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Ask!: Lampoon's a wrap

By Mike Rudeen, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)

Published May 11, 2008 at 3 p.m.

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Skorpion asked whether National Lampoon still publishes a magazine or just produces bad movies.

The last issue of the famously irreverent magazine was published in 1999, 29 years after its start. There's still a Web site, though, with a wide variety of written humor, features such as Stick Figure Death Theatre and short comedy videos, including The Exorcism of Britney Spears by Mike Huckabee.

A complete set of the magazines is available on DVD at amazon.com and other outlets.

As for the movies, some produced by National Lampoon and others by producers who just bought the licensed name, well, that's a matter of opinion.

Here's a new question:

On maps of Colorado, it appears as if the northern border of the state is narrower from east to west than the southern border is. Is this due to the curvature of the Earth, or is it really narrower, or both? If so, how much narrower? Put another way, is Colorado a trapezoid as opposed to a rectangle? - Athena, Denver

Know the answer? Post it on the Ask! blog, blogs.RockyMountainNews.com/denver/ask, or e-mail rudeenm@RockyMountainNews.com. While you're on the blog, check out the other questions on the Ask! home page, or post one of your own by clicking on the link to the left on the page.

Comments

  • May 12, 2008

    12:19 p.m.

    Suggest removal

    HolierThanThou writes:

    The northern boundary of Colorado is shorter than the southern boundary because our east and west boundaries follow longitudinal lines. Longitudinal lines run north-south. As longitudinal lines go north from the equator they converge at the north pole.

    The Earth is a globe. Not, as many creationists and conservatives are inclined to believe, a flat surface. Neither is it a cylinder. So, the distance between longitudinal lines running north-south is at a maximum at the equator and goes to zero at the poles.

    There's also a significant bump in the southern boundary of Colorado, so that it doesn't quite follow a single latitude. Note the latitudes are parallel and would be perfectly equidistant if the Earth was a perfect sphere. But the Earth bulges around the equator and a bit to the south, which makes it ever so slightly egg-shaped.

    Colorado isn't even a flat surface, not counting for the mountains. It's spherical with mountains and elevated terrain on that sphere. If one carpenter holds a plumb bob on the eastern boundary at 102 W longitude and another holds a plumb bob on the western boundary at 109 W longitude, their plumb bobs will be about 7 degrees off from each other. So, people standing up straight on the eastern and western boundaries of the state are leaning away from each other by about 8 and 3/4 inches for every 6-foot height. And they will disagree on the exact time of high noon, when the Sun is at its zenith, if their watches are synchronized by almost half an hour.

    I hope this simple explanation helps.