“In 1845… the cost of mailing a letter was reduced to three cents, making the mail accessible to working women, middle-class housewives, and schoolgirls with pocket money. Suddenly, wide swaths of women had access to two dangerous things — the mail and the post office.”

Dinosaurs in Space: A Paleocosmological Rebuttal

by Becky Ferreira

Last week, chemist Ronald Breslow made a splash the size of the Yucatan crater with the greatest non-sequitur in the history of academic papers: he decided that the concept of chirality (that is, a molecule’s dominant orientation) probably means that there are Star Destroyers manned by T-Rexes floating around in our galaxy.

Well, friends, here we go again. Breslow is yet another legitimate scientist who is clearly trying to nose his way into the highly exclusive field of mad science. Listen, I didn’t go through 1.21 years at the fictional Emmett Brown College just to have some highly trained, intellectually rigorous and eminently qualified thinker like Breslow swoop in to tell me what to think about dinosaurs in space. Um, hello? I literally wrote the book on paleocosmology — the study of extraterrestrial dinosaurs — two years ago (by “book” I mean it’s a Tumblr that I posted on four times two years ago) and I’ve been on the lecture circuit about this important issue ever since. So guess what Breslow, you’re about to gain a smackdown with a real expert on paleocosmology and it’s going to be about as pretty as an Oviraptor (the ugliest of all dinosaurs, despite serious contenders Alxasaurus and Psittacosaurus). Let the rebutting begin!

1. You’re not the first kid on the paleocosmological block.

The concept of dinosaurs in space is hardly a novelty. While I founded the actual discipline of paleocosmology, I did so only by standing on the shoulders of giants. I am like totally the same as Isaac Newton. Mad scientists and philosophers have long suspected that creatures as epically monstrous and powerful as dinosaurs would not be taken out by some measly space rock, and this has led to a rich, speculative mythology regarding our extraterrestrial dinosaur brethren. Take the paleocosmological prophets Calvin & Hobbes, who worry about the toll such groundbreaking revelations will have on our naïve, superstitious society. They are like totally the same as Charles Darwin.

Long have we also told stories of Captain Raptor, the intrepid astrosaur of yore, bastion of justice and peace on planet Jurassica.

In fact, paleocosmology goes back even further than that: some crazos have even speculated that this carving on Ta Prohm temple in Cambodia is evidence that an alien Stegosaur cooled its heels back on Earth about 1,000 years ago.

Finally, the threat of extraterrestrial dinosaurs is not even a new concept to the scientific community. Just last month, NASA astronaut Ron Garan discussed the potential dinosaur space program with his fans on Reddit:

If the dinosaurs had a space program, we’d all be in trouble.

Human-Dinosaur tensions would mount as they developed a rocket capable of achieving high orbit. An arms race would ensue, followed by the stalemate of Mutually Assured Destruction.

Mankind would act first, with a strike upon the Dino capitol, the warhead would be a several-megaton ICBM with a dozen MIRVs. It would be nicknamed ‘The Meteor, Pt. 2.’

Point being: step off, Breslow. If you want to be a part of the paleocosmological community, at least do your research first!

2. Extraterrestrial dinosaurs are not a toss away point.

This one’s pretty simple. If you’re going to throw out the possibility of super-intelligent tyrannosaurs piloting starships, make sure it’s actually the focus of your paper. Painstakingly accounting for the lack of diversity in molecular chirality, then mentioning offhand that other planets must have evolved space-faring dinosaurs, is something most journalists would consider to be “burying your lede.” So the next time you want to shoot us in the face with crazy, don’t waste our time trying to earn it. Just take out your crazy gun, fill it with dinosaurs from space and go Patrick Bateman on us. Which brings me to my final rebuttal….

3. Real science or mad science: make your choice.

As many legitimate scientists have already pointed out, Breslow’s conjecture about alien dinosaurs isn’t exactly a stellar example of the scientific method. The direct quote from his paper is as follows:

An implication from this work is that elsewhere in the universe there could be life forms based on D amino acids and L sugars, depending on the chirality of circular polarized light in that sector of the universe or whatever other process operated to favor the L a-methyl amino acids in the meteorites that have landed on Earth. Such life forms could well be advanced versions of dinosaurs, if mammals did not have the good fortune to have the dinosaurs wiped out by an asteroidal collision, as on Earth. We would be better off not meeting them.

