You know, a guy Jordin used to work with at Livermore is now at Harvard and is actively pursuing research in cold fusion. He walked into Jordin's office one day during a visit and asked Jordin what he knew about alchemy. Jordin startled him considerably by know rather more than lead into gold! Much of it, of course, picked up from fantasy and especially Yarbro's St Germain novels! Anyhow, apparently there seems to be some real overlap between alchemy and cold fusion...

MKK

I used to be an active alumni supporter of my undergrad-college SF library. A number of the current-student-members became enthused with alchemy, astrology, psychic powers and the like. They read big thick books about the stuff with an enthusiasm they didn't apply to their course material.

Alas, I made the mistake of razzing them about it. Bad mistake. Belief in this crap was part of their Religion-of-the-moment.

And I will confess a weakness for the Lensman series...admittedly, mostly for the giggles...

It's clear, however, that he really did individually inscribe the advance-ordered copies for individuals -- not common these days!

Cheers,
Tom

Tom, I'd sort of had in mind that if anyone here were likely to spot the provenance of the title of this post, it was you. And no, it's not Doc Smith, though your Doc Smith story is pretty cool.

Cheers,
Tom

(Tell all the truth, but tell it ... hyphen???)

"Hello, you've reached the Psychic Detective Agency. We already know who you are, and why you're calling, so at the sound of the tone, please hang up."

Isn't amazing what shows up in Google?

Cheers,
Tom

The answer seemed to be "no."

This is the trailer>.

The film opened with that answering machine message. Alas, that was the only joke in the show. It didn't stop them from repeating it, with variations, for the length of the movie. A comedy needs more than one joke. Honest. You could have walked out after the opening titles without missing a thing.

It may look like a bed, but it's really a time machine. You lay down, fall asleep, and when you wake up, BAM! You are in the future!

Of course it only works one way...

For more information on alien abductions, see my new website, aliensandchildren.org

Also see Dave Jacob's website, ufoabduction.com

Thank you.

Michael Menkin

In the show I saw, the researchers hired a group of MIT students to do a crop circle, approaching it as a set of engineering parameters. They did a pretty good job (used a little portable microwave thingie to explode the stems, and resorted to explosives for the iron spheres). One parameter was that they had four hours to do the whole thing from start to finish. They barely made it.

They also showed some apparent film of a "natural" crop circle forming...there were some ball-lightning-like things over the crop, and the stalks fell down in mere seconds.

I remain skeptical, but unless the show was an elaborate hoax by or on Discovery Channel, there's stuff there way beyond two guys with a board.

Maybe some stems got exploded, maybe some iron spheres got scattered. Odd things can happen. But we know who made the circles.

My response is, don't underestimate your fellow humans' creativity! Just because you can't figure out how to do it, doesn't mean someone else couldn't possibly have figured it out.

They also admit on their website that they don't make ALL the crop circles in England. Others have gotten into the act, at least.

Jeremy, I definitely don't think any of the circles, even the ones with the cavities-and-iron, could not have been made by humans. If they were I'd like to find out WHY more than HOW (though that's interesting too).

We already know about the two guys with a board, just as we know about the cheeseball out west in this country who walked around with Bigfoot cutouts on his feet - no one but a very naive or unobservant person (i.e. most people) could mistake anything so made for a footprint; it doesn't explain the observations of acquaintances of mine. (Sure, they might have been lying to me. But WHY? I wasn't in a position to do anything, and I was and remain quite skeptical.)

We're talking about accounting for the data. The two hoaxers' explanation doesn't account for the expulsion cavs or the microiron (and the ones with those are the only interesting ones IMO). That's all. If they explain how they did those things too, and why, I'll believe them. Until then, I'll keep an open mind: not concluding they're a poorly understood natural phenomenon, but not rejecting the possibility either.