The Holy Grail Press
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Word of the Every So Often
sulcate: (adj.) Imagine your brain. If necessary, take it out and look at it. Notice how it has all those parallel groves on it. Those groves are sulcate. Seashells are another good example of “sulcate,” which is anything (but usually stuff in nature) that has long, narrow groves, channels, or furrows usually running parallel.
The Daily Lesson
On August 14, 1975, The Rocky Horror Picture Show was shown for the first time at a theatre near you, and it’s probably still showing there. I remember a theatre in San Diego where all they showed was The Rocky Horror Picture Show. That’s probably not a sustainable economic model, but I don’t think they cared.
The Rocky Horror Picture Show had a fairly standard plot. A young couple with car trouble ends up at a castle. There they encounter a mad scientist from the planet Transexual who’s created a muscle-bound plaything, then a biker arrives, people get seduced, others get eaten, and then there’s a big cabaret show before the castle blasts off into space. Pretty usual stuff.
Over the years at midnight screenings, the movie has become interactive, with people wearing costumes, shouting out lines, dancing, and using props, such as real toast for the “toast” scene, and newspapers to cover their heads in the rain, because others have brought squirt guns.
Just about everything was controversial about the movie. It probably still is. There was open sexuality, infidelity, gender fluidity, L, G, B, T, Q, and espcially the Plus, and all sorts of naughtiness. Seriously, if you’ve seen the movie just imagine going in there not knowing what you were getting into, with or without audience participation.
The Rocky Horror Picture Show started out as a musical play, The Rocky Horror Show, which debuted in London in 1973, where it was a huge success, playing to consistently sold out audiences. The film version wasn’t quite as successful, at least at first. On its opening release, the movie was a flop, not even making back the meager 1.4 million it took to make it before being pulled. But then it came back with a vengenance. Since its return to midnight showings on weekends, it’s made 170 million and counting.
So was it really that good of a movie? Who cares?
Cartoon of the Week
Friar
Stuff
The History of the Future: Sabermetrics and the Demonstrative Display of Faith
Sabermetrics, the use of statistical analysis in baseball to evaluate the performance of players, had been around since the end of the 20th Century. It was in the summer of 2027 that Billy Crudesky, a sportswriter for Weasel Sports, applied Sabermetrics to demonstrative displays of faith in professional baseball. He sought to find out how players who crossed themselves before batting, pointed to the sky after getting a hit, said prayers before taking the mound, or other obvious displays of their religious beliefs actually performed relative to those players who did not. What he found was startling. Those players who publicly demonstrated their faith did far worse than other players. Batters were found to hit, on an average, a full forty points lower than those players who did nothing more than warm up. Base runners were thrown out more often, and less likely to score. Pitchers had a higher ERA, walked more batters, and lost, on an average, five more games per season. And fielders averaged more errors and made fewer marginal plays than those who simply did nothing. By the end of the 2027 baseball season, Crudesky reported that demonstrative displays of faith had completely disappeared from professional baseball.
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