. The government allocated GHC$38.5 million (US$10 million) to nuclear and space science technology in 2015 as it aims to further space education and benefit from its own satellite imagery.

A short drive outside the Ghana Atomic Energy Commission is the University of Ghana’s graduate school where many GSSTI staff are based, including Eric Aggrey, a project manager at the institute.

“[People] always see space science as just sending man to the Moon,” he explained. “I am very much keen about human development… most of the time our teaching ends on the blackboard and now we can have people practising their skills. [That] will help us a lot.”

The government has 20 staff at its institute, while the nearby University of Ghana has started courses in astronomy, as does the Kwame Nkrumah University in Kumasi. ANUC’s initiative currently employs six people, and the school has aspirations to start academic courses in astronomy and space science. Outreach programs on space education are also happening at primary schools across the country.

But the value of the nascent Ghanaian space program isn’t just for education. At present, the nation is reliant on satellite images from foreign companies, but by having its own independent satellites, Aggrey and others believe significant benefits can be felt across society.

“God willing, we will also go into launching our own satellite. In the next couple of years we are going to be able to clearly define our needs and design a satellite to fill our needs,” Aggrey said.

“If we have our own or a regional satellite then we will have a common agenda if it is for agriculture, environmental degradation, storms… then we can use them to address local problems,” said Godfred Frempong, chief scientist at the country’s Science and Technology Policy Research Institute (STEPRI).

“[In] Ghana, for example, illegal mining is destroying our environment,” Frempong continued. “So if we have a satellite [in orbit] we can use it to pinpoint where activity is going on. That would perhaps not be activity of interest to the US, but it is of interest to us.”

As you might have noted, their concerns aren’t about harvesting asteroids but getting a better grip on their agriculture and natural resources. A working space program can give them that. In fact it’s really the only way.

Here’s something else a space program can provide; materials that can handle horribly adverse conditions. Why does that matter to you? Well, the next time a plane crashes keep in mind that, thanks to Vladimir Tatarenko utilizing these new technologies, instead of dying you could float safely to the ground.

“Surviving in a plane crash is possible,” claims Ukrainian aviation engineer Vladimir Tatarenko who devoted much of his life to inventing a life-saving capsule that can help thousands to survive in aviation accidents.

While working at the Antonov serial production plant, the aircraft manufacturing company in Kyiv, Tatarenko was often a member of special commissions, working on the scenes of accidents.

“Looking at these horrible scenes and knowing the statistics of crashes I came to certain conclusions. People are wrong about air disasters, because some 80% of them happen due to human error,” the inventor told in an interview to the Ukrainian e-zine AIN.UA

“While aircraft engineers all over the world are trying to make planes safer, they can do nothing about the human factor,” Tatarenko added, explaining how he came up with the idea of a rescue container.

After five-decade research Tatarenko has received a patent on the invention of the escape capsule system designed to rescue crew and passengers of a civil aircraft in case of emergency.

The idea of an ejecting capsule in the commercial aircrafts is not new, Russian inventor Gamil Halidov has also come up with the similar concept of a passenger compartment with a huge parachute.

“For years the research community was unable to bring it to life, because engineers could not find a suitable material. But we have used carbon-fiber – a very strong and lightweight material, which proved to be suitable,” Tatarenko said.

The system envisages that the capsule with seats for passengers and crew is installed inside the aircraft’s fuselage. It could escape through the rear hatch of the aircraft within two to three seconds in case of almost all emergencies – engine failure, fire on board, technical problems triggered by bad weather conditions and other troubles.

The benefits there are self-explanatory. Right now the only downside is that all luggage would be lost, but they’re working on it. Unlike your robot overlords, they put people first.

Well, someone had to.

Now, I’m sure that you’ve seen those cute electric cars on TV and the occasional street. And I’m sure your first reaction was “GO BACK TO BERKELEY YOU FUCKING TREE HUGGER!”

