Honestly, I have no idea if former NBA superstar Shaquille O’Neal was joking or not when he told the world the Earth is flat.
O’Neal was gabbing on his podcast, “The Big Podcast with Shaq,” when the talk turned to current NBA star Kyrie Irving’s pronouncement last month that the globe is…, well, isn’t. It’s a plane.
Listen Up, Pupils
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Irving’s geography lesson made a medium-sized splash when he said it and Shaq’s iteration of same is making an even bigger one. I’m trying to figure out which is stupider:
- The fact that two grown, college-educated men who are idolized by scads of kids around this holy land are talking — and thinking — like ham actors playing illiterate rejects from some cut-rate renaissance fair, or
- The fact that we give a good goddamn what they have to say about anything other than putting a large orange ball through a 10-foot high rim
O’Neal says it’s all a big joke now. When he uttered his flat-earth-ness, though, he sounded serious. I guess. Who knows?
Really, who knows anything these days?
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Say It Ain’t So
BTW: The comments underneath Shaq’s podcast are priceless. In fact, a guy with the screen name dwayne insisted — as Shaq did — that book-learning and science are examples of brainwashing. (“There’s three ways to manipulate the mind: What you read, what you see, and what you hear,” O’Neal said.) Another commenter argued with dwayne over Newton’s inverse-square formula in his universal law of gravitation, during which spat dwayne argued that E=MC2 is actually the law governing the gravitational force.
“Stop being taught,” dwayne insisted, “and do your own research! Teaching is synonymous with brainwashing! You’ve been lied to!”
The truth is, the flat-Earth idea has been gaining traction around (oops!) the world the last few years.
So, now, we’ve got scientists raising a hullaballoo and people on all sides throwing the “fake news” canard around. And, dang mang, there are bound to be racial slurs thrown in sooner rather than later. This whole thing has become a controversy — even though it’s no such thing.
Let me ask you something: Do you even like our country any more?
Me? I barely tolerate it at this point.
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Jess Fest
My guests on Big Talk this afternoon: Middle Coast Film Festival honchos Jess Levandoski and Jess Reed. Jess L. is one of the co-founders of the now-four-year-old celluloid orgy and Jess R. is the gala’s biz manager.
Jess Reed (L) & Jess Levandoski
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Next week — hot-as-a-pistol local novelist Annette Oppenlander, whose latest, Surviving the Fatherland, is a coming-of-age love story set against World War II Germany and its aftermath.
Big Talk is a regular Thursday feature of the WFHB Daily Local News. Tune in to 91.3 for the news at 5pm and here for the podcast anytime. Big Talk’ll blast on at about 5:15pm.
Talk soon.
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