And they've done it! Free shrimp, one per customer, on May 10th. Who says planetary research doesn't pay off back home?
(Meanwhile, is any enterprising energy utility going to give away natural gas in honour of the newly discovered methane?. Probably not. Maybe we should just all fart a bit more in celebration...)
Jeremy Leader wrote
Well, I'm sure everyone here has seen comparisons between the budgets of various big epic movies and various small space projects, right? The two budgetary regions definitely overlap more than they used to.
The entire ToTR trilogy apparently weighs in at $350m, approx; that's a touch less than one of the two Mars rovers due to land in January
Teresa, a thousand apologies for misspelling your name.
What next? Send Jackson and Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyer copies of Red, Green and Blue Mars. The story of a fellowship (actually a set of overlapping fellowships), amazing landscapes, extraordinary buildings (labs in the wall of Echus Chasma, the space elevator), war, murder, scheming, romance. Mythic scale. Set pieces -- the fall of the elevator, the burning of Carr, the escape down Valles Marineris, the flooding of Burroughs. And a constitutional convention that constitutes as remarkable an intrusion of committee as the Council of Elrond.
Unmodified Martian landcapes probably hard to come by in New Zealand, but there are doubtless nice alpine landscapes for early stages of terraforming. Besides, Wellington is more conveniently situated for filming in Antarctica than any other film making centre on the planet.
Cameron had the three books optioned at one point but I think they've reverted; and better Jackson than Cameron anyway (though I'm a bigger defender of Cameron than many).
Theresa's point about accepting the sacrifice of physical logic brings to mind a possible sacrifice of philological logic that has been bugging me since I came to learn a little more about Tolkien a couple of months ago.
Although I am but an acorn in such matters, it's my understanding that the history of middle earth is in large part a way of explaining why the elves speak two languages as distantly related as Finnish and Welsh. But if elves, as Graydon so wonderfully reminds us, are sempiternal, why do their languages evolve at all? I'd always imagined that the driver of language shift is that new generations speak slightly differently and old generations die out. If older generations don't die out, would languages really change all that much?
I'll admit that there is unlikely to be empirical evidence on this, but there must be theories about linguistic evolution that might throw some light on this, and it seems likely that somewhere round here might know them. And it seems quite possible Tolkien himself may have addressed this question...
The General (Sassoon)
91GOOD-MORNING; good-morning!92 the General said
When we met him last week on our way to the line.
Now the soldiers he smiled at are most of 92em dead,
And we92re cursing his staff for incompetent swine.
91He92s a cheery old card,92 grunted Harry to Jack
As they slogged up to Arras with rifle and pack.
. . . .
But he did for them both by his plan of attack.
It's interesting to note that in the past few years the two minute silence at 11.00 on 11/11 has made a comeback in british public life. It almost feels as though it is a compensation for the fact that the veterans themselves are with us less and less. Fewer people to remember; more institutionalised remembrance. There are alternative explanations, I'm sure. Anyway, it interrupted the press briefing on teh upcoming Mars missions I was at in a simple and dignified way, and it wouldn't have happened a decade ago.
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