That’s okay. Not everyone reacts well to change. That said, one basic problem with them is that you have to charge them every few hours and random strangers tend to frown on you pulling up to their homes and plugging your car into their electrical outlets.

That was then. This is now. Inventor Ismael Aviso, in the Philippines, has come up with a self charging motor. All verified independently by the Philippine’s Department of Energy (DOE).

DOE Test Results

The Technology Application and Promotion Institute, a division of the Philippine Department of Energy, tested two technologies developed by Ismael Aviso: his electric car and his repelling force.

In testing the electric car, they compared the efficiency of the DC motor using a conventional power supply (MERALCO), to the efficiency of the DC motor using Aviso’s power source. Their measurement equipment included a dynamometer (which measures the torque produced by the spinning wheel); and oscilloscopes, to measure electrical output. They ran three tests of each type.

As was expected, the efficiency of the DC motor using the conventional power supply coming from a wall outlet was 45%. More than half the energy is being wasted as back-EMF, resistance, and heat.

But with Aviso’s apparatus in place, the DC motor measured the efficiency as 133% — meaning that more energy was produced than was consumed; validating the claim of “self-running” (with unseen energy being harvested from the environment).

In his preparatory meeting with them last week, he told them that the “conventional” mode will show the DC motor running at its rated efficiency of around 65%, while the Aviso mode will show at least 90% efficiency; and he told them he wouldn’t be surprised if it showed 140% efficiency – very clearly harnessing energy from the surroundings. Now today, he nearly reached the 140% high projected.

In the repelling force test, his mode of propelling a one kilogram weight 33 feet in the air consumed four times less energy than by means of an ordinary low speed motor.

Aviso said the full test results report will be made available next week, after which they will recommend the funding of his technology (not by the Philippine government, which does not have the budget for this, but by qualified third parties).

Evidence

Aviso provided the following video of today’s testing, most of it in time-lapse mode to speed up the video.

Here’s a letter that the department sent Aviso on February 14 to schedule today’s test. It says that the testing would be witnessed by members of the Inter-Agency Technical Evaluation Committee at the UP-VTRL compound of the Technology Application and Promotion Institute, a division of the Department of Energy.

As mentioned in our last story about this technology, Aviso was featured Monday morning on Channel 7, the largest TV network in the Philippines. They accompanied him to the meeting with the Department of Energy on February 17, in which the proposed testing procedure was discussed. Here’s the video of their coverage that they posted today on their site.

For the latest Philippine news stories and videos, visit GMANews.TV

If you click Ismael’s link above you can even get the plans to build your own engine and try it out yourself. For a micro-car or two-seater, it works fine.

In America, legendary drag racer, Big Daddy Don Garlits, has developed an electric motor which can attain speeds of over 200 mph. So the engines needed to make electric cars commercially feasible now exists. With Ismael’s new technology you can look forward to quiet, high speed, environmentally friendly, vehicles that would have many commercial applications.

Just consider this some more fun stuff science has done while you were out.

Idles – 26/27 from Felix Drake on Vimeo.

Listen to Bill McCormick on WBIG (FOX! Sports) every Friday around 9:10 AM.
Visit us on Rebel Mouse for even more fun!
contact Bill McCormick
Your Ad Can Be Here Now!

Christmas Films You Need to See

December 23, 2015 by

wnc-xmas2 — Santa’s little helpers are wonderful.

Back in 2012 I wrote a fun little blog about Holiday films everyone needed to see. Most people will point you to the classics like Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer, a fun story which reminds children that they’re all useless and will be shunned until they provide a service to their overlords, Santa Claus is Coming to Town, which seems like a pedophile’s wet dream today but was actually very sweet when it was first released (and is still a personal fave of mine since I’m not a pervert – well, not that kind of pervert), Frosty the Snowman, a fun story that reminds kids how much fun it can be to hop a freight train with a stranger, and, of course, A Christmas Story, the first holiday special to ever feature bad lingerie and guns. Certainly there are others, from It’s a Wonderful Life to Die Hard, there are plenty of movies for the older viewers who need chronic depression and death with their holiday.

