My efforts to crush yet another internet poll are being opposed by JT, who is leading the rebel insurrection to put Greta Christina on top.
Sure you could argue that there is a lack of diversity in the choices, but that’s the whole point: will you submit to the soul-crushing power of the empire (of course you will! There are no such things as souls!) and be allowed to live, or follow some spunky kid into defeat and ignominy and total destruction?
You know the choices. It’s JT:
(You will forget that JT is rooting for Natalie Portman.)
Versus me:
The choice is clear. Vote Pharyngula every day. Know the thrill of unbridled power.
To boldly go where…oops, wrong geekdom.
Glen Davidson
Wait. PZ is my father? I gott go back and reread my script.
I read that in Darth Vader voice o.o
I’m now picturing Greta Christina with Leia-style hair buns, yelling at Vader!PZ to get into the garbage chute.
.
.
.
.
This sounds like really bad fanfic. Or really AWESOME fanfic.
Except that Princess Leia was yelling at Luke and Han to get into the garbage chute, not Vader.
Or was that meant to be a nerdcheck?
One of the kids I went to school with in Arizona was Hopi. He wondered why Princess Leia was wearing the traditional hairstyle of a postpubescent Hopi maiden. And I still wonder about that.
Hold on. This is about the worst taunt in the world. “Haha! You’re the chump who has to marry Natalie Portman!”
Second…if you’re Vader, doesn’t that mean I grow up to be you?
@JT
yes, that is why PZ is so determined to twist your spirit now so that you will properly become what you are destined to.
/cackle
I feel a disturbance in The Force that I haven’t felt in many years…
I wondered if Darth could climb into one of those small pod racers and win the race like young Anakin did. The reaction times needed to navigate the course were incredible. But then he would have won by using a different tactic. Darth would have wiggled a finger and the other pilots would have died horrible deaths. The Sand People snipers would be under piles of rabble when he went by. So Darth could have flown through those convoluted caves at a slower pace.
But no, Darth Vader was not at all adventurous. He would simply collect the prize and Jabba the Hut would be served up in a million cans of escargot.
Except that it’s not that you just get to marry Natalie Portman. You get to be Hayden Christensen’s shitty, stilted, cardboard cut-out version of a person marrying Natalie Portman’s shitty, stilted, cardboard cut-out version of a person, capping off the most uninteresing romance ever.
In a way it’s practically Heaven, with all the mind-numbing banality that entails.
PZ’s using a bit of license here. His voice is nowhere as deep and rich as JEJ’s.
JT got robbed.. why is WWJTD not up there??
The conversation about adjusting and/or scratching man parts is over on The Endless Thread.
That’s just your midi-chloriitis acting up. Here.—[Hands Larry a tube of salve covered in characters licensed from the Star Wars franchise.]—This usually works. If it’s especially bad, take a couple of these.—[Hands Larry a pill bottle similarly covered in characters licensed from the Star Wars franchise.]
I knew a guy whose Force pain got to be so much he had to see a specialist at ILM General Hospital®: a subsidiary of Lucasfilm Ltd. I’ve got the specialist’s card here somewhere. Ah, here it is.—[Reads from a business card.]—”Dr. Thinlyveiled Jewishstereotype.” Let me know if you need his number.
Look, if we’re not going to rule the galaxy together!!!! then I’m not interested.
Here’s a picture of PZ without the helmet.
Natalie Portman’s shitty, stilted, cardboard cut-out version of a person would be a pleasant change of pace from the papercuts i get from the magazine version of her…for a little while anyway.
I think you’ve solved the theodicy problem.
There is a God, but he’s George Lucas.
OT: It was not just the popups, which are annoying as hell themselves – and I know you’ve had a pile of complaints about them – it was when I got a background popup that started talking to me, even though I already have Flash blocked, that your advertisers got annoying enough for me to install Adblock Plus and begin recommending it to others.
*Emperor Palpatine Voice*
JT – strike down PZ’s chances of winning the Reader’s Choice award for favourite Atheist blog with all of your snark, and your journey to the Godless Side will be complete…
(insert mad, cackling laughter)
*/Emperor Palpatine Voice*
Is this a Seinfeld bit or do you really fap to magazines as if it were 1988?
Tell me I’m not the only one who read that as “mini-clitoris”.
I’ll just be over here in the corner by myself, then.
Currently 72% for Pharyngula, the rebellion of the young jedi knight JT seems to be in trouble. It appears that, with the Pharyngula Horde, PZ now weilds the ultimate power in the blog-iverse!
