Hahahahahaha!!! So... are you in a relationship?
The excellent website Damn Interesting has an article on acoustic locators: [www.damninteresting.com] (And THANK YOU Esther, for forcing me to search for that article. Damn Interesting had been dormant for years after being part of my daily regimen, and I'd given up checking the site. Now I see it's back, thank FSM.)
Although most of the remaining locators (also called "acoustic mirrors") are in England, there is a magnificent one on Malta, pointed right at the southern tip of Sicily: [g.co] Not all of the stationary locators were dish-shaped; many were huge curved walls, and this is one of them. They could detect the bombers' engines as much as fifteen minutes before the enemy aircraft reached shore, and doubtless saved many lives.
An excellent meta-joke undone by faulty technology. I appreciate the attempt.
The best episode of "The Outer Limits" of all time: The Zanti Misfits. Look it up, find a way to watch it, shudder uncontrollably, and enjoy.
What Would Geordi Do?
I'll take some of the flak for you. Not only did I love "Speed Racer", but I wished it had been shot in 3D. A load of fun, true to the spirit of the original, and some of the most gorgeous visuals ever put on screen.
I designed and set up a Pepper's Ghost illusion for a large haunted house in San Antonio more years ago than I care to remember. There are a few things you can do to make the illusion more convincing. For simplicity's sake we'll call the reflected room the ghost room and the one the audience looks directly into through the glass the real room.
1. Measure everything very carefully, and angle the glass at exactly 45 degrees. Your measurements should be made from the front surface of the glass. There will be a slight reflection from the internal face of the glass (causing a faint doubling of the "ghost"), but all distances must be measured from the front of the glass.
2. Brace the glass really, really well, otherwise it will flex and ruin the illusion.
2. Get two identical copies of all the props you will be using. A chair is a very good prop for this. When you position them in the real room, there should be enough space for the ghost to walk behind. Once you've got things set up in the real room, glue them down. With the glass in place and the lighting on, position objects in the ghost room so that they appear to overlap exactly with the real room (it's going to take several people to do this). Once the props are positioned correctly in the ghost room, glue them down as well. Then spray everything in the ghost room with matte black paint, including the walls, floor and ceiling.
3. The real room should have a patterned wallpaper and be lit relatively dimly. One wall of the ghost room should be missing a section, with a single bright light source placed as closely along that wall as possible.
4. Rotate your cast frequently, because the ghost room can get pretty hot. Also be careful that ghost makeup doesn't get smeared onto the black props -- it will show up and mess up the effect.
Setting it up this way lets you do some pretty spectacular things. The ghost can enter and exit the room through the wall. Objects in the room can be seen through the ghost, but the ghost cannot be seen through the objects. We always got a great reaction when the ghost got up and walked behind the chair it had been sitting in.
Keep in mind that in a haunted house, this illusion is going to cause a serious traffic bottleneck because people are going to stand around trying to figure out how it is done, and even if they know how it works it still looks amazing. Be prepared to limit the time the audience is allowed to linger.
1. Measure everything very carefully, and angle the glass at exactly 45 degrees. Your measurements should be made from the front surface of the glass. There will be a slight reflection from the internal face of the glass (causing a faint doubling of the "ghost"), but all distances must be measured from the front of the glass.
2. Brace the glass really, really well, otherwise it will flex and ruin the illusion.
2. Get two identical copies of all the props you will be using. A chair is a very good prop for this. When you position them in the real room, there should be enough space for the ghost to walk behind. Once you've got things set up in the real room, glue them down. With the glass in place and the lighting on, position objects in the ghost room so that they appear to overlap exactly with the real room (it's going to take several people to do this). Once the props are positioned correctly in the ghost room, glue them down as well. Then spray everything in the ghost room with matte black paint, including the walls, floor and ceiling.
3. The real room should have a patterned wallpaper and be lit relatively dimly. One wall of the ghost room should be missing a section, with a single bright light source placed as closely along that wall as possible.
4. Rotate your cast frequently, because the ghost room can get pretty hot. Also be careful that ghost makeup doesn't get smeared onto the black props -- it will show up and mess up the effect.
Setting it up this way lets you do some pretty spectacular things. The ghost can enter and exit the room through the wall. Objects in the room can be seen through the ghost, but the ghost cannot be seen through the objects. We always got a great reaction when the ghost got up and walked behind the chair it had been sitting in.
Keep in mind that in a haunted house, this illusion is going to cause a serious traffic bottleneck because people are going to stand around trying to figure out how it is done, and even if they know how it works it still looks amazing. Be prepared to limit the time the audience is allowed to linger.
Well, I grabbed a screen cap of the slide in HD, enlarged it, and compared the relevant entries. You are correct about the 1.2 meters, but according to the slide, Ewoks really are 98% crap. There is no indication of a decimal point in there.
