Would I Believe An X-Wing?

If you really had the Millennium Falcon, you wouldn’t be driving a busted old Subaru

There's nothing wrong with driving a busted old Subaru.  Those cars are built to last.  

To be clear, I'm not casting aspersions on anybody's car, be it a busted old Subaru, a brand new Maserati, or a 6 year old Hyundai...

Guess which one is Jeremy's.

...but when I see a bumper sticker on my car that says "My Other Car Is The Millennium Falcon" I get confused.  Why would anybody choose to drive a car such as this if they had the Millennium Falcon at their disposal?   

Instead of being stuck at the same red light in mall traffic in front of a 6 year old Hyundai, you could be (quite literally) rising above it all and soaring away in your Class 0.5 Hyperdrive-equipped space freighter.  Leave the traffic (and quite frankly the whole planet) behind and explore the solar system, other worlds, discover new places, meet new species, try to break the 12-parsec record for the Kessel Run.  The entire galaxy is at your beck and call...so why in the name of all things good and plenty are you sitting here with me?  

I can imagine that you're not comfortable enough yet with the concepts and theories of Faster Than Light travel, celestial navigation is difficult, and maybe fuel for the Falcon is expensive, but you're also not going to solve any of those issues stuck in traffic.  

It actually seems more plausible that you really don't have the Millennium Falcon, and your bumper sticker is lying to me.  Having the Millennium Falcon on earth would mean that somebody brought it here from a distant galaxy (which, even given the extreme nature of illegally-modded hyperdrive would take centuries) and just left it here for you to buy.  It's also ridiculously old.  There is no definitive time frame for the Millennium Falcon (only that the events concerning the ship happened a "long time ago"), but estimates go up to almost 2.6 million years and are based on topics far too scientific to be healthy for somebody to have calculated.  Also, if somebody in the Greater Jeremy Area had the Millennium Falcon, (which does not have a cloaking device), it couldn't be hidden very well, and we would all know about it by now.  It would be on TV and all over the internets where the new owner of the Millennium Falcon was. 

I find it very unlikely that your other car really is the Millennium Falcon.  I therefore call Bunk on your bumper sticker. 

Just Can't Let It Go

Yes, I’m still annoyed with that trivia question we got right.  Yes, I have a problem


This is merely scratching the coat of wax on the surface of your problems, Jeremy.  


So, not long ago was Trivia Night.  It's a thing that happens all over the place in all manner of forms.  In this particular instance, there was actually a buzzer that you had to press, and a guy who had to run around the bar getting people's answers after they buzzed in.  It was a unique change of pace and offered some significant advantages over other pub trivia methods once they replaced the battery in our buzzer and allowed it to actually work halfway through the first round.   

Needless to say, our team was composed of geniuses like myself and we won.  That's tangential to the story.  

One of the reasons that we won was our brutal domination of a category in the second round that involved weaponry used in Science Fiction.  Questions ranged all the way from Tron to the Death Star.  One of the questions dealt with Star Trek.  Surprise surprise.  Pretty much as soon as the host mentions anything out of the Star Trek universe, you're pretty much certain that the answer is going to be "phasers," and you'd be correct.  That was, in fact, the answer, and we totally did get it right.  However, there was a quirk in the question itself that irritated me.  The question said something about a thing you can set to stun, and then went on to talk about how it's a thing that Kirk and Spock would fire at the Borg.  

Star Trek fans are cringing right now.  

Yes, setting the phasers to "stun" is classic Star Trek.  Kirk, Spock, and the Borg are key fixtures in Star Trek.  But, kids...the timeline here is just all wrong.  See, Kirk and Spock were part of The Original Series, which deals with the Enterprise's "Five Year Mission" which takes place between the years 2245 and 2250.  Humans weren't introduced to the Borg until well into "The Next Generation,"in the year 2365.  While it's entirely true that the crews of The Original Series and Next Gen had some minor overlaps (McCoy had an abnormally long life and was a guest on Next Gen's Enterprise once, Scotty was trapped in suspended animation and made a single appearance, Spock was a Vulcan, so he lived long enough to see the Next Gen Crew, and there was an entire movie devoted to time travel between the two crews), none of these overlaps dealt with the Borg.  

It's quite safe to say that the trivia question was Bunk, as Kirk and Spock never canonically fired their phasers on the Borg...set to stun or otherwise. 

By 1985, He Knew He Made A Mistake

So, if he only heard the end of the song, how did Chuck Berry copy Marty McFly’s lyrics so perfectly?

Jeremy will once again be crapping all over a beloved and iconic movie to celebrate your monday.  Enjoy, everybody!

So, let's leave aside all the usual time travel cliches about paradoxes and parallel time streams and all that stuff and just focus on one important detail that nobody seems to bring up. 

Everyone knows the scene from Back To The Future where Marty McFly ends up playing guitar for the band at the high school's dance.  If not, get out of whatever hole you've been living in for the past 29 years and Watch The Scene Here.  There are probably spoilers in that if you're not familiar, but you brought it on yourself.  The hand thing makes sense within the canon of the movie, so just go with it.  

So, the funny funny joke here is that Marty McFly accidentally went back to 1955 and invented rock music, specifically Chuck Berry's iconic "Johnny B Goode."  We'll ignore the fact that he's playing a guitar from 1962, or that the genre clearly already has legs by the fact that the band is entirely clear on how to play the blues riff in B while watching for the changes.  We'll ignore the fact that Marty is such a terrible musician that he seems to think that his nonsensical guitar solo not only fits within the realm of 1955 dancehall music, but in that song.  We're supposed to believe that he just got carried away in the spirit of the moment, so we can go with it.  

Lets focus on the bit where Marvin Berry calls his cousin Chuck to introduce him to this "new sound."  Again...the band already knew how to do it, so it can't be that new.  Also, by that point, the bulk of the song was over, and they were just onto the guitar solo part which everyone present agreed was pretty terrible.  This is what Chuck Berry heard over the phone...not the early makings of Rock and Roll.  He also clearly didn't hear ANY of the lyrics...so over the next three years before Johnny B Goode was officially recorded, Chuck Berry not only managed to copy a new song that he only heard one awful part of, but managed to guess all of lyrics with complete accuracy.  This seems to be like an unbelievable coincidence. 

I'm sorry to say this, Michael J. Fox and Robert Zemeckis, but I am forced to Call Bunk on Back To The Future.