Richard Uhler

...

When I hear this song, especially by Ofra, there is not a dry eye in my head.

Ba'al Chatzaf

Thanks for posting this, Bob. Ofra's voice was (and of course still is) riveting.

Boris Karloff - a witty song and a great vocal performance.

...

I believe that's actually Thurl Ravenscroft singing. (Thurl provided the "Tony The Tiger" voice for Kelloggs cereal commercials, among other things.)

I jumped to a conclusion, Karloff did the narration. But the song still rules.

True!

Boris Karloff - a witty song and a great vocal performance.

...

I believe that's actually Thurl Ravenscroft singing. (Thurl provided the "Tony The Tiger" voice for Kelloggs cereal commercials, among other things.)

...

If I can find someone who still plays, almost any Avalon Hill game.

...

Wow, that takes me back. I *loved* Panzerblitz & Panzer Leader as a teen. I haven't played since my college years in the early '80s though.

Richard; Thanks for the link.

You're welcome.

I asked this question on my blog.

Are any of Hitchcock's TV shows available?

Yes: http://www.amazon.com/Alfred-Hitchcock-Pre...8990&sr=1-1

...Gay guys and FBI guys would be welcome compared to some of what goes down around here. Last week I got jumped by 3, er, "urbans" while I was walking home from a pool match. They lost, but my face got pretty messed up. In Lakewood, of all places...geez. I used to live here, between 78 and 82....

I'm sorry to hear this. My partner & I lived in Lakewood from 1999 until last December; it sounds like we picked a good time to leave. Although we never had such a problem as you described, it was obvious to us that the area was no longer as stable as we used to think it was.

Nevertheless I enjoyed my years in Lakewood and will remember it with fondness.

When Atlas Shrugged was published almost all the reviews were negative. The worst being National Review's by Whitaker Chambers.

Over the years the reviews have improved. Enough that it is considered a modern classic and is on high school reading lists.

For me some of the best test for any book are the following . Is it still in print? Are people still talking about. Atlas passes that test with flying colors.

Is there any other bestseller from 1957 that can be said about?

Thanks.

ALfonso

Chris -

Provocative idea! Anyone know how to find bestseller lists from the past so one could actually ask the "whatever happened to that book" question about bestsellers from the 1950s?

Alfonso

A Google search provided these, among others:

http://www3.isrl.uiuc.edu/~unsworth/course...lers/best50.cgi

http://www.hawes.com/no1_nf_d.htm

Other than Atlas the only novels from 1957 on that first list that I've even heard of are Peyton Place and On The Beach, and I kinda doubt that either of these changed anyone's life as AS has done. (I did read Day Of Infamy from the NYT list as a teen, but the same comment applies.)

Alfonso, I wonder what you had intended to say...?

Just thanks.

Alfonso

Ah. You're welcome.

Peyton Place was the "dirty book" of the 50ths. Does anyone still read it.

On the Beach which was written by Neville Shute about a nuclear war which is killing everyone in the world. It was different from much of Shute's earlier works.

The book service Paper Tiger offers many of Shute's works. Bob Koker on this site recommend one of Shute's books

Right; On The Beach was on an optional reading list in a class I took when I was 13 or 14; I passed it over in favor of Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, IIRC.

When Atlas Shrugged was published almost all the reviews were negative. The worst being National Review's by Whitaker Chambers.

Over the years the reviews have improved. Enough that it is considered a modern classic and is on high school reading lists.

For me some of the best test for any book are the following . Is it still in print? Are people still talking about. Atlas passes that test with flying colors.

Is there any other bestseller from 1957 that can be said about?

Thanks.

ALfonso

Chris -

Provocative idea! Anyone know how to find bestseller lists from the past so one could actually ask the "whatever happened to that book" question about bestsellers from the 1950s?

