It makes sense within the context of the story. Like they’re going to blame the man?
“Three chances” didn’t mean three times having sex with the same man, though. Each “chance” was a period of two years, after which the handmaiden would be assigned to a different man. And handmaidens who couldn’t bring a healthy child to term in six years weren’t banished to the wasteland for that reason alone, it was because only women considered criminals under the new regime could become handmaidens in the first place. Male criminals and those female criminals who weren’t young and fertile were sent directly to the wasteland.
This still doesn’t seem like a great arrangement of course, but it’s supposed to be a dystopia.
ETA:
IIRC, it’s actually stated in the novel that the new regime doesn’t believe that male infertility is even possible.
Handmaids were fertile women who were not eligible to become Wives. The narrator had an affair with a married man, who later divorced his first wife and then married her. She had a child with this man, which proved that she was capable of conceiving and bearing a live child. So, on the one hand, she was considered to be an immoral sinner, but on the other hand, she was a valuable resource. In fact, she was tattooed to show that she was the property of the state/country of Gilead. And make no mistake, she WAS property, not considered to be fully human. She didn’t even have a permanent name, she was called Offred, Fred being the first name of her current assignment.
Women were offered a choice to be Handmaids, but their choices were something on the order of “Become a Handmaid, or you get to clean up hazardous waste without protection”, so neither choice was really all that thrilling. There was a third option that wasn’t talked about…the state of Gilead had brothels, and a young attractive woman could work in those brothels. The brothels were for hospitality to men of other nations, and as perks for men who were highly placed in Gilead.
Young women of good moral character were considered proper Wife material, and were also assumed to be fertile, though if they never managed to get pregnant, their husband would be assigned Handmaids if they reached a high enough rank.
The official doctrine was indeed that men were always fertile, and that a woman could control her fertility to at least some degree by being pious and obedient. Unofficially, both Offred’s doctor and Fred’s wife acknowledged that there was a good chance that good old Fred was shooting blanks. The doctor offered his services as a stud, and Fred’s wife suggested a liaison with the chauffeur/assistant. Both of these people offered this solution to Offred’s problem, but both were mostly thinking of the benefit to themselves, not to Offred.
Basically, the rulers of Gilead only wanted certain men to reproduce, but they wanted all the fertile women to be popping out babies on a regular basis. The privilege of marriage was not granted to every male, and a fertile woman did not have much of a choice as to whether or not she wanted to have babies. Either she was married off, or she was a Handmaid, or if she rebelled and they couldn’t break her, she was put in a brothel or put in a work gang.
Handmaids were examined monthly by doctors, to determine whether they were ovulating or nearly ovulating, and there was a big ceremony every month with the whole household participating, with a bit of TV watching (a rare treat), a Bible reading, and then the Commander, the Wife, and the Handmaid went to have a fertilization ritual. And it was a ritual, with prescribed positions for everyone.
On 21 Jump Street, Officer Anthony “Mac” McCann introduced himseld by saying he grew up in “mun-AU-chee”, New Jersey.
If you grew up in, or if anyone on the entire TV production crew of the show had bothered to call the Borough Hall of, Moonachie, New Jersey, they would have known it’s pronouced “MOON-au-kee.”
I’d probably make the same mistake. My town’s name is Wenatchee, pronounced Weh-NAT-chee.
Years ago there was some Washington state based bank chain whose radio marketing campaign revolved around emphasizing that they were a local bank. The commercials featured a bunch of “big national bank” executives holding meetings to discuss ways to pass themselves off as “local”. One ad had them all hilariously practicing how to properly pronounce the names of various Washington cities., like “Puyallup” (correct: pyoo-AL-lup) and “Sequim” (correct: Skwim). Native American names are fun!
It’s also amusing listening to East Coast sportscasters pronounce “Oregon”.
Padding. Gets author’s word count up, and the readers eat it up because it’s a fast, super-easy read.
That would turn me off though.
See, if it had been thr33, that would almost have been clever. Almost.
