Date: Wed, 9 Jul 2003 21:51:38 -0400 Subject: Re: So many dead birds, so little time? Status: RO In alt.religion.kibology, kibo@world.std.com wrote: talysman (talysman@globalsurrealism.com) wrote: > James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) wrote: > > Joe Manfre (manfre@world.std.com) wrote: > > > I've been seeing a whole lot of dead birds on the ground [...] > > > I can't shake the gnawing feeling that this is some kind of harbinger > > > of imminent doom. > > > > Well, it is, unless we can assemble a crew of people to go to the center > > of the Earth and blow up the evil part of the core of the Earth in order > > to instantly fix the weather everywhere on Earth. But I didn't know > > you live in London -- everyone knows that any disturbance of the Earth's > > core causes birds to crash into things in London, people with pacemakers > > to drop dead in Boston, the Space Shuttle to crash-land in the Los Angeles > > drainage canals "CHiPs"-style, > > there's no way the space shuttle would crash, because the skilled > shuttle pilots could steer it by shifting the fuel back and forth > between the wing tanks! they would just land on the freeway instead! "NASA, we have no coins for the tollbooth!" "Endeavour, you'll have to improvise. Try to file down the secret Congressional Medals Of Honor that are hidden under your seats so that a robot arm can automatically award them to you posthumously after you crash." "Okay, we're using the token lady astronaut's nail file to try to reduce these to the size and color of quarters..." "Endeavour, hurry! You are only three miles from the tollbooth, and at your speed of Mach 10 you will be there in exactly five minutes!" "HOLY SHIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII***KA-BOOM!*** Now THAT was a close call!" "Endeavour, this is the current President of the United States. You are our nation's greatest heroes and I've got cold brewskis waiting for you! And I'm very proud of you, son." > > and most importantly, the Colosseum explodes because it's a > > "collecting dish for centrifugal energy". > > those blasted romans! always collecting our centrifugal energy! > I bet they will use it to create the world's most powerful arbalest! First they collect all our urine, then they collect all our centrifugal energy. They're stealing our wee-wee and our whirliness in order to turn the Colosseum into the world's largest all-yellow spin-art machine in order to trick Rudy Guiliani into coming to Ancient Rome to shut down this perverted whirl-a-wee art exhibition, and then they'll make fun of him for not wearing a Triscuit-like toupee! This segue allows me to finally explain those verses by Martial I quoted in the thread about how smelly Rome was. Last week, I wrote: -> And even the Romans thought fish sauce stunk, or at least the smart -> ones did. Let's ask Martial to drop us some zingers: -> -> Unguentum fuerat, quod onyx modo parva gerebat; -> olfecit postquam Papylus, ecce, garum est. Loosely translated (largely due to my own ineptness with Latin), it comes out as something like "It was ointment carried in a small onyx jar. After Papylus smelled it -- behold! It's garum!" -> Of course, without knowing Papylus's taste in perfume, I don't know -> whether that was a condemnation or a recommendation -- I can imagine -> some Romans would enjoy walking around with fish guts in their hair -> all day. They'd smell almost half as bad as Thais: -> -> Tam male Thais olet quam non fullonis avari -> testa vetus, media sed modo fracta via, -> non ab amore recens hircus, non ora leonis, -> non detracta cani Transtiberina cutis, -> pullus abortivo nec cum putrescit in ovo, -> amphora corrupto nec vitiata garo. -> Virus ut hoc alio fallax permutet odore, -> deposita quotiens balnea veste petit, -> psilothro viret aut acida latet oblita creta -> aut tegitur pingui terque quaterque faba. -> Cum bene se tutam per fraudes mille putavit, -> omnia cum fecit, Thaida Thais olet. "Thais smells worse than a penny-pinching fuller's broken jar [of old urine] in the street, worse than a goat that just made love, worse than the mouth of a lion, worse than a dog pelt being tanned across the Tiber [the tanneries were kept across the river in the smelly industrial district], an aborted chicken rotting in an egg, a jug contaminated by moldy garum. She tries to change her odor: Whenever she undresses for a bath she's covered with depilatory, talc, vinegar, and three of four coats of mashed fava beans. She thinks everything's perfect after these thousand tricks, but when all is done, Thais still smells Thais-tacular." I suspect having a primitive version of a Taco Bell side dish packed into her pores is one of the reasons Thais had B.O. I don't know whether she was a real person or if Martial was just picking random names to insult. (The people he hates tend to have Greek names.) A fuller was someone who cleaned/toughened/dyed wool, and urine was part of the process. You have to admire the Roman fullers' business model of setting up public piss-pots so that they could sell customers a service which involved using the costumers' own urine. "Pee here, for free! Then pay us to soak your clothes in your own pee!" Hopefully nobody continues that form of business, especially at Taco Bell. > > That claim is > > given twice in the "Cinefex" article on "The Core", so I'm revising my > > odds on whether "The Core" (which looks to be a super-tarded tupidfest) > > is or is not sillier than "Deep Core" (which has Wil Wheaton.) > > > > I think I need to rent both movies (once I can find a store that can > > rent or sell me "Deep Core" -- it doesn't seem to be in any of the > > stores around here) > > have you tried netflix? I've been considering signing up with them, > since they apparently have many obscure movies. it's also like the > TiVo of mail-order video rentals. Hey, no way am I ever renting