While it’s possible that creatures like dinosaurs evolved on other Earth-like planets, it’s weird that a scientist like Breslow makes the same basic mistake Creationists do in assuming evolution is a straight line with a definite purpose. I see where he’s coming from: if the KT extinction event hadn’t occurred 65 million years ago, mammals might not have evolved and who knows what brainy dinosaurs like Troodons and Philosoraptors would have done with all that extra time on the planet?

But the major reason dinosaurs came to rule the world in the first place was due to another mass extinction event around 200 million years ago between the Triassic and Jurassic — those beasts were so goddamn epic that they were both created and destroyed by humungous cataclysms! This is not even to get into the utter lack of eschatology in evolution — I mean, have you ever seen a platypus? How can you believe in an evolutionary endgame after that?

Clearly, nature is making this crap up as it goes along. When famed chaotician Ian Malcolm asserts that, “life finds a way,” what he actually means is that life finds infinite ways, some of them super-weird and unnerving (take another look at the Oviraptor if you need a reminder). So yes, a dinosaur-like species may have evolved on another planet, but in terms of the multitude of weird life forms that might exist instead, I’d say that’s really hedging our bets.

So, Breslow didn’t exactly uphold real science, but has he made a contribution to mad science? NO! I mean, really, dinosaurs evolving separately on other planets? How ridiculous! Obviously, dinosaurs were catapulted off Earth by an air pocket caused by the KT extinction event asteroid, and were then sucked up by a wormhole and delivered unharmed to a planet in the Messier 94 galaxy, about 15 million light years away. I have evidence of all of this because I invented a time-traveling camera. Watch my lecture, Dr. Breslow, and take some notes, because that’s what mad frakkin’ science looks like, my friend.

In conclusion, I’d like to say on behalf of all mad scientists that it’s not that we don’t respect those who have chosen the path of legitimate science. But let’s all get on the same page. We won’t infringe upon your strict empiricism and rigorous intellectual standards so long as you agree to leave stuff like dinosaurs in space up to us. We can, of course, still both share the tradition of messy hair and off-putting gesticulations that have gravitated to the overlap of our Venn Diagram.

Oh and by the way, the descendants of the dinosaurs originally catapulted off of our planet are scheduled to return to Earth any day now, so none of this matters much anyway. See you in the belly of a Space Rex!

Becky Ferreira is a comedy nerd.

Previously in our dinosaur section:
• Please Bring Back “Jurassic Fight Club”!
• Sauropod Swindle! The Monstrous Lies of “The World’s Largest Dinosaurs”

Remember that time someone wrote a parody of modern media, and in it, they had a company lay off an entire magazine’s staff, but the editor-in-chief was opening his own “custom content” shop, which would also provide all the content for that magazine that now had no employees, but at least the new “custom content” shop would hire some of the newly unemployed as freelancers maybe, with “flexible hours and the opportunity to work on other projects” but “not salaries or benefits”? Well, the joke’s on you, because it’s actually real life! Even better: this is probably the best possible outcome of what was going to happen here! Now let’s all sit in our rooms with the lights off and listen to Siouxsie.

by Sara Morrison

Tonight, “Revenge” returns from its (too-long) hiatus with a crop of new episodes, sure to be full of awesomeness. But will they also be full of awkwardness? You see, Emily VanCamp and Josh Bowman, who play engaged couple Emily Thorne/Amanda Clarke (she has two names, it’s complicated) and Daniel Grayson, are together off-screen as well. If a recent photo of the couple is anything to go by, their real-life relationship may have been concluded by the time tonight’s new episode starts.

You don’t have to be a body language expert to think that Bowman, his arms folded protectively over his chest, his eyes dead, horrified or distracted, is not as into this whole thing as VanCamp, who looms over him, lips mashed against his face, sucking with desperate determination. This presents a potential problem for viewers! We now all know they’re dating. If they break up, we’ll know that, too. And then we’ll all have to watch their characters in romantic scenes together and think about how awkward that must have been to film. If they aren’t very good at acting and/or their breakup is especially acrimonious, that awkwardness will be obvious. And that’s just unpleasant to watch. We do not want to see real-life problems on our guilty pleasure fun show.

