And at the Half That's Christians 1, Dinosaurs 4

My current favorite thing on the Internet (other than myself, obviously (and discounting anything Doctor Who related (Oh My God, I haven't looked for Series 9 rumors on the net yet today(OK, back from that now - nothing really new, but there was an interesting bit about Stephen Hawking)))) is a fringe group going by the name of Christians Against Dinosaurs.

One can find their Facebook presence here, and their website proper here.

I should add a note of warning that you can't really see much on their Facebook page without joining, which is fine, but I've also heard vague rumors that they have a bit of a Columbia House Record Club philosophy about letting people unjoin, so you should probably just be aware of that possibility going in.

Now, I know there are a lot of religious fringe groups out there with equally batshit beliefs (and indeed  - as both regular longtime readers will already know, I'm not above spending a happy hour or two trolling their Internet message boards.) What I really like about CAD (if I might use the acronym) is one simple thing-

-I genuinely have NO idea if they're kidding.

Every time you think you've found conclusive proof one way or the other you come across something else that brings everything into question again. 

I mean, for the love of god, one of their website banners just reads 'Stop Big Paleo', and that has simply got to be a joke, right? But then you click on Christian Mom's video immediately below it and all you can do is stare into her crazy eyes and think, 'damn, Christian Mom.  You genuinely believe this, don't you??'

And so on and so on.

Of course, over the last few days my understanding of the name has shifted and now instead of Christians against Dinosaurs, I kind of think of it as Christians versus Dinosaurs, which led to several happy hours imagining what Christian v. Dinosaur interscholastic sporting events might look like -

Tennis - Christians have the edge in agility, plus have opposible thumbs. Dinosaurs get frustrated and stomp on net, eat Christians

Golf - Much the same as Tennis

Bake-Off - Christians make exquisite 4 tier fondant spongecake tower with functional chocolate waterfall. Dinosaurs eat oven.  And Christians.

Quiz Bowl - Christians ring buzzer to answer first question. Dinosaurs get startled and trample all involved

Hot Dog Eating Contest -  At the finish, Christians have eaten 32 hot dogs. Dinosaurs have eaten 567,876 hot dogs and 6 Christians.

And after that they kind of fall into a pattern. (But if anyone out there wants to make an animated web series of this I promise to like the crap out of it.)



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After a little more digging, I've come across what I think is the reality of the situation.  And is so often the case, it is so much better than you'd expected it to be.

In a nutshell, the implication is that the good folks at CAD - having been so fed up with the general state of douchiness on the Internet in general - specifically hand crafted a cause to be SO ridiculous, SO mockable, and SO apparently sincere, that it brought out the hard line trolls on BOTH sides of the spectrum into the full light of day.  It was essentially designed as a clearinghouse of the worst of the worst of both religious fundamentalist commenters AND smug hipster douchebags who like to spend a lot of time making fun of other people's religious beliefs anonymously on the Internet. The end game (if one believes this theory) being that it would ultimately make it obvious to the casual observer that this... THIS is why we can't have nice things.

I'm a huge fan of people finding effective ways of communicating the message that the whole world would be a better place if we all made an effort to be less of a giant dick from time to time.  A message that stings just a bit, as if you read the first portion of the column, you'll see that I'm exactly who they're talking about.

Well played, Christians.  Well played, Dinosaurs.
Well played.

Tomorrow - All right... we'll talk about the freakin dress.

If this becomes a thing, I totally want credit for coining the term

The thing about the history of television, when you stop to think about it, is that there isn't actually a tremendous amount of it. (The first commercially available sets coming in 1928, 1934 or 1936, depending on how pedantic you are about what qualifies as a proper television set and how comfortable you are giving Germany the credit- although to be fair, 'Telefunken' is a freakin' awesome name for a company)

It's even more recent that we stopped thinking of television as being something other than just happening and then being gone forever. (I'd insert an obligatory rant at this stage about how the BBC destroyed more than half of Doctor Who made between 1963-1969, but then I'd have to get into the whole thing about rumors that they've found most of them in Africa, and honestly I really am trying to focus here.)

I had a whole section here about the way TV changed into marketable product, but I've deleted it (see how it feels, BBC?)  so that I can skip ahead to the chase.  The landscape of television is nearly always still heading into uncharted territory simply because it hasn't been around long enough for it not to.

The reason that I bring this up is that I've noticed an increasing occurrence lately of a phenomenon that I'm going to dub 'Gen2 Cameos'.  (Dear Internet, please remember where the term came from.  Unless its existence leads to some sort of war atrocity, in which case please disregard this request.)

What I'm talking about here is when an actor makes a cameo appearance on a sitcom* solely because they co-starred on a previous sitcom with one of the cast members.  Like when John Mahoney shows up on Hot in Cleveland (He was Martin Crane on Frasier alongside Jane Leeves and later Wendie Malick for those of you who don't follow the reference.  And some of you are in Morocco, so that's totally understandable.)  In the past this wasn't particularly common, simply because it was much less common for someone to have more than one sitcom, Lucy Not-withstanding.

*It also happens on drama programs, but not in quite the same way.  See: Alexis Denishof's guest run on Dollhouse versus his guest appearances on How I Met Your Mother to see what I mean there.

One of the notable points of interest with the phenomenon of Gen2 Cameo (gonna keep hammering in that term until it sticks people) is that it often is more telling for who doesn't get invited to make a cameo than who does.  For example, I notice that both Jennifer Aniston and Lisa Kudrow have appeared alongside Courtney Cox on the show Cougar Town, and yet none of the guys from Friends have.  And Courtney is one of the Producers, so it's not like she couldn't make it happen if she wanted it to.  Sure, maybe the guys have just all been busy.  I suppose that's possible.  I still find their absence to be interesting.  Much like the way I find it interesting that Sarah Michelle Gellar has yet to appear as a Gen2 Cameo on... um.. .anything.  With anyone she's worked with before.  I'm just sayin'...

Which is all a roundabout way of saying that it's only a matter of time before Melissa Peterman drops by on Malibu Country.*

*For the sake of Morocco - she played Barbra Jean on the sitcom Reba, which starred Reba McEntire, who now stars in the sitcom Malibu Country.  I mention her here almost entirely as an excuse to shoehorn in a mention of the fact that I happen to know her.**

**As a Friend, <Facebook>, if nothing else, although if we bumped into each other I'd give it a 63% chance that she'd remember my name.  And as much as Vizsla = Knowledge, Vizsla even more = Gratuitous Namedropping.*** 

***I'll refer you to next weeks 'Famous Dans that I know' column, where I plan on bathing lovingly in the reflected glow of mentioning 20-30 times that I know Dan Harmon.  I'd totally send him unsolicited spec scripts for Community, but I suspect that Facebook has an 'unfriend' button for just that sort of situation.****

****I wonder if Dan and Melissa know each other....*****

*****I no longer have any idea what I was talking about before I started footnoting footnotes..