Bad Ideas

Let's try something fun tonight.  The Raccoon Inc. editorial board has hereby proclaimed that tonight shall be...

A TALE OF BAD IDEAS

And to judge these bad ideas is a celebrity panel of experts.  To my right the self-proclaimed star of the A & E hit television show "Storage Wars", Mr. Dave Hester.

Thank you, Aaron.  Pleasure to be here.

To my far right, from the hit cartoon My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, the character that arguably was the propelling force behind its magnetic internet fame, Derpy Hooves.  Ready for some scintillating conversation this evening?

Yeah!  Alright!  Am I on TV?  Hi, Mr. and Mrs. Cake!  I got the cookies you sent me!

That's great stuff there, Derpy.  Now, to my left is a man who surely needs no introduction, so please let's have a warm round of applause for Mr. Sammy Davis Jr.

How're you cats doing tonight? It's swell to be in front of a live audience tonight.  Real swell. 

Thank you, Sammy.  To my far left now is a gentleman whose been around since the Great Depression, and if you think your fortunes are won and lost on a gamble, Dave, you ain't seen nothing.  It is my esteemed pleasure to introduce the Mr. Milburn Pennybags, or as the viewing audience at home may know him as, The Monopoly Guy.

Oh ho ho ho...  You're too kind.  The pleasure is all mine, dear boy

And last, but far, far from least across the table it is my great honour to introduce a legend.  the one, the only, the incomparable Alfred Hitchcock.

Good evening...

Now, for our first bad idea, let me just dig around in the old bucket here and...  ah!  Yes!  The first bad idea is...


SQUARE'S TOM SAWYER

Yeah.  Hm.  O.k.  Well.  Here's what we're going to do.  I'm just going to throw out the game's cover art and a few screenshots before continuing.

Cover art.

Screenshot #1.

Screenshot #2.

Square's Tom Sawyer is strange.  I don't know what to make of this.  Was this Square-

E-excuse me for just a minute, fellas.

Oh, sure, Sammy.  By all means.  Was this just Square attempting to be historically accurate?  Super Minstrel Show Bros.?  Are they, like, complicit in this racism?  The game's from 1989.  I would imagine that by 1989, even the notoriously xenophobic Japanese would have known that this is just not right.

Hello, Gene?  Sammy here.  What in the hell did you just sign me up for?

In fact, it seems almost gleefully racist.  Hell, Archie Bunker had it figured out way before then.  I think that it is, ultimately, just one of those things that Square wishes that it had a do-over for.  Good idea, miserable execution.  Heaven help them if Square-Enix decides to make a "To Kill A Mockingbird" RPG.

Now, Dave, you're a businessman.  What kind of damage can this sort of imagery faux pas do to your business?

That's a good question, Aaron.  One thing you always gotta be aware of is your target audience.  Who are you selling to?

Good point!  I don't think that they were intending to market the game to, say, the Klan.

I wouldn't know anything about that, Aaron.  I deal mostly in furniture.

Well, right.  I suppose so.

And if you're looking for a good deal on some quality-priced furniture, come on down to Dave Hester Auctions.  We're at 3869 S Main St. in Santa Ana, California.

Oh, yeah, hey, Dave...  Did we not tell your guys that this is supposed to be a comedic celebrity talk show, like, say, Hollywood Squares or QI?

I don't really watch much TV.

Well, it's supposed to be sort of a comedic show, you know?

No.

Like, do you know any jokes at all?

No.

 No..?  None at all?  Nothing?

O.k.  Why'd the chicken cross the road?

Oh hey!  That's more like it!  O.k.  I'll bite.  Why did the chicken cross the road?

To get to Dave Hester Auctions at at 3869 S Main St. in Santa Ana, California.  Or call us at (714) 434-0722.  The website is-

*cricket noises*

O.k.!  O.k.  We get it.  Geez, why don't you buy some time?

And speaking of buying time, when do I get my appearance fee?

Relax!  Relax...  You'll get the fee in the green room after the show.  Now, before we end your segment, can we hear one of those famous "Yuuup!"'s of yours?

As was discussed with your producer prior to this event, "Yuuup" is a trademarked phrase and any use of it during this "celebrity panel" would be outside the scope of the current agreement.  Therefore, no.

Well, it was worth a shot.

