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Listen to Culture Gabfest No. 473 with Isaac Butler, Stephen Metcalf, and Dana Stevens with the audio player below.

It is astonishing and shameful that we’ve reached the point as a nation where the antics of a sketch comedy troupe have a visible influence on the head of the federal government, but there’s no point denying that’s where we’re at. So, in very important news that could change the course of the presidency, and indeed the entire world, Melissa McCarthy returned to Saturday Night Live this weekend to reprise the role of White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer.

McCarthy debuted the character a week ago, and according to Politico, Trump loathed it, particularly because Spicer was being played by a woman. The story—and that detail in particular—could just be members of Trump’s fractious staff trying to ratfuck each other, but Trump’s uncharacteristic silence about last week’s episode can’t have been a good sign.  Regardless, it seems unlikely Trump will be thrilled to see McCarthy not only return, but return in high heels—specifically, the Ivanka Trump Women’s Katie 2 Dress Pump, which he’s pushing to make up for the sales Ivanka has recently lost over the whole Edda Mussolini thing.

But besides a joke that seems specifically designed to piss off the President (and maybe get us all killed), McCarthy also offers a fun tour of the Trump administration’s hostility toward the press and (relatedly!) their flexible relationship with the truth, as with this justification for Spicer’s “Atlanta” gaffe:

Yeah, I said that wrong when I said it. And then you wrote it, which makes you wrong! Because when I say something wrong, you guys should know what it is I’m meaning. You’re wrong! And that’s why you’re here. Obviously, I meant Orlanta!

Also don’t miss Spicer’s list of terrorist attacks, which is just as much bullshit as the real one but sounds more like a terrible Hardy Boys-style series:

• The Bowling Green massacre—not the Kellyanne one, the real one!
• The Horror at Six Flags
• The Slaughter at Fraggle Rock
• The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down

The exquisite cameo from Kate McKinnon as white nationalist Keebler elf Jeff Sessions is the icing on the cake. Or it would be, if these people weren’t really running the country.

SONOS is basically the be-all, end-all of premium, multi-room home audio systems, and their excellent PLAY:1 speaker is $29 off today. That’s not a huge discount, but these speakers hardly ever go on sale outside of Black Friday, and even then, the discounts are pretty minimal. [SONOS PLAY:1, $171 with code EPIC3]

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As America gorged itself on the Super Bowl, another champion was being crowned Sunday in a far more globally competitive sport: team handball. Don’t remember team handball? It’s the fast, physical, seven-on-seven court sport in which players try to hurl a ball the size of a honeydew into a net the size of a chifforobe. American reporters tend to notice it only during the Olympics, when they wonder why the U.S. doesn’t have the best team in the world because, you know, LeBron would crush at team handball.

DataQuest is a recently launched online data science learning platform for python. The site consists of a gamified series of missions that increase in difficulty as your skills progress. Here are a few other features of the site.

• Sample Code
• Live, Interactive Browser-based Coding Environment
• Step by Step Instructions
• Instant Feedback
• Helpful Forums for Q&A

The site is still under development and the founder, Vik Paruchuri, is looking for help developing more content and missions for the site. If that is something of interest to you, get in touch with Vik via the DataQuest website.

It started as an offhand brag, but turned into a dare. I was telling my Gizmodo colleagues why I loved my Windows 8 tablet: it's fast, it's cheap, it's a fully fledged PC. Hell, I said, I could probably hook it up to a monitor and use it as my workhorse for a week.

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With the 72^nd annual Golden Globes a minute or two over their allotted three-hour run time, Meryl Streep, who is allowed to do whatever she wants, took an extra beat to tell the crowd, “How much are we going to miss Amy and Tina? Oh my god.” Streep was referring to Tina Fey and Amy Poehler’s promise that this, their third time hosting the Globes, will also be their last. Imagine how much longer next year’s Golden Globes will feel as the hours tick by and there’s no hope that Fey and Poheler will appear in new outfits?

