Yeah, and they were all wearing makeup to make themselves brown (or brownish, in the case of the original show). Hey, Spock wore pointed ears, but he was played by Nemoy who was really Jewish. I guess that means he was a Jew, not a Vulcan (Vulcan/Half-Human).
How about that for the final episode of Enterprise. Have Bob Newhart wake up in bed next to Emily from the Bob Newhart show and go, "...I just had the strangest dream. Scott Bacula was the captain of a spaceship, and there was this woman with huge lips in a leotard... and this engineer with a southern drawl..."...
Fire Berman and Braga right now! These two dumbasses have single-handedly killed the entire franchise. I mean, even Interplay sued because they made the franchise unsaleable for video games. (Though, Trek games have always sucked, and that's another topic.) I remember reading once that Berman and Braga brag that they've never even seen a episode of the original series. Who puts two people that haven't seen the cornerstone in a franchise in charge?!? It's like putting vegans on the board at McDonald's.
I mean after DS9, they got Voyager going, and it was OK for a little while, then it was just WTF technobable every day. And when that got old, hello T&A. I mean, why else is 7of9 there?!? Then Enterprise...
Alright, here's my deal. You have a series around nearly 40 years now. Now, sure there's inconsistancies, but durring those years you assemble a scaffold work of how things work, what things are, and generally how the Star Trek universe is. Then these two waltz in and go, "Well, screw plot. Lets have some aliens and they attack the ship. Yeah, and then the Captain can use the Quantum Warp Antimater Neutron Flux Capacitor Torpedos, that the ships engineer just built, to disable the enemy ship."
Then just to piss on the grave for the franchise, you make a prequel. In this prequel, you defy an encyclopedic "history of the future" that's created over 35-some-odd years of the franchise, and have this crew - this crew that's not been mentioned by anyone ever - be the most signifigant in the history of your franchise by inventing damn near everything and bearing the name of the ship that is cornerstone to your franchise also.
The movies are all crap now too. I mean, you used to be able to tell good or bad by the number. Even good, odd bad. 1,3,5 Bad, 2,4,6 good... Then Generations... It was OK but the rest. The rest were just crap.
I heard once a long time ago. (Before even Voyager) rummors of a series to take place with Sulu and the Excelsior in the late Kirk movie timeline. This would have been so much better than Voyager or Enterprise. But it never came. Now a prequel... Yeah that worked so well for Star Wars... Sure, yeah, lets do that. Can we put the Borg in it?!? Can we make it time travel related?!? Oh? How about a movie where the ship and crew are attacked by an alien and there's like a mystery and they have to figure out who's really behind what's happening, and it's all resolved in a big showdown in the end.
I hear Shattner even went to Paramount and tried to get Berman and Braga's jobs. Hard to imagine but he can't do any worse. Personally I would love to see Shattner at the helm of a whole new Star Trek. But I'm sad to say it, but with Berman and Braga left in charge and them pumping shows and movies out as fast as they can type I think Enterprise is probably gone in another season and a poor movie box office draw (and face it, we all know another Berman and Braga film would have one) might just spell the end of the line. I mean, it's all about the money, and if Star Trek keeps being a turd for Paramount, we may soon be seeing a Trek-less future.
Monkelectric says: In an interview berman said "We made a great movie."
Berman also once bragged (back in the Voyager era) in an issue of Starlog that he had never even seen an original episode of Star Trek.
...so yeah, that's who you want to run your franchise...
As for your two ideas...
What I'd like to see: a compelling movie about Q. Think about it, the first episode of TNG -- we meet the Q race who puts humanity on trial, the *last* episode of TNG, Q puts humanity on trial *again*, picard of course saves the day and warns picard "You don't get it do you? The trial never ends, We'll be watching you." You could easily make a *great* movie or two about that.
Bitch?!? Did you see the final episode of The Next Generation?!?
Second of all, I'd like to see a movie/series about the beginings of the borg. That would be a *GREAT*.
addie writes: Archer attacked and stormed a totally innocent ship because he needed their warp coil; T-Pol turns out to be a drug addict! These are things that NEVER would have happend on the original Trek...
The Enterprise Incident (Third Season): Kirk storms Romulan space to steal a cloaking device from an innocent Romulan vessel.
This Side of Paradise (First Season): The Enterprise goes to Omicron Ceti Three, where a native plant sprays the crew and makes them all high and lathagic, until Kirk figures out how to save everyone.
...and you can't have evil Klingons anymore. Because that would mean you would have a predominately dark skinned color race that is "evil", and you'll get your ass sued for that sort of thing.
I would love to see a movie devoted to the great star trek time warp.
Yeah, cause I love to spend two hours of my life to find out something changes in the last five minutes to undo all the events I've just seen, thus negating even watching what I just did. Yeah, real good. Maybe they can have some sort of anomoly where the same five minutes repeat over and over. Dear God! Yes! Let me pay $7 to watch five minutes of film over and over, then in the end find out it never really happened anyhow.
