We re-watched Pirates of the Caribbean a few nights ago, and noticed that Jack Sparrow also has a compass that doesn’t point north, just like Locke on Lost.
Clearly, Locke’s compass points to the Isla de Muerta! It’s in the wrong ocean, but they were off-course…
Okay, this has got to be one of the strangest pairs of sci-fi news stories I’ve seen in a while.
First, Farscape star Ben Browder (John Crichton) will join the cast of Stargate SG-1 for its ninth season. (No word yet about his character, though I suppose he could appear as Daniel Jackson’s long-lost brother.)
Now it turns out that Farscape star Claudia Black (Aeryn Sun) will reprise her Stargate SG-1 character Vala in a 5-episode arc next season. (The original episode in which she appears, “Prometheus Unbound”, airs in January.)
Another one for the “Holy frelling dren” file.
(Thanks to aeryncrichton for the news.)
Three words: Holy frelling dren!
Alternate review: “Boom. Boom boom boom. Boom boom. Boom! Have a nice day!”
After four drive-bys, I finally managed to get a picture of the Gondor street sign. It was far enough away that it’s barely readable (this is the native resolution on a 5 megapixel image — it’s not shrunk, it’s just cropped). Eventually I ought to turn onto a side street, park the car, and walk to a nice vantage point instead of just holding the camera with one hand while zooming by and hoping I get an image.
I’ve updated Living in Middle Earth.
You know how you see some numbers in one context so often that you think of that meaning when you see them somewhere else? Seriously: If you’ve spent a lot of time on the web and you notice the clock reading 4:04, or a price coming up as $4.04, etc., chances are you find it funny, right? It’s like realizing that someone’s initials are A.T.M.
Well, I was looking at the Star Wars Trilogy on Amazon and noticed it had 1394 reviews:
I saw that number, and my mind instantly thought “Firewire.”
(Yes, the question of the day is, “How can I make a post about Star Wars even more geeky?”)
Yes, Star Wars has changed again [archive.org].
Looking at the comparisons, it seems most of the changes really have just been cleanup. They finally fixed the compositing in the Rancor pit, for instance. And some of the Special Edition bits that didn’t work quite right, like the Jabba scene in A New Hope, have been redone. (He now looks closer to the Return of the Jedi and Phantom Menace versions.) They’ve also cleared up some continuity glitches. Nothing wrong with that — I’m all for fixing things that are genuinely broken.
Then there’s the annoying stuff:
Anyway, for those who want to skip the commentary, here’s the USA Today article and here’s the side-by-side comparisons.
Update 9/10: Here’s another writeup that goes into more detail on the changes and reviews the DVD set as a whole.
On the way to work this morning, Katie noticed one of those ubiquitous catering trucks and remarked, “With a name like ‘Superior Coffee,’ you know it probably isn’t.” It’s a useful guideline: if a company has to tell you something is gourmet, for instance, that means it can’t count on its reputation alone.
That reminded me of a story David Weber told at a convention about the first Honor Harrington book. They were almost ready to go to press when he got a call from his editor.
“I’ve been thinking. Your viewpoint characters are in the Royal Manticoran Navy. The villains are the Republic of Haven. Isn’t that backwards? Shouldn’t the monarchy be the bad guys?”
They went back and forth a bit, until one of them said, “What if it’s the People’s Republic of Haven?”
They agreed that was a good solution, and then proceeded to look through the proofs for a place where they could insert the word without moving the page breaks around. As I recall, he said they only found one spot, and possibly the map, but he used the full name in the rest of the series.
