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Why do movie makers keep getting it wrong?


Don't know but they sure do, don't they. Of course sometimes the quality shines through despite what the directors try to do. The best example of this is Blade Runne aka "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep" by Dick.

From Boito's libreto for Verdi's Otello. Iago is speaking early in Act II and is outlining his philosophy. He says:

"And I believe that man is the plaything of
unjust fate
From the germ of the cradle
To the worrn of the grave.
After so much derision comes Death.
And then? Death is Nothingness
And heaven an old wives' tale.
"

kinda on topic

E credo l'uom gioco d'iniqua sorte
dal germe della culla
al verme dell'avel.
Vien dopo tanta irrision la Morte.
E poi? E poi? La Morte è' il Nulla.
È vecchia fola il Ciel.

Hardly a day goes by that I don't reference my CD copy of the OED. I use a Mac and have a partition labeled OED2 with the data files on it. It confuses the application into thinking I have the CD mounted so it runs from the hard disk. It is at my immediate beck and call. It is te ONLY reason that I use 'classic' in an OSX environment. A great reference.

Conan.
"What is best in life?"
"The best in life is to crush your enemies, drive them before you and hear the lamentations of their women."

sounds good to me

Probably was having her period. Happens all the time.

'BOUT TIME

Then a silence came to the river,
A hush fell over the shore,
And Bohs that were brave departed,
And Sniders squibbed no more;
For the Burmans said
That a white man's head
Must be paid for with heads five-score.

Hey I don't blame him..he's a civilian and in a scary situation...

... ...
Yeah and so were the passengers on that ill-fated airliner that plowed into the ground in Pennsylvania. But they didn't cry and wimper ... they went to their doom with grit and determination and saved lots of lives doing so. Remember ??? LET'S ROLL!!!!!

Pardon if this has been posted on this thread



The Grave of the Hundred Heads -Kipling
 

 
There's a widow in sleepy Chester
Who weeps for her only son;
There's a grave on the Pabeng River,
A grave that the Burmans shun,
And there's Subadar Prag Tewarri
Who tells how the work was done.

A Snider squibbed in the jungle,
Somebody laughed and fled,
And the men of the First Shikaris
Picked up their Subaltern dead,
With a big blue mark in his forehead
And the back blown out of his head.

Subadar Prag Tewarri,
Jemadar Hira Lal,
Took command of the party,
Twenty rifles in all,
Marched them down to the river
As the day was beginning to fall.

They buried the boy by the river,
A blanket over his face --
They wept for their dead Lieutenant,
The men of an alien race --
They made a samadh in his honor,
A mark for his resting-place.

For they swore by the Holy Water,
They swore by the salt they ate,
That the soul of Lieutenant Eshmitt Sahib
Should go to his God in state;
With fifty file of Burman
To open him Heaven's gate.

The men of the First Shikaris
Marched till the break of day,
Till they came to the rebel village,
The village of Pabengmay --
A jingal covered the clearing,
Calthrops hampered the way.

Subadar Prag Tewarri,
Bidding them load with ball,
Halted a dozen rifles
Under the village wall;
Sent out a flanking-party
With Jemadar Hira Lal.

The men of the First Shikaris
Shouted and smote and slew,
Turning the grinning jingal
On to the howling crew.
The Jemadar's flanking-party
Butchered the folk who flew.

Long was the morn of slaughter,
Long was the list of slain,
Five score heads were taken,
Five score heads and twain;
And the men of the First Shikaris
Went back to their grave again,

Each man bearing a basket
Red as his palms that day,
Red as the blazing village --
The village of Pabengmay,
And the "drip-drip-drip" from the baskets
Reddened the grass by the way.

They made a pile of their trophies
High as a tall man's chin,
Head upon head distorted,
Set in a sightless grin,
Anger and pain and terror
Stamped on the smoke-scorched skin.

Subadar Prag Tewarri
Put the head of the Boh
On the top of the mound of triumph,
The head of his son below,
With the sword and the peacock-banner
That the world might behold and know.

Thus the samadh was perfect,
Thus was the lesson plain
Of the wrath of the First Shikaris --
The price of a white man slain;
And the men of the First Shikaris
Went back into camp again.

Then a silence came to the river,
A hush fell over the shore,
And Bohs that were brave departed,
And Sniders squibbed no more;
For he Burmans said
That a kullah's head
Must be paid for with heads five score.

There's a widow in sleepy Chester
Who weeps for her only son;
There's a grave on the Pabeng River,
A grave that the Burmans shun,
And there's Subadar Prag Tewarri
Who tells how the work was done.

Well ... ... .. maybe - maybe not. There is no question that the energy necessary to be transferred to achieve orbital velocity is well within the capabilities of technology, even with the hideously inefficient technologies that we use today. If we limit ourselves to reaction motors using chemical reactions to transform the energy into velocity, then it becomes difficult but, even today, not impossible. The Shuttle proves this. If we were to use reactions propulsion [rocket] and some sort of ram -jet technology so that it is not necessary to haul oxidizer as well as fuel matters become simpler. As for re-entry the shuttles problem is that the requirement is to dissipate the energy in a short period of time. Sanger's idea of skipping over the top of the atmosphere to dissipate the energy over an extended period of time might not have been practical a half century ago but modern computing machines and energy management software should make this far more practicable today.

I do think we can do better. The requirements for energy transfer to achieve escape velocity are NOT enormous but attaining a reasonable means for doing so have eluded us so far. We do not need 'crank solution' [pace John Campbell and his reaction-less Dean Drive] and maybe not even need space elevators or some such.

I choke up whenever I read this
I choked up when I saw SS-1 on final roday - it looked so purty!!!

High Flight

John Gillespie Magee, Jr

Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of earth,
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I've climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
Of sun-split clouds, --and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of --Wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov'ring there
I've chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air...
Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue
I've topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace
Where never lark or even eagle flew --
And, while with silent lifting mind I've trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.

"The English are not very spiritual people, so they invented cricket to give them some idea of eternity." - George Bernard Shaw 

Please both Wintel and Mac folks: MAC stands for:

Media Access Control IEEE specifications for the lower half of the data link layer (layer 2) that defines topology dependent access control protocols for IEEE LAN specifications. This is usually used as in "MAC address" of a network card a ___ byte number that uniquely defines a Ethernet cards address

Mac stands for Macintosh.
Wintel stands for Windows-Intel

PC stands for Personal Ciomputer [ as in Macintosh, Wintel, Commadore, etc]

drjoe

Sorry if this has posted:

why should he be allowed to speak.
President Reagan "Mr Gorbachof - tear down that wall"
President Clinton "Ms Lewinsky -take down my pants"

er ... ... ... shouldn't that be Chappaquatic ?????

The quote about "the Hun" that I recall is that "He is either at your throat or at your feet."

what about Winston's "A hun alive is a war in prospect"

can the Sidney Opera House sue for theft of Intellectual Property?

this kind of behavior towards animals is a well known precursor to similar behavior directed towards humans - it is an index behavior of, for example, serial killers. however it is usually a solitary behavior and seldom a group activity as referred to here. Is it an indicator of a new form of sociopath - the group serial killer?

Yeah! and while they're at in the 19th amendment could use some repeaing too.