Owing to hundreds of years of immigration, the US is one of the most diverse nations on Earth, despite the effort of the likes of WalMart and McDonalds to homogenize us.
Which works, because we'll all be working there in a few years. You can't outsource cashier...
"does the same job" can be a diffuse and difficult thing to measure. Witness the return of Dell support to America - because Indian workers weren't well-rooted in American culture. The same would happen if the tables were turned. Last I heard, American workers were incredibly productive.
But then if an outsourced worker is only 1/2 a competent as you, but costs 1/4. Hire three, then you get 150% for the 75% cost. Then you can threaten to fire them and get another 10% out of 'em.
And I think the Dell thing was a PR move. American's didn't want tech support from people they couldn't relate to. But then with every phone support job that came back, how many programming jobs were sent overseas?
I lost my $35k/yr developer job, but now I got this $9/hr phone tech support job. The economy is great.
The article says that Indian companies buy US goods, but do Indian consumers? If an American company shifts an American job to India, does it also shift that purchase of its product? Will an Indian consumer base arise as fast as the American consumer base is destroyed?
Dosen't have to. Because we'll find a way to buy it anyhow, at least until the credit runs out and we bankrupt. Hopefully by then enough of India's population is now making enough to take over for us. After all, there's a billion of them and 300 million of us.
I mean think of it this way. If you have 100% market penetration here in the USA, you only need 33% of the population of India to break even. China works well on this idea to with it's roughly 1.5 billion inhabitance without all the pesky human rights to deal with. Which makes a wonderful industrial center.
I can attest to the lemon juice. I used to use orange extract myself, mixed with water. I'd spray it in an old windex bottle in the general areas I didn't want the cat to go like behind the TV and under the computer desk. Just make sure your not spraying your devices. Worked like a charm. Apparently from what I've read, cats hate citrus smells. I would even use lemon sented 409 cleaner if people were coming over and I wanted the cat off the couches, that would work for a day or two until the smell of the couch took back over.
Damn dude, I'm younger than you and I knew that the Robin Williams one was a remake. 'Course I wasted a year and a half persuing a film-arts degree... Ahhh, now lets see here, where's my copy of the Jerry Lewis ('60's) version of "The Nutty Professor"?
Alright, I can top that. I work in a company that not only masters karaoke, but also allows the general public to come in and record. We're two doors down from a studio... Now, about three months ago, our heater for this section of the building went out so we've been at the mercy of the weather, with an outside door being beside our office, leading to the employee outside smoking area. So someone's in and out every 10 - 15 seconds... Then to plus all this, mandatory employee name tags were started this month along with a health care plan at about $75 a week.
If it dosen't beat ya, then at least I'm at par...
My feelings exaclty, it BSG has a Star Wars taste to it. It's like Spam, it tastes sort of like ham, but it's not...
I personally have to wonder if shows from the 90's will be remade in the 2010's with the same sort of contcept. I can see it now, Mystery Science Theater 3000 four hour miniseries... And instead of the host (Joel/Mike) we'll have a hot chick in a tight jump suit, and Servo, well he's a chick now too, and Crow as a chick too. And the Mads... hell, make 'em all chicks and the Satellite of Love, a strip club... and instead of watching movies, they have to dance or something... Oh! I gotta go get the people at Sci-Fi on the phone...
Northern Exposure was perhaps the best thing to come from CBS for the whole of the 1990's. It was sad to see it fall apart so bad when Rob Morrow's character (Fleischman)left, and the addition of the wholy uninteresting Paul Provenza (Dr. Capra) in the final season. Fleischman I could make a connection with, stranger in a strange land sort of dynamic. Capra was just sort of there. I mean, the great parts of the show were the ones where the town of Cicely was having somesort of community event of which Fleischman would have to be clued in to. Capra never seemed to care or even be involved really.
The worst part of it all though was the final episode, the events just didn't make since. Holling went into "rut", as we are told he does every year, which was never introduced before. Chris and Ed talk about how they used to sit around and drink beer, while the whole of the series remarks how Ed never drank and would even be the only person with milk on the table at Maurice's dinners.
I know i'm being a bit of a "fanboy" about this, but the rating were tanking in that final year and everyone knew it, so at least Northern Exposure got to have a final episode. Shamed they wasted the opportunity.
It's not all bad. I've had two such jobs, one on staff and another contract and both were quite excellent. The first was system administrator for a high school back in the early '90's. Because of the Y2K initiative to get schools online tons of new equipment would come in, but since it came through county before it came to the individual schools, we got county's hand-me-downs as they got the newest and best. So I got to go through each computer. Long story short, I found out some things about some very high-level people because they didn't wipe their Outlook e-mail or newsgroups... After hinting around a little to some people, my duties seemed to get really light, and the new equipment started to come straight to us. (Well for a while.)
