Next time you hear about a site that has been looted with metal detectors, and there were 100 little pits there – remember this photo.
- Seen two ridiculous password behaviours recently. One Polish bank tells you to enter part of your password, about a third of the characters, which ones is randomised each time. One Swedish newspaper generates a password for you, then tells you to enter that password backwards, which is another way of saying ”Here’s your password backwards!”.
- Idea for a sketch: a group conversation at a party that works like a Facebook thread. Most participants ignore each other and only reply to what the first person said, often making identical responses. Two hours after everyone has moved on to new subjects, a new guest arrives and replies to the old thread, repeating something that’s already been said twice.
- Anyone who thinks there should be more AC/DC hits should listen to Airbourne, “Ready to Rock”.
- Movie: Clue (1985). This over-the-top whodunnit parody brings together a group of strangers with secrets in a Gothic manor full of potential murder weapons. Grade: good, silly comedy!
- I’m writing a Motörhead tribute song about the importance of taking condoms along on space shuttle missions in the 80s. “The Space of Aids”.
- Poor David Gahan. After two years, Vince Clarke leaves the band and he’s like “Finally I can stop singing about gay men!” And Martin Gore just “You will now spend decades singing about BDSM”.
- In Starship Troopers ch. 2, Heinlein calls a genetically enhanced dog a “stable genius”.
- The OCR on this free ebook of Starship Troopers is so bad that everyone’s in the Anny.
- While Verhoeven’s movie Starship Troopers parodies fascism, Heinlein’s novel does not. I just read a long didactic passage where he argues for corporeal and capital punishment.
- Asked a white-haired gaffer if he was born in the 40s (like my parents). He is 13 years older than me.
Aardvarchaeology - by Dr. Martin Rundkvist 
Starship Troopers is very much an author tract. Heinlein admitted writing the novel to express his frustration with American political leaders not seeing the USSR as the threat that he saw it as. And while the racial views were relatively enlightened for the time (the book features a Filipino protagonist at a time when characters of non-European ancestry were rare in science fiction, and the few that did exist were usually in subservient roles), Heinlein’s political views had taken a sharp right turn in the 1940s, correlated with his divorce from Leslyn and his marriage to Virginia.
Heinlein clearly demonstrated a command of polemic writing in this novel. His arguments are superficially convincing, as long as you don’t examine the implicit assumptions too closely.
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Just to mention one thing, he doesn’t seem to understand that few people would like to live in a society where all political issues are settled by polling a minority filled with a blindly militaristic esprit de corps.
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“While Verhoeven’s movie Starship Troopers parodies fascism, Heinlein’s novel does not.”
Quoting the relevant part of the parody novel Jellyfish from Mike Resnick & David Gerrold:
“…whose didactic tracts on personal responsibility had left generations of readers arguing which type of fascist he was”.
I take it there really is some subtext for readers to latch on and argue about.
(picked up the novel once, didn’t finish it)
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The novel contains enormous amounts of sermonising, including long flashbacks to high school lectures.
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Typical Heinlein. I’ve read The Moon is a Harsh Mistress which was OK, and Stranger in a Strange Land, which was well written, but I kept waiting for something really interesting to happen, and nothing did.
Asimov said that Heinlein’s political views always mirrored those of his wife, and he was married more than once.
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As for password foolishness, an obligatory link to a classic example of what not to use for a password.
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When Clue was in theaters, they had the gimmick of having three different endings, to entice customers to see the film multiple times. The theater would indicate in its newspaper ads which of the three endings (A, B, or C) it was showing. The video release version that I saw combined all three with a handwave: after the first ending, there was a title card saying that that was one way it might have happened, but maybe it happened this way instead, and the second ending followed. Then another title card saying that this was what really happened, followed by the third ending.
The characters, plot, and floor plan of the mansion were based on the board game sold under the same name in the US. In the UK the game is known as Cluedo. I don’t know whether Sweden follows US or UK English on this point, or whether there is a Swedish version of the game.
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I saw the same version as you did. Cluedo is or was a mainstay of Swedish toy stores. The name alludes to the UK name for Parcheesi, Ludo.
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