I vaguely remember a story where someone tried this, and the vampire just glances at the pile and says “6,972” without breaking stride…
Well, the real Vlad was both a Count and a Voivode- which can be translated as “Prince”. (Duke or Warlord are also possible, Duke as in “Dux” is likely closest)
This is absolutely hilarious. I mean, how???
I know, right? I’m going to be merciless on her about this for a long time.
I think I was about 5 Seasons into the Goldbergs when I realized they were Jewish. The. Goldbergs.
Sherlock I ain’t.
You need a warning: Now you can’t unsee it.
Are you sure? I thought it was a play on I, Robot
Maybe you and my wife should get together to watch some tv shows. Everyone else could place bets on who would spot the obvious location/ethnicities first.
No reason it couldn’t be both.
And, of course, the main character of the show is named Adam Goldberg, which is the name of the show’s creator.
I’d just rewatched the movie Margin Call and realized that Kevin Spacey’s dead dog must have been in his car for at least 24 straight hours.
Til today, I thought Giallo was a director…top that!!
The publisher stole the title (which I think can’t be copyrighted anyway) from the Eando Binder book about Adam Link. Asimov questioned it, and the publisher replied “Fuck Eando Binder!”
Of course, all these titles derive ultimately from I, Claudius.
Yes, you’re right (except it was a short story). I had forgotten.
In Star Wars, there’s a scene aboard the Millenium Falcon which had always puzzled me…time index 0:38 (1) TIE Fighter Attack A New Hope 1080p HD - YouTube
Han enters a ladder tube going UP and Luke descends DOWN the ladder.
Moments later, the tube is presented horizontally.
???
I now realize, since the Falcon has artificial gravity, Han can put UP and DOWN wherever it is convenient for him!
I always thought that was a really cool and imaginative detail.
Gravity aboard spaceships is one of those things that makes little logical or scientific sense (save perhaps for 2001’s spinning centrifuge), but is necessary to produce a film here on Earth. Might as well have a little fun with it.
James Gunn gave that version in his Isaac Asimov: The Foundations of Science Fiction.
It’s possible. Marty Greenberg, the publisher, was a volatile, self-centered guy. He also published Gunn’s earliest books so Gunn knew him, although not as well as Asimov, who was part of the same club.
The problem is that no two memories of that era match one another. Asimov gives a much milder account in I, Asimov: A Memoir:
Martin Greenberg of Gnome Press was a glib young man [actually two years older than Asimov] with a mustache, quite charming, as glib young men often are, but, as I found out in the end, not quite reliable.
However, he seemed willing to publish collections of my old stories and that rather glorified him in my eyes. I put together nine of my robot stories – eight that had appeared in ASF [Astounding Science Fiction] and the first one, which I now restored to its original title of “Robbie.” He published it toward the end of 1950 under the name of I, Robot, a name that Martin himself had suggested. I pointed out that there was a well-known short story by that name by Eando Binder, but Martin shrugged that off….
Asimov would almost certainly not used “Fuck Eando Binder” in his family-friendly bio, so that may not be conclusive.
However, Frederik Pohl was his agent, and the one who normally did all the dealings with Greenberg, and in his The Way the Future Was blog, Pohl gave a completely different version.
When I handed the manuscript over to Marty, he said, “I don’t have to read this, I’ve already read them all. I’ll write a contract. But I need a title and there isn’t one on the script.”
He was right. No new title occurred to me, but I’d admired the title on an Eando Binder robot story — “I, Robot,” borrowed from the great Robert Graves novel, I, Claudius — and it wouldn’t matter what we put in the contract, because the title could always be changed and titles aren’t copyrightable anyway. So said the contract, and the Binder title just never got changed.
Pohl would definitely have put in as juicy an anecdote as “Fuck Eando Binder.”
I’ve written the definitive history of Gnome Press to be put up online soon, and I constantly ran into these clashing seemingly authentic recollections from people who were there. Who was right? Usually not Greenberg. I’ve been able to show from objective outside data that Greenberg later handed out the wrong publication history, somehow switching later books in a series with earlier titles, and that false ordering has been reused by everyone for 40 years. Nothing anybody says about sf in the 40s and early 50s is reliable. Even contemporary accounts in fanzines often don’t match up. It’s a historian’s nightmare.
I can imagine. I’m currently reading a bio of Leonard Cohen, and the author will report anecdotes/facts as they are related to her or documented somewhere, but was able to say for some of them “nope, that’s not how that happened.” For example, he couldn’t have decided to include a particular song on an album in Dec 1966 by playing it over the phone for someone, when the album was released in Sept 1966. There were a couple of other myths she’s corrected so far in the book. I like that she’s done it this way. And it shows why a biographer’s job can be fraught.
I saw what you did there. The one time a director took the trouble to chastise me in person was when I quoted the Scottish play. I was a background actor lying in a pool of artificial blood, and during the set up quoted the Lady; “Who would have thought the old man had so much blood in him?” The director didn’t mind small talk during the set ups, but the Scottish play was right out.