The second was for a city elementary school / junior high who wanted to do a Quicktime VR walkthrough of the school. So, one night me and my crew came and for an absorbantly large amount of money, we made about 70 VR panoramas of the building. (The concept being some crap about yuppie parents being able to walk around the school and seeing it, without actually having to come to the school or be active in their childs education. After all, school is daycare between 7:45 and 3 for these people.) We'll, I started the process of stitching all the images together to make the QT VRs (all automated) and about five days later, it finished them. I contacted their Sys Admin / Web guy and said I had them, but apparetly the school let the PTA know about them and parents got all worried that people would have a virtual walkthrough so they could plan kidnappings of their kids or plant bombs in the building or what not... Paranoid freaks... Still got paid for it though.
Those that give up liberty for freedom, deserve neither. -Benjamin Franklin
Oh jeez, I wasn't personally attacking Audi here, I was just saying that the kind of general excitement to most cars are gone now days, sure there's teh exceptions and the elite +$40k cars but the common car that has become the classic car of today, that is all gone.
But, I did notice in your message a few things I would like to comment on. First:...VW owns Audi. Along with Bentley, Lamborghini, Seat, Skoda.
Deutz-Fahr Group owns Lamborghini. It was also owned by Dahmler-Chrystler for a short stint in the 1990's...
The Audi TT runs on a modified New Beetle chassis(the TT is wider among other things.) And turns like a tank. I mean you can't make a 90 turn in one of these things if you had to. It's like turning a 100' semi.
Go to an Audi dealer. Sit in an A4. Now go into a VW dealer, and sit in a Jetta. Now do you understand why the A4 sells like hotcakes, despite costing well over 20k base?
Alright. I went to my local Audi dealer last night, then went accross the street to the VW dealer. I wasn't really all that impressed by the A4. It accelerated alright, and cornered smooth with a smooth ride, but so did the Jetta. Sure the A4 has some better immenities and looked nicer, but for the money, the Jetta would still get you to work and back with roughly the same feel, and for a lot less.
Now the New Beetle convertable, that was a P.O.S.... Why does it cost more, when there's less car? I mean it's slow. I mean SLOW. It weighs less than the Beetle, yet it has less pick-up. WTF?
Well, I choose 1985 because it seemed to be the year where everything stopped being remarkable. Look at just before 1985, in '81-'83 you have the DeLorean (a personal favorite of mine). There's the Datsun 280z, the old Toyota Celica Type R was still being made (though, not avaliable in the US), and you had those little Mercedes 2 door convertables, which I am not particularly fond of but people seem to love them. But in '84 Chrystler introduced the Caravan and everything seemed to change shortly after... Sure the infamous "K car" was already about, but the Daytona just didn't seem to be interesting anymore and the last of the unique cars seemed to come off the roads and everything became sort of cookie cutter. Fords became underpowered, GM started to only make seven cars and just change the logos, and all the imports sort of stopped being exotic.
Now, if I was just going to say the last year of the American car, I would have to go much earlier, and as a matter of fact, I can give you a day. That would be the exact same day the Mustang II rolled off the assembly line, and from then on America stopped making cars people dreamed about.
Now here we are, twenty-some-odd years later and what have we got? Ford wants to make everything look like eggs with the biggest bundle of wires and hoses possible under the hood. GM makes about 7 cars still, and every year they make them a little bigger. (One has to wonder how big the Escilade[sp?]/Yukon/Suburban/Avalanche/Tahoe/Raine r is gonna get. I mean come on, we only got 8 feet wide to work with here.) Chrystler is starting to look better but their engines are still crap, reguardless of what their Hemi marketing bs would have us believe.... The american car is dead from any sort of classic point of view, and no one will ever spend thousands restoring a '96 Pontic Sunfire to mint.
Well, I do have to be honest here and say, I didn't even think about these cars, really because I never see them. I've always looked at the Prowler or the new GT-1 Mustang as more of a collectors car than a real car. People don't buy them to drive, they buy them to put in their garage and maybe just drive on weekends. And to me, this should not be what a classic car is, cars everyone drove and the common man could afford. To me, there's just something wrong with a $40k price tag on the Thunderbird. It's taking the classic car and making at an elitist thing.
Following this line of thought, when my dad thought back to his childhood, there was the muscle car which was affordable to the masses, and built to last. Now days the common car isn't supposed to last, and when I think back to my childhood I'll remember the Escort or the Chevy Love (small pick-up from the 80's). These were ment to last, but not the 50 - 80 years their older pretecesorts have made it and still continue to work. I mean the names themselves prove my point. Ask anyone whos around cars if they have ever heard of a Rambler or Edsel or Chevy Nomad and they will tell you they have. Now ask them about the Love, or the Currier, or the Lynx, or what about the Nova II? These cars were on the road just twenty years ago and we're already forgetting them. Oldsmobile has stopped production. In twenty years, think anyone will rember the old Eighty-Eight or the Cutlass-Cruiser? I do. Now, what about the Aurora or the Bravado...
