Fay, I think when it was airing in the US I described it as falling in love with a compulsive parachutist: any day might be the day your beloved went splat. Alas that it did.
What you did to me was unbelievable, Connor. But then I got stuck in a hell dimension by my girlfriend one time for a hundred years, so three months under the ocean actually gave me perspective. Kind of a M.C. Escher perspective, but I did get time to think.
Angel ,'Conviction (1)'
All Ogle, No Cash -- It's Not Just Annoying, It's Un-American
Discussion of episodes currently airing in Un-American locations (anything that's aired in Australia is fair game), as well as anything else the Un-Americans feel like talking about or we feel like asking them. Please use the show discussion threads for any current-season discussion.
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Nutty - May 12, 2003 4:13:38 pm PDT #4683 of 9843
"Mister Spock is on his fanny, sir. Reports heavy damage."
Betsy HP - May 12, 2003 4:18:42 pm PDT #4684 of 9843
If I only had a brain...
Typo Boy - May 12, 2003 4:31:18 pm PDT #4685 of 9843
Calli: My people have a saying. A man who trusts can never be betrayed, only mistaken.Avon: Life expectancy among your people must be extremely short.
Looking at the menus and seeing:
Smoked guinea Foul with Cranberry Chutney
Personally I prefer Fowl.
(I presume this was a typo and not a britishism.)
Noumenon - May 12, 2003 11:13:27 pm PDT #4686 of 9843
No other candidate is asking the hard questions, like "Did geophysicists assassinate Jim Henson?" or "Why is there hydrogen in America's water supply?" --defective yeti
Westerners--are incredibly odd, with our strange ideas..., our idea of sex as a completely mutual activity between two (or more) equal subjects, and so on.
Larry Niven really put a twist on this by designing species with nonsentient females... wish I could remember what effect this had on their society. I know he worked out some interesting consequences.
Typo Boy - May 12, 2003 11:15:51 pm PDT #4687 of 9843
Calli: My people have a saying. A man who trusts can never be betrayed, only mistaken.Avon: Life expectancy among your people must be extremely short.
The Kzin - and it turned out it was more complicated than that. The females were not really non-sentient. And the whole Kzin society and genetic traits were a result of a primitive tribal society getting hold of genetic engineering and remaking themselves in the image of their folk tales.
Burrell - May 12, 2003 11:19:00 pm PDT #4688 of 9843
Why did Darth Vader cross the road? To get to the Dark Side!
Larry Niven really put a twist on this by designing species with nonsentient females...
Is this one of those weird male fantasies that I just don't get, like the one about being a disembodied head in a jar?
Noumenon - May 12, 2003 11:21:25 pm PDT #4689 of 9843
No other candidate is asking the hard questions, like "Did geophysicists assassinate Jim Henson?" or "Why is there hydrogen in America's water supply?" --defective yeti
Can you remember why the Experimentalist puppeteers made them nonsentient? I can't. I know there was some kind of evolutionary or societal consequence; Niven always does that.
Typo Boy - May 12, 2003 11:23:55 pm PDT #4690 of 9843
Calli: My people have a saying. A man who trusts can never be betrayed, only mistaken.Avon: Life expectancy among your people must be extremely short.
I think this is more a Niven fantasy than a male fantasy. (Heck being a disembodies head in a jar is not a male fantasy either.) He was trying to come up with a plausible truly alien society. Having much more extreme biological differentiation between male and female is one way to get a species truly alien to us. Making them carnivores was another. And it is also (in spite of Niven being very right wing) a satire on a certain type of sociobiologists. As in "here's what we'd really be like if your theories werer correct">
Burrell - May 12, 2003 11:26:41 pm PDT #4691 of 9843
Why did Darth Vader cross the road? To get to the Dark Side!
Heck being a disembodies head in a jar is not a male fantasy either.
Based on the number of times I've read otherwise reasonable scientists and philosophers ponder on this as a "what if?" I'm thinking that it is. Not fantasy as in sexual fantasy, fantasy as in "plausible other imaginary."
Typo Boy - May 12, 2003 11:30:37 pm PDT #4692 of 9843
Calli: My people have a saying. A man who trusts can never be betrayed, only mistaken.Avon: Life expectancy among your people must be extremely short.
I don't think it was the puppeteers that made them non-sentient. The Kzin were a pre-industrial, pre-fuedal hunter gather people enslaved by a space going race. They managed to rebel, and wipe out their owners - and suddenly they were a hunter-gatherer people possessed of space travel, genetic engineering and generally advanced technology.
So as a very male-chauvinist culture, they engineered speech centers out of their women -making them not unintelligent, but pre-verbal. (You can argue over whether intelligence is possible without speech - but this is the Niven premise, and their is some evidence that the two are seperable.)
The Puppeteers have three sexs, one of which is not intelligent, two of which are.