Wow! I’d been looking for this old “3-2-1 Contact” segment forever:

[via Scrubbles]

From a few months ago: Tired Sci-Fi Tropes, Part 1 and Part 2.

My favorites:

(1) Humanoid aliens. This is the one I always make snarky comments about whenever Matt’s watching reruns of Star Trek: Voyager.

I don’t have the space here to go into the reasons why an alien life form, even an intelligent one, is unlikely to be an upright bipedal, bilaterally symmetrical, four-limbed, endoskeletal, pentadactyl, binocular and binaural chordate.

(2) The Planet-as-Location.

Sci-fi writers love to treat “planet” as if it’s a single location. “Let’s land on the planet, where we’ll meet the one settlement of the one culture, and have the one adventure the planet can afford us.” Planets are entire WORLDS. Even with advanced technology, it will take a space exploration crew YEARS to explore and survey a single planet. Even an uninhabited one.

Thomas Jefferson complains about Queen Elizabeth’s visit to Virginia.

Yet much of the Publick Attention has been turned of late to issues of a Lotterie merely to see Her Majesty for a few moments or of a “Webcaste” for those who do not win such a Lotterie. Moreover, Publick Discourse itself has been spent on the issue of whether it is required of gentle ladies, or merely proper of them, to wear hats within the presence of Her Majesty…