Buick's 3800 Series II v6 is the only american supercharged V6 I know of. And I know of no American turbo v6s. Come to think of it the only American turbo I4 I know of is the PT Cruiser, oh and it's supposed to be an option on the upcoming Chevy Cobalt.
It simple really, what will become of cars from today when they become classics. They simply won't.
You see, cars like the '57 Chevy or the '68 Camero were unique, they only made so may and the ones around today were lovingly restore or maticulously cared for so that they exsist today. But it's not just that, those cars were made to last. That's why you still see a '38 DeSoto or a '42 Dodge Pick-up. It's also why you can go to a junkyard, buy and old Impala or Oldsmobile and restore it. There's parts out there and you can repair what you can't find. But, as cars went on, and companies wanted larger proffit dividens, and then came plastics...
Nowdays cars aren't built to last, well, not last lifetimes. They're built to last until the payment book is done. Sure you have exceptions like Toyota Camary's or Honda Civic's that go on and on, but there's nothing unique to these cars. Their people movers, and that's it. I for one can't really imagine taking my kid, on a warm spring day, to an autoshow just to see a bunch of '92 - '96 Tercels or '87 - '91 Sentras.
Then there's the plastics I mentioned. My last car was a '94 Chevy Cavlaier Wagon. It was mostly the same car as the '81 Chevy Celebrity, or the Oldsmobile Ferenza, or the Pontica Sunfire / J2000, or the Cadillac Cimmaron, or the Buick Skylark / Century. All of which had a nearly 15 year stint known as the General Motor's J-Body design. But it's not just GM. The Ford Taurus is the Mercury Sable, or the Ford Crown Victoria is the same as the Mercury Grand Marquee or something like that... It's not just American cars though, the Pontiac Vibe is also the same car as the Toyota Matrix... Which was the retool from the wagon variance of, you guessed it, the GM J-Body. The only diffrence between these cars is a plastic molded bummper or body panel. Strip away that and you have the same 2.2l I4 engine mounted to the same H3430 3 speed automatic front wheel drive system with front disc brake and optional rear wheel discs...
But it goes beyond that, the materials used now days aren't even designed to last that long. A friend of mine has restored a 1985 Buick LeSabre. (GM H Body I believe, same thing as the Chevy Capris Classic for those keeping score.) A problem arose from when his coolant resevoir cracked and he had to replace it. General Motors changed the design to the resivoir in 1988 to make way for a redesign of the cruise control vacume system. So the part, even as a replacment part, was discontinued in 1991. The part itself was made of a sub-quality plastic that, after about 15 years becomes hard and brittle. So you can't go to a junkyard and buy another one off another Buick as, it too, will crack and brake. In the end, his only option was to use ducktape until the whole of the container rots and he has to make another container all together.
I know I have harped on American cars alot, and I really do love them, but even the author's AUDI is not unique. Audi has for years traded engine and body parts and techniques with Volkswagon, so much so that alot of Audi's now have VW W8 engines, while VW itself builds three of it's cars on the same chassi. The Passat, New Bettle, and Jetta are, when you trear them down, all the same car...
Oh well... Hopefully tennagers won't get ahold of too many Malibus or Impalas (the old ones, not this new crap) and enough will be spared 22" wheels and hydrolics that they will still be drivable in 20 years so that when I take my kid to a car show one day I can show them that, damnit, their used to be some nice cars. Some style that wasn't just an option package, that steel was fashioned into moving elegance, and cars of this caliber should not be messed with aside from the factory design, and that one time long ago, it was just wrong for Cadillac to make a pick-up.
Blah, a VoIP price war would do wonders for the industry, I mean just look at the DSL price wars a few years back. That lead to lower and lower prices and more and more service, eventually to the point where only massive conglomo-corps were the only ones left because they had the money to bankroll DSL service till the little guys went broke. Oh, wait... I guess that was the opposite of my point.
Oh well, at least the DSL price wars left really all the big telcoms as the only DSL providers, and VoIP is something the telcoms don't want to exsist anyhow so they can keep their strangle-hold monopoly on services, so when they jump in and play the same game this time, and all the upstarts go bankrupt, it will leave all the Bells running VoIP services, and... oh, crap.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, and they were all wearing makeup to make themselves brown (or brownish, in the case of the original show). Hey, Spock wore pointed ears, but he was played by Nemoy who was really Jewish. I guess that means he was a Jew, not a Vulcan (Vulcan/Half-Human).
How about that for the final episode of Enterprise. Have Bob Newhart wake up in bed next to Emily from the Bob Newhart show and go, "...I just had the strangest dream. Scott Bacula was the captain of a spaceship, and there was this woman with huge lips in a leotard... and this engineer with a southern drawl..."...