But the list I created had nothing to do with any of them. Any third rate blog could cough them up. No, my list is for those among you who are connoisseurs of cinema. Who are willing to experiment with your palate. For those who might prefer a moment off the beaten path.

You know who you are.

Merry Christmas!

**********************************

By now you’ve opened the gifts, had your Christmas breakfast and settled in for another year of holiday entertainment. At least until the NBA takes over your TV. This is truly a magical time. The toys haven’t been broken yet. Uncle Ned is still mostly sober. Aunt Edna, still aglow from the kisses from the kids, has yet to begin her annual screed about what a failure you are. Cousin Tony seems to have taken his meds today so that’s one less thing to worry about. As I said, it’s a magical time. But you and I know that if you have to watch A Christmas Story or Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer one more time it is quite possible that you will react badly. Not to worry, it is exactly moments like this that the World News Center was designed to address. Well, these and stripper based funerals. Below you will find an alphabetical list of 11 movies, because Top 10 lists are for amateurs, that will brighten up your day.

Babes in Toyland
All you need to know about this super-happy film, beyond the songs, toy soldiers and dancing puppets, is the super-happy story line. “On the eve of their wedding, evil miser Barnaby hires two henchmen to drown Tom and steal Mary’s sheep, cared for by Little Bo Peep, thus depriving Mary and the children she lives with of their livelihood, forcing her to marry Barnaby.” Kind of makes you misty, doesn’t it? Your kids will be in therapy for decades.

Christmas that Almost Wasn’t (The)
“It is the week before Christmas, and Santa Claus visits attorney Sam Whipple, asking for his help. It turns out that the evil businessman Phineas T. Prune holds the lease on the North Pole, and is about to kick Santa out for nonpayment of rent! As such, there will be no more Christmas!” It is never explained why Santa needed the cash and took a mortgage on the North Pole and Phineas T. Prune is so over the top evil, right down to his mustache, you’ll forget to worry about it. The film has every Christmas cliche, including the bad guy who falls in love with a toy, so it may be the only Christmas movie you’ll ever need to see.

Ernest Saves Christmas
Oh, this is a joyful mess. Santa goes to jail because this guy (a children’s show host) thinks his name is Santos, no racism there, and Ernest loses his job for giving a free ride to Santa and Santa seems to suffer from Alzheimer’s. Nothing like creeping dementia to make your holiday joyous. Plot points include this heart warming gem; “Ernest and Harmony (whose real name is later revealed by Santa to be Pamela Trenton) discover the magic power of Santa’s sack, and immediately Pamela starts to abuse it. She steals the sack, and attempts to run away yet again.” Santa’s magical sack is clearly different than mine.

Eight Crazy Nights
Yeah, it’s a Hanukkah movie, so what? A plate of latkes warm the tummy no matter your religion. And it’s Adam Sandler, that master of subtlety and gentle wit. Doesn’t this plot just scream ‘group hug’? “Davey Stone, an alcoholic with a criminal record, is sentenced to community service under the supervision of an elderly referee. Davey is then faced with trying to reform and abandon his bad habits.” The special part are the songs, all of which sound like they were written by an inmate with anger issues.

Fitzwilly
This movie has everything you could possibly want in a holiday movie. Dick Van Dyke had yet to join A.A. and he is clearly drunk in this film. Add in a soundtrack that was obviously mailed in after a month-long bender by John Williams, who would later redeem himself with that whole Star Wars thing, and you have oodles of family fun. But wait! There’s More! There’s a plot too; “Claude Fitzwilliam, leads the household staff to rob from various businesses by charging goods to various wealthy people and misdirecting the shipments, all to keep Miss Vicki’s standard of living.” Gosh, it’s like every role model you want for your kids in one film.