[QUOTE=AtomicDog]
It’s called “tactile telekinesis.”
[/QUOTE]
I have that too, except I call it “picking stuff up”. I also have vocal telepathy, it’s pretty neat.
How do you get that to work? Everything I try to pick up breaks.
I think it was Mickey Spillane who was asked why his detectives always took six shots to hit a bad guy. His answer was something like, “Hey, I get paid by the word. Every time Mike Hammer’s gun goes ‘bang’ it’s three cents to me. If you think I’m going to let him out of a scrape with fifteen cents’ worth of unused ammo, you’re crazy.”
'Twas I–and it was a Yank in a redneck bar asking for a “packet” of cigarettes.
That book also had a typo in the secret code–which as proofreader of the paperback, I pointed out, though it wasn’t fixed until the edition after that, which also fell to me. (And I figured it out looong before the fictional team of experts!)
I noticed a similar glitch in Hearts in Atlantis, where the character is a 60s college student who plays Phil Ochs’s “'I Ain’t Marching Any More” album incessantly. Later, he wonderingly notices the trident-in-a-circle symbol people are wearing. But have a look at that record sleeve:
http://www.silverdisc.com/images/70/725543971616.jpg
Sorry, I’m super-late to this thread, but isn’t it quite possible that the scriptwriters put that “mistake” in there as an in-joke?
I think he meant in the book. Don’t remember that in the movie. Crichton went to Harvard.
How else would an American refer to a pack of cigarettes, if not as “a pack of cigarettes”?
One reviewer back at the time pretty much panned Superman the Movie for a number of reasons. Many of them were about departing from the writing and even art elements of the comics. He said that the tall, elegant bulidings on Krypton shown going back to the '50’s were the way to go.
He noted that Lois seemed to fly on her own power whenever Superman was in contact, but dropped like a stone as soon as the contact was broken. He speculated, although reluctantly, that perhaps Superman could negate inertia at will with his power of flight. And then went on to muse that perhaps that was the reason Lois didn’t break every bone in her body when he caught her.
(I think it was Comic Journal.)
There was a TV program about half a dozen years back with scientists commenting on the science, or lack thereof, in modern movies. One claimed that “Superman wouldn’t have been doing her any favor…” in the initial rescue scene. Perhaps he hadn’t heard of the theory of extended inertial fields.
You are right, though, because even Spiderman, in the pre-reboot trilogy, does the same thing with MJ. Since Spidey has no anti-gravity flight power, there is nothing to extend to people he carries and catches. Saving her a few feet (inches) from the ground, while exciting visually, makes no sense. And the scene could have been handled differently, with enough time to gradually brake her speed, starting fairly far from the ground.
If you are also thinking of Batman, I have no recollection, but it woudn’t surprise me.
In the comics, as I understand it (I wasn’t reading comic books at the time), when Gwen Stacy got tossed off a bridge and Spider-Man caught her by shooting a web line at her, Peter later realized that he may have killed her just as dead as she’d have been had she hit the ground. That is, he realized her neck probably snapped when he stopped her fall.
After that incident, he switched up his technique and started catching falling people in web nets instead of trying to snag them with a web line.
So the writers were actually thinking about that kind of thing.
That’s pretty awesome! I always wonder about the steep learning curve a superhero must deal with.
At least the X-men have the Danger Room to train in. What about Batman? How does he evaluate the strength of the masonry he’s swinging his grappling hooks from on the fly like that? I think in the 1989 Batman movie, he did ask Vikki Vail how much she weighed before using his equipment with her. That was pretty cool.
He did; she answers him (I think she says 115 lbs). After escaping to safety, he tells her that she weighs more than what she’d said.
In the film Skin Game Lou Gosset’s character looks up at the night sky and makes a comment about observing Pluto. The film is set in 1857. Pluto was discovered in 1930, and is not visible to the naked eye.
In an episode of Frasier where Daphne’s mother visits from England, the mother makes a comment about dying and being placed in her casket. That is a purely American usage. An English woman would call it a coffin.