Fire Berman and Braga right now! These two dumbasses have single-handedly killed the entire franchise. I mean, even Interplay sued because they made the franchise unsaleable for video games. (Though, Trek games have always sucked, and that's another topic.) I remember reading once that Berman and Braga brag that they've never even seen a episode of the original series. Who puts two people that haven't seen the cornerstone in a franchise in charge?!? It's like putting vegans on the board at McDonald's.
I mean after DS9, they got Voyager going, and it was OK for a little while, then it was just WTF technobable every day. And when that got old, hello T&A. I mean, why else is 7of9 there?!? Then Enterprise...
Alright, here's my deal. You have a series around nearly 40 years now. Now, sure there's inconsistancies, but durring those years you assemble a scaffold work of how things work, what things are, and generally how the Star Trek universe is. Then these two waltz in and go, "Well, screw plot. Lets have some aliens and they attack the ship. Yeah, and then the Captain can use the Quantum Warp Antimater Neutron Flux Capacitor Torpedos, that the ships engineer just built, to disable the enemy ship."
Then just to piss on the grave for the franchise, you make a prequel. In this prequel, you defy an encyclopedic "history of the future" that's created over 35-some-odd years of the franchise, and have this crew - this crew that's not been mentioned by anyone ever - be the most signifigant in the history of your franchise by inventing damn near everything and bearing the name of the ship that is cornerstone to your franchise also.
The movies are all crap now too. I mean, you used to be able to tell good or bad by the number. Even good, odd bad. 1,3,5 Bad, 2,4,6 good... Then Generations... It was OK but the rest. The rest were just crap.
I heard once a long time ago. (Before even Voyager) rummors of a series to take place with Sulu and the Excelsior in the late Kirk movie timeline. This would have been so much better than Voyager or Enterprise. But it never came. Now a prequel... Yeah that worked so well for Star Wars... Sure, yeah, lets do that. Can we put the Borg in it?!? Can we make it time travel related?!? Oh? How about a movie where the ship and crew are attacked by an alien and there's like a mystery and they have to figure out who's really behind what's happening, and it's all resolved in a big showdown in the end.
I hear Shattner even went to Paramount and tried to get Berman and Braga's jobs. Hard to imagine but he can't do any worse. Personally I would love to see Shattner at the helm of a whole new Star Trek. But I'm sad to say it, but with Berman and Braga left in charge and them pumping shows and movies out as fast as they can type I think Enterprise is probably gone in another season and a poor movie box office draw (and face it, we all know another Berman and Braga film would have one) might just spell the end of the line. I mean, it's all about the money, and if Star Trek keeps being a turd for Paramount, we may soon be seeing a Trek-less future.
Monkelectric says: In an interview berman said "We made a great movie."
Berman also once bragged (back in the Voyager era) in an issue of Starlog that he had never even seen an original episode of Star Trek.
...so yeah, that's who you want to run your franchise...
As for your two ideas...
What I'd like to see: a compelling movie about Q. Think about it, the first episode of TNG -- we meet the Q race who puts humanity on trial, the *last* episode of TNG, Q puts humanity on trial *again*, picard of course saves the day and warns picard "You don't get it do you? The trial never ends, We'll be watching you." You could easily make a *great* movie or two about that.
Bitch?!? Did you see the final episode of The Next Generation?!?
Second of all, I'd like to see a movie/series about the beginings of the borg. That would be a *GREAT*.
See also Star Trek: The Motion Picture.
addie writes: Archer attacked and stormed a totally innocent ship because he needed their warp coil; T-Pol turns out to be a drug addict! These are things that NEVER would have happend on the original Trek...
...and you can't have evil Klingons anymore. Because that would mean you would have a predominately dark skinned color race that is "evil", and you'll get your ass sued for that sort of thing.
The Enterprise Incident (Third Season): Kirk storms Romulan space to steal a cloaking device from an innocent Romulan vessel.
This Side of Paradise (First Season): The Enterprise goes to Omicron Ceti Three, where a native plant sprays the crew and makes them all high and lathagic, until Kirk figures out how to save everyone.
I would love to see a movie devoted to the great star trek time warp.
Yeah, cause I love to spend two hours of my life to find out something changes in the last five minutes to undo all the events I've just seen, thus negating even watching what I just did. Yeah, real good. Maybe they can have some sort of anomoly where the same five minutes repeat over and over. Dear God! Yes! Let me pay $7 to watch five minutes of film over and over, then in the end find out it never really happened anyhow.
Owing to hundreds of years of immigration, the US is one of the most diverse nations on Earth, despite the effort of the likes of WalMart and McDonalds to homogenize us.
Which works, because we'll all be working there in a few years. You can't outsource cashier...
"does the same job" can be a diffuse and difficult thing to measure. Witness the return of Dell support to America - because Indian workers weren't well-rooted in American culture. The same would happen if the tables were turned. Last I heard, American workers were incredibly productive.