As a loyal member of the Horde, I would like to think that this means we will all become the online equivalent of supremely cool Sith space ninjas, but the sad truth is that I am more akin to one of the eminently interchangeable Storm Troopers who seem to go to a special acedemy in order to learn how not to shoot straight…
So…you’re the same man at different points in time?
What would you expect from a group-thinking hive-mind set in an echo chamber?
(The first time I ever went to the range, I put three rounds in the target of the shooter to my right. So, I’ll be right there with you, pal, keeping that barn safe by shooting at it.)
You’re not.
May I share your corner?
One of the unsolved nerd questions, who would win in a fight between Imperial Storm Troopers and Red-shirted Ensigns?
‘Running the Nubian blockade’, eh Carlie?
You can tell it’s sweeps week because Greta Christina has sexy pictures on her blog. You have pictures of Star Wars characters. It may come down to whether atheists are nerdier ore hornier. I predict carnage.
Well, one group cannot shoot straight, and the other group dies from near misses, so I predict the Imperial Stormtroopers would win. Unless one of the Imperial Stormtroopers is a beautiful woman, in which case all, bets [longer pause], are, [long and pathetically dramatic pause, off.
You are not alone.
Brownian @ 24;
Which somehow (probably through the magic of troll-logic) simultaneously suffers from Deep Rifts(TM)…
Would that make us a hive-mind with multiple personality disorder?
I must admit that I was speaking purely figuratively. I have never so much as handled a firearm, even on a range, and nor do I have any wish to. Perhaps it comes from growing up in the UK and never being part of a culture where gun ownership is common, but frankly I can’t stand the things except in silly action movies (ludicrously over the top, John Woo style bullet-ballet choreography being optional).
So I would be standing at a safe distance, calling encouragement as you fired at everything but the barn…
There Will Be Blood!
Oops, wrong movie geekdom.
carlie @ 21;
As noted by others, you are far from alone in that. ‘Mini-clitoris’ just grabs the eye a bit more than ‘midi-chloriitis’ for some reason. I can’t imagine why…
;-P
I think your corner is going to get a little crowded.
I’ll just be over here in the corner by myself, then.
I think your corner is going to get a little crowded.
Watch where you put that elbow.
That’s not your elbow? Erm. Never mind.
@ ‘Tis Himself, 26
Well, since Stormtroopers actually manage to hit unnamed characters (just ask the crew of the Tantive IV or numerous Ewoks) the Red Shirts would be in deep Bantha Pudu.
Stormtrooper [Holding up a torn shred of red fabric]: “Look Sir: Ens—”
[In the distance.]: “Aieeeaaagh!” [They run, and come upon more Stormtroopers surrounding a dismembered corpse.]
Stormtrooper Commander: “Trooper! What the hell was that? You were ordered to take the prisoners alive!”
Stormtrooper: “I, uh, I—we didn’t touch him, Sir. We just asked for his name, rank and serial number, and he died.”
[Captain Kirk beams down and immediately removes his shirt.]: “I…”
[Stormtroopers begin wildly firing in all directions.]
Kirk: “…comeinpeace.I…”
[Stormtroopers continue wildly firing. Lucas collects royalties on every blaster shot.]
Kirk: “…want…”
[Some Stormtroopers run out of blaster ammo. Others reach retirement age. Nothing important is ever hit.]
Kirk: “…youtoknowthatI…”
[Rick McCallum has CGI geeks replace every blaster shot on screen with a tiny, sped-up version of American Graffiti, because his grandfather died and left him $300 million on the condition that he spend $30 million on nothing of lasting merit in 30 days, or some such shit. George Lucas pats him on the head and gives him a milkbone, then re-releases the film as a Super Special DVD Box Special Edition Special.]
Kirk: “…mean…”
[Fifty more Ensigns beam down with phasers, because the Federation is all about science and exploration. They explode in grisly ways upon contact with the standard, breathable air every planet is surrounded by.]
Kirk: “…younohar…”
[The Stormtroopers fall over themselves in a way that makes the Keystone Kops look dignified. Palpatine appears to take command of the situation himself. He pulls off his face to reveal that he’s the flute-playing elephant thing from the Mos Eisley cantina in Episode 4 because RETCONNING EVERY FUCKING INCIDENTAL CHARACTER ON SCREEN IN ’77 = SCRIPTWRITING to George. Also, the species is revealed to speak with slavic accents and wear track suits because RACISM = KIDS’ MOVIE to George.]
