Stefan @24: I was one of those wargamers, kinda, only I'd given up wargaming about ten years before and then taken up role-playing games. The dropping of 10-kilotonne, 20-kT, 100-kT "tactical" nuclear weapons on a West Germany where the settlements were an average of 5-kT apart was almost as bad as the cognitive dissonance of playing a scenario where they weren't dropping like autumn leaves. When D&D made its way to my corner of the world, it was such a relief to go down into dungeons and murder innocent monsters for their treasure.
Gordon the Gopher, a hand-puppet that regularly appeared on morning TV a while ago (never watched morning TV, so I don't know much more than that). The floor cleaner is stumping me, though, unless it's one of those with the face printed on it.
And the more modern association is with Gordon Brown, btw, unless I've critically failed my Cultural Knowledge (native) roll.
Huh, chalk me up as another Brit who'd never heard of the Ford Prefect. I thought it was just the random glomming together of two words, in the manner of Writers Who Do Not Do The Research (I'll spare you the TVTropes link) naming foreign characters by mashing up two words found in the appropriate dictionary. It explains the gag about Arthur's first encounter with Ford, though.
Next time, Teresa (if there is a next time), I suggest rapping the gentleman on the breast bone with the handle of your cane while asking in a loud voice, "Young man, are you on drugs?" Give him just enough time to splutter, then ask, "Or is it alcohol? Never mind, you're awake now, so you can tell me where to find the framistams and doohickeys."
Giacomo @40:Chances are that he's going to be the first US president in an extremely long time NOT to start a new armed conflict.
Too late. He's already started in on the Moon people.
Re: Margaret Atwood, I read a review of her latest by Ursula K LeGuin in the Guardian on Saturday, in which LeGuin regrets that since The Year of the Flood isn't SF, she must review it as a 'realistic novel':
To my mind, The Handmaid's Tale, Oryx and Crake and now The Year of the Flood all exemplify one of the things science fiction does, which is to extrapolate imaginatively from current trends and events to a near-future that's half prediction, half satire. But Margaret Atwood doesn't want any of her books to be called science fiction. [..] Who can blame her? I feel obliged to respect her wish, although it forces me, too, into a false position. I could talk about her new book more freely, more truly, if I could talk about it as what it is, using the lively vocabulary of modern science-fiction criticism, giving it the praise it deserves as a work of unusual cautionary imagination and satirical invention. As it is, I must restrict myself to the vocabulary and expectations suitable to a realistic novel, even if forced by those limitations into a less favourable stance.
That would be why he hasn't applied for it. ;p
As I recall, Charlie Stross is a Yorkshireman by birth. So far as I know, he has not yet applied for Scottish citizenship.
While you're upgrading, can I ask what the "Don't make me type all this again" tick-box does? I've a vague idea I ticked it once, a long time ago, and I don't seem to have needed to again, so presumably it works. Whatever it does.
Experience shows that the DD Shermans were a good gamble, in that they did the job they were intended to do at four of the five beaches. Good odds, I think. That they didn't succeed at Omaha is down to them being deployed too far out from the beach, for the most part, though being given bad navigation cues and an understandable lack of sea-going experience on the part of the tank crews contributed.
It's odd, I picked up a book a couple of weeks ago claiming that all the DD tanks sank, and none of their crews survived. The first part isn't completely true for Omaha, and not at all true for the other four beaches, and the second part almost completely false, in that all but five tank crew members were picked up by other boats. They must have a bad reputation because of Omaha, but I think it's undeserved.
The DDs worked, for the most part, getting infantry support onto the beaches without risking vulnerable tank landing craft to shore artillery.
One thing I forgot to mention is that I didn't notice what any of the female officers were wearing*. I didn't even think of it until I read this thread. The only picture I have in my mind is of the midwife in the opening scenes who I'm fairly sure was wearing trousers (or pants, if you prefer). I can only assume that the design of the other female crew uniforms was sufficiently similar to TOS that it didn't register. As a straight male, I feel oddly discomforted.
