Mission

Such bravery in the face of intellectual peril! Did I mention you were my hero?

Yeah, but R2 is also smarter than everyone else in the movie. (Probably due to the rule that the smallest and/or youngest main character must also be the smartest in most Hollywood productions.)

It's gotta be Lob. Only Lob could do this role justice. (This explains my avatar's eye patch...)

Yay! Now I can add a link from the Surgeon's Journal for you on the Vendors page. The Surgeon's Journal being what it is, you have to have web links to make it useful. (John, you can see that page here. You know, I should create an index for the Easter Egg pages at the end of the PiP Journal...)

For the record, I did offer to move all this out of the petty annoyances thread to the thread's author. Folks, feel free to continue listing your annoyances if you enjoy doing so. I'm really not trying to hijack this thread...honest. Consciousness is composed of the thoughts we think. (It's the thoughts we think we think. The other thoughts are mostly inaccessible except when they appear in consciousness or during sleep or pre-sleep. Even those thought can only be recalled later, so they are biased by the conscious process. Whatever the conscious process is composed of. ) So you'd be hard-pressed to separate thoughts from consciousness. (Consciousness and subconsciouness fascinate me. Every time I have to do a paper for a Psych class, I try to turn it into a paper on such topics. I've done three of them now.) From where do these floating thoughts originate? Are these thoughts that float through one's consciousness themselves conscious, the stuff of consciousness, or something else altogether? Is emotion thought? I believe thoughts are always streaming and some of them enter consciousness and some don't. (I reserve the right to change that belief.) Now emotion! You love to open new cans of worms, don't you? The most fascinating thing I have learned about emotion is from Aron and Dutton's famous mis-attribution of emotion experiment on the Capilano Extension Bridge. Basically what happened was they had an attractive woman on the bridge asking guys questions for a psychological experiment. At the end of the Q&A, she gave them her phone number and invited them to call. She did the same thing on a regular, small bridge. At the end of it, the guys on the extension bridge were more likely to call her back by a huge margin, suggesting they were looking for a date. This whole thing led Aron & Dutton to explain that they mis-attributed the fear they felt at being on the high bridge as arousal. From this the whole idea that you don't have an emotion until you have a thought emerged. So, in this model, emotions emerge because of thoughts. Several other experiments have been done since that support this idea. So emotions may or may not be thoughts, but they are apparently preceded by them if this is true. (There's all kinds of 'if's' in psychology. )

For long voyages, food had to be gathered from where ever sailors found themselves - otherwise they starved. Thus they would have probably tried all sorts of strange foodstuffs. They particularly look for types of meat and I have found records of them trying everything from seagulls to penguins to seals to walrus to land animals they cannot even name, but only describe. Amputations were common at sea because they were easier than extended treatments and the sailor could be gotten back to work fairly quickly...even if he were minus a part. In fact, I have read that the quality of a surgeon was based in part on how fast he could perform and amputation (keep in mind they had no anesthesia during the GAoP). Many could do them in under two minutes - which is quite fast when you consider how involved a good amputation was. (It's a good deal more than just taking a saw and hacking away.)

Oh man...in one of the privateer journals I read they brought all the parts for a ship to some location in South America and built it when they arrived. Unfortunately this doesn't relate to medicine even remotely so I don't have any notes on it. I can't even tell you which journal it was in. I only remember it because I thought it was unusual when I read it. It seems to me that they would almost have to build it on a beach because at this time just about every civilized port in South America was Spanish held if I have my facts straight. They could hardly build a docking structure on the beach without the Spanish noticing and attacking them. (That I recall from some account of Juan Fernandez Island...and I'm not sure which one that was either. )

While I was looking for a suitable pic of C3PO for my new avatar, I stumbled across this: Pretty cool. Every woman should own a pair. (Although I think I could make a pair for less than $159 K.)

Be sure to make Dutch take you somewhere nice!

1) That which does the thinking. 2) Try it. You are always thinking, no matter who you are. Or, perhaps stated more correctly, thoughts are always flowing through your consciousness. You can control some of these thoughts. The ones you cannot control, you can control your thoughts about those thoughts. To borrow from QM James point (at least I think this is his point), try thinking of nothing whatsoever. No music, no noise, no news, nothing going on around you in the environment...nothing. See if you can do it. What is consciousness? Are we the sum of the conscious thought? What about pre-conscious and sub-conscious thought? How is it possible that we can we think about our thoughts? (Are you sure you're not Phil in disguise? And where the hell is blackjohn? This is getting good...)

(I tried...) Actually, more at your side. Jabba doesn't exactly have a lap. While you're making lekkus, Jack, you can also make a giant prosthetic Jabba tail for M.A. d'Dogge. I want to be C-3PO! "Might I suggest—" "Shut him up or shut him down!"