But then if an outsourced worker is only 1/2 a competent as you, but costs 1/4. Hire three, then you get 150% for the 75% cost. Then you can threaten to fire them and get another 10% out of 'em.
And I think the Dell thing was a PR move. American's didn't want tech support from people they couldn't relate to. But then with every phone support job that came back, how many programming jobs were sent overseas?
I lost my $35k/yr developer job, but now I got this $9/hr phone tech support job. The economy is great.
The article says that Indian companies buy US goods, but do Indian consumers? If an American company shifts an American job to India, does it also shift that purchase of its product? Will an Indian consumer base arise as fast as the American consumer base is destroyed?
Dosen't have to. Because we'll find a way to buy it anyhow, at least until the credit runs out and we bankrupt. Hopefully by then enough of India's population is now making enough to take over for us. After all, there's a billion of them and 300 million of us.
I mean think of it this way. If you have 100% market penetration here in the USA, you only need 33% of the population of India to break even. China works well on this idea to with it's roughly 1.5 billion inhabitance without all the pesky human rights to deal with. Which makes a wonderful industrial center.
I can attest to the lemon juice. I used to use orange extract myself, mixed with water. I'd spray it in an old windex bottle in the general areas I didn't want the cat to go like behind the TV and under the computer desk. Just make sure your not spraying your devices. Worked like a charm. Apparently from what I've read, cats hate citrus smells. I would even use lemon sented 409 cleaner if people were coming over and I wanted the cat off the couches, that would work for a day or two until the smell of the couch took back over.
So, does this mean, here in the US we all get free jumbo shrimp now? I mean, paragraph five specifically says, "ocean water", not an ocean.
Damn dude, I'm younger than you and I knew that the Robin Williams one was a remake. 'Course I wasted a year and a half persuing a film-arts degree... Ahhh, now lets see here, where's my copy of the Jerry Lewis ('60's) version of "The Nutty Professor"?
But I just frickn' bought an XBox! Of for crying out loud... Stupid Crimson Skies and it's making me finally want an XBox...
Great, guess that's what I get for holding out, but just not long enough. Stupid Microsoft...
Alright, I can top that. I work in a company that not only masters karaoke, but also allows the general public to come in and record. We're two doors down from a studio... Now, about three months ago, our heater for this section of the building went out so we've been at the mercy of the weather, with an outside door being beside our office, leading to the employee outside smoking area. So someone's in and out every 10 - 15 seconds... Then to plus all this, mandatory employee name tags were started this month along with a health care plan at about $75 a week.
If it dosen't beat ya, then at least I'm at par...
My feelings exaclty, it BSG has a Star Wars taste to it. It's like Spam, it tastes sort of like ham, but it's not...
I personally have to wonder if shows from the 90's will be remade in the 2010's with the same sort of contcept. I can see it now, Mystery Science Theater 3000 four hour miniseries... And instead of the host (Joel/Mike) we'll have a hot chick in a tight jump suit, and Servo, well he's a chick now too, and Crow as a chick too. And the Mads... hell, make 'em all chicks and the Satellite of Love, a strip club... and instead of watching movies, they have to dance or something... Oh! I gotta go get the people at Sci-Fi on the phone...
So, here's my question. If you get a male one, then a female one and breed them, is that copyright infringment?
Northern Exposure was perhaps the best thing to come from CBS for the whole of the 1990's. It was sad to see it fall apart so bad when Rob Morrow's character (Fleischman)left, and the addition of the wholy uninteresting Paul Provenza (Dr. Capra) in the final season. Fleischman I could make a connection with, stranger in a strange land sort of dynamic. Capra was just sort of there. I mean, the great parts of the show were the ones where the town of Cicely was having somesort of community event of which Fleischman would have to be clued in to. Capra never seemed to care or even be involved really.
The worst part of it all though was the final episode, the events just didn't make since. Holling went into "rut", as we are told he does every year, which was never introduced before. Chris and Ed talk about how they used to sit around and drink beer, while the whole of the series remarks how Ed never drank and would even be the only person with milk on the table at Maurice's dinners.
I know i'm being a bit of a "fanboy" about this, but the rating were tanking in that final year and everyone knew it, so at least Northern Exposure got to have a final episode. Shamed they wasted the opportunity.
It's not all bad. I've had two such jobs, one on staff and another contract and both were quite excellent. The first was system administrator for a high school back in the early '90's. Because of the Y2K initiative to get schools online tons of new equipment would come in, but since it came through county before it came to the individual schools, we got county's hand-me-downs as they got the newest and best. So I got to go through each computer. Long story short, I found out some things about some very high-level people because they didn't wipe their Outlook e-mail or newsgroups... After hinting around a little to some people, my duties seemed to get really light, and the new equipment started to come straight to us. (Well for a while.)
