So, yeah. We were driving towards James M's recently relocated stag night party at the Dux, stopped at the lights at the end of Kilmarnock, waiting to turn onto Dean's Ave. This guy just, slowly, serenely even, turned in front of oncoming traffic into Kilmarnock, not a care in the world. The oncoming traffic braked and probably though something along the lines of "What the fuck?", before continuing quietly on their own journey (I was expecting some horns or gesticulating or something, but they seemed pretty cool with their brush with violent braking).
I commented that the guy must've thought he was driving a four wheel drive or something - you know, a false sense of invincibility or whatever. Eddie reliably informed us that in fact he probably had a third nipple. Hence his invincible nature.
Um. Riiiight.
Turns out the man with the golden gun had a third nipple, so therefore, in true scientific, deducting style, Eddie had deduced that people with third nipples were invincible. From there the conversation degenerated, if possible, into idle chat about finding people with third nipples and trying out "invincibility" tests on them. Like shooting them. Or pushing them over a cliff. Or other violent and anti-social acts. Then we decided that the problem with that was that you could never be sure that it wasn't some sort of lucky coincidence that they may have survived one of these tests, so you'd have to keep going, just to be sure, administering more and more of them.
Then we arrived and others drank beer and I went home. Yeah, I'm crap. But now I'm taking another look at intersections, just as the ad tells me to.
Posted by saint at February 9, 2004 11:59 AM | TrackBackGreg Easterbrook (Tuesday Morning Quarterback or TMQ) of NFL.com writes:
This Week's Star Trek Complaint
Watchers of the many Star Trek movies and serials are constantly confused about what "warp speed" means. Sometimes warp nine takes you halfway across the galaxy in a few hours, sometimes destinations are years away even at maximum velocity. Sometimes each warp number seems to double the previous number (warp four twice as fast as warp three, and so on) while sometimes it is suggested that each warp speed is a thousandfold faster than the previous. But if warp two was a thousand-fold faster than warp one and so on up the scale, warp nine would be almost a septillion times faster than light -- and a septillion is a 1 followed by 25 zeros. At that speed, a starcruiser could cross the entire Milky Way galaxy, which is 100,000 light-years wide, in less than a minute.
Goofy sci-fi moments often come when a ship traveling faster than light passes some normal-speed object. In a Star Trek Enterprise episode, Captain Archer is kidnapped by an alien bounty hunter. A starcruiser gives chase, and the bounty hunter begins discussing whether he should drop his ship out of warp speed and dive into the atmosphere of a nearby planet to hide. As Archer tries to talk the bounty hunter into surrendering, through the window viewers see the planet, slowly rotating beneath the ship. At the speed of light, a spaceship would roar pass even the largest planet in a couple seconds.
And TMQ wonders, if you were traveling faster than light, what would you see out the window? Presumably nothing, since no light could catch you. But on Star Trek, what they see out the window is blurry stars.
Posted by: Soma at February 11, 2004 07:47 PM