Then again, that could just be a terrible photo, taken at a weird moment. Perhaps things are just fine between VanCamp and Bowman and dating your co-star is a really terrific idea with no foreseeable downside. Perhaps history can be our judge: let’s take a look at on/off-screen couples of TV shows past, from Ozzie and Harriet to Billy and Allison; from Sydney and Vaughn to Dexter and Debra, to see just how well that worked out for everyone.

The 50s

In the beginning, there were old married people.

As it happens, the on/off-screen relationship existed before screens did. In the 40s, married couple Ozzie and Harriet had their own radio sitcom, “The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet,” in which they played a married couple named Ozzie and Harriet Nelson. Their real-life sons David and Ricky joined the cast a few years in, and the show moved to television in 1952. It stayed on the air for the next 14 years, as a weird pseudo-proto-reality show based on the family’s life. When David and Ricky got married in real life, their wives joined them on the show. So we have plenty of weird on/off screen relationships here.

Ozzie and Harriet were a couple before the show, and they stayed together after it was cancelled in 1966. Their marriage was probably never as happy as their fictional counterparts’ (nothing would be, because 50s TV shows loved to portray perfect families and make the rest of us feel inferior), but the real-life version of the couple actually got to, you know, have sex and sleep in the same bed, so I’d call it even. Both sons divorced their co-star-wives, but only after the series was cancelled, thus depriving us of the chance to see what would happen to the annoyingly perfect fake Nelson family if their real counterparts were to break up. In this case, on/off-screen coupledom was a success…

… except for the fact that Ozzie and Harriet’s son Ricky and his co-star-wife had twin sons named Gunnar and Matthew — best known to us as the early 90s hair band Nelson. Nelson sucks, and should serve as a warning to any TV people considering reproducing with an on/off-screen partner.

Real-life couples playing fictional couples were apparently big in the 50s, so we also had “I Love Lucy,” which starred real-life married couple Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz as Lucy and Ricky Ricardo. Their fictional counterparts certainly had their arguments, but they always made up by the end of the episode. In real life, Ball filed for divorce the day after they filmed the series finale (at which point the show had evolved into weirdness that was the hour-long “Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour” anyway) — which was also Arnaz’s birthday. Ouch! That made the papers, obviously, so by the time the final episode aired, the viewing audience knew the happy fictional couple on TV was being played by a miserable real-life one. Ball never made that mistake again. Though she married after Arnaz — and stayed with her second husband until her death — in all three sitcoms she starred in after “I Love Lucy,” her character was a widow.

After that, there’s a long dry spell for on/off-screen couples. Either we didn’t know they were hooking up in real life until long after the shows aired, or the actors on most of the shows were too busy doing drugs to hook up, or the male leads were secretly gay, or my knowledge of behind-the-scenes gossip decades before I was born just isn’t very good. But by the 80s, the age of hungry tabloid journalism made it difficult for stars to keep their romantic lives private.

The 80s

“Growing Pains”: Towards the end of the show’s run, Kirk Cameron became a born-again Christian. His character, Mike Seaver, started dating some girl named Kate, played by Chelsea Noble, who was also big into Christianity. It was a match made in their unshakable belief in Heaven, and the actors were married the summer before the show’s final season. Mike and Kate got engaged in the series finale. The Camerons are still married today, so that could be considered an on/off-camera success in terms of relationship longevity, but Kirk Cameron is so annoying about it, refusing to kiss anyone on-camera except his wife, thus forcing anyone who wants to work with him (which, these days, is relegated to a few fundamentalist Christian filmmakers) to either cast her as his love interest or have her body double in kissing scenes with anyone other than his wife. So, that’s a pain. Also, you’d think that anyone who was that happily in love would be open to letting other people find that same happiness with and make those same commitments to their partners, regardless of gender. Cameron most certainly isn’t, and we all have to know about it every time he pops up on that Piers Morgan show or wherever, so I’m calling that another fail.

“Night Court”: To the best of my knowledge, the cast did not date each other. But I love this show and it doesn’t get nearly enough credit or attention, so I thought I’d throw it in here anyway. I still find it hard to believe that anyone could resist the charms of Markie Post and Markie Post’s Mullet behind the scenes.

