I was born in 1974 but due to books, still worried a fair bit about nuclear war as a teen (as a child, I worried about venomous snakes and leprosy, even though I lived in Canada. This was also due to books). Actually, I mostly worried about radiation sickness (Chernobyl happen during my lifetime, and I'd also visited Hiroshima as a 12-year-old): through college, I'd look around at buildings, trying to gage where I'd have to stand to be vapourized quickly and avoid the two weeks of agony.
Ha. The knitters'/crocheters' website, Ravelry, has an
astronomically long forum thread on "annoying things non-knitters have
said to you," about half of which are variants on "where do you find
the time?"
Only 19, which makes me sad and ashamed because I like fonts, but I
tend to be familiar with the ones that come packaged with adobe
products, or with the fanciful ones off 1001fonts.com
how to protect your children from the trauma of news like this.
I seem to recall, during my childhood, hiding newspapers from my mother, trying to protect her from trauma.
re #301:
A friend of my husband's collects slide rules, and back in high school
got to be very smug during an exam when everyone else's calculator died
(it was a very hot day).
xefer:
Thanks for the list of serial numbers. Mine is 1916 and was manufactured in Scotland, which is neat to know.
Susan: According to the booklet with it, it's a "No. 99 - Lock Stitch, for Family Use." I looked the model up, and the jpg shows
a similar machine, except mine doesn't have a treadle. There are three
spare needles in the compartment, so I'm probably ok for another decade.
I have a really old Singer (made of cast iron, with a crank
on one side), and while it would be nice to be able to serge, I'm
pretty happy with it (plus in the extremely unlikely event of my being
attacked while sewing, I could probably use it as a weapon). My concern
is needle replacement. Anyone know if interchangeability is an issue
with old/new sewing-machine needles?
#231, etc
IIRC, the Brave New Word society had come about through consumerism and dumbing-down - various corporations had become rich enough to set themselves up as the actual government and it was in their interest to create a race of humans who just wanted to buy stuff (and to work so they can buy stuff) - robots wouldn't drive their economy because they don't spend money. The Alphas, for the most part, don't seem to have been stoners - they just needed everyone beneath them to be...
Re #12:
I guess that like many humans, they most resent the ones who are almost like them but not quite.
As for the 3 pigs, no mention of the delightful WB cartoon The Three Little Bops?
We keep ours on top of the fridge so people don't overeat.
re #48 -- I remember a conversation that in retrospect was probably about Skylab - my mother was worrying something would fall on us, and my father said, "well what do you want them to do, outfit everyone in crash helmets?" A boy in my kindergarten had an uncle in Australia he said was going to send him a piece of Skylab.
In 1982 we were living in Toronto - there was of course a great deal of fuss over Charles and Diana's wedding, but I also recall some neighbours setting off fireworks on an occasion that wasn't Canada Day, and I think they may have been celebrating the Repatriation of the Constitution.
I remember various elections (including one where I wanted John Crosby to win because he had the same name as our neighbours' cat - from some of the other comments this sems to by typical kid political logic). I think the next international news I remember was Chernobyl - apart from the horror of the event itself, there was some concern about dust traveling around the world, and we were told to wash everything in the garden before eating eat (which we always did anyway).
I recall Challenger of course -- and Tiennamen Square *very* vividly: I was twelve by then, and had been watching the protests on tv - they'd seemed so hopeful at the time. I heard the shootings on the radio - the CBC had an on-the-spot correspondent, and afterwards I walked around our back yard, replaying in my head his horrified voice, and the phone abruptly cutting out.
Breakfast of the Gods (sort of like Crisis on Infinite Earths if the characters were all breakfast-cereal mascots) is interesting, but slow to update: http://www.webcomicsnation.com/poyorick/botg/series.
php?view=archive&chapter=10960
Yeah, but we just get the finite gobstoppers, not the genuine Wonka everlasting ones.
I think the Jeep should really count as a reference to the original rather than actually Tlonian, given that Segar's Jeep was not a vehicle.
Serge - I think I saw it in a dvd store under the name of Timescape; a friend of mine who saw it agrees that it just uses the story as a set-up to a typical avert-the-disaster thriller, but still liked the plot point that the hero (unlike most movie characters) figured out the basics of what was going on in the first ten minutes or so (trying to avoid spoilers, although the title already is one).
re: #116
Canada appoints a Governor-General as stand-in for the Queen when she's not in Canada (i.e. most of the time). While the duties are mostly ceremonial, s/he is supposed to act as a sort of advisor to the PM, and if the situation you describe were to occur, I think the GG, being around to see what was going on, would be more likely than the Queen to try and intervene. I don't know if in the present day s/he legally can do so - but it has occurred in the past: google "King-Byng-thing" for details.
Oh, and on the topic of good recent graphic novels and the Eisner Awards, Eisner himself only died a couple of years ago, and he was working up until the end - his last book was "The Plot," about the history of the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" and how it keeps coming back as the fuel-log of anti-semitism, even though it keeps getting revealed to have been a forgery.
Mitch (#105) - but it's sf, so the tech will only prove a liability if the natives are ewoks.
I've been working up some Christmas and Hannukah card designs this year. One of my rejected ideas was a 20-sided dreidel with the caption "+8 olive oil," or perhaps m4cc48335 pwn!"
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