The second was for a city elementary school / junior high who wanted to do a Quicktime VR walkthrough of the school. So, one night me and my crew came and for an absorbantly large amount of money, we made about 70 VR panoramas of the building. (The concept being some crap about yuppie parents being able to walk around the school and seeing it, without actually having to come to the school or be active in their childs education. After all, school is daycare between 7:45 and 3 for these people.) We'll, I started the process of stitching all the images together to make the QT VRs (all automated) and about five days later, it finished them. I contacted their Sys Admin / Web guy and said I had them, but apparetly the school let the PTA know about them and parents got all worried that people would have a virtual walkthrough so they could plan kidnappings of their kids or plant bombs in the building or what not... Paranoid freaks... Still got paid for it though.
Those that give up liberty for freedom, deserve neither. -Benjamin Franklin
The GMC Typhoon and the Cyclone are two vehicles that use a 4.3 v-6 with twin turbos.
Ahh, but the Typhoon and Cyclone are no longer in production.
Oh jeez, I wasn't personally attacking Audi here, I was just saying that the kind of general excitement to most cars are gone now days, sure there's teh exceptions and the elite +$40k cars but the common car that has become the classic car of today, that is all gone.
...VW owns Audi. Along with Bentley, Lamborghini, Seat, Skoda.
But, I did notice in your message a few things I would like to comment on. First:
Deutz-Fahr Group owns Lamborghini. It was also owned by Dahmler-Chrystler for a short stint in the 1990's...
The Audi TT runs on a modified New Beetle chassis(the TT is wider among other things.)
And turns like a tank. I mean you can't make a 90 turn in one of these things if you had to. It's like turning a 100' semi.
Go to an Audi dealer. Sit in an A4. Now go into a VW dealer, and sit in a Jetta. Now do you understand why the A4 sells like hotcakes, despite costing well over 20k base?
Alright. I went to my local Audi dealer last night, then went accross the street to the VW dealer. I wasn't really all that impressed by the A4. It accelerated alright, and cornered smooth with a smooth ride, but so did the Jetta. Sure the A4 has some better immenities and looked nicer, but for the money, the Jetta would still get you to work and back with roughly the same feel, and for a lot less.
Now the New Beetle convertable, that was a P.O.S.... Why does it cost more, when there's less car? I mean it's slow. I mean SLOW. It weighs less than the Beetle, yet it has less pick-up. WTF?
Again, I have misspoken. I meant supercharged or turboed and in production.
Again, my bad.
Well, I choose 1985 because it seemed to be the year where everything stopped being remarkable. Look at just before 1985, in '81-'83 you have the DeLorean (a personal favorite of mine). There's the Datsun 280z, the old Toyota Celica Type R was still being made (though, not avaliable in the US), and you had those little Mercedes 2 door convertables, which I am not particularly fond of but people seem to love them. But in '84 Chrystler introduced the Caravan and everything seemed to change shortly after... Sure the infamous "K car" was already about, but the Daytona just didn't seem to be interesting anymore and the last of the unique cars seemed to come off the roads and everything became sort of cookie cutter. Fords became underpowered, GM started to only make seven cars and just change the logos, and all the imports sort of stopped being exotic.
e r is gonna get. I mean come on, we only got 8 feet wide to work with here.) Chrystler is starting to look better but their engines are still crap, reguardless of what their Hemi marketing bs would have us believe.... The american car is dead from any sort of classic point of view, and no one will ever spend thousands restoring a '96 Pontic Sunfire to mint.
Now, if I was just going to say the last year of the American car, I would have to go much earlier, and as a matter of fact, I can give you a day. That would be the exact same day the Mustang II rolled off the assembly line, and from then on America stopped making cars people dreamed about.
Now here we are, twenty-some-odd years later and what have we got? Ford wants to make everything look like eggs with the biggest bundle of wires and hoses possible under the hood. GM makes about 7 cars still, and every year they make them a little bigger. (One has to wonder how big the Escilade[sp?]/Yukon/Suburban/Avalanche/Tahoe/Rain
BTW: There *ARE* some Chevy II's running around.
1967 seems to be the really hot year, but there's plenty of earlier ones. You just have to know where to look.
Woops, hehe. I meant the second generation Novas... The little hatchback from the 80's... My bad.
Well, I do have to be honest here and say, I didn't even think about these cars, really because I never see them. I've always looked at the Prowler or the new GT-1 Mustang as more of a collectors car than a real car. People don't buy them to drive, they buy them to put in their garage and maybe just drive on weekends. And to me, this should not be what a classic car is, cars everyone drove and the common man could afford. To me, there's just something wrong with a $40k price tag on the Thunderbird. It's taking the classic car and making at an elitist thing.
