Holy Shit, It's That Guy! (The Hobbit Edition)

We're gonna do another one of these things, because it's fun and it's my blog and I'll cry if I want to. But I don't want to cry. I want to point out relatively obscure actors in high profile roles that you probably missed. Speaking of which, I missed one last time. Tywin Lannister, as it turns out, also makes a great movie-within-a-movie villain. Here he is being ridiculously evil in Last Action Hero:

That glass eye doubles as a bomb. If that doesn't make you want to watch this masterpiece, you are dead inside.

Like last time, I'm going to ignore the bigger, more obvious ones. Yes, Martin Freeman was Arthur Dent, Ian McKellen was Magneto, Benedict Cumberbatch is a Benedict Sexybitch. Obviously.

I really am straight, I just call 'em like I see 'em

But what about humble Radagast the Hippie Brown?

Seen here making a mockery of his character

Did you notice that he's a freaking Time Lord?

I'm not saying all the Istari are Time Lords, I'm just saying Gandalf kind of regenerated

How about this handsome fellow? Does he look familiar?

And no, believe it or not, it's not your mom.

No?

What if you saw him with no prosthetics and no CGI...as you could when he played Marc Antony on Xena: Warrior Princess?

He's not the only Xena alum in the cast. See if you can find the others!

Finally, one of my personal favorites. This guy, who sparked a bizarre sub-fandom when he first appeared in The Fellowship of the Ring:

His official name is "Lindir," which is Elvish for "Singer."

...is none other than Bret McKenzie, the musician responsible for the rebooted Muppet Movie soundtrack. He's also one half of Flight of the Conchords, New Zealand's third most popular folk parody duo.

He's on the left. The other half is in the middle.

Holy shit, right? 

Let me know if I missed any good ones.

Holy Shit, Turing!

I briefly mentioned Alan Turing in his capacity as a code breaker during World War II, but I didn't really elaborate. How about I do that now?

Turing was a goddamn genius. He had a mind that handled intricate logic the way most of us handle tying our shoes. During World War II, he helped build the framework for what would eventually become computers, and he did so in an effort to decode the German Enigma Machine. When his efforts paid off, he moved on to a more difficult version used by the Nazi navy, and he did that part himself. Because he felt like it.

How hard could it be?

When the war ended, he decided to continue working on this newfangled "computer" idea, and it's largely because of that decision that you're reading this post today. At one point during his research, a strange question arose. He and his team were creating machines with stored memory. Machines that employed logic with relatively little input from users. The question was, "At what point can these machines be considered intelligent?"

And so the concept of realistic artificial intelligence was born. Turing even gave us a way to determine when we were approaching or crossing that threshold. He got the idea from a party game where two people would go out of sight and type answers to a series of questions, trying to imitate each other so that the rest of the group can't tell who's who.

The game was adapted into film in 1997

The Turing Test is like that, except one of the two players is not a human. The best way to go about it, Turing argued, would be to create a child-like computer then subject it to an education of sorts. And that's what people did. Chatter bots are all based on the principle of the Turing Test. They learn new tricks by talking to people. None of them have quite gotten the hang of it, though.

Well, until last week. At the University of Reading, a chatter bot named Eugene managed to convince a third of a panel of judges that it was a 13-year-old Ukrainian boy. Granted, there are some concerns about the methods, the judges, and the parameters. But the test itself was never a dichotomy so much as a general idea of where the fine line is between a machine and a mind. What Eugene tells us is that, while we might not have created a mind yet, we're very close.

And it doesn't at all resemble the terrifying love child of Macauley Culkin and Heinrich Himmler

As for Turing, he became the victim of archaic moral legislation. Alan Turing was a gay man, which was not something you wanted to be in the United Kingdom back in his day. It was illegal for him to be who he was. One day, his house was robbed, so he called the police. It came out while they were interviewing him that he was in a relationship with a man. He was promptly arrested and convicted of "indecency." His punishment was a combination of probation and chemical castration, as well as the revocation of his security clearance. This effectively ended his career.