*Except for Uhura and Gaila in that scene.
I think Jay's remembering the series from the mirror universe.
Just got back from the movie before reading this thread, got a couple of comments. "Red matter", "black holes"? Obviously, strange matter, or something even more exotic, and worm holes, though they probably decided not to invoke the DS9 wormhole because of all the implications that would bring with it.
About Uhura undressing, I know nothing about women undressing together, but beyond the Hollywood posing and camera-angling, that scene didn't seem too unnatural to me; is this a cultural thing, like the reaction to Dr Manhattan's... nudity? Being British, I can't claim to be very European, but I'm more in sympathy with a relaxed attitude to partial nudity, and roomies is one of those situations where a relaxed attitude seems to be in order.
I was wondering about the plumbing in engineering. The water flow didn't seem particularly fast for, say, the primary reactor coolant for a ship travelling at flank speed to a rendezvous with the fleet. Perhaps it was actually something to do with life-support?
Clearly, Romulus' star collapsed because of a weapons test, possibly related to red matter. This explains the suddeness, in astronomical terms (too little warning for a natural event), and the slowness, in human terms, of the collapse (enough time to arrange a courier from Earth or Vulcan to Romulus). Or possibly it was an attack from another alternative universe, by someone driven mad by their home planet being destroyed by Romulans.
One other thing I didn't like was the camera work during the action scenes. The dizzying sweeps through CGI scenary that modern directors seem addicted to were bad enough, but the hyperactivity of the cameras during the fights I just couldn't keep up with; those scenes were just noisy blurs to me. In fact, I think it gave me the migraine I walked out the cinema with (aura only, no great inconvenience).
Overall, I don't feel as though the film interfered with my childhood. TOS and my childhood were a long time ago, and those memories are too firmly bedded to be disturbed by any fiction, even one with a superficial resemblence to ST:TOS.
I'm a bit boggled by the idea that you can order fonts for a gravestone the same way you can order them for a newsletter. Surely the style of the individual gravestone carver comes into it somewhere? I suppose that while many typefaces owe their designs to the style of ancient inscriptions, modern inscription styles might owe something to modern letterforms; but I still wonder how many typefaces designed for output on a typesetter are easily reproducible on a gravestone.
If I could have any typeface, though, I think I'd like Melior.
I think some of it is down to the modern trend of journalists being required to write more in less time. Judgement takes time to turn over in one's brain, time that you don't necessarily have when you have more column inches or minutes of airtime to fill. Acceptance of "golden mean" journalism may mean that modern journalists have almost reached their limit in how much they can be squeezed.
Will, my brain suggested phantom forces, which is alliterative, at least, but I don't think there is a generally accepted term. I can't find one associated with possibly the most famous example: the First United States Army Group set up to convince the Germans that the D-Day invasion was going to take place at Pas de Calais.
Earl @200: From not attending cons regularly, I'm afraid that I'll have some trouble adjusting my reading of Tim Powers and Ian Watson after seeing them at Eastercon, for different reasons. Powers-in-my-mind had a generic voice, kind of mid-Atlantic, but also somewhat earnest. Tim Powers in life is a charming, laconic, dryly funny Californian. I don't know how his books will sound when I pick them up next.
As for Ian Watson, the real one has this marvelous, theatrical tone, like a Shakespearian actor. At the moment the only one of his books I have is a Games Workshop Space Marine one that I've never read. Like a Shakespearian actor may actually be the only way to read it.
BTW, Madeline @89, I'll buy that book when you publish it.
I think I recall reading that moondust smells of gunpowder, if I'm remembering correctly.
Madeline @41: I just saw an item on the evening news about the Israeli Army dropping white phosphorus shells on a Palestinian school, followed up by a single HE shell, which they claimed was aimed at a sniper.
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