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Cocktail Chatter: Teleportation

By Rick Paulas
September 7, 2012
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Happy family at the Star Trek teleporter | Photo: mwichary/Flickr/Creative Commons License

 

Having a bar conversation is hard. You have to, like, know stuff about the news and be able to communicate that stuff in a way that doesn't make you sound like an idiot. Throw alcohol into the mix, and it's a recipe for disaster. Good thing I'm here to help. Here are ten stories from this week to assist your barroom chatter.

1. Talking about TV in the day and age of DVR and buying-on-iTunes is a bit tricky. There's an unwritten week-long moratorium on discussing the events of a spoiler-capable show to allow everyone to catch up. So now, that the week-long conversational hiatus is just about up, feel free to chat all about last Sunday's amazing "Breaking Bad" mid-season finale.

2. Did you, like so many other hundreds of thousands who spent last Wednesday glued to their TV sets, fall back in love with our former Commander-in-Chief Bill Clinton?

3. Meanwhile, seems like the nation went ahead and fell out of love with our own mayor, Antonio Villaraigosa, for his various oopsies.

4. The trailer for the straight-to-DVD "official sequel" of the classic "A Christmas Story" is out there, on the Internet, ready to destroy the last sacred bit of your childhood. And of course Daniel Stern is in it.

5. Ben and Jerry's are suing "Ben and Cherry's," a series of adult DVDs, saying that they are sullying the reputation of the ice cream makers and possibly "creating confusion" among customers. Personally, I think the lawsuit's legit -- I can't count the amount of times I walked into 7/11 trying to get a pint of "Chunky Monkey" and ended up walking out with a bag full of porn.

6. Should everyone be outraged by the publication of "No Easy Day," the Navy SEAL-written account of how the assassination of Osama bin Laden went down? I have no idea! But no doubt you have an opinion on this you can share.

7. This week, Eat|See|Hear out in Santa Monica is screening the utterly-perfect '80s comedy "Three Amigos." Here's a fun conversation: Of the three, who currently has the best career? The constantly-angry-yet-gainfully-employed Chevy Chase, the too-banjo-obsessed Steve Martin, or the consistently-funny-and-underrated Martin Short?

8. Sports-stuff: This Chicago White Sox fan dropped not one, but two foul balls that were hit directly at him. The conversational opportunity here? How close you've gotten to a foul ball, and if you think you could catch one unlike this terribly-handed person.

9. Did you drive to the bar where you are currently having this conversation? Then you must not be Amanda Bynes, who Lohan'd herself into a driver's license suspension from the California DMV.

10. Very brainy physicists in Vienna have figured out how to teleport a quantum state over a distance of 143 kilometers, a new record. Obviously, I have no idea what it means, other than we're clearly on the brink of being able to teleport like in Star Trek. RIght?

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