Two years later, Alan Turing imitated his favorite fairy tale (Snow White) by lacing an apple with cyanide and eating it, killing himself. And that's how Britain showed its appreciation for one of the greatest minds their country had ever produced. A mind that not only laid the groundwork for modern computer science, but saved countless lives by taking the enigma out of the Enigma machine. It only took them 55 years to apologize for the way they treated him. Then 4 more for the Queen to give him a pardon.

Holy shit.

Holy Shit, It's That Guy! (Game of Thrones Edition)

I'm gonna take a different approach today. I'm going to go all pop culture and throw educational value to the four winds. See, I've been watching Game of Thrones lately, and it keeps occurring to me that I've seen a lot of the characters before, often in surprising roles. Sometimes, the moment of anagnorisis makes me utter the sacred words of this blog, so I've decided to dedicate this post to those actors.

Here's the rules: It has to be a smallish role in something that was a pretty big deal back in its day. These rules are loosely defined and subjective. I just want everyone to know that I'm aware of that. Anyway...

What started me on this track was actually Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which I just recently started marathoning for the first time. Turns out it was way overdue. So, in the first episode of the fourth season, this awkward college freshman turns up, is promptly turned into a vampire, and is subsequently slain by the eponymous heroine:

This is what handsome looked like in the late '90s

He looked vaguely familiar, but I couldn't quite place him. Not three days later, Pedro Pascal did an AMA on Reddit wherein he mentioned that he had made an appearance on Buffy. If you're not sure who that is, just think of the sexiest Game of Thrones character you know. Whether you are male or female, gay or straight, the correct answer is:

Speaks for itself.

Next up is Maester Pycelle, or "that perverted old prick in King's Landing." Here he is in the show:

Look at his stupid, smug little face.

And here he is piloting an AT-AT walker in the Battle of Hoth for The Empire Strikes Back:

Gotta hand it to him. He survived serving under Darth Vader. Few officers did.

And here he is choosing poorly in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade:

"A cup for the King of Kings." Dumbass.

How about this guy:

Essence of brooding distilled to a human face. After it's been set on fire, of course.

Surely he hasn't been in anything too big, right? He's such a memorable character, you'd know for certain if you'd seen him before. Right? Well, all I can say to that is, "Narp."

Yarp

That's him as the simple grocery boy Michael from Hot Fuzz. Maybe you would have recognized him if he had said more than one mangled word in the film.

This is fun. How about this guy? Joffrey Baratheon, First of his Name, spoiled little shit of a king, played by the only actor who has successfully made me want to stab a child in the face:

Ugh. Just look at that face. It's begging to be knifed.

Well, here he is with Rachel Dawes during R'as al Ghul's attack on Gotham City in Batman Begins:

The fact that I don't even want to kick him a little bit is a testament to his acting chops.

I could go on and on like this. Catelyn Stark, for example, was Hermione's mom in the second-to-last
Harry Potter film. Jorah Mormont (aka General Friendzone) was in an episode of Doctor Who. There are so many characters in the series, you'd be hard pressed to not find one with a surprising career history. Let me know if I missed your favorite.

Holy shit. This was fun. I'll do more for other shows with big casts.

Holy Shit, Damascus Steel!

Remember how the Byzantines basically invented napalm about a thousand years ago? Probably not, so follow the link and read about it. Go ahead, I'll wait.

Take your time.

Pretty cool, huh? So, you know the part where we still don't quite know what Greek Fire was since it was a closely guarded military secret? That's sort of the same deal with Damascus steel.

Damascus steel swords were made primarily in the Middle East. Funnily enough, they did not originate in Damascus. Their name is the result of someone mishearing the word "damask," a type of weaving pattern that the metal's texture resembled.

Except, you know...stabbier

They were made from wootz steel out of India, and through some miraculous forging process they became incredibly sharp, as flexible as a yogi, and harder than mithril. Legend has it that a Damascus steel sword could cut a feather from the air then slice through armor like a hot machete through lightly curdled milk without losing any of its sharpness.

