Childishly Intelligent
Netflix recently announced that Friends was being removed from their streaming service, starting on January 1, 2019. There was a public outcry and that decision was promptly reversed and the 90’s sitcom will now stay on Netflix throughout 2019, thus once again confirming Hollywood’s sneaking suspicion that all they really need to do to make […]
“Wait a minute, Doc. Ah… Are you telling me that you built a time machine… out of an industrial age understanding of the arbitrary segmented concept of time as it pertains to human understanding of the revolutions of our world around the yellow dwarf, main sequence star that we orbit?” Time travel is an interesting […]
From the human voice to the telegraph to the telephone to however it is kids communicate these days… We’re going to say interpretive Fortnight dancing?.. Human interaction has been part of the human experience since our caveman ancestors learned to throw rocks at our other caveman ancestors to get them to stop painting on the […]
What do you think of when you think of the United States Military? Is it uniforms? Tanks? Battleships? Video game design? Hollywood producers? Well, maybe you should, because some of the popular culture we love -and hate- nowadays have their roots in the Department of Defense. For the record, that is the apparatus which helps […]
It is summer in the city, a time when the jackets finally begin to come off, and the fresh stench of warm street garbage begins intermingling with the fetid subway breeze. Yet, there is no denying that our climate is changing, with record low and high temperatures. What we are trying to say is that […]
Thomas Keith Glennan, is a name you have probably never heard before, which is understandable. Dr. Glennan was an electrical engineer who dabbled in the new technology of sound motion pictures at Paramount and Samuel Goldwyn Studios, briefly worked for Vega Aircraft, and finally joined the Division of War Research at Columbia University in 1942… yeah […]
This week marks one year since the inauguration of Donald Trump, and its been quite a year. And, quite frankly, we’re sick of writing about it. So we have decided to ignore the Donald -if only for one day- and turn to the story of another billionaire business magnate turned President of the United States, […]
To many there is a certain romance surrounding the Confederacy. Maybe it has to do with our affinity for the underdog, or the American rebel spirit? Maybe it is rooted in some notion that the antebellum South somehow represents a simpler and more gentrified time? And maybe to those people, the statues of Southern generals and […]
Whether you have been aware of it or not there has been a lot of talk lately about net neutrality. Its a term that’s getting thrown around more than pies at a clown convention, but what does it really mean? Well, in very basic terms, Net Neutrality refers to the idea that the flow of […]
We don’t normally comment on brand new shows at The NYRD, but it is worth talking about Designated Survivor, the Kiefer Sutherland political thriller about how a terrorist organization blows up the Capitol building killing most of the American government and leaving an earnest and inexperienced Housing and Urban Development Secretary as President of the […]
Perhaps you’re familiar with Two-Face, the Batman villain, played both by Aaron Eckhart and by Tommy Lee Jones doing an impersonation of a malfunctioning black-light. Regardless of which version you cling to as the definitive one, Harvey Dent is a super-villain who uses his trademark coin to make all his decisions. One flip to decide […]
This past weekend, AMC’s The Walking Dead returned to television to finish up the second-half of its seventh season, and with a Republican in the White House, we are expecting the shows popularity to soar once again. Now, we are not saying this because it is very likely that Donald Trump is the American President […]
Donald Trump’s inauguration is tomorrow, and there is a persistent question that has been popping up around here the past few weeks. “Would you rather live in the rise of an empire or the fall of an empire?” It’s a fundamental question about personal preferences and ideals. Would you rather live at a time when […]
It’s time to pack your bags, get your books, and load up the car, because we are off to college. No, we’re not talking about the type of college where you sit in a classroom, live in a dorm, and get up to outdated stereotypical 90’s hi-jinks. We are talking about the Electoral College. We […]
We want to get something off our chests: The Wizard World of Harry Potter doesn’t work… Don’t get us wrong, Harry Potter and the books of JK Rowling are timeless masterpieces, and we love them as do you, but logically they don’t make sense. The world of Harry Potter works pretty well as a concept […]
We made a promise to ourselves that we were done writing about election-related issues, but much like our electoral college, promises were apparently made to be broken. -Oh, sick civics burn- Yet, if this election has proved one thing it is that we know nothing about how the other half of the country works, lives, […]
This week will see the release of Marvel’s Doctor Strange, the second film in the movie/comic juggernaut’s Phase 3. The beginning of Marvel’s rise to stardom and America’s obsession with superhero movies began back in 2008 with the release of Iron Man starring Tony Downey Stark Jr. and it has been going strong ever since, breaking […]
It seems like the latest hype in gaming these days is virtual reality headsets. This new technological innovation has taken over consumer shows and comic conventions by storm. From the Oculus Rift to a cardboard box glued onto a Galaxy 7, every gamer and mega tech corporation is out to get a piece of the […]
There has been a lot of buzz lately about the Great Barrier Reef, between Outside Magazines viral article and at least two Pixar movies. The barrier reef is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and has been declared the greatest aquatic wonder in the world. The GBR is firmly ingrained in our collective human consciousness, and […]
Star Trek is turning 50 this week. The classic franchise that has always been about future people doing future things in a Galaxy far far… oh wrong one… where Kirk, Spock, McCoy and all the rest boldly go where no split infinitives have gone before. The Original Series spawned eleven movies, four more TV shows […]
You may have heard people say that “Race is a social construct,” similiar to language, national boundaries, or Hogwarts’ Houses, and much like Hufflepuff, the concept is one mired in identity, economics, and power. Understanding the history of the labels that we wear and assign is about understanding the history of shifting social classes, politics, […]
Hello and Valar Morghulis to all our viewers at home. We want to welcome you back to our final week of coverage and our recap of the Westeros Olympics. It has been an exciting festival of talent and competition this year. Isn’t that right, Chuck?… Chuck? Hold on, I’m being told that Chuck died. The […]
If you think Donald Trump is a megalomaniac with grandiose ambitions for Presidential power, than you would be right. However, he is not the first man in American history to start a political frenzy over the Presidency. You may only know the name Aaron Burr from an old “Got Milk” Commercial, or simply as the […]