Following this line of thought, when my dad thought back to his childhood, there was the muscle car which was affordable to the masses, and built to last. Now days the common car isn't supposed to last, and when I think back to my childhood I'll remember the Escort or the Chevy Love (small pick-up from the 80's). These were ment to last, but not the 50 - 80 years their older pretecesorts have made it and still continue to work. I mean the names themselves prove my point. Ask anyone whos around cars if they have ever heard of a Rambler or Edsel or Chevy Nomad and they will tell you they have. Now ask them about the Love, or the Currier, or the Lynx, or what about the Nova II? These cars were on the road just twenty years ago and we're already forgetting them. Oldsmobile has stopped production. In twenty years, think anyone will rember the old Eighty-Eight or the Cutlass-Cruiser? I do. Now, what about the Aurora or the Bravado...
Buick's 3800 Series II v6 is the only american supercharged V6 I know of. And I know of no American turbo v6s. Come to think of it the only American turbo I4 I know of is the PT Cruiser, oh and it's supposed to be an option on the upcoming Chevy Cobalt.
It simple really, what will become of cars from today when they become classics. They simply won't.
You see, cars like the '57 Chevy or the '68 Camero were unique, they only made so may and the ones around today were lovingly restore or maticulously cared for so that they exsist today. But it's not just that, those cars were made to last. That's why you still see a '38 DeSoto or a '42 Dodge Pick-up. It's also why you can go to a junkyard, buy and old Impala or Oldsmobile and restore it. There's parts out there and you can repair what you can't find. But, as cars went on, and companies wanted larger proffit dividens, and then came plastics...
Nowdays cars aren't built to last, well, not last lifetimes. They're built to last until the payment book is done. Sure you have exceptions like Toyota Camary's or Honda Civic's that go on and on, but there's nothing unique to these cars. Their people movers, and that's it. I for one can't really imagine taking my kid, on a warm spring day, to an autoshow just to see a bunch of '92 - '96 Tercels or '87 - '91 Sentras.
Then there's the plastics I mentioned. My last car was a '94 Chevy Cavlaier Wagon. It was mostly the same car as the '81 Chevy Celebrity, or the Oldsmobile Ferenza, or the Pontica Sunfire / J2000, or the Cadillac Cimmaron, or the Buick Skylark / Century. All of which had a nearly 15 year stint known as the General Motor's J-Body design. But it's not just GM. The Ford Taurus is the Mercury Sable, or the Ford Crown Victoria is the same as the Mercury Grand Marquee or something like that... It's not just American cars though, the Pontiac Vibe is also the same car as the Toyota Matrix... Which was the retool from the wagon variance of, you guessed it, the GM J-Body. The only diffrence between these cars is a plastic molded bummper or body panel. Strip away that and you have the same 2.2l I4 engine mounted to the same H3430 3 speed automatic front wheel drive system with front disc brake and optional rear wheel discs...
But it goes beyond that, the materials used now days aren't even designed to last that long. A friend of mine has restored a 1985 Buick LeSabre. (GM H Body I believe, same thing as the Chevy Capris Classic for those keeping score.) A problem arose from when his coolant resevoir cracked and he had to replace it. General Motors changed the design to the resivoir in 1988 to make way for a redesign of the cruise control vacume system. So the part, even as a replacment part, was discontinued in 1991. The part itself was made of a sub-quality plastic that, after about 15 years becomes hard and brittle. So you can't go to a junkyard and buy another one off another Buick as, it too, will crack and brake. In the end, his only option was to use ducktape until the whole of the container rots and he has to make another container all together.
I know I have harped on American cars alot, and I really do love them, but even the author's AUDI is not unique. Audi has for years traded engine and body parts and techniques with Volkswagon, so much so that alot of Audi's now have VW W8 engines, while VW itself builds three of it's cars on the same chassi. The Passat, New Bettle, and Jetta are, when you trear them down, all the same car...
Oh well... Hopefully tennagers won't get ahold of too many Malibus or Impalas (the old ones, not this new crap) and enough will be spared 22" wheels and hydrolics that they will still be drivable in 20 years so that when I take my kid to a car show one day I can show them that, damnit, their used to be some nice cars. Some style that wasn't just an option package, that steel was fashioned into moving elegance, and cars of this caliber should not be messed with aside from the factory design, and that one time long ago, it was just wrong for Cadillac to make a pick-up.
Blah, a VoIP price war would do wonders for the industry, I mean just look at the DSL price wars a few years back. That lead to lower and lower prices and more and more service, eventually to the point where only massive conglomo-corps were the only ones left because they had the money to bankroll DSL service till the little guys went broke. Oh, wait... I guess that was the opposite of my point.
Oh well, at least the DSL price wars left really all the big telcoms as the only DSL providers, and VoIP is something the telcoms don't want to exsist anyhow so they can keep their strangle-hold monopoly on services, so when they jump in and play the same game this time, and all the upstarts go bankrupt, it will leave all the Bells running VoIP services, and... oh, crap.