Around the mid-1700s, the rise of gunpowder and lengthy disruptions in trade from India eventually led to the loss of the swordsmithing techniques required to forge Damascus steel. They became a thing of legend. Then science happened.

Pictured: Science. And it keeps changing directions. Watch. It'll freak you out.

While the technique for making it was lost, there were still some extant blades that historians and scientists could study. These have wielded some pretty interesting results, chief among which is that Damascus steel was reinforced by carbon nanotubes. Those weren't actually discovered, by the earliest reckoning, until 1952. It wasn't until the 1990s that we started making practical things out of them.

What I'm saying here is that as far back as 2000 years ago swordsmiths in the Middle East were literally (though probably unwittingly) using nanotechnology.

Holy Shit.

Holy Shit, Blackbeard!

Edward Teach was a mean fellow. Born in Bristol (probably) and forged in the fires of Queen Anne's War, he took to the sea as an apprentice to Benjamin Hornigold when the war ended. Hornigold, at the time, was a notorious pirate. Teach would strike out on his own after Hornigold's retirement, and the New World would shudder at the mere mention of his nickname: Blackbeard.

Blackbeard captured a frigate, equipped her with 40 guns, named her Queen Anne's Revenge, and set to work crafting an alliance of pirates. With a veritable army behind him, he accomplished remarkable feats of bold buccaneering, including the blockade and capture of Charleston, South Carolina. He made a fortune by ransoming the entire population, then settled down nearby.

Teach was a skilled propagandist. He cultivated his image as a pirate boogeyman so that violence was rarely necessary. He wore his famous beard as thick as a wolf's fur and curled it up around his ears, inviting victims to compare him to a savage beast. Whenever he boarded ships or spoke to captives, he tied cannon fuses to his hat and lit them, creating a terrifying image of shadow and smoke that would make a Balrog feel right at home.

Dude, sweet hat.

At this point, the British offered a general pardon to all pirates if they would only please knock it off, for god's sake. Blackbeard graciously accepted, then almost immediately took to the seas again for more sweet, sweet booty.

At that point, the Governor of Virginia got a little bit pissed off. He made it his mission (or rather, the mission of his underlings) to track down that wascally piwate if it was the last thing he did. So he sent Lieutenant Robert Maynard after him. Through a secretive blockade and clever subterfuge, Maynard found Blackbeard on Ocracoke Island off the coast of North Carolina, relatively isolated, relatively drunk, and fully off guard.

Despite being outnumbered, drunk, and caught unawares, Teach managed to get to one of his ships and fire off a well-timed broadside that instantly shredded one third of Maynard's men and put one of his three ships out of commission. Confident in his impending victory, Blackbeard had his men grapple Maynard's ship and board it. This was exactly what Maynard wanted.

Careful, Teach! Maynard's been playing Yu-Gi-Oh since it launched!

The moment the pirates were aboard, Maynard's sailors burst from the hold and attacked. The pirates, still lightly buzzed, were taken by surprise and immediately lost the initiative. Somewhere between ten and twelve pirates were killed. Although Maynard lost almost as many men, the battle was over when Blackbeard died. Of course, the reason Maynard lost almost as many men was that Blackbeard just would not die. The two of them locked together in combat, and Blackbeard utterly wrecked Maynard's shit, breaking his sword and moving in for the kill just before another sailor slashed his neck and stopped him.

It took as many as five gunshots and twenty sword slashes to bring that beast of a man down. When he fell, his men quickly surrendered. Maynard cut off Teach's head and attached it to the front of his ship so that the whole sailing world would know who was going to collect Blackbeard's bounty.

Which was kind of a dick move, if we're being honest

His death, of course, did little to diminish his legend. The man with the wild beard and fiery cap took more mortal wounds than a bear before he fell. For that and for all his misadventures, when we think "pirate" we think "Blackbeard."

