Giant Freakin Robot

Haven’t you always wanted to live out Michael Bay’s Armageddon? Well, now is your chance, sort of. NASA and the White House want your help in identifying asteroids that could potentially crash into Earth with devastating effect. This is part of the administration’s 21st Century Grand Challenges, “ambitious but achievable” goals involving science and technology, and designed to engage the public. Sometimes there are prizes.

Lori Garver, NASA’s Deputy Administrator, said, “This is really a call to action to find all asteroid threats to human populations and know what to do about them.” She also takes the time to note that humans are “smarter than the dinosaurs.” It’s nice to be reminded of that sometimes, but the point would seem to be that we can hopefully avoid being wiped out by a big flying rock slamming into our planet. I certainly hope so.

The primary goal of this Grand Challenge is to aid with the location of an appropriate space rock to use in the Asteroid Redirect Mission, or ARM (formerly titled Asteroid Retrieval Mission). This is a plan to move an asteroid into a lunar orbit so astronauts can visit the site and train for the real thing. That sounds much more exciting than Ben Affleck and Bruce Willis bounding around in a swimming pool.

How cool would it be to show up next Halloween dressed as the T-1000 from Terminator 2? And we’re not just talking about slapping on some mirrored aviators, a police uniform, and calling it a day. Oh hell no, we mean full on, gaping-liquid-metal shotgun-blast wounds, and that long, sword-like arm that stabs the guy through the milk carton. What if you could own a real life costume from the movie. Sure, you don’t look anything like Robert Patrick, but that would be pretty sweet.

And now you can do exactly this. The T-1000 costume is just one of tons of crazy cool pieces of sci-fi and movie memorabilia up for auction in the upcoming Screen Used Online Auction. You can also adorn your home with an actual facehugger from Alien. Or how about taking a spin on your very own hoverboard? The Pit Bull Hoverboard from Back to the Future II is also up to bid on. Other items include a Mogwai from Gremlins 2, the medical tri-corder from Star Trek: Insurrection, and more. There are blasters and a couple of lightsabers from Star Wars, a coat from The Matrix, and costumes from Chronicles of Riddick. All in all, there are more than 460 items up for auction.

We here at Giant Freakin’ Robot aren’t immune to the calls of quackery, and we sometimes get stretched outside our regular comfort zone, reporting on such things as music on ice and debunking moon-crazed lunacy. And now we’re sharing the “news” that living entirely off of sunlight alone isn’t possible for human beings. Maybe Superman, but no mere mortals.

Case in point, a month and a half after Eastside, Washington’s Naveena Shine gained global notoriety by attempting to prove whether or not “breatharianism” — the New Age-y claim that sunshine can serve as a food substitute — was steeped in realism. After spending 45 days on a diet consisting solely of water and tea — with the Emergen-C vitamin supplement added in the most recent days — Shine is abandoning the experiment, partly due to a lack of funds and partly due to having received a decent percentage of the Internet’s most focused hatred.

“I was just asking a question, but there was just so much negative response that that means the question can’t even be asked,” Shine said. The 65-year-old dropped from 159 pounds to her current weight of 126 pounds, but was still spending her days dancing and cleaning the trailer she rented to conduct her experiment. She filled the trailer with cameras to record her actions 24/7 to prove she wasn’t cheating on her diet, and this was part of why she ran out of money. She hoped for charitable donations but raised only $425 through her website. People spend money on a lot of crazy shit, but I guess they drew the line here.

There’s an ancient Zen koan you may have heard, it goes like this:

One day a Student asked his Master, “Master, how do you interest the managing editor of Giant Freakin’ Robot in an unnecessary remake of Logan’s Run?”

The Master thought for a moment. Then he threw scalding hot tea into the Student’s face and screamed, “The Internet hasn’t even been invented yet, you idiot!”

It’s possible I may have made that all up. Either way, the answer the Master should have given is “Hire the guy who created BioShock to write the script.” Clearly Warner Bros. knows that truth, because they have indeed signed Ken Levine, the writer of the video game BioShock, to write a new script for the long-in-the-works remake of 1976’s Logan’s Run.

A Logan’s Run resurrection has been in the works for ages, with X-Men: Days of Future Past’s Bryan Singer keen to helm a reboot that never quite came together. He finally left the project in 2006, after years of trying to get it going. More recently the project had attracted director Nicolas Winding Refn and actor Ryan Gosling, but Gosling backed out last fall. Now it’s back to square one, but as far as foundations go, hiring Levine is pretty damn solid.