Alan Young died on Thursday.

I know that for our parent's generation he'll always be Wilbur from Mr. Ed, but for us he's Scrooge McDuck. I'll miss him.

Looking through his IMDB I was also reminded that he did an awesome job in The Great Mouse Detective.

Incidentally, he has a Bacon Number of 2.

Tomorrow is Towel Day, so here are a few Hitchhiker's links...

A fan animation of the original guide entry on towels.

An epic remix of "The Journey of the Sorceror" complete with excerpts of guide narration by Douglas Adams himself.

Another one, but with more of a techno spin and less narration.

An astronaut on the International Space Station celebrates last year's Towel Day by reading a book excerpt and wearing a "Don't Panic" T-shirt.

Numberphile talks about the cultural impact of 42 and discusses some of the number's mathematical properties. I'll bet none of you had ever heard of a pronic number before today, much less a primary pseudoperfect number or a Harshad number.

Wikipedia gives a number of other properties of 42.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incredible_Crisis

That's . . . quite a plot.

During the ST:TAS days, Leonard Nimoy recorded a promo for the 1970's Pink Panther cartoon.

Just a little randomness to add spice to your day.

An art gallery displays 50 pieces of Trek art for the 50th anniversary.

Some of you may recognize that one of the pieces is the epic fanart that I posted a long time ago featuring basically everybody who ever appeared on TOS.

A ragtime piano cover of the Tetris theme (Korobeiniki).

It's a fun spin on the classic tune that's been stuck in all of our heads for the last 25 years.

I've been binging on YouTube clips from ''Mr. Smith Goes to Washington", one of my favorite movies. I stumbled upon a fan's impersonation of one of Jimmy Stewart's speeches. Too bad "hoarse due to dehydration Jefferson Smith" sounds an awful lot like "Christian Bale as Batman."

Judge for yourself.

Gene Wilder died yesterday.

Yeah, this bummed me out.

Clip time!

Pure Imagination (original by Wilder)

Pure Imagination (Maroon 5 cover)

Chocolate Factory Ending ("He lived happily ever after")

The Lobster Quadarille (remember when he was the Mock Turtle?)

The Chip 'n' Dale Rescue Rangers opening remade with real chipmunks, some puppets, and a greenscreen.

So, yeah, that happened...

Once again, I'd like an emoticon that's a face that blinks in confusion and says "that's random" over and over.

A site recommends "Darmok" as the first episode to watch for a person who has never seen Star Trek before in their lives.

Yeah, um, what?

I was going to stick this in the quintessential episode thread, but I didn't want to be mocked for necroposting, and the connection was tangential anyway.

I appreciate what Darmok attempted, the problem is that it raised too many questions about how the Universal Translator was ever supposed to work. If anything, "instant" translation should be extremely crude and mechanical. Let the eggheads over at the Daystrom Institute talk with representatives of each race to get the grammatical rules straightened out and perfected. But no, the UT works perfectly with everything including proper nouns instantaneously, except for this episode when it hiccups all over the place.

Now, just to convince you that I still like the episode, here's the Gilgamesh clip.

A few years ago someone created "Star Wars Rock" on YouTube. That is, Schoolhouse Rock audio with the video replaced by appropriate Star Wars clips. And some goofy commentary via subtitles, of course.

Adjectives
Interjections

Someone made a video explaining the major and minor powers in the Trek universe along with a summary of major events in the Prime Universe.

I disagree with some of the events deemed important (and the mentioning of events from Enterprise), but it's a decent primer if someone wanted to jump into the middle of Deep Space Nine having never seen anything Trek before.

Nimoy Sunset Pie

Images that can be as bizarre as you want, the only rule is that it has to have Leonard Nimoy (as Spock or otherwise), a sunset, and a pie.

So yeah, um, this exists...

http://garfemon.tumblr.com/

Another bizarre image project, where someone's drawing Garfield as all 151 original Pokemon.

There it is again, the desire for the blinking "that's random" emoticon.

I looked for quotes about weirdness, here are some.

