In Which We Meet Bane Cosby

Ashly and I have both told you about how these crossovers occur.  Random statements happen. Another unrelated comment arises.  The tangents meet, then twist, turn and eventually merge into experiments in the impossible.  So far we've looked at tacos and wave superposition as well as a crossover bar fight between famed smugglers Han Solo and Malcolm Reynolds.  But today we have one that clocks in a little higher on the meta scale.

In late July, My friend was telling me about The Dark Knight Rises.  I had yet to see it, and he was trying to give me the spoiler free review.  I'm not sure how it worked out that this came up, but discussions of Batman turned into discussions of The Cosby Show, of which we're both big fans.  Our end conclusion - Bane, The Dark Knight Rises villain and expellee from Ra's Al Ghul's League of Shadows, was in fact a member of the Cosby Show family - a son of Cliff and Clair Huxtable.  This all spawned from a twitter exchange Ashly and I had about CM Punk turning heel on RAW's 1000th episode.  The logic at the time was that Big Show was to CM Punk as the Joker was to Harvey Dent in The Dark Knight, pretty much "letting him off his lease" and turning his dark side loose.

Remember the episode where Vanessa goes to a party and gets drunk (Season 6 Episode 3, "I'm 'In' with the 'In; Crowd") playing some drinking game called "The Alphabet Game?" Taking shots when you can't name a city beginning with a given letter is a cornball idea that really only could have been spawned in the 80's, but they made it work.  While this whole mess was going on at the Huxtable house, Theo happened to be at the house when Cliff and Clair figured out what was going on.  Theo's response?

Theo: I never thought Vanessa would crack under the pressure.
Clair: What pressure?
Theo: The pressure of growing up in this family. Because of what you guys have accomplished, people expect a lot more from us than other kids. Think about it, you're a lawyer, dad's a doctor. That's a lot of pressure mom.
Clair: We never said "become a doctor" "become a lawyer", we said "go to school, get good grades, become whatever you want".
Theo: There you go, pressure! "Go to school" "become something", that's a lot of pressure, mom. All my friends see it.

What went unsaid was that in addition to the Huxtable children we had seen on television, there was also Bane, the adopted eldest.  He had clearly cracked under the pressure of being a Huxtable child.  So he didn't become a doctor or a lawyer.  Instead he ended up in that prison pit, torn over the fact that his father was now Ghost Dad.

Ashly of course added some additional evidence to the proceedings, citing that anyone whose father was in Leonard Part Six would also go insane.  But no kids, we're not nearly full circle yet.  It's clear at this point that Bane has some daddy issues.  And as said by Austin Powers' father in Goldmember, "If you have a daddy issue, here's a daddy tissue."  Do we all remember who played him in the movie?  That's right kids, Michael Caine - The Alfred Pennyworth Himself.

So after this was up on the facebooks and the twitters for a bit, of course the picture at the top of the post starts showing up on the interwebs.  So you're welcome, internet.  Because we're totally taking credit for that.

The Doritos Locos Taco and Wave Superposition

Have you had the Doritos Locos taco from Taco Bell?  If you somehow you live near one of those Taco Bell locations that doesn't carry them or under a very large rock, let me lay out for you.  Imagine a hard shell taco.  Got it?  OK, good.  now imagine that the corn shell has been replaced by a giant nacho cheese Dorito that has been fitted into the shape of said taco shell.  And that's it.  That's the whole gimmick.  And somehow, this particular amalgamation of Mexican style fast food and nacho cheese snack food has driven people positively nutty.  I'm not of that particular nacho cheese hive mind.  No my friends, I'm not drinking the proverbial Kool-Aid.

Let's ignore for a second that it can on some level be literally referred to as "all that and a bag of chips."

Anyway, while many hail this taco as the second coming, I can't see the draw.  It tastes more or less like a regular taco, with the prime difference being that my fingers have orange Dorito dust on them when the experience is over.  To make sure that I minimized variables in this test I tried this taco from two separate Taco Bell locations - at each location getting one taco with only cheese and meat and one "supreme."  It just seems to me that the flavor of a nacho cheese shell just adds some sort of semi-redundancy.  There's already some cheesiness in the taco.  Upon further analysis of the issue, I think I've found the reason for my lack of enthusiasm, and it can be explained (in a lost continuity) by physics.

