Why Big Bang Theory Is Way Better Than Lost

NOTE: Lost Season 5 spoilers, for those of you watching the boxed sets only.

You all remember how much I love The Big Bang Theory. If you’re a geek, this isn’t optional. You must watch this show. It’s the tale of four socially awkward physicists whose love of comic books, role-playing adventures, video games and geek trivia constantly gets in the way of their relationships with women, especially the cute blonde wannabe actress who moves in across the hall.

Leonard - The least awkward and the most driven to try to fit in to society, Leonard is short and moderately attractive.

Sheldon - A tall and skinny Texan from a Christian household, Sheldon is less of a geek and more of an alien visitor to our world. Baffled by human interaction and protocols, Sheldon is fussy and exacting.

Rajesh (Raj) – The Indian immigrant Raj is unable to speak to women unless he’s drunk (based on a real person that the producers knew with the same hang-up).

Wolowitz - Living with his mother and dressed in the most gawd-awful form-fitting clothes, the Jewish Wolowitz nevertheless sees himself as a ladies man.

The Big Bang Theory is obviously written by people who are immersed in the culture they are parodying. For example, “Wednesday is Comic Book Day”… which, of course, it is and any nerd worth his salt knows that, but if these writers tried to fake it and had, for instance, the guys going out to get new comics on a Friday they’d look like a bunch of posers.

On April 13, the episode “The Hofstadter Isotope” showed a trip to the comic shop, with a lengthy argument about the Batman R.I.P. storyline which referenced the Zero Hour removal of Batman finding Joe Chill as well as many more recent developments. You can’t fake this stuff.

Now, contrast that with the Lost episode “Some Like It Hoth”.

Hugo “Hurley” Reyes has been a fan fave because he’s always bringing up some fanboy reference to Scooby Doo or Star Wars. When the Oceanic flight goes down, he’s reading a Spanish language version of “Green Lantern/Flash: Faster Friends”, and on the more recent Ajira Airways flight he was reading the Spanish language version of “Y: The Last Man” (written by Lost’s own Brian K. Vaughan).

Recently, the castmembers were time-tossed back to 1974, where they spend three years working for the Dharma initiative. They don’t let anyone know they are time travelers. I remember thinking that if I was one of them and I was challenged to prove that I’m from the future, I would retell Star Wars shot-for-shot with music and sound effects and flawlessly-replicated dialogue, then tell the person to go back to the mainland and wait for Star Wars to debut.

In “Some Like It Hoth”, Hurley boasts that he’s seen Empire Strikes Back hundreds of times, which is why he’s writing the script down from memory along with a few tweaks so that he can give it to George Lucas.

Cool, right? However, the script he’s writing doesn’t quite jibe with the actual movie (ref: Chewie’s taking down the probe droid as soon as it lands). A guy who has seen it so much would be more accurate.

Later, he compares the strained relationship of Miles and his father with the relationship of Luke and Darth Vader.

“That’s was Luke’s attitude too. Darth Vader was his father and Luke didn’t want to put the light sabers down and talk it out. But at what cost? It got his hand cut off. Two Death Stars destroyed. Boba Fett got eaten by the Sarlaac. And we got Ewoks. Ewoks, dude. And let’s face it, Ewoks suck.”

What the poodoo is he talking about?

How can a guy who has supposedly memorized Empire Strikes Back not know that Luke Skywalker had already had his hand chopped off and lost his light saber when Darth Vader reveals his parentage? When Luke next meets his father, he has surrendered his light saber and attempts to reach his father through dialogue, hoping that there is still good in him. He is only goaded to fight later when Darth is unwilling to meet his son halfway.

To any Star Wars fan worth his salt, Hurley’s dialogue is merely hackwork attempting to get Star Wars fans to chuckle that Ewoks do suck. The writer of the episode tried to fake it and it shows.

Note to Hollywood: you cannot fake nerd devotion.

(2 votes, average: 3.00 out of 5)

 Loading ...

How to post YouTube videos in a WordPress blog

Update: Some say that only Admins can post…which makes no sense at all.  I’m checking into that.

I was going to make this a private page just for my fellow Monitor Duty authors, but then I realized that there may be many non-MonitorDuty users who could be having the same problem and this might come in handy.

Everyone else can just skip this post. No geek goodness will be discussed herein.

I can’t believe Birds of Prey was canceled. I loved that book. Oh! Oh, right. How to do a YouTube video in a WordPress site.

My guess is that most of you are trying to do it via “QuickPress”, the little area on the Dashboard home page. 

Don’t use QuickPress.

Don’t ever use it, really, since it doesn’t offer categories and tags, and I want everyone who posts to categorize their post and, if possible, tag it as well.  Otherwise, I just have to clean up the posts later.

What you want to do is go to the “Posts” section and choose “Add New”.  (Your view may not match mine, as I have Admin level authority and I’ve applied a style to my view, but you should be able to find it.) When you are ready to paste in your YouTube video code, click the right tab that says “HTML”. Then, paste in Embed code for the YouTube video.  You can then either switch back to “Visual” for further editing/writing, or hit “Publish”. Voila!

Oh, you can also use the “Embed Video” icon and just paste in the URL for the video.  I’m going to test that out:

Secret Wars Reenactment Society

Doesn’t look like that worked.  What ARE they smoking over at the WordPress documentation site?

(No Ratings Yet)

 Loading ...

Daft Punk – Technologic

Hutch! make embedded media work!

Took me an hour to post a ten minute dealy and it will not work.

embedding youtube is supposed to be elementary!

(if the video doesn’t show, Hutch must fix it)

Talk about nightmare fuel!!!

(No Ratings Yet)

 Loading ...