Fred Claus
“A garrulous hustler running from the emotional fallout of the ultimate sibling rivalry, poor Fred keeps trying to find happiness through one failed scheme after another, pushing away the people who care about him most.” This movie is so grandly contrived that you can pick out what will happen next in every single scene. It even has Santa’s boss. You might be forgiven for thinking that Santa doesn’t have a boss, but Kevin Spacey exists to prove you wrong. Not for anything else that I can see, but there you are.

Great Rupert (The)
Forget the plot on this one I’ll tell you all you need to know. This film has a magic squirrel, Jimmy Durante doing barroom versions of Christmas carols and lots of plucky poor people. Oh, and it has a dude who talks to the magic squirrel and plays a concertina too. Did I mention that the magic squirrel steals money from their landlord so the family can eat and pay rent to the landlord the squirrel just stole from? No? I probably should have. Lots of feel good stuff here.

Polar Express
“On Christmas Eve, a doubting boy boards a magical train that’s headed to the North Pole and Santa Claus’s home.” Oh, that only scratches the surface. This movie has Tom Hanks in full on schizophrenic mode. All of the adult male characters are played by Hanks. So we get him as a condescending prick who doubles as a train conductor and as a drunken hobo. The kids in the film are subjected to horror after horror, all needlessly, until they succumb and believe in Santa again. The films modernized version of rotoscoping gives it a nightmare feel. It is a must see film in my home.

Santa Claus (1959)
What can I say about this masterpiece? Shot in Mexico and dubbed into English it takes the myth of Santa to logical, if unusual, conclusions. Santa knows if you’ve been bad or good because he has a telescope in his space station (what do you mean you never heard of Santa’s space station?) and he peeps into bedrooms. This classic features Santa versus Satan for control of the holiday. Satan, the bad guy in the red suit, tries to turn kids against the holiday by giving them stark nightmares where they are attacked, and possibly eaten, by their dolls. The plot line doesn’t do this work of art justice, “With the aid of Merlin, Santa Claus must defeat the evil machinations of the devil Pitch to ruin Xmas.” The whole Merlin thing is never explained and, by the end, you just won’t care.

Santa Claus Conquers The Martians
This incredible film used to be an annual staple on WGN until someone sobered up. There’s just not enough space to capture everything worth seeing but here’s a start; the Martians come to Earth to kidnap Santa so their kids, who are suffering from planetary depression, can learn to laugh and play like earth kids. The Martians have technology that could lay our planet to waste but they keep forgetting to use it. So, they are immediately discovered by the U.S. Department of Defense and are forced to land and hide. On an on it goes. Add in the fact that Santa smokes and his wife is a controlling bitch and you have holiday magic. The opening theme song is so bad as to sound as if it were imported from a Jap/Pop satire. The fact that this was Pia Zadora’s big screen debut is only a minor bonus. And, no, she couldn’t act then either.

Year Without Santa Claus
“Mrs. Claus tells us about the time Santa had a bad cold and decided to take a vacation from Christmas. Two of his elves, Jingle Bells and Jangle Bells decided to go out (with Vixen) to find children to convince Santa that the Christmas spirit is still important to everybody else. But they have to get past Heat Miser and Snow Miser, first, before they land in Southtown, USA, where it never snows for Christmas. But the Miser Brothers can’t agree to let it snow in Southtown. But Mrs. Santa knows their mom–Mother Nature.” The songs by the Miser brothers alone make this a must see but the Santa themed jail break in Southtown make this must see TV on an epic scale. Also it is the first clearly feminist Christmas film. Mrs. Claus and Mama Nature don’t take no guff, no sirree bub I tell you what. A friend of mine claims this movie was written by a bitter lesbian, but I don’t think so. It has a weird sweetness that permeates throughout. Maybe a bitter lesbian who got a second date then.

So there you have it, 11 films to fill your holiday with heretofore unimagined joy. You can thank me later.

Listen to Bill McCormick on WBIG (FOX! Sports) every Friday around 9:10 AM.
Visit us on Rebel Mouse for even more fun!
contact Bill McCormick
Your Ad Can Be Here Now!