As in year’s past, Fey and Poehler did a great opening monologue and then took it easy. This is the Globes after all, and one conjures visions of them tippling back champagne and rubbing shoulders with other soused famous people while letting various flares of energy—Wiig and Hader, Tomlin and Fonda, a win for Jane the Virgin, Frances McDormand shooting shade-rays out of her eyes—get us through the three-hour run time. If, by hour two, one misses Tina and Amy desperately, and longs for more than a sporadic sighting of them with Margaret Cho as a North Korean journalist, their “we do it on our terms, and our terms say you get a perfect monologue and then we relax” vibe is what makes them so good in the first place: They never push too hard.

Unlike their predecessor Ricky Gervais, Fey and Poehler always hit the right targets. And the right targets are not primarily the rich and famous people assembled in a display of orgiastic self-praise, but hypocrisy, sexism, and Bill Cosby. Fey and Poehler started by piercing the pieties surrounding The Interview: North Korea’s reaction to the film “Forc[ed] us all to pretend we want to see it.” Then they dropped in some sharp jokes about sexism: “Boyhood proves there are still great roles for women over 40, as long as you get hired when you are under 40”; “It took me three hours to prepare today for my role as human woman”; and, after listing Amal Alamuddin’s many accomplishments: “So tonight her husband is getting a lifetime achievement award.” Then they landed on Bill Cosby. (Jessica Chastain may have been deliciously scandalized, but Fey has been needling Cosby for years.)

Fey and Poehler set up their Cosby joke so that it briefly seemed like the two might have differing opinions about his actions; really, they only differed on how to do an impression of Bill Cosby drugging women. (“I put the pills in the people! The people did not want the pills in them” vs. “I got my pills in my bathrobe and I put them in the people.”) By the anodyne standards of awards show banter, the bit was provocative, but it was also a subject right in Fey and Poehler’s wheelhouse. They had to address it, really, and they did so in a way that was both scathing and funny.

But no matter how good Tina and Amy are, given their annual post-monologue disappearing act, the Golden Globes always eventually turn back into an award-giving event and not a coronation of Tina and Amy as national treasures. On the TV front, this year’s Globes spread the awards around—to everyone who was not a network. Amazon, Showtime, and FX each took home two awards (including the big ones: best comedy, best drama, and best mini-series), while HBO, the CW, PBS, Netflix, and Sundance each got one. ABC, CBS, Fox and NBC got zilch, yet another harbinger of their reduced cachet.

The Hollywood Foreign Press is a notoriously idiosyncratic award-giving body, with a penchant for recognizing the new. This often makes the show more lively and fun than the Emmys, which has a penchant for recognizing what they have recognized before. True to form, this year’s Globes were a bonanza for first-time nominees: Jane The Virgin’s Gina Rodriguez, Transparent, Fargo, and The Affair were the night’s big TV winners. The beguiling and lovely Jane the Virgin could use the attention and the great Transparent deserves all its acclaim. I’m less fond of Fargo, but in the last few months it has successfully established a narrative for itself as the more discerning TV viewer’s True Detective, an alternative to all that macho, Yellow King-related, Reddit-inspiring misdirection.

Fargo also beat out two other excellent HBO offerings, The Normal Heart and Olive Kiteridge, both of which seem like ideal award show fodder, but probably could not compete this year with the buzz around Fargo and True Detective. (The Globes, like Jeremy Renner, fixate on that which is sexy.) As for McDormand’s loss to Maggie Gyllenhaal, whose The Honorable Woman was even bleaker than Olive Kitteridge but did have more international themes, well, I’m sure the members of the HFPA are all now living in fear that they will run into McDormand and she will turn her Olive Kitteridge-stare upon them.

And the victories confirm The Affair is the kind of series designed to win awards: well-acted, well-crafted, and ostensibly serious, but actually self-serious and stuffy. (How to Get Away With Murder is the exact opposite, so it’s no wonder that The Affair’s Ruth Wilson beat out Viola Davis in the Best Actress in a Drama category.) I feel a little less annoyed by its win when I look at what it beat out, though: The Good Wife, Downton Abbey, Game of Thrones, and House of Cards. Two of those shows are also tony series that aren’t nearly as good as they think they are, and the two that are much better than it aren’t new. Besides, lamenting an award show’s poor choices is half the fun of watching an award show. Still, I would feel better about it if Tina and Amy were around to crack a joke.