Alfonso

A Google search provided these, among others:

http://www3.isrl.uiuc.edu/~unsworth/course...lers/best50.cgi

http://www.hawes.com/no1_nf_d.htm

Other than Atlas the only novels from 1957 on that first list that I've even heard of are Peyton Place and On The Beach, and I kinda doubt that either of these changed anyone's life as AS has done. (I did read Day Of Infamy from the NYT list as a teen, but the same comment applies.)

Alfonso, I wonder what you had intended to say...?

When Atlas Shrugged was published almost all the reviews were negative. The worst being National Review's by Whitaker Chambers.

Over the years the reviews have improved. Enough that it is considered a modern classic and is on high school reading lists.

For me some of the best test for any book are the following . Is it still in print? Are people still talking about. Atlas passes that test with flying colors.

Is there any other bestseller from 1957 that can be said about?

Chris -

Provocative idea! Anyone know how to find bestseller lists from the past so one could actually ask the "whatever happened to that book" question about bestsellers from the 1950s?

Alfonso

A Google search provided these, among others:

http://www3.isrl.uiuc.edu/~unsworth/course...lers/best50.cgi

http://www.hawes.com/no1_nf_d.htm

Other than Atlas the only novels from 1957 on that first list that I've even heard of are Peyton Place and On The Beach, and I kinda doubt that either of these changed anyone's life as AS has done. (I did read Day Of Infamy from the NYT list as a teen, but the same comment applies.)

...

Peter Jackson cut out that portion of the novel that didn't move the main plot forward. Tom Bombadil and the Barrow Wights had virtually nothing to do with Sauron and the Ring.

Indeed. When I re-read the trilogy after seeing the films I merely skimmed the whole interlude-with-Bombadil section, thinking it a dull digression. I didn't miss it in the films at all.

Richard:

~ By 'open marriage' I meant official 'marriage' wherein both partners accept 'swinging' (or, as used to be called, 'an "arrangement" between them'): sexual interaction by either with random others (neighbor-'swapping' or random pickups) was permitted by each

~ By 'polyamory' I meant love/committment (not applicable to the above) to more than one which might, or not, include sexual interaction with them; if such occurs, any 'permission' aspect is a separate question.

~ Accurately used by me or not, any dictionary check will show them to be not synonomous.

LLAP

J:D

Point taken.

Bob;

Have you seen Daniel Craig? I have not but people whose judgement is good say he is very good.

When I get a DVD player I am going to rent Casino Royale.

I thought Casino Royale was loads of fun. Daniel Craig makes an excellent Bond - hard, cynical, driven, and with an undercurrent of personal dysfunction that makes his suave public face look interestingly false. Until I saw this film Sean Connery was, as far as I was concerned, The Only Bond Who Counted; but I would love to see Mr. Craig in further Bond films.

Richard,

Swinging is the way the general public will always see consensual changing of sex partners between married couples, regardless of how the information is packaged.

Some Objectivists care about calling it something else, but not all that many. I personally do not find the term offensive.

However, the image conveyed by the word "swinging" does kinda grate against the Puritanical attitudes towards sex I have witnessed in statements by some Objectivists (mostly orthodox), going all the way back to Rand.

Michael

Thanks. I've never known any Objectivists in daily life; I have no idea what their actual attitudes towards these things are.

Certainly a term like "swinging" is loaded language, but had the article in question called it polyamory I'd still have said to myself, "yes, and that's one place where she really screwed things up for herself and her movement."

And it's a funny thing - having just typed that, I felt a sort of rush of compassionate affection for this woman I never met - as if knowing about her mistake drives home to me her humanity, makes her life more immediate in some way. That'll want some thinking about on my part.

..."dabbled in swinging" (more confusion with ideas of 'open marriage' and polyamory)...

And the difference is...?

...

But it was a kick-ass movie and a great cathartic.

Ba'al Chatzaf

...and I just got home with the DVD, which will provide this weekend's necessary catharsis. And maybe next weekend's too.