Kirk: “…rm.Spo…”
[Sensing a loss of control, J.J. Abrams beams down. Elephantine is blinded with lens flares. Rick McCallum attaches himself to Lucas’ ass, relying on Lucas’ bloodstream to provide him with nutrients for the rest of his life.]
Kirk: “……”
[The dead and damaged Stormtroopers pick themselves up and reassemble into one of the conjoined twin ships from Bespin because you’ve seen one of those before in a movie you liked, which confuses and prevents your lizard hind brain from causing you to set the theatre alight in pain and rage. From the afterworld, Gene Roddenberry pinches a woman’s ass.]
Kick: “…ck,let’scutaduetalbum.”
Eh, I was an air cadet in my youth. To tell the truth, I was a drill geek—I’d much prefer to march around and do fancy clicky stompy things with unloaded and unfireable rifles than shoot them off.
‘Tis Himself, OM @ 26;
I have always found it hilarious that in A New Hope, when Obiwan and Luke come across the destroyed Jawa Sandcrawler, Obi states that the attack had to be by Storm Troopers because nobody else could produce blast points that are so ‘precise’, only for the Storm Trooppers to spend the entire rest of the original trilogy managing to miss short range shots against stationary targets in the open en mass. I wonder if that was some kind of ongoing in joke or something.
And of course, one imagines that the fact that the life expectancy of Red Shirts is measured in picoseconds was probably left out of the Starfleet recruitment materials…
Back to our cross-franchise matchup, most of the time I would imagine a Storm Trooper default win – sure, they wouldn’t hit any of the Red Shirts, but the Red Shirts simply must die, it is an immutable law of science fiction. So I imagine that a slightly Final Destination-esque series of events would occur to ensure that all the Red Shirts perished from fast acting alien infections/falling rocks/fatal toe-stubbings or similar calamities…
… However, should you somehow eliminate all sources of Red Shirt slaughter other than Storm Troope blaster fire, then we have a problem of the unstoppable force/immoveable object variety. Since they can’t ‘pass through each other’, so to speak, then you would probably end up with some kind of paradox, and science fiction teaches us that unavoidable paradoxes are very, very, universe-obliteratingly bad things…
Brownian, I genuflect in your general direction in awe of your pull-it-out-of-your-ass humour. That needs to be in the opera.
Anybody got John Williams’ number?
Brownian @ 35;
That… was… inspired! I laughed so hard I practically fell out of my chair. I especially liked Kirk immediately removing his shirt upon arrival before opening negotiations. It either had to be that or the fabric spontaneously ripping for no reason.
You just know things would have gone so much better if the Storm Troopers had just had the foresight to include a semi-naked green dancing girl among their number to act as a negotiator…
@ 36;
That sounds like it required lots of coordination. I imagine it was very visually impressive though, especially when performed by a large, well choreographed group.
Ogvorbis: Now With 98% Less Intellectual Curiousity! @ 33;
Because it’s a knee, right?
Right?
Wait a second… not a knee…
But… but… what else could it be?
;-)
It could be. My squadron was one of the largest in Canada, so we could do some cool things. Of course, cadets are just kids aged 12-17, so there were a few of us who’d always join the drill teams and rifle and colour guards and do precision stuff, while everyone else (excepting the band, of course) would kind of just tromp along in the half-assed ways of kids. One year, there weren’t enough FN rifles to go around, so my friend and I were assigned Lee-Enfields to drill with. It was a painful honour. (FN rifles can be carried by nestling them along your arm and holding the handle/grip, whereas Lee-Enfields have no such handle, and are carried by resting the entire weight of the rifle on the middle finger bent through the trigger guard.)
I have great memories of that shit. High level drill can be hair-tinglyingly awesome.
NOOOOO!
Agent: Great news. I’ve got a spot for you on a network TV series!
Actor: That’s fantastic! What show?
Agent: It is a cutting edge series that explores difficult subjects.
Actor: Wonderful. What show?
Agent: It stars some well known [mumble] b-grade [/mumble] stars.
Actor: What series?
Agent: And you even have a part with the star.
Actor: What series?
Agent: And you’ll be wearing a red shirt.
Actor: Aaaaaaaaaaagh! Star Trek Security? There’s no security in a part like that!
Agent: Did I mention you get a scene with the star?
Actor: And I die, right?
Thank you, thread. Was having a bad day. Now having a slightly better one.