While I acknowledge that in all likelihood you are correct, as someone born well before the dividing line I choose to believe that Ewoks are, in fact, 98% crap.
I loved the Ewok Vital Statistics slide. Average Weight: 50 kilograms. Average Fecal Deposit: 49 kilograms. And coffee flies out of my nose.
I can just see it: Meyers produces an episode where Itchy is Batman and Scratchy is the Joker. Robin shows it to him expecting him to laugh, but Batman just snarls and walks away. Later that night he's riding around in the Batmobile, snickering.
And let us not forget he played Roger Meyers, Jr. of Itchy and Scratchy fame.
Now why do they want to go messing with my fantasy of twin Tasha Yars by making them all creepy-like?
Ideally sitting up in bed and complaining about fried cheese giving him nightmares.
If you're interested in the subject, may I suggest Rev. Robert Kirk's "The Secret Commonwealth", written in 1691. [www.sacred-texts.com] There are times while reading it you get the disquieting impression that he's describing something real and dangerous.
Don't you think he should go up against the World Crime League first? Hanoi Xan has been on the loose since at least 1984, and nobody seems to give a damn.
The fusion can go well. They had to go in twice on me; the second time they fused two vertebrae. It's been eighteen years with only sporadic pain until recently. I actually look back on the recovery from the surgery as a golden age: out of constant pain, flat on my back on the floor watching Mystery Science Theater 3000 and teaching myself to program in C++.
Aaaand you get a heart.
I wouldn't call it a "correction" exactly; it's certainly a bizarre spelling to modern eyes. It's amazing how fluid spelling, grammar, and punctuation are over time.
As an example, for a while the ampersand was not considered informal, and had a specific usage (which also changed over time). It was, I believe, the cursive for 'et', the latin word for 'and'. You'll see old manuscripts that abbreviated et cetera (etc. -- literally 'and so forth') as &c., but the main usage was in lists -- it was pronounced 'and' but had a slightly different function.
Right now we're undergoing a major shift in the usage of punctuation, with very authoritative arguments on either side. One debate (which is actually related to how the ampersand was used in lists) is over how to handle phrases like "one, two and three". It can be either the traditional construct I just used, or "one, two, and three", a.k.a the 'serial comma". I favor the latter, as do Oxford University, the Chicago Manual of Style, and Strunk & White. (It's also known as the Oxford comma.)
Another punctuation controversy concerns how punctuation is used with quotation marks. Traditional usage is to place the punctuation within the quotation marks, as in: The last paragraph contained the phrase "a shift in the usage of punctuation." The argument against it, of course, is that the period was NOT part of the quotation, and rightly belongs outside of it. This is the logical position to take, and one that I have tried to follow in my own writing over the past year, but it's taken some effort of will. (So I'm not doing it out of ignorance.) My former high-school English teacher and I are in some disagreement over that one. Other than "that's the way it's always been done", the main reason for the traditional usage seems to have more to do with typesetting aesthetics rather than reasoning.
I'm behind the times when it comes to the number of spaces following a period or colon, however. Using two spaces, as I do, apparently marks one as an uncouth dinosaur not fit for human company.
As an example, for a while the ampersand was not considered informal, and had a specific usage (which also changed over time). It was, I believe, the cursive for 'et', the latin word for 'and'. You'll see old manuscripts that abbreviated et cetera (etc. -- literally 'and so forth') as &c., but the main usage was in lists -- it was pronounced 'and' but had a slightly different function.
Right now we're undergoing a major shift in the usage of punctuation, with very authoritative arguments on either side. One debate (which is actually related to how the ampersand was used in lists) is over how to handle phrases like "one, two and three". It can be either the traditional construct I just used, or "one, two, and three", a.k.a the 'serial comma". I favor the latter, as do Oxford University, the Chicago Manual of Style, and Strunk & White. (It's also known as the Oxford comma.)
Another punctuation controversy concerns how punctuation is used with quotation marks. Traditional usage is to place the punctuation within the quotation marks, as in: The last paragraph contained the phrase "a shift in the usage of punctuation." The argument against it, of course, is that the period was NOT part of the quotation, and rightly belongs outside of it. This is the logical position to take, and one that I have tried to follow in my own writing over the past year, but it's taken some effort of will. (So I'm not doing it out of ignorance.) My former high-school English teacher and I are in some disagreement over that one. Other than "that's the way it's always been done", the main reason for the traditional usage seems to have more to do with typesetting aesthetics rather than reasoning.
I'm behind the times when it comes to the number of spaces following a period or colon, however. Using two spaces, as I do, apparently marks one as an uncouth dinosaur not fit for human company.
Thank you very much.