Sorry about that, fellas.  I'm back now.  Hope you didn't miss me much.

 Oh, hey Sammy.  Good to see you back.  Is everything alright?

Oh yeah.  We're cool, we're cool.  I just talked to my agent and he said either I do this gig or I kiss Carroll O'Connor again.

Yeesh!  Well, we're pretty much done here with Square, so now we're on to the next topic.


THE CHARGE OF THE LIGHT BRIGADE

Chaaaaaaaaarge!

One of the more famous blunders in military history, known as the charge of the Light Brigade after the poem by Tennyson, happened on October 25, 1854 during the Battle of Balaclava.  The main-

Coooooool!  That was a long time ago!  I didn't even know they had credit cards back then!

Uhh...  No, it wasn't a credit card charge, it was a cavalry charge.  It was during a battle.  The Battle of Balaclava.

*respectful silence*

Uhh...  No...  That's not quite right, either.  The Americans weren't involved in this conflict.  The Russians were invading a weakened Ottoman Empire.  The Ottoman Empire was deeply indebted to several major European powers, in much the way that Greece is in modern day Europe, and Great Britain and France were two of the major lenders, so they intervened on the Ottoman Empire's behalf to protect their investment from the invading Russians.  Make sense?

Ooo hoo hoo hoo...  Those filthy Russians!  Communism!  Pfeh!  I'm just an honest man trying to make an honest buck!

And that's why your game needs not one, but two get-out-of-jail-free cards?

 My good man, you know as well as I do that any house you put on Baltic Ave. will have a meth lab in the basement before you pass Go.

Fair enough.  Anyway, the battle was primarily between the British, the Ottoman, and the Russians and took place along a long, flat, straight valley.  The Ottoman had artillery guns overlooking the battlefield on top the valley walls, but the Russians were capturing them for themselves.  At one end of the valley was the British camp and main body of their light cavalry.  At the other end was the Russian troops and a large artillery battery.  The British were observing the Ottoman guns being captured by the Russians and the British Commander, Lord Raglan, issued a command to the Cavalry Commander, Lord Lucan, to take the artillery guns back, but did so in quite vague terms.  The message was delivered to the front by Light Cavalry Captain Nolan.  When the message-

What's a "cavalry"?

Well, you're cavalry.

*shocked silence*

Uh...  Well, all that "cavalry" means is a unit of horses, or ponies, put to a military purpose.  They ponies that go out and fight bad guys.

*respectful silence*

Er...  Close enough, I guess.  Anyway, so Captain Nolan delivers the message to Lord Lucan and when Lucan reads it, he asks Nolan which guns they wanted taken.  Captain Nolan, with a broad gesture of his arm said, "Those ones!"  This wasn't very helpful, so from Lucan's vantage point, it appeared he wanted the guns at the end of the valley taken rather than the ones overlooking the valley, which was the real and far less suicidal objective.  Lucan essentially said, "Meh.  Whatever." and issued the command to the Light Cavalry Commander Lord Cardigan to begin the charge to take the guns at the end of the valley.

Now, why the "Meh.  Whatever."?  Well, Lucan and Cardigan hated each others guts.  Passionately.  And neither of them had commanded a battle before the Crimean War, as Britain was fairly peaceful on land for a generation prior to this war, so a lot of these guys were your typical toy soldiers.  In fact, Lord Cardigan had breakfast in his yacht prior to the engagement.  So, if Lucan was dooming Cardigan to failure, whatever.  And if Cardigan, upon receiving the orders, was about to charge headlong into disaster, whatever.  It wasn't his idea.
So Cardigan sets off down the valley and once the Russians see this, they lick their lips and start firing the artillery both from the end of the valley and the top down at the cavalry.  When Captain Nolan sees them going the wrong direction, I'm pretty sure that he laid en egg before flying across the battlefield to say "Hey, stupid!  You're going the wrong way!"  Only, he never got to say "Hey stupid! You're going the wrong way!" because he charged headfirst into an artillery shell and was killed instantly before he could correct the mistake.

Yes, the ending was rather poorly telegraphed.

Indeed.  So on that day the 4th and 13th Light Dragoons, the 17th Lancers, and the 8th and 11th Hussars charged bravely into the artillery fire.  670 ponies went in, only half came back.

Noooooooooooo!

