Okay, a three-fer:

a) The City Desk
The new Friday Facts is up over at the City Desk, and it's pretty much me-intensive. In fact, five of the eight Friday Facts come from my nimble noggin. If you can pick out which five, you win a prize (Note: Prize will probably suck).

b) The new Transformers Movie
While I honestly don't care one way nor the other for the Transformers live-action/CGI film, I'd like to note in shock and surprise that the new trailer informs us that the new Transformers movie comes complete with a Magical African-American Friend. He informs the live-action Spike Witwicky (I guess) of the majesty of choosing one's own car - that in fact, one's car chooses them. Of all the movies, Transformers has a Mystical Negro. It is the all alien shape-changing robots version of Bagger Vance.

c) The survival of the human race
I was listening to an older Ricky Gervais podcast, wherein he posed to Karl Pilkington some question about the Earth having been demolished in some sort of cataclysm, and he had to pick five other people to go with him to an alien world and start a new society. I honestly thought Pilkington's choices (the ones which I knew anyway) were quite clever, particularly bringing Jamie Oliver, so they'd have someone to make nice meals. He was, of course, made much fun of.

Gervais stipulated that all the labor and reproduction on the planet would be taken care of by "breeder clones" and "drones" and therefore Pilkington wouldn't have to worry about hard labor, so he didn't have to pick hard workers. It seems to me that Gervais was envisioning a slave-powered Idiot-ocracy, so I don't see why Pilkington's the bad guy.

Anyway, I got thinking about the stipulations myself, and I really can't think of five living people I'd take into space. I know I'd want an innovative, knowledgeable, profound and inventive musician on this new world, but with Mingus long dead I'd have to pick very very old Quincy Jones. I'd want a humanist author, someone who understands human nature and can express such with words, and who would probably hate living amongst the breeder clones. Vonnegut's dead, so what the hell, let's take Chuck Palahniuk. For laughs.

Honestly, I think you'd have as much luck building a new human society with five random names taken out of the phone book as you would with handpicking five Big Brains to make the trip. In the end, all I decided was that I'd take Jon Heder and four other people who were actually secretly made out of guns and ammunition, and then I'd spend all my free time on this new world hunting and shooting at Jon Heder.

How's by you, though?

And honestly, folks ... not Stephen Hawking. You know this already, in your hearts.