Pat @Pat@qoto.org

#joke

A man who had been hiding in a deep bunker in Baghdad since the beginning of the war finally crawled out, looked around and asked a guy, "So where's Saddam Hussein?"

The guy says, "What? Have you been living under Iraq?"

#science #fiction #ScienceFiction #SciFi #FTW #sfftw #film #movie #StarTrek #vulcan #deltan #klingons #CarbonUnits #Vger #AI #trekies #kolinahr

Retro SciFi Film of the Week…

Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979)

This film is about a bald, long-legged alien… and other stuff.

It’s hard to convey how anticipated this film was when it was released. The original TV series had been canceled a decade prior, which disappointed loyal fans and by time this film was made, the series had been widely syndicated and gathered a huge fan base. It was a really big deal. The first Star Trek movie, ever.

Production for the film was a real mess. The suits at Paramount thought the thing was some kind of Star Wars knockoff and the script was rewritten several times before production began. They even wanted to turn it into a new TV series at one point. When production finally started, the script was still unsatisfactory to everyone. Creator Gene Roddenberry and director Robert Wise struggled over the project throughout. Leonard Nimoy, William Shatner and other cast members, and even the special effect guy were contributing to the script as the production was going on. The final script at the end of production contained only a fraction of what was in the original script when shooting started.

In the end the narrative wasn’t the tightest story ever produced, but it was original. However, it lacked any contemporary social commentary, which was a hallmark of the original series. The special effects were fantastic (for 1979), as was the score.

Douglass Trumbull (2001: A Space Odyssey) did the special effects which were almost entirely done with models, lighting, hand-painted mattes and photographic special effects; only a few simple computer generated images were used. The score was done by Jerry Goldsmith who continued on with the franchise, providing it with it’s distinctive theme music.

Because the film was so rushed, Wise was not totally satisfied with it and a directors cut was eventually made years later, which he thought was the best edit of the film.

Even with its flaws, I highly recommend this film.

#Turkey #Syria #earthquake

Al Jazeera is reporting more than 45,000 people killed from the earthquake in Turkey.

That's more than three times the number of people who are killed during an entire year in the US from gun homicides.

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/liveblog/2023/2/18/turkey-syria-updates-death-toll-from-earthquakes-passes-45000

Here's a picture of Uranus next to a pic of Earth, to scale.

(PD image per Wikimedia Commons)

I decided to mark the image as sensitive.

I didn't notice it until I was writing the image description, but this image could be seen as offensive. They (I assume CIA) choose to do the eyes in yellow and they made them slanted and squinted (or maybe those are just the pupils that are squinted) so it looks kind of like a caricature.

At the time in the 1960s, nobody even saw anything wrong with these types of caricatures of Asian people and they were common, but today those images are considered offensive.

#cia #taiwan #U2 #spy #globophobia #weather
#caturday

The Black Cat Squadron was a secret spying project run out of Taiwan during the 60s into the mid 70s. It was run by the CIA using ROCAF pilots under the cover of a weather research unit of the Taiwanese Air force.

Most of the missions were flown over China using a small fleet of just two U2 spy planes. The US would replace the planes whenever they were shot down or crashed.

#solar #system #planet #astronomy #science #word

How do you pronounce Uranus?

#nasa #space #quiz #saturn #rocket #ship #lander #esa

We've never landed a spacecraft on Saturn because:

Just did a search and turns out there are a couple of them already out there. A dentist in MA goes by Trans-N-Dental, LLC. And another dentist in MA named Dr. Quon Tran calls his practice Trans Dental Care.

(Not sure if they offer hormone therapy, though. 🙂 )

#joke #pun #lgbt #lgbtq #dentist #trans

I'm going to open a new practice and offer hormone therapy and teeth cleaning.

I'm calling it Trans and Dental.

Warning: This is just a metaphor. If you actually try this with your kid, make sure you watch them closely because the strings of balloons could harm the baby.

#globophobia

Parental tip #42:

How to keep your baby distracted.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4nVDQ8Rl2M

I forgot to mention that Tom Keene was in this film. Keene was a well known film and TV star who did mostly Westerns. This was his last film. He and Talbot gave the best performances in this film, in my opinion.

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Retro SciFi Film of the Week…

Plan 9 from Outer Space (1957)

How did this stupid film become the greatest science fiction cult classic ever? Who knows. This is Ed Wood’s magnum opus. Written and shot in a month, on a budget of $60k.

Here are a couple of excerpts from Wikipedia, “...his ideas tended to be too expensive to film, yet he tried to film them anyway.” and “[Wood’s films were] notable for their campy aesthetics, technical errors, unsophisticated special effects, use of poorly-matched (sic) stock footage, eccentric casts, idiosyncratic stories and non sequitur dialogue...”

Filmed in the San Fernando Valley, north of Hollywood, the movie contains many shots of historical interest from the area, including Tor Johnson’s house where Bela Lugosi did some unrelated test scenes before his death which were later worked into the film as his “last performance”. (Johnson was a professional wrestler and friend of Wood.)

Wood continued to make low-budget sensational films in the Valley, later shifting to porn in the late 1960s because they made more money. His productions were at the start of the boom in the porn industry in the San Fernando Valley, where 90% of porn films were make from the 60s through the 90s. (The industry declined significantly at the beginning of the 21th century due to the Internet.)

The film also starred Gregory Walcott, Bela Lugosi, Maila Nurmi, Tor Johnson, Lyle Talbot and Criswell.

The title was inspiration for the UNIX-like OS, Plan 9 from Bell Labs.

A biopic of Wood’s career was later produced, Ed Wood (1994), starring Johnny Deep as Wood and Martin Landau as Bela Lugosi.That biopic covers his productions from Glen or Glenda (1953) to Plan 9 from Outer Space (1957). The former was about transvestism -- Wood himself was a cross dresser and many of his friends were in the LGBTQ community.

(View this film at: https://video.qoto.org/videos/watch/21371376-a49f-499e-acb8-af232c0dea8e )

#science #fiction #ScienceFiction #SciFi #FTW #sfftw #film #movie #SanFernandoValley #LowBudget #vampires #horror #GraveRobbers #plan9 #lgbtq #lgbt #vitamins #Criswell

The correct answer is the second one, "aware/attentive to issues of racial/soc. injustice".

Only three participants in the poll, so I guess not many people care.

So, I guess I won't be too concerned about it either. We'll just use the term as a marker -- when someone uses the term derisively, they are self-identifying as a racist.

#WordOfTheDay

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Today's word of the day...

Globophobia

🎈

#humor #lgbt #lgbtq #religion

There is only one true interpretation of Leviticus 20:13. It says that if two men have sex together, they have to smoke some weed first…

‘If a man lay with another man as he lay with a woman, they both shall be stoned.’

#poll #woke #BlackHistory

Which of the following are ‘woke’?

You can still see it with binoculars...

https://qoto.org/@Pat/109268224828108075