The 90s

With the success of “Beverly Hills, 90210,” a new wave of TV shows starring hot young people with gigantic hair and raging hormones burst forth, providing us with plenty of fodder. The “90210” spin-off, “Melrose Place,” had its share of bad acting and ridiculous storylines, which usually made it that much more awesome. But not always. Andrew Shue, a.k.a. Elizabeth Shue’s less-talented sibling, played Billy Campbell, who started a relationship with Allison Parker, played by Courtney Thorne-Smith, who was at least a better actor than Shue (it’s impossible to be worse). Shue and Thorne-Smith dated in real life during the show’s first season. Then they broke up, but Billy and Allison were still together. Uh oh. The viewers at home knew all of this at the time, so their scenes as a fake couple had that extra awkward layer of tension, made all the more obvious because Shue was never a good enough actor to close his mouth during a scene, let alone hug his now-ex-girlfriend convincingly. Thorne-Smith has commented on the weirdness of it all in interviews since, but considering she would go on to spend eight seasons playing Jim Belushi’s romantic interest, she really has no right to complain about her “Melrose” days. Cupid’s arrow struck the “Melrose” set several times: Laura Leighton (Sydney) and mega-hunk of the era Grant Show (Jake) dated for a longer time than their characters ever did. Leighton left the show and ended up with Doug Savant, who played one character Sydney would never have an on-screen relationship with: Matt, who was gay. They’re still married. And Heather “Special Guest Star” Locklear and Jack Wagner’s characters got married, but the actors were just friends until years after the cancellation of “Melrose.” They started dating in 2007 and got engaged last year, but it was called off a few months later.

The 00s

“Alias”: Jennifer Garner’s history of dating her co-stars went back to at least “Felicity,” where she fell in love with Scott Foley. They married and things seemed great until disaster struck and Garner got a role on another TV show with another male co-star: Michael Vartan. Both Garner and Foley have denied that Garner cheated on her husband, but the fact remains that they separated and Garner and Vartan were soon seen together. Their characters, Sydney Bristow and Michael Vaughn, also became romantically involved. But then Garner and Vartan broke up and Garner hooked up with yet another co-star (Ben Affleck, who she met while filming “Daredevil”), who she went on to marry — all this while “Alias” was still in production. It’s safe to say things were probably a bit tense on the set between Garner and Vartan after that, and suddenly there was a lot less Vaughn around, culminating in the fifth and final season — during most of which Vaughn was “dead.”

“One Tree Hill”: Chad Michael Murray and Sophia Bush met on the set of “One Tree Hill,” where their characters also dated. Their real-life romance probably helped that storyline along, especially when Murray and Bush got married after two years together. But then they got divorced, and their show was still on. And Murray suddenly got engaged to some high-school girl who was an extra on the show and Bush started dating another co-star, James Lafferty, and it kind of made everything tough to watch. Fortunately, Murray soon left the show and faded into relative obscurity and Bush found love with yet another co-star, Austin Nichols. Their characters got married on the show; in real life, Bush and Nichols broke up around the time the series stopped filming. Things worked out only slightly better for cast members of the other, better teen drama that premiered the same year: On “The OC,” Adam Brody and Rachel Bilson stayed together from the first season, when both they and their characters started dating, until their real-life break up just before the series finale (in which their characters married), leaving the audience with little on-screen evidence of any post-break-up tension.

“House”: When Jennifer Morrison and Jesse Spencer were revealed to be dating behind the scenes, it was cute. Then the characters they portrayed, Drs. Cameron and Chase, had this weird drugged-out hook-up that evolved into a friends-with-benefits relationship — which would have been fine except for the fact that we never got the sense Chase and Cameron were friends in the first place. Perhaps that storyline was influenced by Morrison and Spencer’s relationship, which blossomed into an engagement around this time. All was well until Season Four, when the actors apparently peed on all the writers’ Corn Flakes, and all of a sudden their characters were given only a few lines of dialogue or so each week. As their characters’ relationship became serious, their real-life one ended. The couple never got married in real life, and even while their characters had almost nothing to do on the show, the writers who obviously hated them made their characters get married after the real-life relationship was over. That must have been a fun scene for everyone involved to film and isn’t weird to watch as an informed viewer at all. By the way, after all of that? They kicked Jennifer Morrison off the show and had Chase and Cameron break up for no good reason. They had one more awkward sex scene before Cameron left forever, divorce papers in hand. I have a feeling Morrison was happy to be out of there.

