ArtieShaw
Easy. It’s a dried and shellacked squid that has been posed in an artful, somehow bipedal and menacing position. I call it the creeping horror and keep it in an old wooden box.
Not really my taste, but it was a gift.
I didn’t really expect anyone to know that, which was sort of the joke. He was very famous in his time, but by now it’s a bit of a deep cut.
Artie Shaw was a clarinetist who ran a jazz band. In addition to that, he was also quite the weirdo. Womanizer, liked math a lot (like more than is natural), was an expert marksman who was nationally ranked in that sort of thing, and really into fly fishing. Also, currently, very dead. And that’s good because otherwise he’d be 114.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artie_Shaw
here’s a sample of his work https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k_v3GY3ZqdM
Shock: I’m not really Artie Shaw.
The actor cat who played Lucky was pretty chill, but ALF was pretty insistent upon telling the family that he wanted to indulge in some tasty cat recipes. It didn’t feel violent or real. Just silly. I haven’t seen the show since 1989, but that screenshot seems dead on balls accurate.
I collect ancient coins and this explanation doesn’t fly for me. There’s a certain amount of “artisanal-ness” in the production of ancient coins - which were all handmade. Like, I’m looking at a tray of coins right now and there’s no way a simple go/no-go tool would be helpful. Also, for this purpose a simple handheld counterweight balance would be more accurate and portable. The existence of these simple balances, along with reference weights for various denominations, is well documented.
Moreover - if you’re an ancient merchant, what is more important? The weight of the silver or the ability for it to pass for a denarius issued by Rome? Particularly for international trade, it seems to have been the former. Bankers’ cuts and countermarks are commonly seen on coins, and seem to have been an early form of foreign exchange. (eg - I’m travelling from Athens to Ephesus with a stock of my local currency. If I pass it to a local banker in Ephesus, they can evaluate it, determine the local exchange in terms of silver, and give it a locally recognized countermark to assure their own merchants that they’re getting the equivalent local value).
That being now off my chest, I’ve got no great answers for the dodecahedrons. I strongly suspect that it was a nifty thing that metal workers made as a master’s thesis.
Casefile. It’s not that content is boring or uninteresting. It just knocks me out.
Thundercats! Not great, for sure, but I remember that the same weaknesses were still there in the 80s
Snarf was always insufferable. My idiot brother and I hated Snarf. Why was he not humanoid like the other Thundercats? Why was he a ripoff of Lost-In-Space’s Doctor Smith? Why did he have weird crocodilian qualities? “snarf snarf”
Liono was just one dimensionally dumb. Kit and Kat were clearly there for the littler kids to relate to.
Tigra and Panthro were solid dudes. Cheetara and Pumyra were the closest thing to making me question my sexuality at a tender age. Mumm-ra was great - he had a nice pyramid and flying wrappers. Mumm-ra’s henchmen have probably aged the worst.