(For any physicists, engineers, or miscellaneous scientists, be advised that the following is an extremely rudimentary explanation of wave superposition, so back off.)

plus, sine waves look like taco waves

If we apply principles of wave propagation to the Doritos Locos Taco, we find the answer in interference.  Now interference isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it is a thing, and can be classified into the two main flavors of constructive and destructive.  Take two identical waves and lay them on top of each other.  They meet crest for crest, and the magnitude of the resultant wave is the sum of the magnitudes of both.  That's called constructive interference and happens if the phase difference between them is 0 or a multiple of 2π.  A phase difference of an odd multiple of π (1, 3, 5, etc.) will instead cause destructive interference, gimping the magnitude of the resultant wave.

The charts on the left illustrate this issue, and are from Canada under the Stars (thanks, eh).

Assuming that flavor can be expressed and represented using plane waves, we can apply this simple concept to the Doritos Locos taco, I can theorize one thing - that the the flavor of the nacho cheese Dorito shell and standard taco flavor is out of phase by π, and the destructive interference is gimping the magnitude of my taco experience.

It's the same principle that allows noise-cancelling headphones to let you listen to your tunes in peace, just with delicious flavor waves instead.

Go on, come up with something better.

Two Smugglers Walk Into a Space Bar...

It seems like a simple enough question, but the answer is more complicated than one might think.  Today, via Twitter, we here at Lost Continuity set out to answer this all-important question:

Who would win in a bar fight, Han Solo or Malcolm Reynolds?

Lost Continuity? What's All This, Then?

If you're a fan, or have ever been a fan, of any facet of nerdery - be it comics, games, even movies and television, there's one concept you have to just let go of to glean any enjoyment out of it. Continuity.  And by that of course I mean the more universal concept of linear time.  Nerdery is dominated by parallel worlds, different storylines and arcs, movie versions vs TV versions vs book versions, and they are all capable of making you scratch your head and become cross over a failed reconciliation.  Just read any comic book that has the word "crisis" attached to it anywhere.  So while some people try to reconcile these different timelines, and try to get some sense of continuity out of it for their own simple human understanding, we on the other hand embrace the chaos, and routinely play along with a "take it and run with it" attitude, sometimes outright destroying them. What do we draw from? The list is pretty exhaustive: comics, video games, science fiction, webcomics, professional wrestling, general nerdery, and pop culture.

Who are we you ask?  We, the shadowy (well not really) figures behind this project are Technical Fowl's Tushar Nene and New Age Amazon's Ashly Nagrant.  We destroy sci-fi and pop-culture continuity at some frequency - sometimes with intention, but usually inadvertently - ultimately creating words that could exist in the realms of nerdery but never will.  You see, we've known each other since college, and have both taken different paths to become exceedingly expert at being ridiculous.  On twitter you'll find these mind-bending conversations marked with a #crossingthestreams hashtag, as we all know from Ghostbusters that doing so could potentially stop all life as we know it instantaneously, causing every molecule in your body to explode at the speed of light.

you know, total protonic reversal.

To give you an example of what kind of ridiculousness can be expected here, a simple comment by Ashly on devouring "stories of malicious inspiration" and my simultaneous desire for a slice of cake evolved into a universe where Galactus, eater of worlds devours entire planets for their cakes, in addition to planet sized cakes, which theoretically could be stolen forty at a time by Lex Luthor. After the discussion on gravity and the degree of difficulty of said cake theft, the the introduction of Mogo the living planet was added to the mix, and we now have a league of planetary cakes with their own Green Lantern Corps, complete with oath:

"in brightest cream on blackest plate,

no flour shall escape its fate.

let those who pies and pastries make,

beware my power, green lantern cake."

A thought, a meme, two comics, science, and a bad poem.  The result? A lost continuity.  To borrow from Penny Arcade's Tycho, it's not that we saw this universe.  It's that we saw where it was not, and said "no, this will not do."

So welcome to the project kids. Enjoy.