Source One:

Dick Francis: Some are born weird, some achieve it, others have weirdness thrust upon them.
E.A. Buccianeri: Weirdism is definitely the cornerstone of many an artists's career.
Alain de Bottom: There's a whole category of people who miss out by not allowing themselves to be weird enough.
Dr. Seuss: We are all a little weird and life's a little weird, and when we find someone whose weirdness is compatible with ours, we join up with them and fall in mutual weirdness and call it love. (another source claimed that a similar quote is from Robert Fulghum, I'm not sure who's right)

Source Two:

Sebastian Stan: Embrace your differences and the qualities about you that you think are weird. Eventually, they're going to be the only things separating you from everyone else.

Source Three:

Jacob Nordby: Blessed are the weird people: poets, misfits, writers, mystics, painters, and troubadours, for they teach us to see the world through different eyes.
Tom Robbins: There is no such thing as a weird human being, it's just that some people require more understanding than others.

Source Four:

Crow T. Robot: You're weird. Which results in creativity.


This could easily go in the Amazing Things thread too:

https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/commen...he_death_star/

This guy designed most of the ships in A New Hope, he worked on Close Encounters and War Games and 2001, he helped Walter Conkrite broadcast the Apollo 11 landing, he designed the first proper color monitor -- just read the thread. Amazing Thing: The Death Star trench run was basically an accident. The model for the Death Star developed a depression, and rather than spend a lot of time patching it up, Cantwell convinced Lucas it should have a trench.

Source Five:

Mandy Hale: So you're a little weird? Work it! A little different? OWN it! Better to be a nerd than one of the herd!
Donna Lynn Hope: I like weird. Conformity bores but is inescapable for the most part. We all follow something, even if it is following the goal of wanting to stand apart. We are a sea of ordinary people; it is always the quirk, the flaw or the ingenuity that stands out.

It's Newgrounds Day in the Link Thread!

I'm in the middle of an Ashens marathon, and I was reminded of what web video was like over ten years ago, so let's do a Newgrounds Day!

I won't link to things like The Return of Ganondorf or the Floating Hands toons again, I've already done those too many times.

You all know about the Ultimate Showdown, but what about another video by Albino Blacksheep, Geeks in Love?

The sheer number of references boggle the mind. Can you find Doc Brown and Clara, the Spock snowman, the Monty Python foot, the All Your Base guy, the Teal'c cosplay, Potter Puppet Pal Dumbledore, or the Lemmings?

Pretty Much Ocarina of Time. A different style of abridgement than a fiver.

Magical Trevor. I forget if I saw this one on Newgrounds or YouTube first.

Super Mario Crossover. This is the original one, the one that I played the most.

One of many Rabbit Joint Zelda song videos. It's not even the best one possible, but I was in a hurry and the song is the most important part. Just like Magical Trevor, the Ultimate Showdown, Badger, etc. this song deserves it's place in early Net history.

Majora's Mock. Wait for the third option to present itself.

They're bringing Teddy Ruxpin back in a new form.

Boy, did he haunt my childhood. Even back then, I thought he was creepy, and back there in the '80s he was everywhere for awhile.

When it comes to nostalgia bears, give me the Gummi Bears any day. As for actual teddy bears, I had one that looked similar to this. Much less creepy, right?

I don't think I've posted 331Erock yet. He takes the theme songs from our childhood and turns them into metal versions with his electric guitar. Just a few selections...

Cartoons: Ducktales Main Theme, Gargoyles, Batman Beyond, Sailor Moon, Let it Go from Frozen, He-Man and the Masters of the Universe
Live Action Shows: Mister Rogers Neighborhood, Star Trek, MacGyver, The Lone Ranger/William Tell Overture, Power Rangers
Video Games: Ducktales Moon Theme, Super Mario Medley, The Legend of Zelda
Films: Spider-Man Medley (Raimi films medley, 1994 cartoon, 1981 cartoon, 1967 cartoon), Superman, Indiana Jones, Back to the Future, Star Wars