Sound waves often interact with many objects before we hear them. Understanding and controlling those interactions is a major part of acoustic engineering. The animations above show shock waves—sound—from a trumpet interacting with different objects. The sound is made visible using the schlieren optical technique, allowing us to observe the reflection, absorption, and transmission of sound as it hits different surfaces. Fiberboard, for example, is highly reflective, redirecting the sound waves along a new path without a lot of damping. In contrast, the metal grid is only weakly reflective and a small portion of the incoming sound wave is transmitted through the grid. To see more examples, check out the full video, and, if you want to learn more about acoustics, check out Listen To This Noise.  (Image credits: C. Echeverria et al., source video)

We're not the only ones thinking about the end of 2014, and looking forward to 2015. The Business Examiner has some end-of-year thoughts from leaders in the business community around Pierce and Thurston counties.

The tone is a little cautious, but overall definitely optimistic, with talk of

Pocket squares seem straightforward: you stuff it into a pocket then head off to your fancy gathering, right? Turns out it's slightly more complicated, but thankfully The Art of Manliness shows off a variety of folding methods for a pocket square.

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With the last City Council meeting of 2014 in the rear view mirror, and news in both the private and public sectors winding down for the year as well, we've begun to look ahead to 2015, and what issues we might be writing about in the coming year.

As we look into our crystal ball, we see a list of

Doonesbury by Garry Trudeau for December 14, 2014

The Pacific Maritime Association, the owner collective of shipping terminals on the West Coast, is charging that International Longshore Workers Union members have been intentionally slowing down the loading and unloading of cargo ships in retaliation of stalled contract negotiations. The current contract expired July 1. More »

Many of us set aside a portion of our income, such as 15% or more , for retirement and call it a day. That might be great if you have 30 years left to save, but what if you're just catching up to saving for retirement now or you've started saving much earlier? Fidelity's age-based savings milestones offer one way to see if you're on track.

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The Babadook, the first feature film written and directed by the Australian actress Jennifer Kent, is an example of my favorite kind of monster movie: one in which at every moment the monster is both internally and externally real. An apt metaphor for the hero or heroine’s deepest-buried fears, yes, but also a legit-terrifying creature with both the ability to inflict real bodily harm and, if at all possible, Nosferatu-length claws seen in silhouette against a doorframe.

It’s a question always sparking hot debate in parenting circles: Do you let your babies and toddlers use screens? For years, the health and child development establishment has been advising parents to avoid exposing their toddlers and babies to screen media. But daily life increasingly includes video, smartphones, and touchscreen tablets. Questions have been flying: Is staying away really the best approach?

Today they arrived! The first printing of Creative Colloquy Volume One was delivered to Jackie Cassella’s house. More »

If your phone has wireless charging built-in, it never hurts to have an extra charging pad handy. [iClever Qi Enabled Wireless Charger, $20 with code 6KQZG38U]

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In February of 1960, the American magazine Look ran a cover story that asked, “Should a Girl Be First in Space?” It was a sensational headline representing an audacious idea at the time. And as we all know, the proposal fell short. In 1961, NASA sent Alan Shepard above the stratosphere, followed by dozens of other spacemen over the next two decades. Only in 1983 did Sally Ride become America’s first female astronaut to launch.

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Not everyone can do their own car repairs, but some routine maintenance is perfectly easy for anyone. Changing your oil is one of the easiest things you can do yourself—whether you want to save money or do it just to practice self-reliance. Here's how to do it.

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You spend a lot of time in very close contact with your mattress, and it's important to keep it clean. As you can't just throw it in the washing machine, you need to gets hands on, and Katie Berry has a few tips to help get your mattress looking like new again.

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darthcamaro writes "Oracle today officially released Java 8, nearly two years after Java 7, and after much delay. The new release includes a number of critical new features, including Lambda expressions and the new Nashorn JavaScript engine. Java 8, however, is still missing at least one critical piece that Java developers have been asking for, for years. 'It's a pity that some of the features like Jigsaw were dropped as modularity, runtime dependencies and interoperability are still a huge problem in Java,' James Donelan, vice president of engineering at MuleSoft said. 'In fact this is the one area where I still think Java has a long way to go.'"

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