The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Serge:

Thanks, Melissa, And you have me intrigued, petra. I guess I'll have to wait.

While on the subject of time travellers...

I've been going thru the first DVD set of The Time Tunnel and enjoying it. True, one does have to put oneself in a certain frame of mind whenever an Irwin Allen show is involved, but if that can be achieved, then this series is a pleasant diversion, especially if one likes stories about time travel. Not only does the show have a neat musical theme by John Williams, but science is mildly weird so far, and, if I remember my youth correctly, nobody is ever turned into a werewolf, nor are ghosts and evil clowns encountered. But thre are aliens on Earth to abduct cows. That being said... The last episode I've seen so far was about Trojan War sans the gods, and was kind of a dud, as it relies way too much on footage from cheesy Italian epics. No, I don't know if we're supposed to notice that some warriors are wearing Roman outfits, or that the guys over in that corner are Persians from the Battle of Thermopylae. Picky, picky.

The episode before that was crack of doom and has nothing to do with Tolkien's Mount Doom. It does have to do with a volcano though, specifically Krakatoa, where Torin Thatcher plays a crotchety old scientist who just won't leave, no matter what Our Heroes tell him. Of course, the scientist, being old and crotchety, must have a beautiful young daughter who assists him in his work. Sue and I thought she looked very familiar, but the name Ellen McRae didn't ring a bell. Eventually, my wife Sue figured out who she was and a bit of research on my part confirmed it: she was born in 1932 under the name Edna Rae Gilhooley, but most people know her today as Ellen Burstyn, last seen earlier this year playing an Episcopalian Bishop in short-lived show The Book of Daniel.

Funny where some people worked before becoming well known.

I have a 14-year-old daughter whose ambition is to be the first volcanologist on Mars.

Good for her, Lila!

Say, how much would a Mission to Mars cost, if it were launched today? To think of the money being wasted on the sands of Iraq. Not that we would actually go to Mars if the Iraqi War had not happened, but still...

"Debbie does Deimos", ajay? And "Sinning in Sinharat", and "Jerking in Jekkara"...

Keith, that map of Mars makes me say... Groovy!!!

Melpomene, Xopher? I like it. Up in Quebec, my friend Nicole and her hubby Pierre have two daughters, the elder named Ariane, the younger one Daphne. I betcha those two kids know where those names come from and what they mean. The parents are smart, and so are the kids, and the 9-year-old was heard casually using ther word 'lugubrious'.

My top vote though remains with Theora. I never could find what it meant after that one time, years ago. I think it meant 'one who opens doors', which was appropriate for Amanda Pays's character in Max Headroom.

Thanks, Bob... I guess the Bible just doesn't have that many good names for girls. (I mean, Jezebel?) My neighbors went the sort-of Victorian route too, what with one daughter being Emma and the other Hannah. Meanwhile, my sister-in-law and her hubby are planning to go a different source than usual for their daughter: one of the top names on their list is Aria, what with dad being such an opera fan.

"What is your name?"
"Jon."
"No, Jon. What is your real name?"
"Pyro."

Well, there is power in names.

Speaking of which, what is the trend for naming kids these days? The fashion around the year 2000 appeared to have been to go for biblical names, at least for boys. What is it, these ago, a bunch of 12-year-olds got onto my bus, boys and girls. One of the girls gave her name to some other kid as being Promethea, I think. I've never heard that name in the real world before, and she's too old to have been named after Alan Moore's own take on Wonder Woman. Maybe I heard wrong. But it IS a neat name.

Molly, Larry? What did the little guy die of? My Murphy had to be put to sleep last year because he liver was shot. I had a female cat named Sissy, after the actress Sissy Spacek and she also had to be put to sleep, because of cancer.

Meanwhile Jefferson the male cat is still around and quite healthy. We named him after Thomas Jefferson because we rescued him on July 4th, 1998, and he was this scrawny thing. Like his namesake, he showed a lot of curiosity. He loved exploring all closets & cupboards. Oh, and he does respond to his alternate name, Bad Cat.

I had a female kitty called Murphy. Sue went ahead with my suggestion because that was RoboCop's real name. A for where that name had really originated, that was from my reading Gaiman's Sandman. There was a story that was a bit like a film noir, with a short squat creature dressed in a trenchcoat & hat, and acting like it was Bogart. There was this mysterious character it referred to as Murphy, who really was Morpheus.

It's snowing outside. This is the first snow, and in fact the first precipitation, we've had here in Albuquerque for the whole winter.

Reminds me that TCM showed Truffaud's Fahrenheit 451 yesterday and, while it's not my favorite movie, I still watched the final scene, when people walking thru the snow are memorizing stories for when the world will want them again.

CHip, you are cruel. Meanwhile, San Francisco's Castro Theater is having a premiere for the colorized version of Plan Nine from Outer Space.

Yes, the world is a cruel place,

Zeke it is. Duly noted, Larry. If I got another dog, and if it were a male, I'd probably go for Lockjaw, the big teleporter canine of the Inhumans. Or Krypto. (Thanks to Lisa for reminding me of the obvious.) For a girl dog, I'd probably go for Theora, which was the name of Amanda Pays's character in Max headroom. On the feline side, I have a doctor friend in Quebec who liked to name her kitties after various cancers.

To Rob Rusick... A big sigh of envy as New Mexico is way too far from Rochester, NY.

So, Larry, have we come up with good names for your puppy?

And I'm sure that somewhere there's a pastry-and-cake shop called Just Desserts.

Actually, Xopher, there is such a place, somewhere in Oakland, I think, if not in many locations around the Bay Area.

Seen the Oscars last night? If not for Jon Stewart being the host, I'd have skipped, but I'm glad I did. Got quite a kick out of the Brokeback Mountain 'homage' where clips from old westerns acquired a whole new meaning, to say the least, especially the ones from The Big Country when Gregory Peck says:

"Ramon, what's about to happen must remain between you and me... and the horse."

Darren McGavin and Don Knotts both died.

What are you thanking me for, Marilee? Oh, for CSA... All I did was bring it up. Larry is the one who mentionned NetFlix.

Thanks for the tip about CSA, Larry.

You have nothing to be sorry for, M.E. I very much appreciated your post. One thing I didn't say earlier is that that I have been a voracious reader from an early age. I've been told that I stared at the daily's funny section even before I could read, and if someone showed me reprints of the Buck Rogers strip of the year 1960, I could probably pinpoint the exact strip where it all clicked one day and I could read the words. I read a lot thru high-school & college, but it was pretty much only SF, in the written form and in comics, and I was made fun of throughout those years because of that. As a result, I felt no wish to look at the stuff that makes up Literature because, hell, if its proponents were going to look down on me because of what I loved and what gave pleasure to this lonely kid who had not a single friend, I wanted nothing to do with what they loved. Yeah, looking back, it may seem stupid, but I had only myself to mark my own path. Then I came across the birth of Quebec's SF fandom, and I wasn't alone anymore, and there were all those people who loved what I loved AND the other stuff.

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