NOW

“Dexter”: This has to be the most awkward of all on/off-screen hook-ups. First, Michael C. Hall and Jennifer Carpenter played siblings. Yes, Dexter and Debra Morgan aren’t blood relatives, but they grew up together and that’s basically the same thing as far as I’m concerned. In real life, they aren’t biologically or adoptively related, so they were free to carry on. It made things a little weird watching them pretend to be siblings while knowing they probably had sex a half hour before that scene was shot, and my mother and I liked refer to Carpenter as Hall’s “sister-wife” after they eloped on New Year’s Eve 2008. But it wasn’t that bad, and they seemed happy enough — until they weren’t. Less than two years after their wedding, Carpenter filed for divorce. People wondered how this would affect the show, guessing Carpenter would have to be killed off. She wasn’t. Instead, the writers found a way to make things even more awkward by having Debra confess in the sixth season finale that she had romantic feelings for her own brother. Coming up next season: no less than eight levels of awkward right there, I’d say.

Every other show Emily VanCamp has starred in: When she was on “Everwood,” she dated Chris Pratt, who played her brother. A few years later, she dated her “Brothers & Sisters” co-star David Annable, who played her half-brother. Their off-screen romance created so much on-screen chemistry that the writers decided to go with it and made VanCamp’s character not related to Annable’s after all, paving the way for the characters to marry. By that time, though, VanCamp and Annable had broken up. Their chemistry died, and VanCamp was written out of the series. Oops.

All in all, I think it’s pretty safe to say that anyone looking to get involved with a co-star is going to regret it one way or the other. The viewing audience will, too, suffering through awkward post-break-up sex scenes, on-screen sibling interactions full of creepy sexual tension, grandchildren who make terrible music, and homophobic born-again Christians (admittedly, I’m still not sure if that one is the fault of “Growing Pains”). And VanCamp, currently at least 0-for-2 when it comes to dating co-stars, should really know better at this point. Or perhaps this is her PR strategy playbook routine, at this point?

But maybe those crazy kids will make it work, I’ll be proven wrong, and “Revenge” will stay awesome. Or, more likely in light of the historical evidence, Josh Bowman is one bad public make-out photo away from being killed off.

Sara Morrison once lived in Los Angeles and played roller derby. Now she goes to graduate school in New York and thinks about roller derby.

Pretty soon you won’t even be allowed to smoke on your fire escape. It’s like the mayor wants you to quit or something.

Yup. This is a trailer to a book trailer — not just any book trailer, but the “longest, most depressing book trailer.” Time and space collapse. Congratulations, Kevin Moffett, you’ve awesomely ruined everything!

Here is a list of “ten thoughts that may be stressing you out,” but it doesn’t include “They’re on to me,” “It can only get worse from here and it almost certainly will,” “Are the Mormons going to posthumously baptize me?” or “I am all out of people to blame,” which are usually the ones that get me going.

So: “A poll due for release on Wednesday shows that a large majority of Americans believe that this year’s unusually warm winter, last year’s blistering summer and some other weather disasters were probably made worse by global warming. And by a 2-to-1 margin, the public says the weather has been getting worse, rather than better, in recent years.” Now, to be sure, it is only an online poll, and let’s remember that linking specific weather events to “global warming” is what allows “climate skeptics” to pretend that an icy day in April disproves the idea that we are mucking up the climate, but if people really are starting to come around to the idea that this thing is actually happening that’s very good news! I would say given another ten years of education on the subject, plus the growing number of omnipresent fires, floods and drought, and eventually we will be ready to do something about this problem. So let’s all meet back here in 2022 when we can start the process of discussing possible solutions. We’re gonna win this thing!

Photo by Eugenio Marongiu, via Shutterstock

They are forging Gorgonzola!

Awl fave Big K.R.I.T. made Washington D.C. rapper Fat Trel a terrific beat for the first single off his lauded Nightmare on E Street album. What’s that descending piano sample from? I recognize but can’t place it. Probably not Springsteen, but it’s nice to imagine.