You know, until Johnny Depp ruined it.

Holy shit.

Holy Shit, Derinkuyu!

Derinkuyu is a town and district in Central Anatolia, Turkey. The district overall has a population of just over 20,000. It wouldn't be a particularly remarkable place, except there's something underneath it that attracts some attention. Something about 60 meters beneath the surface.

Or, in American units of measurement, a little over half a football field underground

It's another city. Not one that was buried underneath constant construction like you'd find in London or Rome. A city that was designed and built under the surface. That's not entirely unique, but given the fact that it was built in the Eighth Century B.C. and is the largest underground city ever built, it's pretty goddamn spectacular.

The Derinkuyu Underground City could house the entire modern population of the District of Derinkuyu. If it wanted to. It's pretty much over being populated by now and has moved on to be a sort of retro-touristy kind of place. It's something of a hipster in that way. But you wouldn't understand, it's pretty underground.

HA!

The city had room for over 20,000 people, as well as grain stores to feed them all and housing for livestock. There were market districts, warehouses, stables, and more carved into the rock under Derinkuyu. There were even heavy stone doors that could block passages in case of invasions.

It was probably built by the Phrygians, but it's been used and even expanded since then by various Persian, Greek, and Turkic cultures as a dwelling place or a refuge. Today, it's a tourist attraction. If you're ever in Central Anatolia (and really, why wouldn't you be?), you can check it out yourself.

Now, I'm not going to say the Phrygians only found the city and it was originally constructed by dwarves fleeing from Durin's Bane in Khazad-dûm...but I'm not going to say that wasn't the case either. Because I like to keep some hope alive.

The entrance probably looks like this. I hope.

Either way, it's a massive, sprawling city that is completely invisible if you look at it like any normal person would. And that's pretty damn cool.

Holy shit.

Holy Shit, Donkey Kong!

In 1981, Nintendo was known primarily as a toy company that produced trading cards in Japan. In fact, they were barely known at all in the West. They began producing arcade games in the '70s, but they enjoyed limited success until Shigeru Miyamoto burst onto the scene.

He and Gaben are the patron saints of gaming nowadays.

Shigeru Miyamoto created Donkey Kong, and from there went on to become the single most influential figure in console gaming history. Donkey Kong started as a licensed Popeye game, but the licensing situation didn't work out. So the team had to come up with new characters. They called the hero "Mr. Video," a name which would change to Jumpman shortly afterward. When the Nintendo of America team was confronted with an angry landlord demanding their late rent, they averted his wrath by telling him they'd name their new hero after him. The landlord, Mario Segale, agreed to back down.

That name should be familiar to you.

The villain, they decided, would be a King Kong knockoff named Donkey Kong. The name basically came from a linguistic misunderstanding. "Donkey" is an obscure, archaic slang term for a stupid or foolish person. Miyamoto found that definition, coupled it with a word he understood to mean "giant ape," and called it a day. The American team thought it was hilarious, and the name stuck.

You know who didn't think it was hilarious? Universal Studios. As they understood it, they owned the rights to King Kong ever since they fought a court battle over the issue in 1975, and Nintendo was using a blatant knock-off character to reap enormous profits without paying them one red cent. Or even yen.

I'd like to believe this is the face the studio heads made.

So they took this little toy company to court. It had all the workings of a classic David and Goliath battle. There is speculation that Universal's legal department figured Nintendo would just settle to avoid a costly battle, but Nintendo's legal team had done its research pretty well. When they got to court, they made an elegantly simple argument.

King Kong is in the public domain. And what's more, Universal knew full well that he was. That's why they won the right to make a movie about him in the '70s. The judge ruled in favor of Nintendo, citing the ridiculousness of suing over a public domain character and the fact that Donkey Kong was different enough not to be confused with King Kong anyway.

I mean, the building he climbed wasn't even finished!

