Links! But first, apparently Kristen Stewart blinks!
Hokey-dokey then….
:: It’s not that I hate the others; not even the prequels. They’re fine for what they are. It’s just that as the Star Wars universe expands, the impact of that first film diminishes. I don’t love them like I love that first movie. In fact, I’ve grown to think of them as non-canonical. I wish I’d known I had that option when I was 13 and rebelling against the idea that Darth Vader is Luke’s dad. I still think that’s a bogus story development. (Interesting take! Personally, Vader being Luke’s father is my favorite story development in the entire saga.)
:: This was the first time a private company did what has previously been the sole province of national governments: they designed, built, and successfully demonstrated both a booster rocket and a functioning, useful spacecraft. Yes, NASA provided some seed money and the parameters to follow, but SpaceX, and in particular the company’s founder Elon Musk, essentially did this on their own. And while there are several other private companies aiming for the same goal, SpaceX got there first. A plucky little company comprising fewer than 2,000 employees, mostly enthusiastic young people from what I can see, has brought us into the age of commercial space travel. It’s a great story. (It is a great story, and one I’m glad to see unfolding. I do hope for some caution against reading this development as another Grand Triumph of the Market Where Government Failed, because without a government to do the blunt-force to get there first, the market never would have gone there at all. Still, it’s time for governments to get out of Low-Earth Orbit and start moving out farther, and let the Market follow as it will.)
:: There are what? 7 billion people in the world now? Statistically speaking, there has to be at least one person in the world who hates puppies, Harry Potter, chocolate, AND bacon. *shudders* (This person must be found. And eliminated. The existence of such a person threatens everything that is good about the human species! New blog to me, btw…by Beth Revis, author of a SF book for teens called Across the Universe, which I just started reading. The first 40 pages are pretty good…but I’m keenly interested in the market for which this book is written, because it just might be the target market for Princesses In SPACE!!! (not the actual title).)
:: Ever wondered how big the fictional continents of Westeros and Essos are compared to the real-life USA and UK? (I was actually planning to figure this out for myself, given that in A Dance with Dragons, GRRM provides a specific 300-mile distance between two points on the Westeros map, but now I see I don’t have to. Huzzah! Basically, while Westeros is significantly skinnier than the continental USA, a journey from the Wall to the southern coast of Dorne would be roughly equivalent to going from San Francisco to Boston.)
:: Instead, as we’ve seen so often before, we recognize that there seem to be no boundaries as to what people seem to have been given permission online. (These last two cover similar ground. I’ll be interested to see what Presidential campaigns are like in, say, fifteen or twenty years, so that candidates have to answer for their blogs and whatnot. It’ll be interesting to see some person who ran a rabid war-blog in 2003 running for office.)
:: So I’m giving us credit for helping out Santana by not having been there. (Heh. Finally getting that first no-hitter…maybe I just don’t get it because I’m a Pirates fan and they’ve got a few no-hitters, but it strikes me as odd that such an event could be as big a monkey on the back of a franchise as the commentary has indicated since Johan Santana threw the first no-hitter in Mets history the other night. I mean, a no-hitter is awesome and all, but…well, would you trade a World Series win for a no-hitter in some regular season? I sure wouldn’t. The Mets have two World Series wins to their credit. Was a no-hitter that big a thing? Or was it just that it became a big thing once the game reached, say, the seventh inning and Mets fans all over realized what might be happening?)
More next week!
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Thanks for the link, J, and the links – always a fun collection. As a life long Mets fan, the reason I'm happiest about Johan's no hitter is that now I never havevto hear another announcer talk about how the Mets have never had a no hitter. I don't know any fan that really cared. It was more of a curiosity. The Mets have had some great pitchers – Seaver, Matlack, Gooden, Cone, Martinez – and while a lot of mediocrities and even bad pitchers have thrown no nos it seems just plain odd that none of those guys managed it while with the Mets. I think what made this so much fun for us though isn't that we'd been waiting for it, it's that we weren't. It came as a wonderful surprise. It was made more fun by its coming during the 50th anniversary of the team and in a season when the team's doing way better than they were supposed to *and* it was thrown by a great pitcher in what we're all rooting is his comeback year.
also re the Mets – some called it the curse of Nolan Ryan, who had SEVEN after he was traded. so for Mets fans, and I consider myself only a mild one, this is the Red Sox breaking the curse of the Bambino (1920-2004)
also the Mets had seemingly a gazillion one-hitters, no-nos going into the latter innings