anything through the Postal Service. I've been a Book-Of-The-Month Club dupe once in my life, and once was enough. Also, I'd keep making the mistake of throwing bad movies in a trash can instead of a mailbox after watching them. I have a real TiVo, so all I have to do is wait for some channel to become bankrupt enough to have to show "Deep Core", and my TiVo will force me to watch it, whether or not I want to. Except that one of the four disk drives in my TiVos is getting sick, so it's possible that I'll get half of "Deep Core" followed by a system meltdown and a fire that will destroy the entire apartment building, hopefully including the damn laundry room. > > and closely scrutinize them to see which one is the least plausible > > depiction of a completely realistic journey through boiling rock in > > a submarine with a power drill in its nose, then I would use a power > > drill to drill a hole to the core of the Earth and drop both movies > > in to see which one causes the Earth to explode, unless the seaQuest > > can stop me, because I understand that it's fallen through the Earth's > > mantle _again_. Damn that Roy Scheider and his inability to keep his > > submarine in the ocean! > > didn't the glassbottom submarine go to the earth's core, too? they > couldn't seem to keep that submarine in the ocean, either. always > having to fight off space aliens and toy dolls. come to think of it, > the man from atlantis kept having to fight aliens as well. what is > it about the ocean and aliens? The glass-fronted SeaView from Irwin Allen's "Journey To The Bottom Of The Sea" is allowed to fight a different guest star from outer space and/or Hell every week, because that show isn't a serious educational program like the scientifically-accurate "seaQuest DSV", which always ended with an embarrassed-looking Dr. Bob Ballard explaining to the camera precisely how true all of the science on the show was. ("Although scientists have not yet defeated Satan at the bottom of the ocean, with continued oceanic research someday we might. Join us next week for another highly plausible adventure on 'seaQuest DSV'.") The difference between "The Core" and "Deep Core" seems to be similar (although I haven't seen either movie) -- both are dopey bozofests about wacky adventures inside the molten core of the Earth, but "The Core" was made by people who were convinced they were making the most serious piece of realism since "2001" (the director tended to get really irate in interviews when he kept insisting the entire movie was 100% scientifically accurate, and he also seems to have convinced the actors of this, as they kept going on talk shows trying to explain to incredulous hosts that the Earth's core really could cause deadly beams of space light to slice the Golden Gate Bridge in half) while "Deep Core" doesn't have that air of pretentious stupidity around it, just good honest action-movie stupidity. "Deep Core" was made by people who were trying to make a movie really fast while "The Core" was made by people who thought they were doing important work in the field of exploding-planet research. As far as "The Man From Atlantis", remember that "seaQuest" also featured a guy with gills in his armpits so that he could swim like a fish. Kevin Costner also played on in "Waterworld", but let's leave him out of this because we're only discussing things even more ridiculous than "Waterworld". The episode of "seaQuest" where Roy Scheider's submarine fell through the Earth's crust (and dialogue made it clear that eventually the submarine fell all the way beneath the _mantle_) was a pretty typical second-season "seaQuest" episode, in that it involved the submarine being chased around underground by giant worms that fired laser beams from their heads. That was a few weeks before Mark Hamill came in from outer space and abducted the submarine to fight a water on an all-underwater planet that had no submarines of its own, and then the seaQuest was destroyed and everyone was killed, but then ten years later the aliens revived them in whatever spot on Earth where their happiest memory was, so Commander Ford woke up in the shower, just like the guy who played "The Man From Atlantis" did on "Dallas" after the writers realized that TV shows don't need to make any sense. Sadly, "seaQuest" was such a laughing-stock that the network only renewed it twice (probably only keeping it on the air in order to suck up to its creator, Steven Spielberg.) If NBC's "seaQuest" had remained on the air for a fourth season (after its "seaQuest DSV", "seaQuest", and "seaQuest 2032" phases) I'm sure they would have done an episode where the seaQuest travelled back in time to ancient Rome to keep the Romans from stealing all the urine from future Taco Bell restrooms. After all, the _did_ do one where Neptune threw his giant trident at the submarine. Oh, and there was that one about the pushme-pullyu squid that caused the "seaQuest" crew to hoard its glowing poop (which was referred to endlessly as "fish poop" because the extent of Dr. Bob Ballard's scientific advising didn't even cover explaining to them that squids are not fish.) Why do I have to keep reminding you people of these details? You people aren't as familiar with everything that was wrong with "seaQuest" as you should be. You probably don't even remember that the "fish poop" episode had a scene where special guest star Yaphet Kotto said to Roy Scheider, "Feel my buttocks!" I am not making up _anything_ about "seaQuest". -- K. Still, at least I didn't have to pay to watch it by mail. P.S. A warning to anyone who watches movies with me in the next few weeks: I just got a tape of an extremely rare and extremely, extremely, extremely bad movie. It's based on a series of trading cards and stars Anthony Newley and a bunch of midgets dressed as diseased babies. I suspect it will make "Baby Geniuses" seem cute.