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K, replying to my own post, but I thought this was too funny. Prince has apparently never granted permission for any of the parodies Al has done on his music...

from and interview on the onion A.V Club site:


AY: Yeah, and the whole Coolio thing got blown out of proportion. [A minor controversy erupted in 1996 when Yankovic parodied Coolio's "Gangsta's Paradise," incorrectly assuming he'd had the offended rapper's permission. ?ed.] So, four years after the fact, every single interview I do, I get, "So, what's this whole Coolio thing?" Ugh. "First of all, it was four years ago, and up until Behind The Music, most people had forgotten about it."

O: Do you still even bother to ask Prince for permission? [Prince has never granted Yankovic permission to parody his material. ?ed.]

AY: No, I'm waiting for him to have another hit. It might be a while.

Interview in The Onion AV club. No mention of Von Braun, Herr or Frau.

Tony.

You know, I always got the feeling that "Mostly Harmless" was deliberately written by a bitter man to piss his fanbase off so that they'd stop bugging him to write sequels to the first four books.

Well, I started to write another Dirk Gently book, and I just lost it. For some reason, I couldn't get it going, so I had to put it aside. I didn't know what to do with it. I looked at the material again about a year later, and suddenly thought: Actually, the reason is that the ideas and the character don't match. I've tried to go for the wrong kind of ideas, and these ideas would actually fit much better in a Hitchhiker book, but I don't want to write another Hitchhiker book at the moment. So I sort of put them on one side. And maybe one day I will write another Hitchhiker book, because there's an awful lot of material sitting 'round waiting to go in it. Another reason is that the last one, Mostly Harmless, is a very bleak book. People have tried to read all sorts of complicated reasons into it, and the reason was that I just had a lousy year. Just for all sorts of personal reasons, from a terrible death in the family to... Every kind of area, whether it was personal or professional, had just gone sour on me, against a background in which I had to write a funny book, which turned out not to be very funny. So I'd quite like to maybe do another Hitchhiker book that sort of perks up the tone again.

However, in the movie it was champagne on on the Motherboard not beer on the CD.

Personally I don't care for (later) Heinlein-esque, neo-Burroughs, "let's talk about sex, disturbing stuff, and all combinations of the two, then call it art", science-fiction books. To me, it ends up sounding like pubescent mental masturbation.

But that's just my opinion, haven't read the book, and don't plan to. That's just what I get from this "review". I think this interview with Ray Bradbury sums up my opinions nicely.

There he states he'd like to do another Hitchhiker book that's a lot more lighthearted (yes!), which I guess is what The Salmon of Doubt is.

Personally, I would go farther than Wowbagger and say that you should only read the original trilogy - HHttG; Restaurant at the End of the Universe; Life, the Universe, and Everything. Soemthing about So Long and Thanks for All The Fish didn't sit well with me. However, I have high hopes for The Salmon of Doubt; Starship Titanic was damn funny, and if he can keep going along those lines, I'll be happy.

I'm going to quote the whole of the Lotus-eaters bit since it is quite short (Robert Fagles trans, Penguin 1996):

Once we'd had our fill of food and drink I sent
a detail ahead, two picked men and a third, a runner,
to scout out who might live there-men like us perhaps,
who live on bread? So off they went and soon enough
they mingled among the natives, Lotus-eaters, Lotus-eaters
who had no notion of killing my companions, not at all,
they simply gave them the lotus to taste instead...
Any crewmen who ate the lotus, the honey-sweet fruit,
lost all desire to send a message back, much less return,
their only wish to linger there with the Lotus-eaters,
grazing on Lotus, all memory of the journey home
dissolved forever. But I brought them back, back
to the hollow ships, and streaming tears-I forced them,
hauled them under the rowing benches, lashed them fast
and shouted out commands to my other, steady comrades
`Quick, no time to lose, embark in the racing ships'
so none could eat the lotus, forget the voyage home.
They swung aboard at once, they sat to the oars in ranks
and in rhythm churned the water wite with stroke on stroke.

The similarities with 2001 are indeed there but the real issue is the differences.

One of the crewmen is picked out as a scout with a particular skill (running). All the crew return to the ship and more to the point they are specifically rescued by Odysseus. The fact that they are not mentioned again indicates to me that the crewmembers recovered (which is needed if their "rescue" is to be worth anything). The lotus are not fatal either.

What this tells us is not that 2001 isn't based on the Odyssey but that it is loosely inspired by it.

Unfortunately Wheat needs the trailing of events in what might be called the "source material" to be very close-to the point where Dave's buring his hand on the food is symbolic for events in the sacking of Ismarus (figurative events at that) and a space pod having a passing resembance to an insect is a parallel to the launching of 1000 ships to reclaim Helen of Troy!

What we have here is a classic example of the fact that if you pick, choose, and stretch your evidence you can find parallels of all sorts of things in a story. Particularly if the story does actually draw some elements or make references to the material inquestion.

The wooden horse anagram (not subtle, just weak) is the work of a mind overly devoted to a theory as is Frank Poole's non-anagram where Wheat actually admits that he started off looking for an anagram which meant something like "rope dancer" and that he never found one ("Frank Poole is what I call a 90 percent anagram". Yeah - and what the rest of us call "not an anagram") .

The Nietzsche stuff is mindless. Once more we're required to believe that 2001's following of TSZ is so close that the reason the pod sneaks up behind Frank is not so that he can't see it but because we're following a detailed piece of symbolism. Well, if it were that close, why does the pod not jump over Frank and the knock him off?

Wheat happily chooses when the symbolism is tight and when it is "subtle" to match his line. The Nietzsche parallel in 2001, like the Odyssey parallel, is there in the journey of Dave from man to superman but the details are in Wheat's head.

If who have seen Kubrick at work you will know how often he changed his mind about things and their meanings (that's why AI didn't get made while he was alive). The possibility that he constructed this complex and subtle web of symbolism and carried it through to completion simply isn't like him.

Plus, of course, we ignore the contribution of everyone else: Clarke, obviously, but also Wally Veevers and Douglas Trumbull who's input into the phyical aspects of the Discovery were huge and generally unrelated to bathroom floors. Were they all symbol-nuts too?

Next on the list of "things to ignore" are the physics: where exactly should a rocket have it's exhausts? Probably at the back. If you wanted to spin a space station to get artificial gravity how would ships dock? In the middle where there is no gravity and it's a lot easier generally (assuming the docking craft wears a condom, I suppose!).

And finally, because I need to go to bed, why 2001? Well, it could be that it's a reference to Zoraster returning in 9001 but it seems more likely that it's because in 1968 that seemed a looong way in the future but within the audience's possible life times and Clarke is intelligent to know that the new millenium started in 2001, not in 2000. So the connection with Zoraster is simply that both knew that milleniums start on the '01.

This sort of thing is fun to play with but given enough effort I imagine someone like Wheat could find more similarities between The 5,000 Fingers Of Dr. T and TSZ than he has for 2001.

TWW

..that all-time classic Electric Dreams!

I totally agree. This guy has it down - the whole ISP angle is right on. And if it wasn't before, then record company execs are now going "F**k yeah! We've got to buy ISP's!"

Check out this article at www.theonion.com - it's an interview with Trey Anastasio, lead guitarist of Phish, a band known for their free-music distribution. At the end, they touch on some really great points about just why Napster does suck and the other side of recording albums.

What about Pathetic Geek Stories on The Onion?

You send in a, well, pathetic geek story from your childhood, and it is rendered in a comic.

That's not a very accurate description of what Amereican Movie is about.

Go here for a better idea.

-nme!