I Would Probably Go To Jurassic Park

First of all, it was just a movie. Jurassic Park, I mean. None of that stuff really happened. That’s the important thing to remember in all of this. Movies take liberties with things all the time. Like, most submarine missions in real life go off without a hitch. But if you see people get in a submarine in a movie, buddy, some wild stuff is about to go down. As it should. A movie about a bunch of people just hanging out and playing cards on a submarine with no flashing red lights or ocean water rushing in through cracks in the walls would be pretty boring, just like a movie about a trip to an operational and perfectly secured dinosaur theme park would be pretty boring. But I guess that’s Hollywood for you. 

If someone did make a real-life dinosaur theme park with a bunch of lab-made dinosaurs created from fossils and DNA and stuff, I bet it would be fine. There would be all kinds of safety regulations in place. A lot of them would be in place because of the movies, actually, and all the things that happened in them. You could even argue that the existence of the Jurassic Park movies makes the hypothetical existence of a real Jurassic Park even safer. We'd know lots of the potential problems already and could take steps to prevent them. It would be fine. The real-life Jurassic Park would be fine.

I would probably go to it, too, especially after reading this story, which includes one of the better quotes from a scientist you’ll ever see. 

“This study shows that even the iconic T. rex was quite birdlike in the way that it walked,” said Steve Brusatte, a paleontologist at the University of Edinburgh who was not involved in the study. “It would have been something like an eight-ton chicken clucking about in the barnyard.”

I mean, come on. Don’t act like you wouldn’t pay $100 for a one-day pass to go see a giant dinosaur prance around like a chicken. Don’t act like you wouldn’t pay $35 to park in lots two or three miles from the entrance that are named after various dinosaurs. Don’t act like you wouldn’t pay $45 for a couple slices of crappy pizza and a Diet Coke as big as your leg at a concession stand located outside the stegosaurus enclosure. You would love it. And it would be fine. Probably. It would probably be fine. 

Sure, maybe once in a while, a dinosaur would get loose. Mistakes happen. There are accidents at regular amusement parks every year and you still go to those, right? You still get on roller coasters and tilt-a-whirls. Heck, you still get on the rickety rides they put up at carnivals, even though you saw them come into town on a truck that looks like it last passed an inspection in the mid-2010s. You would go to Jurassic Park, too. Especially if you have kids. Kids love dinosaurs. Kids love the zoo and those dumps just have boring regular animals in them. If there really were a theme park filled with man-made dinosaurs and you were the parent of a four-year-old boy, I hate to break it to you, but you would be going to that dinosaur theme park, friend.

And even if a dinosaur did get loose, even if a couple of raptors got out and started stalking the grounds with hunger in their eyes and the taste of human flesh on their tongues, you’d probably be fine then, too. There would be lots of people there. A couple loose raptors couldn't eat everyone before the staff got them corralled. Say there were 1000 people in the park that day and the loose raptors got to 10 of them. Heck, let's go up to 20. You’d still have a 98 percent chance of surviving. Those are great odds. Okay, a few suckers wouldn’t make it out, maybe 10 or 20, and that is for sure a tragedy (RIP), but look, you and I are different. We’re smart. We'd know how to navigate the dinosaur theme park as hell breaks loose around us. We'd be fine.

And even if we got cornered by a loose raptor who started looking at us the way we look at the TV during a Popeyes commercial, consider this: I use a power wheelchair and the sound it makes as it hums around sometimes scares nearby animals, kind of like how a vacuum cleaner scares your dog. I bet the chair would scare a dinosaur, too, at least enough to deter it in the moment and send it off after someone else. You could hide behind me. Actually, no. In front of me. The sound would still scare it. But you should still be in front of me. You know, just in case something goes wrong. Not that it would. But it would be good to have me and my chair around to try to scare one of the other loose dinosaurs. Assuming others got out. Which, again, just looking at the odds, could happen someday. But almost definitely not the day we're there.

It would be fine. 

A real-life Jurassic Park. 

It would probably be fine. 

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STUFF I CLICKED ON

— good blog by Alan Siegel at The Ringer about how Adam Friedland kind of became Dick Cavett

— Alysa Liu is the coolest 

— the Philly Inquirer got the inside story of how Dan McQuade ended up in an episode of The Simpsons shortly after his death

— please listen to the maniacs at Shutdown Fullcast discuss how nutso For All Mankind is and then watch the nutso trailer for the upcoming season, which features a war on Mars

— I love Nazgul the Wolfdog very much

— finally, the backstory on the couple that got married during Bad Bunny’s halftime show

— dork war on IMDb 

— “Hockey, beers and the boys: On tour with 'Shoresy' star Jared Keeso”

— I am angrier than you can possibly imagine that Taryn Hatcher won’t be doing Phillies game this year

— new shark alert

— new Joe Pera alert

— it’s kind of weird that Tom Hanks hasn’t already played Lincoln, to be honest

— Mr. Clean has been fired

— “German tourists trying to create floating sauna rescued from Swedish ice floe”

— “Undercover Thai police go dancing in lion costume to catch serial burglar”

— let me direct Face/Off 2

— let me fire the Phillie Phanatic’s hot dog cannon, too

Okay, that's it for this week. Please share and subscribe and come with me to Jurassic Park.