The only true way to determine this is for them to play several rounds of “Rock – Paper – Scissors – Lizard – Spock”:
Scissors cuts paper, paper covers rock, rock crushes lizard, lizard poisons Spock, Spock smashes scissors, scissors decapitates lizard, lizard eats paper, paper disproves Spock, Spock vaporizes rock, and as it always has, rock crushes scissors.
Brownian could have joined the Corps de Cadet de la Marine Royale Canadienne but no, he wasn’t sophisticated enough. Instead, he played
spaceair cadet.I’ll sidestep the whole grunts vs. guppies. vs. pigeons argument* and note that while Alberta’s coastlines and seaways are somewhat limited, we’ve no shortage of sky. Being the pragmatic sort, I figured that I’d take advantage of the ACs’ access to planes and gliders, and just buy myself a length of rope and a book on knots on my own time should I ever regret my decision.
*My older sister was a proud Sea Cadet, and her son spent followed in her footsteps for some time before defecting to the Army Engineer Cadet Corps. Apparently, a love for the boot-shining-but-not-gun-shooting part of the military runs in my family.
Er, that’s a reference to a stereotype about what Sea Cadets spend the majority of their time doing: learning various types of knots, not a reference to suicide.
I’ll stop with the in jokes now.
Or, if you are serious about getting into decorative knots, check the International Guild of Knot Tyers. Or visit http://www.knottool.com/ which has instruction books and tools for making turks heads (this is a blatant plug, the site is run by my brother-in-law, though I think it is still a hobby-business, no profit (or prophet) involved).
Ogvorbis: Now With 98% Less Intellectual Curiousity! @ 50;
Thre is an International Guild of Knot Tyers?
I take it that the stuff they do is probably a little more impressive than your average bowline, cleat or even Bimini Twist*…
——————————————————————
* I admit it, I googled that last one. The extent of my knowledge about knots ends with tying my shoelaces, and even they come undone at the most inconvenient times.
I wear slip-on Merrells outside, and slip-on Sauconys (practically a slipper with velcro) at the gym.
Yeah, I’ve given up on laces.
I wear slip-on Merrells outside, and slip-on Sauconys (practically a slipper with velcro) at the gym.
Yeah, I’ve given up on laces.
I, uh, kinda like knots a lot. Something about rope…
(And yes, Ogvorbis, I have Knottool on my bookmarks from a previous recommend on your part.)
If I’m picking up what you’re laying down, you’ll love the Puppetry of the Penis guys. (Probably NSFW).
If I’m wrong and ‘rope’ in this case just means ‘rope’ then I totally get that: I’ve got a similar thing for rubber tires.
Ever seen one of those swinging boat Midway rides where they use a wheel with a rubber tire against the metal of the ride to drive it? There’s something about the rubber on metal that just makes me squeeee.
Anakin: You are so… beautiful.
Padmé: It’s only because I’m so in love.
Anakin: No, it’s because I’m so in love with you.
Padmé: So love has blinded you?
Anakin: Well, that’s not exactly what I meant.
Padmé: But it’s probably true.
…
Hold me, like you did by the lake on Naboo; so long ago when there was nothing but our love. No politics, no plotting, no war.
“Only Imperial Stormtroopers are this precise” – Obiwan Kenobi
And he’s right!
In an enclosed space filled with 42 standard-size humanoids, only the Stormtroopers can cluster all their weapons fire into the one 3 cubic inch target volume wherein approach radiants will not intersect with the path of any single named character.
(Mauve shirts get grazed.)
Thy Will Shall Be Done, Dude.
Yo, Natalie Portman will kill your fucking dog for fun. So it’s best not to push her. Unless you WANT her to shove her foot down your throat so far that your shit gets on her shoe.
What? I was promised naked pi…
…oh. ;/
Best comment thread EVER!!!1!! Thank you all.
How the fuck did Lucas make an evil, murderous, miltaristic semi-robot more likable than an over-achieving, impoverished (except for all the expensive hardware he inexplicably has) slave boy?
Is that the same as getting an electric shock from your, urm, ..
[OT]
Amphiox @56, they’re amateurs compared to the Cylons, in the original series.
The farce is strong in one… the poll results could do with longer graph bars so that Pharyngula’s 73% don’t top out, either that or it needs better scaling to show the magnitude of the crushing defeat that the Horde ™ can inflict.
Will I be able to see the crushing in 3D?
PZ, untucked: http://bit.ly/zqyoJk
I find your lack of faith disturbing…