Last night we went to see a screening of Twelve Monkeys, still one of my favorites. There was an odd moment in the middle, though. In the scene in which Bruce Willis and Madeline Stowe are attacked in the abandoned theater, just after Willis’ character kills the attacker, is this exchange:
“You killed him!”
“All I see are dead people.”
Nervous laughter cascaded around the theater as the audience flashed forward to The Sixth Sense and its signature catch-phrase.
Despite growing up in Orange County, I never managed to go to Medieval Times. It’s a dinner show with knights on horseback staging a medieval tournament. Last month in Las Vegas, Katie talked me into going to the Tournament of Kings at Excalibur, which is the same type of show.
![[Knight from Excalibur'sTournament of Kings]](https://hyperborea.org/journal/wp-content/uploads/2006/05/knight.jpg)
When you purchase your tickets, you’re assigned a country. (We got Hungary, which seemed appropriate for a dinner show.) This determines two things: your seating area, and which knight you’ll cheer for. People got really into it, cheering on their own knights, booing others, all from a random assignment. About halfway through the show, I realized it was a Drazi scarf situation.
To explain: The Babylon 5 episode, “The Geometry of Shadows” features a conflict among an alien race called the Drazi. Two factions have been fighting each other on the station, and the crew wants them to stop. The Drazi ambassador explains that every few years, they put a bunch of green and purple scarves in a barrel. Each Drazi reaches into the barrel and pulls out a scarf. Green Drazi form one faction, Purple Drazi form the other, and they fight until one side wins, becoming the dominant political force for the next few years.
The episode was clearly meant as commentary on politics, but here in the dinner tournament was an actual case where nothing but random chance determined allegiance. It wasn’t even a random draw for a team, this was just the cheering section! For a scripted show!
![[Pirate]](https://hyperborea.org/journal/wp-content/uploads/2006/05/pirate.jpg)
Last weekend we went to the Pirate’s Dinner Adventure for Katie’s birthday. It’s a similar setup, only with pirates instead of knights, a smaller arena so that you can actually see the actor/stuntmen’s faces, and a more interactive setup. (There are contests where they get willing audience members to participate, kids get to be sworn in as members of the pirate crew, etc.) Again, you’re assigned a color when you get your ticket, and that color corresponds to one of the pirates. And everyone gets a colored headband. Not too different from those Drazi scarves.
Lately I’ve seen an interesting pattern emerge in the comment spam logs here. Along with the usual collections of links to pills, porn, and watches, there are a bunch of trackback spam attempts using innocuous websites like Google and Yahoo and the phrase “this is very good,” over and over.
Title? “this is very good”
Blog Name? “this is very good”
Author? “this is very good”
The excerpt itself varies a bit, but is usually something like, “this is related article.”
I figure they’re either probes or attempts to poison blacklists.
What’s funny about these is that in the logs, the fields are all run together, so it looks like this:
author: this is very good title: this is very good blog_name: this is very good e-mail: …
The natural inclination is to break the phrases at the punctuation, so it looks like it’s saying, “This is very good title. This is very good blog name. This is related article.”—making it sound like Zathras is behind the keyboard!
There are certain ideas that I find completely acceptable in the context of science-fiction, but completely looney in the context of actual science.
Take, for instance, Erich von Däniken’s premise that gods were really ancient alien astronauts. It’s an interesting idea, but it’s way out there in terms of science. It assumes that (a) myths are historically accurate, (b) aliens exist, and (c) low-tech humans couldn’t possibly have created things like Stonehenge, pyramids, giant stone heads, etc. Not to say it’s not possible that aliens visited the planet in the distant past—just that comparative mythology and architecture aren’t exactly compelling evidence.
On the other hand, I have no problem with the concept in science-fiction. It’s the basic premise of Stargate. The movie and early seasons of SG-1 focused on Egyptian mythology and technology, and in subsequent seasons of the show, just about every ancient legend has turned out to have an alien race behind it. It also figures into the backstory of Babylon 5, with the Vorlons having visited nearly every known race in ancient times, insinuating themselves into local religions and engineering telepaths over the course of centuries.
(via Sclerotic Rings and *** Dave)
You’ve all seen those bumper stickers that say things like, “My child was an honor student at XYZ school.” You’ve probably seen parodies like “My child can beat up your honor student.” But have you seen the Klingon version?
Sorry about the phone resolution: it reads, “My child has more honor than your child.” And yes, it’s in English.
(Yes, Photoblog catch-up week is still going.)
I’m officially declaring this week Photoblog Catch-Up Week, since I’ve got such a backlog of photos I’ve been meaning to post. First up:
Unfortunately this isn’t particularly near the Hobbit Center in Laguna Beach. It is, however, in Lake Forest, the city known for its Middle-Earth street names.
The pairing with the Plaza Suites sign does make me wonder, though: the last time I checked, accommodations on Dagobah weren’t particularly extravagant!
Last week Peter David signed an exclusive deal with Marvel Comics. The contract has exceptions for stuff he’s already working on, like the Spike mini-series and Fallen Angel (both at IDW). The comments on that post linked to an interview at CBR, which had this interesting remark:
DC has been great and I’m very pleased and relieved, bizarrely enough, that they cancelled “Fallen Angel.” Had they not, I’d be in a very tough position because if they were still publishing it and Marvel wanted me to go exclusive, well they certainly wouldn’t have let me keep writing “Fallen Angel” for DC. So, I would have had to make a really tough choice—weigh a comic book I love against my family’s security and health. Fortunately enough I was spared having to make that decision.
It reminded me of the time I realized that VR.5‘s cancellation freed up Anthony Stewart Head to join the cast of Buffy. Or that the Sci Fi Channel turned down the B5 spinoff Crusade in part because they’d just launched Farscape.
I do wonder, though. JMS also had several books grandfathered in when he signed an exclusive with Marvel. Those included Rising Stars and Dream Police at Top Cow… and a Babylon 5 graphic novel for DC/Wildstorm (which has yet to be finished). I suspect the facts that it was a media license and a one-shot probably helped.
It’s also interesting to read Peter David’s comments about Fallen Angel and Icon. You’d think Marvel’s Icon label would be perfect—bigger circulation, lower price, still creator-owned—but IDW put so much effort into relaunching the book that he felt it would be wrong to just pack it in and take it to another publisher as long as they still wanted to publish it.
It would have been odd, though. I wonder how many books have, at different times, been published by both Marvel and DC? The only one that comes to mind right now is Elfquest. Marvel reprinted the original series through Epic in the 1980s, and DC is now handling the manga-sized reprints, the Archive editions, and new stories (still from Wendy and Richard Pini).
