After talking to Quaid earlier today, we couldn't help watching him as the 1960s Queens everyman in Frequency, where his grown-up son starts babbling at him over the radio about baseball scores and who's going to die when. The son (played by Jim "Outlander" Caviezel) manages to save Quaid from dying in a warehouse fire, but through a kind of twisty movie logic, this leads to Quaid's wife being killed by a serial killer the following week. It never fails: You mess with the timelines, you get serial killers. It's all worth it for the above clip, where Caviezel has to explain the situation to Quaid. Who just takes it on board, because he's a mensch.

This used to be the point of the afternoon where I'd talk about the previous night's episode of Star Wars: The Clone Wars, or occasionally Batman: The Brave And The Bold. But both of those shows are off the air for awhile now - Clone Wars returns in the fall, and Brave and Bold in May - which led me to wonder what I should be doing with the time I normally spent watching and writing about them. And then I realized that you should tell me.

In Netflix's "Watch Instantly" area's sci-fi category, the following movies are listed as "new arrivals":
Frequency
Dragon Wars
Godzilla Vs. Destroyer/Space Godzilla
Battlefield Earth
Antibody
I've seen none of these movies before - No, not even Battlefield Earth - but you get to change that. Below, you can vote for the movie you want me to watch this week, and write about this time next week. Majority rules, unless someone makes a particularly compelling case for one of the movies in the comments (Or no-one votes, in which case you're getting Antibody. Dude, it's got Lance Henriksen being shrunk down and injected into a terrorist to save the world). All I ask is that you please be gentle. It's my first time, after all.

The problem with the Thunderscreech was that the supersonic propeller blades would cause rapid-fire shockwaves, even when the plane was sitting on the ground. Test pilots refused to take it up, and officials would order it to be towed far from the test center before firing up the engines, and only one of the two prototypes ever flew, logging only 10 hours. Why? Because those shockwaves would case nausea, spasms, seizures, and loosening of the bowels. What a ride. You can hear the otherworldy banshee wail of one here.

So the word spread that the soundwaves generated by the engines were causing the pooping, and like a game of telephone, soon folks began believing there was a secret low frequency that could unlock the human sphincter. NASA performed tests of low frequencies because they were worried their astronauts might start crapping out upon launch. They mounted cockpit seats on vibration tables that were blasted with 160 decibels in the range of 0.5 hertz to 40 hertz, but no one sounded off into the brown. Even more recently companies have built extremely massive subwoofers that have failed to make anyone prairie dog it, despite the massive amounts of low frequencies being pumped out.

Although this hasn't stopped it from seeping into poopular culture, probably most famously in Transmetropolitan, where Spider Jerusalem carries a Bowel Disruptor that operates on the brown note principle. It even has settings from "diarrhea" to "prolapse." Ouch. Although it was probably ripped off from Steve Meretzky's (of Infocom fame)The Superhero League of Hoboken computer game from 1994, Spider put it to a lot better use. In fact, Ben Folds used the brown note with Improv Everywhere in a 1996 concert hoax involving diapers and chocolate syrup. Now that's entertainment. Mythbusters even tackled the legend on an episode, and they recorded no poop at all.

So, until science comes up with a new method for causing uncontrollable evacuation, bowel disruptors will sadly remain science fiction and not fact. Which is a real pity, because we sure could have used one during the upcoming presidential elections. We'll have to just stick to vomit guns.