This was a massive, pivotal moment for Nintendo. It came on the heels of a massive crash in the home video game market, and it gave Nintendo the confidence to start pushing for a revival of the console. The very next year, the Nintendo Entertainment System was released in America, and the console market has enjoyed increasing success ever since.

If it weren't for a linguistic quirk and a frivolous lawsuit, Donkey Kong would not have served as the springboard that relaunched the game industry. We have this abused, rampaging, kidnapping ape to thank for everything from Super Mario Brothers to Pokémon, and maybe a lot more.

Holy Shit.

Holy Shit, the Platypus!

It was really only a matter of time before I got around to this one. Platypodes (that's the Greek plural form. There is no correct plural form. Look it up.) are what happened when nature had a few extra animal parts lying around and was drunk. They have the bill of a duck (hence the colloquial name), the feet of an otter, the tail of a beaver, and the good sense to live in Australia, home of the weird-ass animals of the world. It's also one of the five species of mammal that lays eggs.

That's something that really shouldn't be possible. Egg-laying is traditionally one of the red flags that say "NOT MAMMAL" in large, imposing letters. However, since the Platypus and its cousins have hair, produce milk, and generally play ball with the rest of the criteria, scientists decided to give them a pass.

Similar to how we sometimes allow this to be called a sport.

That's despite the Platypus flaunting its cloaca around the neighborhood. Where most mammals have various orifices for having a wee, a poo, or a baby, the Platypus streamlined the process into a single cloaca. I assume the main advantage of this technique is that it inspires a great deal of sympathy in other species for Platypus. "I'm not eating that thing," says the Rakali. "He's got it rough enough already with that cloaca business. No wonder they lay eggs."

At times, sympathy is not enough, and the Platypus is threatened. At other times, a human will spot a goofy specimen, and upon seeing its wittle beak and lovey-dovey eyes, will attempt to cuddle it. In both cases, the interlopers are in for one of the shittiest days of their lives. Because those cute little otter feet that Mr. Platypus boasts are good for both swimming and administering an excruciatingly painful venom.

Counter-intuitively, this should strike fear into your heart.

Platypus venom is known for two things: not killing you and making you wish it would. When a human is stung by the Platypus' spur, the area around the sting almost immediately swells, and the swelling rapidly spreads. Instead of wrecking shit in your body and causing pain as a result, Platypus venom goes straight to the pain receptors in your brain and manually flips your pain switch. Because it takes such a direct route, traditional opiate analgesics like morphine do literally nothing for you.

And he stares at you mercilessly all the while.

After a few days, the pain fades away. By which I mean it is replaced by hypersensitivity to any other pain. As in, "The wound feels better but every time you stub your toe you'll be fairly convinced that it needs to be amputated." While there are no deaths on record from Platypus venom, it may be one of the meanest venoms that nature has ever produced.

The Platypus is weird. Weird as hell. So weird, in fact, that when sketches of it first reached Europe, it was almost universally dismissed as a hoax. When a pelt arrived in England, scientists were still skeptical. Some even demanded to examine the body so they could find the stitches they just knew were holding that goddamn beak in place. Eventually, they had to admit that such a thing could possibly exist.

Truly, the Bigfoot of the Nineteenth Century. Except real.

And if you ever see one in the wild, then for god's sake, don't touch it. You will know the deepest depths of pain if it's in a foul mood.

Holy shit.

Holy Shit, Greek Fire!

The popular interpretation of the Roman Empire falling around the middle of the Fifth Century is pretty wrong in a pretty big way. At that point, the Empire was divided into two major administrative regions. One was based in Ravenna (not even Rome!) and was down for the count by 476.

The other, based in Constantinople (not Istanbul) stuck around for another thousand years. It's known as the Byzantine Empire, and one of the reasons for its longevity was a little substance called Greek Fire, which was basically -- and maybe literally -- napalm.

You're familiar with that stuff.

Greek Fire was invented just in time to be used spectacularly in the First Arab Siege of Constantinople (not Istanbul). The city was surrounded, and the Umayyad Caliphate was feeling pretty confident that they were going to add a new member to their conquest club. For years, skirmishes were almost a daily occurrence. The Arab fleet sat in the Bosporus defying the Byzantines to come see what would happen if they tried to break out.

