I'm guessing Syria wouldn't be a receptive audience for a Mel Brooks' film, but that's still hilarious.

Love, secret, sex, and god...


/just sayin'...

Things I learned from watching Star Trek

The reason why we don't hear from extraterrestrial aliens is that their super weapons launch code was A, 1, B, 2, C, 3.

Stupid aliens.

It is a little known fact that most aliens are actually dumber than humans.

Consider, for example, the movie: Morons from Outer Space. Or the television show, Invader Zim. Further evidence can be gleaned from Star Trek (why do so many alien races need Captain Kirk to violate the Prime Directive on a weekly basis, not to mention their comely women folk), Star Wars (don't get me started on how dumb those aliens are) or ALF.

In fact, if aliens weren't dumber than humans, they would already be our Alien Overlords, but the world is clearly run by idiots, so if they are our Alien Overlords, they just make my case the stronger.

Surely a country run by the likes of Bill Clinton, the two Georges or Ronald Reagan would not be surprised by foreign governments using Micky Mouse security. During World War II, the British fed literal tons of fake information to the Nazis and other enemies because the US codes were so simple to crack they could pretend to be Americans at will. Until World War II, in fact, and the beginning of computer science, the American security establishment was still using Caesarian codes for much of their cryptography. Codes which are often taught to small children to keep them amused in between coloring pictures with crayons and connect the dot puzzles. (It's a shovel and bucket. It is ALWAYS a shovel and bucket.)

"I'm having trouble with the radar sir".

Speaking of dumber than human, some of my favourite cartoons turn on aliens being dumber than humans.

1. I love the Private Eye cartoon of the Daleks in front of a staircase. Caption: "Well, that certainly buggers our plans to conquor the universe."

2. There was a Yankee magazine cartoon of a wood-burning UFO.

3. Another great alien cartoon, from PUNCH, IIRC, shows aliens talking to humans. Caption: Actually we're a bit less advanced than you are. That thing we came in was supposed to be a can-opener.

4. PUNCH also ran a great cartoon of a steam-powered flying saucer being sighted by cavemen.

Absurd though they may seem, these cartoons make a lot of sense when compared to the evidence of extraterrestrial visits collected by Charles Hoy Fort in the early XXth century. Many of the late XIXth century sightings involve dirigibles (which supposedly hadn't been invented by the Germans yet), coal, slag and other evidence of coal-burning flying craft, and other evidence that the technology used by the alien visitors wasn't much more advanced than contemporary technology. If that's so, the aliens may come from the Inner Earth, as was supposed by many then and since, rather than from outer space. They are simply just a bit ahead of our technology, so they had steam flying machines before we had gasoline-powered airplanes, dirigibles in the 1890s, and saucers by the 1940s if not the early 1900s.

It's a funny old world, even without Syrians.