Obvious things about a creative work you realize after the millionth time (OPEN SPOILERS POSSIBLE)

Cafe Society
6467

I know, right?

Push propulsion requires serious structural strength and rigidity to work. It’s very hard to push a rope.

Cargo trucks put the cargo behind the pilot. Push is on the ground in front of the cargo.

Visibility seems like crap.

But again, magic spacecraft/ controlled gravity fields mean a lot is doable. Still, the pilots have a hard time seeing where they are going.

I’m not aware that there was an extensive design concept, but I could be wrong. But my impression is that all the detailed schematics and stuff that came along after was fan generated afterwards.

But I disagree about the size. The movie version is pretty big. My observation as a child was that the action figure toy was dramatically undersized. The quickest giveaways are that the cockpit is out of proportion and the legs and hatch are too small.

That’s not in evidence. We never see the cargo hold. What we see are secret compartments for smuggling. Of course they are small. Big smuggling compartments become discoverable by missing volume.

There is a lot we don’t see: cargo hold, crew living quarters, etc.

I interpret the Falcon not as a large volume freighter, but a small fast courier type freighter. That’s why it is atmosphere compatible and lands on the ground. A true large volume space hauler would be much larger. He big is the Space Destroyer? Shouldn’t there be other vehicles in that class?

Which actually spawns a different question. We see Corellian frigates, and they are nowhere near the size of the Star Destroyers. Maybe the Rebellion was constrained by trying to stay hidden and so everything they had needed to be landable for concealment. Or at least the larger the ships, the harder to hide or disguise.

Because it made filming easier. I mean, because Lucas wanted to emulate WWII antiaircraft guns. I mean…

The main guns point vertical to the ship. Yes, they pivot forward and aft, but the main orientation is out from the ship, up/ down. Standing/ hanging in a harness down might be okay, but up would be a bitch.

Strapped to the chair with zero-g would work, but see my afore mentioned director’s preference.

6468

Either that, or the Mississippi.

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In anticipation of getting the Super Deluxe Edition of Deep Purple’s Made In Japan, I’ve been listening to the teasers cuts of Steven Wilson’s remix on youtube (here’s “Highway Star”)

Sounds great, but wait a minute…why is Ritchie coming out of the left channel and Jon on the right? That’s opposite of the way they stood on stage from the audience perspective.

Well, it turns out that’s the way it was on the original album. Never noticed it before now–and it doesn’t affect my enjoyment of the album. But I’m wondering how I didn’t notice after almost 50 years of owning the album and looking at the photo on the cover.

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I wouldn’t say I’ve heard it that many times, but Tove Lo’s Talking Body was certainly in frequent rotation when it came out in 2015. I never paid that much attention but I heard it enough to claim “i knew it”. It was on this very board where someone made reference to it as particularly vulgar (maybe they used a different term, but the meaning is the same). As many times as I’d heard it I really didn’t understand what the big deal was. Today it popped up on my Spotify song list and I finally realized that she sings “If you treat me right, we fuck for life”. Ohhh, now I get it. I find it more lazy / lowbrow than vulgar. Personally, though I can let the expletive fly, I almost never use it in the context of sex. As far as I can remember, the line was never censored when it came on the radio. Maybe the censors thought, as I did, that she’s singing "we fit for life’.

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This site has many sf ships to scale. The Falcon is on the 10x page, scroll down the Star Wars column. At 26.7 meters she’s considerably smaller than movie!Serenity at the top of the page.

On the right side of the 1x page is Nostromo from Alien, definitely a tug and considerably larger at 243.8 meters.

6472

I’ve been bothered about that for years! For a time I was wondering if they mirrored the photos for artistic reasons or something like that. Same thing happens with the On Stage live album of Rainbow and as I’ve seen them live with Ritchie Blackmore on the right of the stage I know it’s not that they’ve mirrored the photos on the cover. For me, it’s still a distraction.
Once I was at a classical concert, and we got to sit behind the orchestra. Therefore, the violins were for me on the right side etc. I could not enjoy that concert at all, I kept thinking this sound image is wrong, wrong, wrong!

6473

Not only that, but once Luke and Han climb into the gun turrets, the attacking TIE fighters reorient themselves to being right-side-up as seen from the turrets.

