Sarah Marshall

quote from I think an Amy Tan book about one of her characters as like a sixth grader being terrified by the thought of infinity and also being equally terrified by the antithesis of it which she envisions is like the universe coming to an end like and the image is something like like a frayed tennis ball bouncing off a wall oh yeah

right there's something really dreadful about that in a great way there is here's what i think about a lot and i might have mentioned it before on this show but i like really love 2001 a space odyssey i really love it when movies are boring um which to be clear i think it is trying to be on purpose god bless it um i really love the dawn of man stuff and i love the middle part which i think a lot i i for one did not really remember until i watched it more recently which is like

This man traveling boringly on a commercial flight to the, you know, airport just outside the moon, the moon base, and then traveling to the moon.

And the thing that he's dealing with is a secret project because they found this monolith on the moon, which is the same one that we saw in the first sequence, which shows up and then, you know, early man or, you know, Lucy figures out how to use weapons.

And it's like this big...

big moment, as you would imagine.

And it's also interesting on the subject of innovation, because I feel like as you're talking about this, there's this very sort of American history book way, and also I'm sure very British way of teaching history that's like, and then one man out of all the men, one man who happened to be well-bred and well-educated and well-connected,

thought of something and he thought by jinx and, and that's how science works as opposed to like a lot of people in different places noticing things, you know, often somewhat simultaneously or, you know, innovation sort of layering on innovation in a way where like nothing is entirely one person's idea.

I think most, if not all of the time, but you know, but this is how it works with eight with the apes in the movie.

Yeah, what I like about the boringness of it all is, well, A, I just think that it's kind of nice to be forced to sit and look at things for that long.

It's not that long, but it feels longer.

And that also that the middle part is then we're going to the moon to see this monolith where these guys in spacesuits like stand in front of it and take cheesy pictures of this monolith they found.

Yeah.

And then this like high pitched ringing starts.

And the premise of that apparently is that, which I don't think you could necessarily figure out just by watching it, is like, what if the monolith is like a baby gate that's been placed there on the moon to tell the aliens or some something, somebody, God, question mark, aliens, God, same diff as far as the movie is concerned.

that humans have like figured it out enough to get to the moon and that we're ready for the next thing and I guess I don't know I guess I love that idea for some reason because it implies this sort of like I don't know this idea of this almost if I keep calling it a baby gate it's because I'm envisioning it as like

alien mommy out there being like look at you and like watching humanity grow like you think you've traveled so far right and we've just gotten to the bottom of the stairs and we're still at the bottom of the stairs and there's also something so nice about that because earth is really special and it's where all our stuff is and there aren't really other planets like it that we're ever going to be able to get to before we destroy this one you know and

So I think I don't know.

I think it's just like we have there's a sort of maybe like spasming capitalist idea right now of like, well, we'll just get a new, hotter, younger planet.

You know, it'll all be fine.