Josh says you're right and I need to go read the Star Wars info some more... Eh. I have years and years of wasted brain cells devoted to this topic. (But Josh and Anna can still make me look like a piker.) You know, I have totally side railed this topic without even congratulating Mae. I apologize for going so far OT (it's a bad habit). Congrats, Mae!

Disturbing?! I give my fellow twins the recipe for five minutes of fan boy famedom and you find it disturbing? Forget the Rancor, he'd never figure into a belly dance routine! (Besides, it'd take weeks to build that prop.) It's interpretive modern bellydancing, see? You guys will be the hit of You Tube! Soon the ad dollars will roll in! (Unless You Tube has a Machiavellian user agreement. Then you better set something up with a T-shirt vendor and sell your image... Can I be your manager?)

You need something more TOY-ETIC. (What oatmeal would Fanboy eat?)

You know, you'd probably really appreciate Cadillacs and Dinosaurs. It's very reminiscent of the better EC comics from the 50s. I'll bring you down the first one if you promise to take good care of it. (The stupid things have gotten pretty expensive on eBay.)

They may have changed his species, but he was always a Twi'lek when I was paying any attention to the SW universe. The Wookiepedia lists him as a Twi'lek. He does look different than Oola. But then Jack looks different than Brig, too.

Um, I don't think he is...Josh mentioned something about Bib last night... I will check when I get home How much you wanna' bet? (Before you check it out, that is.) Bib is Jabba's personal assistant or some such. He's whitish-grey. "I vill...take 'ou to Jabba now." I got the AF when I was about Anna's age.

Time for an update, mainly because Cheeky is being cheeky. An important footnote from Max (The Collected Sam & Max: Surfin' the Highway by Steve Purcell) Gizmo as Rambo from Gremlins II: The New Batch. (There was a reason I chose that originally although I'm darned if I can remember what it was.) The "brain with feet" (as someone calls it in pms) from the wonderfully campy 50s horror/adventure style graphic novel Cadillacs and Dinosaurs. And the current one: "Do not call me Bubbles, for that is not my name! If you were to address me by my name Mojo Jojo, that would be correct! For my name is Mojo Jojo, Furthermore it is not "we" who shall be ruling the world, but "I". I who am Mojo Jojo, not Bubbles, shall rule this world alone, which is to say, without anyone else. And when this world is ruled by one person, not a collective group, that one person who will be ruling the world will be none other than ME, Mojo Jojo, BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!"

Wait...you mean that thread wasn't inspired by this one? You could be Bib Fortuna, who was also there and also a Twi'lek...but I sure don't want to see videos of you belly dancing. (No offense. At least not unless you invest in a gallon of Nair...)

Yes, I did know that much. That is why Brig as Oola and Mae as Leia Slave would go together. (Brig, if you didn't have blonde hair, you could be Leia, but alas...) Although Oola was already digesting when Leia was essentially picked to take her place. Still, Star Wars fans everywhere would love it. If you put it on You Tube, imagine all the joy you would bring to the guys who live in their parent's basements the world over.

It's impossible to hijack a thread around here with the lot of shiftless mods we have on duty. (Well, one of them this is shiftless causing the another one to just roll her eyes at him.)

Well now, that's quite the conundrum! If the mind is everything, what (or who) is the "you" that's doing the thinking, let alone the becoming? Om Tat Sat Touché! Oh boy! A fellow philosopher!! Shall we resurrect the philosophy thread? (Things have been so slow around here in the philosophy department since Phil disappeared...)

I always wondered where people in Florida went for vacations.

Why don't we have a blushing emoticon. (Anna and Josh are already astounded at my astounding ignorance of the SW fan world. We established that at PiP last year...) I do recall the lekku thing from my youthful daze of writing absurdly silly SW Fan Fics, but only vaguely. I'm almost ashamed to admit I used to mod at TF.N... (Mae and Brig totally have to do this now. The third twin has spoken. How do we go about making a lekku for Brig? Surely Jack could come up with something. The guy's a freaking genius at creating stuff.)

That's a Freudian-based concept that has been largely been disproved in typical cases. In extreme situations where people bottle all of their negative emotions up and take no action to fix the problems they are encountering, psychological issues result. In normal cases, this is not generally the case from what I have read. However, the original concept did lead to some amusing psychological remedies like scream therapy. My belief is that complaining is only valid when you take action to fix the problem that you are complaining about. Otherwise it just focuses your attention on the negative aspects of life. "Be careful the environment you choose for it will shape you; be careful the friends you choose for you will become like them." –W. Clement Stone "The mind is everything. What you think, you become." Translated from the original Sanskrit