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.