I recieved bad news from my doctor today: he strongly advised me to give up crack. I wasn't too keen on the idea and I told him so. He started to tell me all about how dangerous it was! Balderdash, I riposted. If it was dangerous then they'd put little warning labels on the bags like the cigarette companies do. That was the main reason I changed from smoking tobacco in the first place. I tried to tell my doctor all this but he invariably treated me with disdain.
Cloud City, Bespin: Main Dining Chamber.
Han Solo: Why you...!
Lando Calrissian: I had no choice. They arrived right before you did.
Han fires three times at Vader. Vader blocks the bolts with his hand and uses the force to grab the blaster.
Darth Vader: We would be honoured if you would join us.
Pause
Princess Leia: Well? Aren't you going to take us away?
DV: I asked you to dinner.
HS: If you think we're going to sit down and eat with y...what's that?
DV: This? Fried Ewok.. Quite a delicacy, or so I am told.
LC: In all candour the Ewok is quite good.
Chewbacca: Rooowr!
PL: Actually it has been quite a while since breakfast.
HS: I'll try the..what did you say it was?
DV: Fried Ewok. On a bed of wronshyr leaves.
PL: (suspiciously) Where did you get Ewok from in the first place?
DV: Endor. (to himself) Blast!
PL: What? Did you say Endor? As in the forest moon?
DV: No.
HS: Why is the Empire hanging around Endor?
DV: Um, the Emperor wanted a change from Bothans. Look, can we change the subject? Here, try the gourmet duck!
PL: General Reekian was telling me the other day about something called a Waldorf Salad.
DV: (blankly) Er, I think we're all out of Waldorfs...
Boba Fett enters.
DV: Ah, Boba, good. Can you fetch the roast duck please (aside) Look out, they're rebels. Don't mention the war! I did once, but I *think* I got away with it.
Boba Fett: Que?
I bear important news.
On my last trip to sample the artistic delights of Melbourne I purchased a red shirt, because it looked similar to that worn by The Bandit in "Smokey and the Bandit".
It now appears that I am not the only one who bought one. The shirt has a distinctive cut, with square pockets, epaulettes, odd buttons and seams down the centre of the lapels. It is also a very vivid red hue. In the latest Womens Weekly magazine I noticed an interview with Gordon Ramsay, foul-mouthed chef that he is, in which he was wearing, beyond a shadow of doubt, the same shirt.
The odd thing is that i've never seen them anywhere other than one little clothes shop in Richmond, and Ramsay was in Melbourne over the same weekend to promote something or other, I seem to recall.
Freaky. Not only do we have a similar taste in clothing but we may even have bought the shirts at around the same time. Still, it could have been worse. It could have been Peter Russell Clarke...
We are now officially living in the future. Today Honda opened it's new production line for the Honda FCX, a car which runs on hydrogen and produces only water as a by-product. Now, it is possible to fill your tank with hydrogen instead of petrol. There have been hydrogen vehicles along similar lines in the past, and both Japan and California have hydrogen filling stations to cater for these But previously these have been bespoke vehicles from BMW or Honda, made to order and handbuilt. Today Honda have taken the step to mass-produce them.
There are teething troubles, of course. These vehicles are only available in California and Japan. But to say that they will not spread further due to a lack of hydrogen stations is like saying that no-one would buy a Model T because there were no petrol stations. If there is a public need, the system will change. I have little doubt that at some point in the future Mr Shell of Miss BP will be offering hydrogen at the pump, or maybe they'll be beaten to the market by Sir Caltex or Dame Liberty, but the day will come when I can buy a hydrogen car and run it quite comfortably. As with the demise of the horse and the livery stable, one day the 'oil burner' will be a thing of the past.
Perhaps I am just being naive. Maybe it is wishful-thinking-induced hubris, but I really would like the sense of hope I feel today to not be misplaced. I feel today like I imagine Gottlieb Daimler must have felt in the late 1890s, having successfully harnessed the internal combustion engine to a rolling chassis. I feel that the world of personal transportation has changed, and changed for the better.
Roll on the future: a future full of non-polluting, non-fossil-fuel using vehicles. A world in which petro-dollars are not financing a militant Islam, and a world without smog.
But still a world with Top Gear :o)
Firstly, i'd like to thank D C White for letting me publish this on his blog. I like to write but getting stuff published is, to be frank, a bit of a pain in the Archangel Gabriel. I mean Dad managed to get two books published a while back but no-one really seems interested in giving me a go. Someone suggested the Gideons but they told me they're not taking on new material at this point in time.
