Don’t be the last on your block to see “Don’t Look Up” on Netflix. It’s a HILARIOUS comedic satire of modern America, against the backdrop of an impending extinction level event, a looming cometary strike upon the Earth. Sort of like “Deep Impact” meets “Idiocracy.” Unfortunately it’s not for kids, it has a fair dose of the usual Hollywood raunch, typical of this straight-to-Netflix stuff.
I was especially amused by the “Inside the Beltway” snobbery directed against Michigan State University (see link). As an alum of a midwestern state school myself, been there, done that. This is a great line from the article:
“The name brand universities take up a big mental space in the public’s mind, but they occupy a fairly small space in terms of the actual professional community.”
I’m proud of and grateful for my education from Cleveland State where we had small class sizes and the full attention of our profs. This in contrast to the 300 students packed into an auditorium-style lecture hall with a “big name” prof from one of the “name brand” school. I used to hear that Carl Sagan had teaching assistants leading most of his classes while he went on Johnny Carson and bopped his female grad students.
However, I have observed, from my era and my sons’, that the kids from Case Western Reserve got all the sweet NASA internship gigs and went on to have the fancy careers, in part because of the connections they made in college and their early work years. So once again, as usual, it’s not what you know, it’s who you can afford to know.