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Home. Ensconced in the guest room. All's well. Among the movies on the planes were Win A Date With Tad Hamilton and Starsky and Hutch. Both movies are better than strictly needed by the demands of their formulas, but I've seen them now three times in two months, and they're not that much better than they had to be. I believe now I've seen them more than I've seen Star Trek: Insurrection, a movie that isn't better than its formula demands.
I got delayed again at Chicago, allegedly weather problems at Newark. That's the same excuse used last month. I've spent, without exaggeration, more time waiting on the runway at O'Hare to fly to Newark than I've spent flying from O'Hare to Newark. We suspected United had filed Chapter 11 and they were trying to hide it. I'm also tired of Funny Pilots explaining problems.
Trivia: In Robert Altman's Popeye, the Rough House Cafe was supposed to catch fire, and be extinguished by a rainstorm, at the end of Popeye's fight scene, but dry winds spoiled the effect and the conclusion was dropped. Source: The Popeye Story, Bridget Terry.
Currently Reading: Living Dolls: A Magical History of the Quest for Mechanical Life, Gaby Wood.
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(no subject)
Date: 2004-07-29 07:48 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-07-29 09:02 pm (UTC)I would've waves as I went past, but I never got closer to you than Vancouver is, and anyway I was on the North side of the plane. Hi again, though. Glad to be back.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-07-29 09:41 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-07-29 10:46 pm (UTC)It's looking like a pretty nice read -- it starts from Modern Automation, rather than going back to classic fables like Vulcan's women and Albertus Magnus's head -- and talks about things like that French duck and more modern things like the Ringling Brothers circus' Doll Family.
The ``woman is an automaton'' is, of course, mentioned as a popular story trope, but I do have to wonder about the converse -- something Fritz Leiber wondered about in his excellent The Silver Eggheads (which I'll give a good review someday) -- why does the story never reveal that the robot is actually a woman? (And, maybe more generally, why always a woman?)
(no subject)
Date: 2004-07-30 01:46 pm (UTC)That's what's going on in the Tales of Hoffmann, at least. Our hero, Hoffmann, is blinded by the beauty of the clockwork doll, Olympia, and fails to notice what is immediately apparent to everyone else (including the audience): her vocabulary consists entirely of the word "yes," her mannerisms are mechanical, and now and then she collapses until her "father" winds her back up! In other words, it ought to be clear to him that there's nothing upstairs, but he can't see past her perfect features.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-07-30 07:54 pm (UTC)You probably have a point abut men being depicted as unable to notice little details like personality when there's a physically outstanding body in the mix.
It sounds like a fun opera. I don't think it's mentioned in the book (but I keep forgetting to look at the index), but there are a remarkable number of Galatea-derived stories. Peeking ahead it looks like George Méliés alone gets a dozen pages,which I wasn't expecting ...
(no subject)
Date: 2004-07-30 12:14 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-07-30 05:45 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-07-30 12:05 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-07-30 01:03 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-07-30 08:04 pm (UTC)I haven't noticed games with cruising speed, but again, on the long-haul flights the whole continental U.S. looks like a commuter flight at this point. This time -- I swear -- I noticed on the position display monitor that we were within a few hundred miles of Vancouver, and I thought, ``Well, almost landed. No sense fussing getting up to the bathroom now.'' Easier to wait for Chicago than get past my two aisle-mates.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-07-30 11:42 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-07-31 07:12 pm (UTC)Indecent is what it is. If they're not going to make the planes faster can we at least work on wave-guides to accelerate the speed of sound within the long-haul corridors?
(no subject)
Date: 2004-07-30 08:01 pm (UTC)Y'know, I lost track of the ``Ask The Pilot'' guy (Salon started crashing the newest version of iCab, and that commercial thing just flakes out half the time) ... did they ever get that book of his columns together?
(no subject)
Date: 2004-07-30 11:48 pm (UTC)http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/biblio?inkey=62-1594480044-0
(no subject)
Date: 2004-07-31 07:11 pm (UTC)Cool. I've got to go hunting in the bookstores around here. Probably it's in Singapore somewhere too, but, well, I do have to get stuff to read on the flight back ...
(no subject)
Date: 2004-07-30 07:59 pm (UTC)They used to fly Concorde into Singapore ... frankly, there's times I'm sorry Nixon didn't choose to go with supporting the Boeing Supersonic Plane instead of the Space Shuttle. Maybe it wouldn't have been any more practical for me, but it might have lead more really fast planes to have two roughly comparable planes flying faster than sound ...
(no subject)
Date: 2004-07-30 07:57 pm (UTC)You know ... that price is getting competitive ... but what we really need are suborbital launchers.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-07-30 11:54 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-07-31 07:14 pm (UTC)It's a nice thought, but what people smell like after ten hours on the plane is the anti-aphrodisiac, believe me ...