...Humor me for the moment and pretend that my premise of the first glance is a true, unrefutable fact. If it is true, then the people you want near you will want to be near you as well, because they will see you for what you are before any conversation is had... You must be selfish and know what you want in order to attract and find what you want, because the first glance means everything.

But...I think that many, many people are more likely to try to see others through the lens of their own attitudes and experience and get a distorted or completely false picture. That is to say, they see only what they wish, or only what they expect, or only what they are familiar with, and will try to force their perception of another into that "preset." One's real personal attitudes may not be visible to them at all.

As an example, in my experience many people seem to insist on seeing both confidence and a reserved manner as arrogance; and they generally don't bother to find out if they're right or not.

I wonder if the cat, being a predator, is able to literally smell the onset of death in another animal, and so also in the humans involved here?

If there is another terrorist attack in America, the effect of [Ron Paul's] words, if taken seriously, could be terrible, leaving us morally disarmed and fearful of retaliating...

If the United States is attacked by Saudi and Egyptian commandos again, like 9/11, who should the US retaliate against?

W.

Any realistic suggestions?

Many phycisits dreamed of Nuclear powered space craft, designers of the Orion envisioned a 10 story tall building with payloads of thousands of tons which could get to Jupiter in a few months. The nuclear test ban treaty killed that. ...

What if it were built and launched from a sufficiently high orbit - would this legally circumvent the treaty?

You can simulate gravity through acceleration or through rotating. One need not build elaborate ring spaced stations for that though, many plans are in the works to have a 'dumb bell' like module that rotates. An existing craft extends a boom or teather with a counterweight and begins turning. (etc.)

Your post pretty much answers my previous question on this general topic; thanks.

We are obviously already on a spaceship, of course.

...

--Brant

Sure, but this one keeps going around in circles. I want to see what's going on over at Gliese 581c!

Seriously, I think that humanity has a need for a frontier built into it - not in all humans, but enough that it's an active factor. And we don't really have a frontier at the moment; sooner or later we'll have to create one.

[.... Likewise we cannot build vessels large enough to have a wide diameter section to spin to produce the centrifugal force as a substitute for gravitation.

Why not? If the ship was assembled in orbit and a landing craft included for use at the end destination, couldn't it be built as large as was needed (given sufficient funding, of course)?

Using the Space Shittle (the tiled abomination which kills crews) it would take many expensive flights to build a very large vessel with a big enough section to rotate for centrifugal force (i.e. artificial gravity). We can't afford it.

etc etc etc

Ba'al Chatzaf

Right. In general I agree with you, especially about the Shuttle; it's the AMC Gremlin of spaceships; it's an eight-track tape deck; it's a Commodore 64; it's bloody ugly. We'd be better off with unmanned cargo pods like the Russians have been using for decades. I don't have the figures but I'd be willing to bet that the cost and trouble of refitting the shuttle inch by inch and tile by tile in between missions and recovering the jettisoned rockets offsets any gain we achieve in using a "reusable" launch vehicle instead of an Atlas booster.

All I was getting at was, is there a specific technical or engineering reason we couldn't make a centrifugal-spin module on a spaceship work, all other things being equal?

My own layman's answer to all of this is ORION. Man oh man, would I love to see Orion fly in my lifetime! I'm not holding my breath, of course.

[.... Likewise we cannot build vessels large enough to have a wide diameter section to spin to produce the centrifugal force as a substitute for gravitation.

Why not? If the ship was assembled in orbit and a landing craft included for use at the end destination, couldn't it be built as large as was needed (given sufficient funding, of course)?

...He was a committed American patriot and I have no doubt that he would strongly support America's fight against Islamic Jihadists.

As I recall (I don't have time right now to look all through Expanded Universe and Grumbles From The Grave for the exact quote) RAH's attitude toward the Russians was essentially "We're not safe with them around - let's conquer and rule them." I expect his attitude toward the Islamic world post-9/11 would have been the same.