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If a TIE fighter were upside down, could you even tell the difference?

6475

Ooh, good question.

Given a long enough look, yes. The hatch is on the top, and the lasers (or whatever the shooty bits are called) are under the windshield.

Regardless, during the attack on the MF, the fighters are oriented in a plane perpendicular to the Falcon. Perhaps the only time when multiple space ships aren’t oriented to the same right-side-up.

6476

I didn’t watch anything in particular but I just learned that Ariel Winter, who played Alex on Modern Family, and Jimmy Workman, who played Pugsley in the 1991 Addams Family movie are siblings.

6477

I’m a big fan of the mystery series Inspector Lewis. I’ve watched every episode multiple times and some of my favorite episodes I’ve watched maybe a dozen times. Last night I watched S4 Ep4 “Falling Darkness.” There’s a decent summary at that link.

It takes place on Halloween, which doesn’t have anything to do with the plot, but adds to the atmosphere. Some college kids who live in a big Victorian house think they have a ghost, so they invite a medium to come and see if she can clear out the ghost. She says the downstairs is okay, but when she goes into an upstairs bedroom, she picks up vibes that tell her Something Bad Happened There in the Past. She tells the ghost all is well and that’s that.

The previous bazillion times that I watched this episode, I assumed that the Bad Thing she was talking about was from back in Victorian times and not related to the story. Silly me. Of course it would be related to the story. :woman_facepalming:t4:

The context is that Laura Hobson, series regular and pathologist/medical examiner, lived in that house with two other women and two men in their college days about 20 years previous. In that bedroom, one of the men, Peter Hawkins, raped one of the women, Ligeia Willard, leaving her pregnant. This happened just after the end of their final year, so the other housemates didn’t know about it. This crime, which doesn’t completely come to light until the end of the episode, is revealed as the pivotal event that kicks off the whole story and brings full circle the tragedy that was launched by that rape. Also, Peter so regretted the rape that he killed himself. Which means that the medium did in fact sense an “unquiet ghost” in that room. It’s a pretty tightly-plotted story–most of them are, but this is one of the better ones, which is why I’ve watched it so often.

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On rewatching the Firefly episode “Jaynestown” with my son, who criminally hadn’t yet seen Firefly, I realized the relationship between the shepherd’s bible being full of inconsistencies and scientific impossibilities and Jayne being the hero of Canton, they are both imperfect but it’s not about them it’s about being symbols of something better that people can use for noble goals.

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Well, you realized that quicker than I did. Of course, I didn’t even specifically remember that the bit with the Bible was from that episode.

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All apologies — this doesn’t quite fit, here — but, back when I was in junior high, my teacher was explaining to the class that he’d been tasked with making a decision and couldn’t figure out which way to to go, and he asked us how we would’ve approached it, and he used a slightly ‘stagey’ voice when explaining to us both the question before him and how he ultimately made the choice, and he had a weird half-smile going as he did so: like some private joke we probably weren’t in on.

And, all these years later, it became obvious to me upon seeing 1776 that he was simply and only quoting the musical, presumably while waiting to see if anyone in the classroom would point out what he was doing.

And, well, no one did, or I wouldn’t be writing this decades later…

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It took several viewings of Dr. Strangelove before I understood that all the men on that plane are going to die. So what’s the difference if Major Kong goes out the way he does? He’d only have a few minutes left anyway.

6482

Here ya go, but last line was clipped.

When did the blur disappear?

“It fixes you.”

6483

Well (nearly) the whole world was going to die. The bomber was rapidly losing fuel but aren’t there ditching/ bailout protocols for that? Do you mean the bomber wouldn’t be able to escape the bomb it dropped?

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Very bottom of the pulldown menu. Thusly.

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Yes. If I understood the dialogue correctly.

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Plot explanation: The bomb was stuck and wouldn’t release (IIRC, the bomb bay doors wouldn’t open). He climbed onto it to fix it. Once he fixed it, the bomb fell with him on it.

Metaphorical explanation: Major Kong on the bomb was just another of several bits of phallic imagery. Dr. Strangelove’s hand sticking up out of his control, for instance.