Missed us by *that* much

Whew! That was close!

Billion-Ton Comet May Have Missed Earth by a Few Hundred Kilometers in 1883

A reanalysis of historical observations suggest Earth narrowly avoided an extinction event just over a hundred years ago.

That’s a billion-ton comet that had broken into thousands of pieces. Had they hit the Earth, the investigating team estimates there could have been over 3,200 “Tunguska events” over 48 hours.

That’d put a crimp in anyone’s day.

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The return of Perry Mason

"Trust me, Della. It will never work between us."

 

Hmmm. I’m a big fan of the old series, and Robert Downey, Jr., has turned in some great performances since cleaning himself up, so this sounds promising:

Warner Bros. Pictures and Team Downey are relaunching the “Perry Mason” franchise as a feature film, with Robert Downey Jr. eyeing the title role, reports Variety.

The trade says that, like the original Erle Stanley Gardner books, the Perry Mason movie will be set in the 1930s and feature characters such as Mason’s secretary, Della Street, private investigator Paul Drake, and Mason’s longtime courtroom nemesis, Hamilton Burger.

I like the return to the 1930s of Gardiner’s stories and I hope this also means they’ll be more true to the Mason of the stories, who was often willing to engage in a little law-breaking himself in service of a greater good. (The original series starring Raymond Burr had that in its early days, but it mostly vanished after a few seasons.) And I think Downey is a good choice for the part — as long as it isn’t a “reinvention” like his Sherlock Holmes movie. I liked that for what it was, but, in this case, I want “Perry Mason,” not a action-hero comic-book alternate-Perry.

Sidenote: Sorry about the lack of posting of late. I hope to be a bit more regular about it; if nothing else, there are some new TV shows to talk about.

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