Unfortunately, yes.  Normally, poems, movies, and so on are made for great victories, not defeats, but this was a rather special exception due to the nature and scope of the failure.  The fortunate part of it all is that these benchwarmers were fighting a rather trivial romp oversees and there wasn't much else going on.  Had this have been fifty years ago against Napoléon, we would be speaking this evenings instead of la Charge de la Brigade Légère.

You know, some things are... too horrific to be recorded on film.

I couldn't have said it better myself.  And sorry again, Derpy.  Now, the good news is that they've pretty much stopped using ponies in battle about a century ago and nowadays they're all living a pretty much happy, carefree existence, so all's well that ends well!

Alright!  I gotta go write a little to Princess Celestia about this right away!  Woo hoo!

Yeah, you go do that.  Now, I don't wanna beat a dead horse here...

Yeah, you better not quit your day job, either.

Mm.  Shut down by Sammy Davis Jr. from beyond the grave.  Anyway, yeah...  On to the next subject.


LEIBNIZ'S WATER PUMP

And I thought I needed a haircut!

Alright.  Now, we're all intimately acquainted with Leibniz so I don't need to go into any details about who he is, right?

Oh yeah yeah!  That's the little green dresser with the vanity mirror at Jysk, right?

...  Uh, no.  He was in fact Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz...

Oh, it's on now!  We got the whole bedroom involved!

Uh, the German polymath, actually, not the dresser.  He invented, oh let's see, calculus, mechanical calculators, Monads...

Psst!  Hey, Dave!

Yeah, what is it, pony... thing...?

What's a "polymath"?

That's when a guy has a whole bunch of wives.

Dear Princess Celestia, I'm learning so much today..!

...but the invention that we're most concerned with here is his water pump.  At the time he was employed nominally as the court librarian for the Duke of Hanover.  I say nominally because he had more or less free reign from the Duke to pursue whatever he wanted to, and similarly a quite sizable budget to do so, as well, within reason.

Yeah, I can relate.  It's not easy being fabulously wealthy.

Ha!  With your two bit operation?  Ha!  Call me back when you own half of Atlantic City.

Yeah, that's pretty easy when the Boardwalk costs $400.00.  $400.00 of fake money, too.  I'm no evaluation expert, but...

Hey, look, fellas.  If anyone of us owns Atlantic City, it's this guy here.

At any rate, once in a while the Duke would intervene in Leibniz's work to look into some practical matters in an attempt to use his genius for the good of the Duchy, rather than just his own personal fame.  One such matter arose when one of the engineers at the mines in the Harz mountains came by and said that though the mines were quite profitable, they were also flooding with water and they came to seek help in solving the problem so that they were serviceable.   Now at the time, Leibniz had been working on hydraulic presses, windmills, lamps, submarines, clocks, and many other mechanical designs, so when the problem reached the Duke, he knew just the man to help.  Between 1680 and 1685, Leibniz worked with the mine's engineers to solve the problem, and after much planning and a sizable amount of expense in construction, Leibniz had devised a windmill powered water pump that could be used to drained the well.  The engineers of the mines thought the idea fanciful and over elaborate, but went along with it because, gosh darn it, he was a genius after all.
And so the time came to put them into use, and... nothing.  It's not that the machine didn't work.  It wasn't broken at all.  Leibniz, for all of his genius and work with windmills and pumps had neglected to consider that the Harz mountains were not that high up and were quite sheltered, and therefore... there was no wind,

I suspect that some ideas are rather doomed from the start.

That's wild, man.  That's crazy.

Yeah, the engineers thought so, too.  They had their I-told-you-so's in spades after that, by cracky.  In the end, as was his somewhat capricious nature, Leibniz never did fully resolve the problem, but set the half-baked invention aside for the next thing that captivated his imagination that moment.  That's just kinda the guy he was.  A million things going on at once all the time.

Yeah...  I feel for him, man.  I really do.

Yeah?

Yeah...

Hm.  How come?

Well...  It just ain't easy being that talented.

Hmm...

You're gonna end up breaking some hearts.

Right.

Because, you know, you're just that good.  You can't help it.

Uh huh.

It's inevitable.  A curse.

O.k., Sammy.  Are you done now?

Yeah...  Just had to get that off my chest.  Feels better now.

I'm glad.  I'm happy for you.  That's awesome.  Moving on.


THE TREATY OF TORDESILLAS

Hey, Pennybags.

