Well, there apparently is now a drug called Quietus.
Sadly, it doesn’t appear to do what the stuff in Children of Men did.
He used it on one of his Foundation stories, too, and mentioned that the glowinng numbers were red. He read that passage in a lectire I went to i the 1970s. “You see,” he said, “I even got the color right!” Of course, those red LEDs ate up power pretty quick, and in a couple of years pocket calculators switched to liquid crystal displays with black figures. But he had been right, for a little while…
In 1992 musician/comedian Heywood Banks put out an album called Treated and Released. The fifth song on the album is called If I had a Bulldozer. The song describes how everyone would treat him with respect if he had a bulldozer, else he would invoke some “justice” with it. The chorus goes, “If I had a diesel rig, With a big old blade, Treads just like a tank, I would have it made, Courtesy would reign, Arguments would cease, 'Cause everyone would know I’d squash them like a cheeeeeeeese!!!”
It’s one of my favorite songs by Heywood, BTW. 
In 2004 a guy named Marvin Heemeyer virtually destroyed the little town of Granby, Colorado with - you guessed it - a bulldozer. The bulldozer had treads “just like a tank” (see Heywood’s lyrics above). Heemeyer spent 18 months transforming the bulldozer into a tank by welding many layers of steel around it:
The similarities between Heemeyer’s act and Heywood’s song are eerie…
On the other hand, Asimov’s pocket calculator appears to have been an analog device, not digital, given that Selden enters input by adjusting dials.
I simply MUST get myself a copy of Nanny Ogg’s cookbook.
You are evil. I’m torn between correcting that and avoiding looking like I was wooshed for missing the joke. Well played, dhkendall.
Cyberdyne, which was the company that created the terminators in the movie, inspired a robotics company to take the same name. Their product is also known as HAL(except its for Hybrid Assisted Limb instead of Heuristically programmed ALgorithmic Computer).
Not quite a reference, but ‘Katrina and the Waves’ are never going to be listened to without a really strong wince, ever again.
For some reason I was thinking this morning about how when celebrities appear on late night talk shows or host SNL, it’s only because they are plugging their latest movie/CD/book/whatever. Then I remembered a sketch (or series of sketches) that Jon Lovitz used to do on SNL where he hosted a talk show that was essentially just an outlet for someone to come on the show and “plug away” with whatever project they currently had going on.
There are now Cheers bars in places like Logan airport and Quincy Marketplace in Boston. Yeah, I know that TV’s Cheers is supposed to be based on the real-life Bull and Finch pub on Beacon Street near Beacon Hill, but if you’ve ever been there you realize how thin the resemblance is – the Bull and Finch is incredibly tiny and congested (more so, now that the series made it famous), and doesn’t lookor feel at all like the TV set. The ones at the airport and Quincy Market are more spacious and do more resemble the one on TV. Even though (unlike the Bull and Finch) neither is downstairs.
I don’t get it.
Ah, I see. Thanks.
On the other grasping appendage, in an earlier season of SNL, host Martin Mull based his entire monologue out of the idea that he didn’t have any new record, book or movie to plug. It was very funny. Lovitz’s idea made a good recurring sketch.
It’s possible that I missed a reference to it, but I’m surprised that, in over 100 posts, and a number of them mentioning Asimov and his Robot stories, that no one’s mentioned U.S. Robotics.
On an episode of Laugh In a “future” newscaster broadcasting from the 1980s referred to “President Ronald Reagan” and got a laugh. (I think the joke was about “President Ronald Reagan has decided not to seek the governor’s office this term…”- not sure what the joke was: perhaps Reagan was being coy or equivocal about seeking re-election as California governor at the time.)
The 1993 movie Demolition Man mentioned the Arnold Schwarzenegger Presidential Library.
Ten years later he was elected Governor …
I thought it was “Because you’ll believe anything.” One of us should check. I’d do it myself, but I’ve fallen and can’t reach my beer.
.
No fair changing the name. To me, they’re still the Mighty Ducks.*
*Because it was a stupid idea in the first place, and for doing it in the first place, they deserve to be stuck with the name.