“Any of you guys ever go to Sunday School?”
I guess the Nazis, Indy and Marion getting Hemorrhoids would not have been the stunning conclusion everyone was hoping for. 1 Samuel 5-6
If Preparation H can combat your Wonder Weapon it ain’t that Wonderful.
Actually I read that one of the reasons Gandalf helped the dwarves was to get rid of Smaug in case he ever was corrupted by Sauron
If I am parsing this sentence correctly- Smaug was already evil. He keeps all that treasure because he wants it. He doesn’t want to use all that wealth to buy anything. He killed who knows how many dwarves in order to steal their treasure. When he mistakes Bilbo words “barrel rider” for a confession that he is from Laketown, Smaug flies out to destroy Laketown and kill everybody living there.
While it is interesting to ask what the Ring would have done to Smaug, he was already corrupt.
I did, but I kept my eyes shut the entire time. Just in case.
Yeah, Gandalf wasn’t worried about corruption, but about an alliance. The draconic status quo wasn’t all that bad, on a global scale: You’ve got one dragon left, and he mostly stays near his hoard, and the worst that happens is occasionally some cattle or maybe a few humans in the area get eaten. But if Sauron promised Smaug even greater treasure in exchange for his help in conquest, you could end up with Smaug burninating the countryside across all of Middle Earth.
“Buy anything,” Trying to imagine Smaug showing up at the town market, shopping for some sheep or cattle to roast for dinner. Perhaps with a little coin purse around his neck.
Nitpick Time: Toth was the melted face, Belloq sploded.
Ah, thanks. Been a long time since I saw the movie, and since Belloq had been referenced a few times upthread, I was assuming he was the one who had lost face.
That’s the contradiction baked into pretty much all Christian anti-Semitism, isn’t it? They’ve got a holy book whose first half is about how God doesn’t like it when people fuck with the Jews, and whose second half is about how God incarnated as a Jewish guy to tell people he doesn’t like it when they fuck with anyone, and there’s centuries worth of Christians who take all that and decide, “God totally wants us to fuck with the Jews.”
You might like this fanfiction, which was written in response to an adaptation of the story that was done on the 1980s version of The Twilight Zone. This rewrite of the story–especially in the ending with the lawyer outlining Barton’s case–brings up many of the criticisms expressed in this thread, as well as by some pretty respected SF authors: the fact that this vital mission is designed with absolutely no margin for error, the lack of a pre-flight check, or a locked door, or even a big old sign on the door saying, “STOWAWAYS WILL BE JETTISONED. NO EXCEPTIONS.”
Of course, I understand the point of the story…that physics doesn’t care about innocent mistakes. But it seems that even if the cold equations of pure science doomed poor Marilyn, a good deal of purely human–and unnecessary–error got her in that situation in the first place. And if even the author was coming up with ways to save the girl…well, maybe there ought to have been another way to make the point. Even if there weren’t, having Barton acknowledge the human error that helped cause this might have alleviated these criticisms a bit. For example, he could have mused angrily, “I never even thought about it until now, but why the HELL wasn’t there a warning sign on that door?”
I figured it contained Gabriel, given what I’ve heard about his title.
Yeah, it’s basically like someone telling a story about the time interval after a gun has been fired and before the bullet hits the target, about how it’s not possible to save the target because of the cold equations of ballistics. Maybe it’s not possible to save them now, but what led up to that point?
The whole “enemies steal the Ark” plot was not invented by George Lucas; e.g. in the Book of Samuel the Philistines defeat the Israelis, capture the Ark, and place it in their temple. In that book it did not really help them: a bunch of people got haemorrhoids or colorectal cancer or whatever.
I don’t remember the show, but it was some 70s or 80s crime show where detectives used their wits, and doggedness to solve crimes, and didn’t rely on “the lab” so much.
Anyway, they were trying to figure out what was wrong with some child who seemed very withdrawn and was potentially a witness to something, and they were all speculating that he had been traumatized by what they were also speculating he witnessed, and wasn’t speaking due to the trauma over what they thought he’d witnessed (in a beautiful example of “question begging”).
Finally, about 40 minutes into the show, someone hits upon the idea that he might be Deaf (duh), and they have a long conversation about how to communicate with him, until one goes off to a bookstore to get a book on “sign language.”
There’s a painful scene where they copy “signs” from the book.
At no point does anyone think of getting a Deaf adult, or even an interpreter to come and talk to him.
Which, to me, is very similar to “Why do so many anti-Semites like Jesus.”
I’ve heard of that episode (though I thought it was a medical drama).
It’s probably plot #82, right after “Getting caught in a meat-locker,” and “Getting your first period, and only dad is home.”
Heh. Good point.
Can the kid read?