Myeeeeees?

You're a wealthy land baron.  You should enjoy this one.

Ready when you are, my good man, ready when you are.

Smashing, old bean!

I concur, old boy!

Undoubtedly, old trench!

Without question, gentle sir!

Indubitably, noble sire!

I like Tordesillas and salsa!

Uhh...  Well, it's not a food, it's a place.  Tordesillas is a city in Spain and it was there on June 7, 1494, just two years after Columbus had crossed the Atlantic, that they signed a treaty that was to be one of the most influential land deals in history, not to mention one of the biggest swindles ever, too.

Swindle, eh?  You got my attention.

Yeah!  See, Columbus had just recently come back from the New World and reported back to everyone that, yes, there was a New World out there ripe for the taking.  Upon hearing this, and with only the sparsest of information to go on, the battle was on between the two great naval powers of the day, Spain and Portugal.  To settle the dispute, the kings and queens of the two countries met at the General Archive of the Indies in Tordesillas to hammer out an agreement.  Authored by Pope Alexandre VI (and it is worth nothing that he was a Spaniard), they set up the boundaries that there be a line drawn along a meridian 370 leagues west of the Cape Verde Islands.  On a map, it looks a little something like this:

Kinda... looks... like... an ass... kinda...

Well, as you can well imagine by taking a look at this, the Portuguese got ripped off by the deal.  Because there was so little actually explored of the New World yet, both sides thought this was fair.  Essentially, this is like saying "Portugal, you get everything up to Oriental Ave., and Spain gets everything after that."

Good heavens!

Good heavens is right, especially if it was no less than the Pope that wrote the deal.  At any rate, this deal cemented Spain's superiority over Portugal once and for all, as well making Spain one of the richest nations during the Renaissance.

I do rather enjoy a good unwitting victim from time to time.

Mmhmm.  And this is why Brazil speaks Portuguese and it's Spanish just about everywhere else in South America.  In fact, the impact of this deal was absolutely monumental and is still felt today.  Like, say, it's Puerto Rico and not Porto Rico.

Astonishing!

Yeah right.  Anyway, now to our last and final topic of the evening.


FORD PINTO

Awwwww yeeeeaaaah...

You want suspense?

Certainly.

Imagine this: you're driving down the road, minding your own business.  You're stopped at a red light, looking around and enjoying your afternoon.

So far, so good.

When BLAM!  You get rear ended, your gas tank combusts and explodes, and you, sir, are a pot roast cooking in the front seat.

How dreadful...

Our thoughts exactly.  The Ford Pinto had precisely this problem.  It gets rear-ended and it catches fire and blows.  This is actually fairly well-known, however, but what's a little less known is the cost-benefit analysis.  If you take a look, you'll see that Ford knew about this problem, but proceeded nonetheless.  The analysis came to the conclusion that the continued vehicle sales would be more profitable than the losses incurred from vehicular damage, injury, and death.  And this was all laid out right before the public's eyes.

Hey!  That's not nice!

No, it isn't.  Not really.  When Ford was faced with the option of installing a plastic shield between the gas tank and the differential to prevent the problem from occurring, it balked at it citing costs.  There was an accident in 1972 that left one child dead and another severely burned which prompted a court case that awarded damages to the victims in the millions (millions in the 70's, mind you).  It was a landmark bit of consumer affairs and served to shed some light on his these mega-corporations felt about cost-benefit, and that "cost" is not just the plastic shield, but human cost.  Thankfully these days things are better in that regard, but whenever a dollar sign is placed on a human life, there's the potential of compromise.

That's all too true, all too true.  You know, I was in a bad wreck in 1954.

Oh yeah, that's right.

Yeah, lost my eye, and never got it back.  How can you put a price on that?

Everything has a price, though.  Come on.  Everything is worth what the purchaser will pay for it.

Quite right, quite right!

The question, though, is dead simple.  Which is greater: humanity's price on the vehicle, or the vehicle's price on humanity?

Exactly.  ...  But man is this morbid!

Psst!  Hey!  Dave!

Yeah, pony thing?

What does "morbid" mean?

It's what I do at grungy old storage lockers every day, all day.

And on that note, that's all the time that we have this week, so I'd like to send out a big thank you both to my panel and to you very much for tuning in to this extended episode and have a good evening.