Brewster Rockit by Tim Rickard for July 17, 2010

All questions worthy of pondering, Sandy.

Anyone can understand English if you speak slowly and loudly.

Although the program’s name is 60 Light Minutes, that Sandy Mooney segment seems really heavy. I guess it’s another illustration of the artificial gravity aboard the R.U. Sirius. For those Star Wars fans out there, just as a parsec is a unit of distance not time, so is a light-minute. Another example of removing the science from science fiction.

Oh. I was hoping to hear and insightful piece by Lazerly Starl.

I like Stardateline better. Especially when they do “Catch a Predator”.

Sheik Yerbouti (grin), everyone knows that “parsec” in Han Solo’s speech in Star Wars has to do with the length of the path in hyperspace that the Millennium Falcon can travel. It would be traveling hundreds if not thousands of parsecs in real space between Corellia and Kessel (instead of a mere 12), otherwise.

Don’t try to out-geek ME when I’m well-rested. You will not win. :))

Incidentally, this is not one of the explanations generally put forward, but somehow I recall having read it somewhere. The last three paragraphs of this page deal with the subject; I still think mine is far more plausible even than George Lucas’ own, given what has shown up on Star Wars: The Clone Wars.

What do we call someone who only speaks one language?

An American!

What do we call someone who knows English but won’t speak it?

A Frenchman!

(or so Stephen on BABYLON 5 would have us believe)

Ah. Sheik, here is an explanation likewise credited to George Lucas, and it tallies with the one I saw long, long ago on a Star Wars Web page iteration far, far away…

The best explanation to me comes from the creator himself, George Lucas. On the audio commentary track of A New Hope DVD, Lucas explains that traveling through hyperspace requires precise calculations to avoid smashing into a star, planet, black hole, or any other large object. The Millennium Falcon is able to plot some of the shortest distances possible. Thus, the ship can arrive at its destination faster than vehicles traveling longer distances.

Has anyone else noticed “Roswell Bem” (BEM = Bug-Eyed Monster)? Very clever, Tim! :))

When are they going to get rid of Sandy Mooney? All he does is give me an excuse to go to the heat removing unit and grab a cold one.

Hey, Sheik, give me just a parsec here and I’ll propose an alternate meaning. Maybe “Sixty Light Minutes” refers to sixty minutes that are light (as in light commentary, light comedy). That alternative actually came from you, when you suggested that Sandy’s comments were “heavy”. Oh, and I’ve always wondered…why are those horrible bug-eyed monsters always so attracted to earth women? Wouldn’t they look ugly to a BEM, just like BEM women look ugly to us? Or maybe earth women have truly captured a universal beauty and we earth guys are the lucky ones. Who in the universe would not fall in love with Catherine Zeta-Jones, for example?

Johanan: I have come to view any “explanation” from George Lucas with a very large grain of salt, ever since he started spouting all that nonsense about Joe Campbell and the Hero’s Journey archetype blah blah blah… when it was quite obvious that the original “Star Wars” was simply Kurosawa’s “The Hidden Fortress” reset in outer space. So when he concocts an elaborate explanation for what sounds a lot more like a simple writing mistake, I’m not exactly convinced.

Meanwhile, just what IS the deal with probing? “I visited Area 51 and all I got was an anal probe, a chip in my brain, and this lousy T-shirt…”

Hi Puddleglum…

I have out-geeked myself. 1) I actually wrote to Sheik that I’d heard the same, that the explanation given by Lucas (as with the others) is a back-formation to cover up an actual writing mistake, but erased that bit; 2) I just realized that the citation from Lucas doesn’t actually fit the scenario I’m presently seeing on The Clone Wars, namely, that the length of a path through hyperspace is most likely meant.

Do bear in mind, I was outdoing Star Trek’s own science when I was eight to ten years old, especially in coming up with reasonable space velocities and calculating actual travel times between stars. So I’m willing to back-form my own explanation on Han Solo’s words, possibly suggest it to the Star Wars community, and the latter can like it or lump it. :))

It is like the Tower of Babel here today.

Anybody know how far light travels in a minute? I’m feeling lazy today…

Lew, he died years ago. He’s an autotron now….autotron is a word isn’t it?

George Lucas doesn’t know squat about science, but as noted, thanks to Campbell now thinks he’s an epic genius. And he obviously can never admit error. He just didn’t know what he was talking about. Look at all the fan suggestions for what should happen in the third movie, who the “one other” hope was, and what the Clone Wars were about – the worst was Lucas’ own. And that doesn’t even count poor Alec Guinness having to say “well, see, the good man who was your father died when he became Darth Vader, so it was sort of a symbolic death, y’see, huh?” By the way, my favorite explanation was that most of the Jedi we saw were in fact clones of each other. As proof, they said that clones were originally not given names, but codes like droids. For example, OB-1…Obi-Wan! In that case, Anakin did die, but Darth was his clone-brother. Or, in one extreme idea, ALL the Jedi in the movie except Yoda were clones – the emperor, Darth, Obi-Wan, even Luke.

George Lucas can never admit error. Like Episode I.

For all of you Star Wars fans defending your mutual fantasies about science, George Lucas, etc., remember the opening of the original Star Wars movie when the spaceships are making wooshing noises in the vacuum of space. If that wasn’t enough to convince you that you would have to completely suspend all scientific knowledge for the length of the movie, then you’re clearly Lost in Space. If you really want to defend George Lucas, try justifying Jar Jar Binks’s existence.

Well doesn’t that alien in the last panel look familiar? What real life newscaster is that supposed to be, Andy Rooney?

Yes, Dry, but it can’t be him. The eyebrows are nowhere near bushy enough.

Soli linguæ bonæ sunt linguæ mortuæ.

@Runar

The only good language is a dead language?

From Wikipedia: The parsec (parallax of one arcsecond; symbol: pc) is a unit of length, equal to just under 31 trillion kilometres (about 19 trillion miles), or about 3.26 light-years. The parsec measurement unit is used in astronomy. It is defined as the length of the adjacent side of an imaginary right triangle in space. The two dimensions that specify this triangle are the parallax angle (defined as 1 arcsecond) and the opposite side (defined as 1 astronomical unit (AU), the distance from the Earth to the Sun).

Does this mean we finally found a way to get rid of Rooney? There’s actually a species that wanted him? Wow!

Yo, Sheik, relax, dude. I knew Star Wars was space opera, not even science fiction, even before I saw it – because I made the mistake of reading the book first. Ouch. Lucas can’t write decent prose, either. Or dialogue, in case no one had noticed that before. And his (first) wife was the extremely talented editor of the first two movies, which is one reason why Return of the Jedi was about half an hour too long and sluggish – they had split up. Oh, and what he didn’t steal from Japanese movies, he stole from E. E. “Doc” Smith’s Lensman saga. If you haven’t read it, do. It has a scope that makes Star Wars look like a backwater in Podunk by comparison, and the story moves.

puddleglum1066 said, Johanan: I have come to view any “explanation” from George Lucas with a very large grain of salt, ever since he started spouting all that nonsense about Joe Campbell and the Hero’s Journey archetype blah blah blah…

Joseph Campbell seemed to have no problem with Lucas’ nonsense when he talked about it in “Power of Myth”, recorded at Skywalker Ranch.