The Underground — Issue #63
Everything you need to know about in this weekly series: A new show on VICELAND that shows what it’s like to be a comedian searching for fame, an honest look at this years Oscar nominees for best picture, a cool website that translates text to ciphers, a boat decided to sail over an underwater volcano without even knowing, and why does the Earth rotate?
At Social Underground we go beyond the mainstream stuff and see what’s underneath the surface. What should we get into, listen to, read, eat or watch? If there is something in our culture that needs attention that’s our job: Show you the underground things that you need to know about: Books, music, television, movies, comedians, art, and whatever else we can find to get you into something you never knew about. That’s The Underground.
1. VICELAND debuts its first television show Flophouse. Although I have only done stand-up comedy a handful of times, there are comedians out there that really dedicate their lives to it. VICELAND is a new channel that will replace H2 — since we can only watch much about Hitler and aliens — and it will showcase new shows like Flophouse: A show that takes a look at houses all around America in which comedians come and go to perform all over the country.
In this episode: Comedians Solomon Georgio, Eric Dadourian, and James Austin Johnson share a house called “Babe Island” in Los Angeles. They have a houseparty & stand-up comedy show in the garage with Clare O’Kane, James Adomian, Alice Wetterlund, and Brandon Wardell.
I’ve heard of these types of houses for a while now. Some homes have up to 10 people squeezed into a house. Some even living in closets that can only hold a bed. If you’re the traveling comedian, and you haven’t hit it big, keeping an apartment in an area like L.A. is a waste of money. Why not have different places to crash while you do gigs… and sometimes crash for a bit too long.
Check out the first episode before it premieres on March 3rd:
2. The Honest Trailer for the Oscars is spot-on as usual. The Oscars have aired (check out our predictions) and everyone will probably forget who won anything by next year, but Screenjunkies took the entire ceremony to the woodshed and beat the crap out of it. Even if it’s a good movie, they still give it a beating. Even when they’re being nice, it’s still sarcastic.
All 8 nominees are highlighted and they’re full of white people! I mean, a LOT of white people. But you can’t really make that big a fuss over it when you actually remember that most of the voters are old white people. Pretty sure old white people aren’t watching Beast of No Nation on Netflix.
Check out the Honest Trailer below:
3. Cryptii is a website where you can translate text to dozens of other codes. The only languages I know are English, a bit of Spanish, a few words of Japanese, and Pig Latin. This website lets you translate your words into stuff like Hexidecimal, binary, and a whole bunch of different ciphers.
“Cryptii is an OpenSource web application under the MIT license where you can convert, encode and decode content between different format systems. This happens fully in your browser using JavaScript, no content will be sent to any kind of server. Any feedback appreciated, just leave me a tweet or contribute.”
It’s a pretty fun website to use… especially if you have people trying to look at your text messages. Imagine you have a significant other who attempts to look at your phone, but then finds out that you are using a Caesar cipher to send messages to all your friends. Well, that actually may backfire because if you go to those lengths, they will know you’re trying way to hard to hide something. Get ready to sleep on the couch, buddy.
4. When you think your boat is heading for a sandbar, but it’s really a volcano. The other day, a photo album was making the rounds on Reddit. It showed a boat coming close to what looked like a gigantic sandbar in the middle of the ocean. It turns out it wasn’t that at all. What they were about to sail through was pumice stone. The boaters weren’t really sure what they were getting into until after they passed through it and heard the eruption of a volcano.
The problem with doing this, beyond obvious reason of not sailing over a volcano, is the way that boat worked when going over water. The air in the boat works as a resistance to the water which makes it float. When a volcano is erupting, a whole lot of air is being pushed up to the surface. the more air there is, the less water there is. This means you can sink very easily. The fact that this boat didn’t sink before the eruption hit the surface is really lucky. So the lesson here is that you should never ever sail over a volcano for any reason… but the pictures are cool.
5. Why does the Earth spin? You may have gone camping where there is not much light pollution in the sky and watched the stars in the sky. You slowly notice that the stars you were looking at a few hours ago are in a entirely different place.
It’s not actually the stars that are moving — well, they are — it’s actually our planet that’s spinning. I’m sure you already knew that, but do you know why it spin? Some planets spin slower than us like Venus, but why does planets spin at all? This video gives a helpful explanation as to why the Earth spins like it does. Also, if Superman decided to spin around the Earth really fast the other way to go back in time (which is absurd), he would kill everyone on the planet. Good job, Superman.
Check out the science of it all below:
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Jeff Sorensen is an author, writer and occasional comedian living in Detroit, Michigan. You can look for more of his work on The Huffington Post,UPROXX,BGR and by just looking up his name.
Contact: jeff@socialunderground.com