Anyway, to business. Being quite high up in the religious pantheon does tend to have it's little perks and one of them is being able to test drive new cars at will. Having the same initials as Jeremy Clarkson doesn't seem to hurt either. Anyway, below are my thoughts on some of the current crop of motors on the market.
Lamborghini Gallardo: Nice seats, colours a bit garish. 4-wheel-drive helps keep it on the tarmac through the twisty bits. Not too keen on the badge though. Looks a bit like that minotaur chap.
Bugatti Veyron: I was really excited about driving this one but when I got in it was a dissapointment. Staggeringly fast but my feet kept slipping off the pedals and someone had left a Beatles CD in the player. I couldn't figure out how to turn it off so the entire test was performed to 'Strawberry Fields Forever'. I shouldn't have worn my sandals.
Dodge Viper: For a car named after the physical manifestation of Dad's archenemy this was surprisingly good. Well sorted and grunty in all the right places. The extra-large drink holders went down a treat when I stopped off at McChucks.
Ferrari 460GT: If there's one thing i've always got time for, it's a Ferrari. They're about the best things ever to come out of Italy, and i'm including the Holy Roman Church in that. I tell you, if the Pope doesn't start driving one of these soon he'll confirm my suspicions that he's a jumped-up little oik.
Porsche 911GT3: I don't know why I even bothered with this one. Porsches have no souls whatsoever and frankly, I should know. Dirty little arse-engined Nazi slot cars. It might drive well but that's no substitute for people not thinking you're a wanker.
A bloke here at work is buying a new car for his wife and I suggested he look at the Honda Jazz. He got a brochure from Honda and I had a look at it today. Aparrently the Honda Jazz with the rear seats folded down can fit "4 suitcases, 3 golf bags, or a tall shrub".
I don't know about you, but I always purchase my cars pursuant to how much shrubbery they can carry, in case I unexpectedly run into the Knights Who Say "Ni!"
Whether it was a metric or an imperial shrub was not mentioned.
Goodtime Slim would not have believed, in the last minutes of the breakfast meal, that his fruit and spice muffins were being watched from the timeless places across the table.
He could not have dreamed his breakfast was being scrutinized, as someone with a microscope studies creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water.
For he had never even considered the possibility of greed on other chairs and yet, across the gulf of tabletop, a mind he considered immeasurably inferior to his regarded his breakfast with envious eyes, and slowly and surely, it drew it’s plans against him.
It may be a symptom of getting old, but as the years go on I find myself siding more and more with Palpatine's Galactic Empire. I'm not talking about the politics of destroying planets or shooting force-lightning from my fingertips, but rather about the more mundane tasks that coincide with my own specialty of logistics and supply economics.
Consider the Galactic Starfleet for example. We're told that Palpatine only hired humans because he was speciesist, but was that really the case? It's certainly what the Alliance propogandists would have us believe, but from a logistical standpoint I don't believe that it was. Say you're building a Star Destroyer at the Kuat Drive Yards. What sort of toilets would you install? It's a pretty fair bet that different races are going to need different shapes and sizes of pan. And the waste itself: what happens if some race's output is highly alkaline while other's is highly acidic? A septic tank explosion in mid-space is going to put a crimp in everyone's day. On an Imperial ship however you don't even need female toilets, unless Ysanne Isard, Mara Jade or Admiral Daala are aboard of course, but even then they could make do easily enough. It would be easy enough to say that you could crew each individual ship with a different species, but what would that do to your manpower flexibility?
And uniforms! I'm not even going to start on the impossibility of trying to fit an Ithorian's head into a Stormtrooper helmet. Can you imagine the quartermaster's store in the New Republic? It's be about as big as the warehouse from Raiders Of The Lost Ark, and that'd just be for the hats.
Mind you, the Alliance can put about all of the propoganda it likes about the Empire's predilection for humans, but how many aliens are there in Rogue Squadron? Sweet fanny adams, that's how many. In fact in the entire Rebel Alliance I can spot three non-humans: Admiral Ackbar, Chewbacca and the little Sullustian chap with the wrinkly face who co-piloted with Lando Calrissian. Bothans were mentioned, but they generally seemed to be employed as the espionage equivalent of cannon fodder.
