Asia's too crowded
Europe's too old
Canada's too cold

Ten continents.>

Reminds me of the History of the Universe in three words, by Iain M. Banks

Chapter 1: Bang!

Chapter 2: sssssssss...

Chapter 3: Crunch.

Dinner Guest: Oh, Mr President, my husband bet me that I wouldn't get three words out of you all evening ...

Cal: You lose.

Another version of the story has the guest saying "Poppa bet me that I ..." etc -- and Coolidge replying with "Poppa wins".

YOu mean like from <Laconia>?

GOOO SPARTANS!!

AROOOO!!!

A pointed turn of phrase, sir.

I see. The difficult questions first, eh?

Um, I'm a science teacher.

Which does not necessarily makes me wise. (See previous posts for irrefutable evidence of same)

where are your manners?

The redoubtable <Stony> has opened his new forum.

I think it meet to head over there and get stuck in with a quick "welcome to the asylum" message, no?

Stonehenge chessforum

Just saying.

Surely a veiled reference to <Kasparov's> infamous

Come to think of it, I don't mind. Please send one to me in Old South Wales.

Aha. You thought I was going to say "and it savaged some children and had to be put down", dintcha?

Humanely, of course. A Xenon gas chamber, an injection of silicon theosulphate ('indicating the presence of a god'), or a silver bullet in the old motherboard. Usually does the trick.

But in fact the beast behaved impeccably. It was only when I got home I found that weasels had eaten my broadband.

Big, ugly, marsupial Korean weasels. Formerly used by artists to hold the canvas for bucolic paintings, they have sworn revenge on the human species.

I think we may be in over our heads on this one. Frogs are technically neutral, of course, but once the holy fallout starts to come down... well, a hard rain is gonna fall and you don't need a weatherman to know that gravity sucks.

I quite like both modes, as it happens, with or without the 'M'. I even like the whimsical spaceship names in the Culture books, which are not everyone's cup of neutrinos.

I actually reviewed 'Consider Phlebas' - the first of the SF books as Iain M Banks - when it came out in 1987. I remember saying that Banks had been hugely and appropriately lauded for The Wasp Factory, and then The Bridge boosted his rep even higher, proving that he was a major literary talent, not just a one-off.

And then came ... this. A violent, deranged galactic space opera with all the trimmings, exploding suns and nano-nukes and a post-scarcity society where everything, even war, is a hobby.

It was as if Banks couldn't accept literary mainstream success. He wouldn't be a real writer until he'd done golden age hardcore sci-fi as well, with a rewired sensibility.

Of course, as usual, I'd had the same thought myself. But instead of actually writing a whole book -- all those *words*, my dears -- I summed it up in one sentence:

"Now that machines do our thinking we can put our brains to a better use".

Unfortunately, I left my brain on a cinema seat in 1988 and haven't had a new idea since.

"Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you."

Spot of trouble with your IP, was it?

I'm trying to "decipher..."

Did you read that due to insufficient bandwidth, the WWW will be <"full"> in two years?

What will happen then?

Will "it" finally be satisfied, as after a good tuck in?

I need to know.

Dashed if I know. And, em, hyphenated if I don't.

Stuff works or it don't. When it don't I fixes it or else I fails. When I fails, there's no success like failure.

And even damnation is poisoned by rainbows.

Is that a Mondegreen, a mixed metaphor, an intertextual perpetual motion machine, some irrelevant lines from Cro-Magnon songs, or all ten at once?

>

I appears <Frogspawn: Editor in Briefs> is off to <Cannes> again interviewing <Scarlett Johansson>!!

<JJ Huckin> (Platoon, Porky's V)

<Linda McCormick> (Evita, Triumph of the Will>

DIRECTED BY:

<Tyler Tharpe> (Citizen Kane, Full Metal Jacket)

TRAILER:

http://www.suckers!!.org

SYNOPSIS:

The "Government" descends on a small town that still has rotary phones. There are no police here. The "Government" drives people insane by testing a military device that deranges people with sound waves.

REVIEW:

When one considers the <horror genre> in toto, or <the horror film qua horror film>, if you will, two facts are inescapable. There is a very, very large market for the <horror film> and a very, very small market for film reviews that have the word <"qua"> in them.

That said, the production values are so minimal here that all who own a cellular phone should be excited by the fact that they could make a better looking and sounding film. The acting is low key to the point of non-existence, and not in a good "cinema verite" way either. It's just plain awful.

In fact, it's so awful it seems like "real people." So when terrible things start happening, the audience is almost asleep, so the horrific scenes have tremedous impact. Really. This film lulls you into such a torpid state that one is no longer "desensitized" to violence.

At any rate, in a bizarre way, this makes the film unusually effective. It's truly horrifying.

--Pauline Kael (deceased)- THE NEW YORKER

BEST LINE IN THE FILM: (not kidding)

<Guy in toque:> "Did you eat half of my Super-Sandwich?"

<Guy in baseball cap:> "What Super-Sandwich?"