But I think the joke was about the ubiquity of the Prefect - Ford had picked what he thought was the equivalent of the name “John Smith” because of how many Prefects were on the road (which wouldn’t work if the car was widely known as a lemon that therefore wouldn’t have become that common on the road).
Tom Baker’s Doctor wasn’t really associated with a car: his Earthbound predecessor, played by Jon Pertwee, famously drove Bessie, an Edwardian roadster, in a number of stories, although Tom Baker did briefly use Bessie in his first story, Robot. It wasn’t a Stutz Bearcat either, however, although there are some minor resemblances: it was an early 70s fibreglass bodykit built on - and this I didn’t know - a Ford Prefect chassis.
- Red Dragon* also joins phonetically in the middle. Maybe Thomas Harris has a thing for that. Of it could be an amazing coincidence.
Kinda makes you wonder what manner of unnatural abomination you’d find on Aisle 34…
Cthulu Flakes
Yog-Sothoth pre-packaged gravy mix
Diet Tab
In the latest BBC Radio installment of the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, they have Arthur saying, “Ford! Focus!” which amused me no end. (I think the Ford Focus was sold in most English-speaking markets, so a more accessible reference than the Ford Prefect.)
Rapper’s Delight by Sugarhill Gang contains the line “Everybody go: Hotel, motel, holiday inn”. The last entry was probably just meant to fill up space. But now I realize that these days, Holiday Inns are sort of in between hotels and motels, occupying a third category, since they have built-in restaurants but are usually set up for easy parking (although some are probably built up like traditional hotels.) When they were originally created and for decades afterward they indeed were, along with Howard Johnson’s which also had an onsite restaurant, the epitome of the franchise motel, but these days it is getting harder to find a motel with a restaurant, and even some hotels do not have one.
In the place of Howard Johnson, I’d offer Hilton Garden Inn as the new middle ground between a hotel and motel, since they have a drinks lounge as standard, and the lobby is roomily set up like a hotel, as opposed to some other chains that sometimes have lounges or restaurants on the premises but are sometimes not in the same building and have smaller lobbies. But they usually don’t have a lot of space for conferences and do not have room service or a non-breakfast full restaurant, so I don’t count them as a full hotel.
George Lucas built Star Wars around his main character Luke Skywalker.
Luke S.
Lucas.
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I was listening to a Star Trek podcast a while ago, and they were talking about the episode All Our Yesterdays. That’s the one where Kirk, Spock, and McCoy beam down to a planet that’s about to be destroyed, so the people are escaping by going back to various eras of the planet’s history. It occurred to me that they’d have to neuter people going back so that they couldn’t have any children. Otherwise they’d have two children, four grandchildren, eight great-grandchildren, etc., leading to God knows how many when the planet is ready to do the big kablooey. Every person they sent back in time would make the problem worse instead of better.
which Star Trek podcast would this be, please?
Maybe that was part of the “adjustment” that Mr. Atoz was talking about.
It’s called “Mission Log”. Rod Roddenberry is the executive producer, so they have support from the Roddenberry estate. Most of the shows are recaps of individual episodes. Be warned, they do each episode, in order, and they’ve already finished TOS and NextGen, so there’s massive archive if you get hooked. They’ve also done episodes with some cast members and writers, too.
http://www.missionlogpodcast.com/ or wherever you get your podcasts.
Yeah, I thought of that, and I can’t really blame the writers for not working that into the show, but it seems like one of those logical loopholes that isn’t a problem until you start thinking about it a bit. Even if it is 50 years later.
Well, unless their being in the past is already part of history in the first place.
Hawaii Five O --the numbers refer to Hawaii being the fiftieth state.
Doesn’t work. Thats similar to the “Why arnt we kneedeep in flies conundrum”
It would depend on the society, wouldn’t it?
If I understand the “why aren’t we knee deep in flies” thing, flies reproduce like crazy, but they also get eaten like crazy. They’ve reached an equilibrium in their environment. It may not be a steady-state (populations may rise and fall as the populations that prey on them rise and fall), but there’s no long-term growth trend. If you sent today’s generation of flies back into the past, the critters back then that ate flies would be very well fed.
That’s not the case with humans. At least, it hasn’t been on Earth, so far. The number of humans has been pretty steadily increasing. Take today’s humans and send them into our past and you’re just feeding that increase. All you’d do is force the population to grow until it hit whatever our naturally-constrained limit is. We couldn’t grow enough food, or disease outbreaks would be more common; whatever it is that naturally keeps us in check. Then our lives become like the flies’; nasty, brutish, and short.
Maybe. It certainly puts a disturbing spin on the “kneedeep in flies” conundrum, which is solved by the fact that in each generation of flies the individual flies are subject to fly-killing factors that cause the actual fly population to maintain a certain equilibrium.
In the case of sending people back, there’s always the potential for even neutered people to disrupt the reproductive results that their actual histories achieved. For instance: Alexander Hamilton was survived by several of his own offspring, and has a significant number of living descendants today. But were I to travel back to 1777 and Elizabeth Schuyler were to become smitten with me and my dashing good looks, she might have been a married woman in 1778 when Alexander came to dine with the Schuylers. With no Hamilton-Schuyler pairing, none of those descendants happen.
Just to forestall any objections about likelihood of Philip Schuyler forbidding the marriage of a younger daughter while her older sister remained unmarried, I have just conjured an equally dashing twin brother, who sweeps Angelica off her feet.
Geekiest. Simulpost. Ever.
Agreed.
To those of us who remember the original series that started in the late 1960s, that was made exceptionally clear. But I’ve noticed in recent years that a lot of people not only didn’t realize it but openly scoff that it could mean any such thing. The mind boggles.