The Byzantine fleet started behaving strangely. In a time when naval warfare was all about smashing ships into each other as hard as you could, they were appearing in the harbor with strange siphons attached. When the two fleets finally met in a pitched battle in late 677 or early 678, the purpose of the siphons became devastatingly clear. 

This honestly looks like something I would have doodled in middle school

The Arabs got very literally hosed. With fire. Liquid fire. Liquid fire that burned with the fury of Achilles even on the surface of the ocean. The whole experience really put a damper on Umayyads' trip to Constantinople (not Istanbul), and they promptly left to write an unfavorable Yelp review.

"There were no mints on the pillow. In fact, there were no pillows. And they set fire to my person."

Forty years later, the Umayyad Caliphate returned to prove they hadn't learned their lesson. In what historians call one of the most important and decisive battles in history...the same thing happened again. The Second Arab Siege of Constantinople was routed by Greek Fire.

Greek Fire continued to give a ludicrously unfair advantage to the Byzantine navy until around the 13th Century. At that point, they may have lost access to the areas where ingredients for the substance could be found. We're not sure, because it was such a closely guarded secret that we don't really know what the hell Greek Fire was. The general consensus among scholars is that it was probably made with a form of petroleum and was sort of like napalm.

And that it would make for a bitchin' battle scene in a fantasy series.

What we do know is that Greek Fire was so powerful that it is credited with stopping the Arab conquest of Eastern Europe dead in its tracks.

Holy shit.

Holy Shit, Moon Landings!

Let me just get this out of the way right off the bat: we put human beings into a small capsule attached to several enormous machines that create aimed and sustained explosions which carried them off of the goddamn planet all the way to the goddamn moon, both of which are in constant motion. They landed and walked on the surface of the moon, then came back home and survived re-entry. We did this six times, and for some reason we haven't even really tried to do it again in over 40 years.

Look at her face. She misses us.

Holy shit.

There is no part of the concept of people walking the surface of the moon that is not profoundly incredible. Literally incredible to a lot of people. Otherwise we wouldn't have the conspiracy theories about it being a hoax. Which are just plain wrong.

Apollo 11, the first manned spacecraft to bring human beings to the moon, had less computing power than a modern graphing calculator. It traveled through 238,900 miles of pure nothing to deposit people onto the lunar surface. Imagine what we could do with the power we have today?

Astronauts could pipe in some tunes!

And have you paid attention to rockets? Do you know what they are? They're pretty much the same thing as missiles. NASA managed to point one of those things at a moving target (albeit a big and predictable one) with enough accuracy and controlled chaos that they could not only fling astronauts to the moon, but do it safely.

Don't make a fart joke, don't make a fart joke, don't make a fart joke...

Neil Armstrong stepped out of the landing module and he was, by most definitions, an alien. Then he flubbed his line (no really, it was supposed to be "one small step for a man," which makes more sense), planted a flag too close to the landing site, picked up some rocks, and went back to Earth. And they made it. Safely. After knocking over the flag during takeoff. Don't worry, even the ones that weren't knocked over have been bleached white by the untempered radiation of the sun by now.

The real kicker for me, though, is the fact that the United States, the only country to have ever put human beings onto the surface of another celestial body, did so six times within a three year period, then never did it again. The entire time we were at it, the public, half awed by the monumental accomplishment they were witnessing, were clamoring about "more important problems back home." You hear the same argument today.

How is this not worthy of attention?

To which I like to say, "Are you fucking kidding me? Look at that shit. Look at what we did, America. Jesus. The moon. We went there." Saying that we shouldn't try exploring space until we've solved all of the problems on Earth is like saying you shouldn't try to get a job until you've figured out how to stop needing to eat. It's pure bullshit.

And seriously, look at that. It's a man on the moon.

Holy shit.