Misson

Johnny Depp/Mel Blanc? (Johnny) (Mel) Yes...I can see it...

Get it from Netflix. You can get "unlimited" rentals for $10 a month, so your $67 would buy 6 months worth of the service and leave you $7 for popcorn. (Note: "Unlimited" is sort of a misnomer as a standalone word as used. You can have one movie at a time at your house for this price and they send you the next movie when your return the one you have. However their turnaround for me is usually 2-3 business days after sending them a movie so it works out to be 4-7 movies a month, depending on how long I keep them. A heckuva lot cheaper than Walletbuster.) They have a huge library of titles - bigger than any rental place. Try it out for a month and you'll probably be hooked. [/adcopy off ] (Duchess got me hooked on it, so this is all her fault.)

Finally got this off my NetFlix list after putting it on there based on hurricane's original post. Subtle, it ain't. Fortunately, Curry is perfectly cast and the rest of the actors play the silliness straight - making it quite watchable. It's basically an extension of Curry's role as Long John Silver. It was more violent than I might have expected (although not really much more violent than most prime time TV.) And there are some pretty funny lines in there. Curiously, they never explained what became of the loan agent foreclosing on the house. I thought he'd be in the chest that the pirates took. I guess old Jezebel Jack ran him through...or maybe he just let him go when he had his sudden personal revelation. I suppose it doesn't matter, although it leaves that subplot sort of hanging. Grandpa and Jezebel Jack would make fine role models to an eight year old kid with an active imagination. (Plus I now know that Captain Jack wasn't the first pirate to sail his ship on land. I wonder if this is what gave them the kernel of the idea?)

Solar is my bet. Other than the need for space to place the panels and the storage problem (which is ubiquitous to all alternative energy schemes), it seems like the best and cleanest option to me. Unless something more cost effective that we haven't thought of or popularized yet shows up. As for energy - it's everywhere; latent energy exists naturally in everything. We just need to figure out how to harness and gather it.

Actually, the page where I found that image has an interesting litany of letters about complaints that people have about the giant windmills - particularly in New York state. (It has to do with noise and light reflection.) You can check it out here. As for dams...God forbid you should mess with anything whatsoever to do with wetlands. I doubt you could build most dams today because of the restrictions the idiotic wetlands legislation that has been created. (See? Cockroaches!) I think solar is the most viable source currently. The only problem is that the cost of the refined silicon has shot up because of the demand for it from solar panels and chips. (Who'd have thought sand would get expensive? ) This isn't good for the solar market because the cost of power generation is currently 3-4 times higher than coal burning. Give it time, though.

Well! We agree on something in regard to the environment. (I do not support most legislation designed to force the issue, however. I think time is green energy's greatest ally. Forcing the issue will only leave the residue of taxation and legal policy designed to squash freedom in place. Laws are like cockroaches - they hang out in the dark and never go away, living far beyond their useful life.) Put your money where your mouth is and go buy a windmill, I say. You can sell all the extra energy you produce back to the electric company. They have these ginormous windmill in the (very) windy Mackinaw Straights between the lower and upper peninsulas in Michigan near the Mackinaw Bridge. I was thinking about them the other day - last time I was up there, I tried to get close to them, but they have it all fenced off. I am still considering solar power, myself. It's not cost effective yet. I believe a day will come when it will be one of the primary sources of energy - unless they figure something else out before it becomes cost-effective.

I sincerely doubt that broad awareness of pollutant output has ever been higher than it has in the past few years. I've read that the younger generations are each progressively more environmentally concerned than previous generations. (Who can blame them with wild tales of melting Greenland and potential 20 foot rises in sea level being breathlessly reported? ) In fact, the financial paper I read talks quite extensively about how important an environmental awareness image is to many companies, especially in regard to 20 somethings. I find this sort of fascinating, actually. Environmental concern has become a somewhat successful marketing ploy. Companies are cashing in on it. (About a quarter to a third of the Ford Motor Company tour called The Rouge that I went on recently was devoted to environmental processes put into place at the plant - from roof plants, to skylights, to effective parking lot filtration.) Stores are cashing in on it. (Wal~Mart has made much hay about this, but so have entire companies. Whole Foods has basically been built around green issue marketing.) Media outlets are certainly using it in their "bad news sells copies" campaigns. Even politicians (the ultimate marketing campaign) are using it to promote themselves. Al Gore has benefited tremendously by branding himself as a "green" candidate. He could even have another run, based primarily on this one, well-marketed point. Green is gold. {Edit: I had a feeling that was a good slogan. Check this out.) I'm sure if you are sincerely interested in pollution awareness that a search of the net will find research supporting this. It's not quite as interesting as how many people watched an extended rock concert, but it's probably a lot more indicative of the truth.

Wow. This is older than the thread we have in Beyond Pyracy! You certainly dredged up an antique, Mad Jack. (We used to have an older thread on this topic but they cleaned up Beyond in 2005 and deleted everything more than a few months old. Lost many pages of responses to this question.) Anyhow, the parallel thread is here.

Hey, they're talking about a book on pirate language called A Pirate Primer in the Pirate Pop forum for those of you who are interested. Check out this thread.

I'm no expert, but I do recall hearing that when you log on using cable modems, the IP addy changes. So it probably wouldn't do much good to give you the list of IPs. Unless you know something I don't?

(Well, that and I don't have my TV hooked up for any broadcast reception. GIGO)

(Putting on my artist's hat.) The first thing I notice is the cheekbones. Johnny's are very defined, Matt's not so much so. The eyebrows are quite different too. I bet if they were both bald, you'd spot the differences immediately. When I draw, I usually do the hair last and the pictures look quite different up to that point.

What's interesting is how well breaking the mold has worked in the past. Star Wars was turned down by over twenty studios when Lucas was pitching it. Rocky was rejected by even more. One studio agreed to make if Stallone didn't appear it - and he wrote it form himself! Even low budget films that try different things sometimes outsell many of the Hollywood carbon copies. The story of how the original Night of the Living Dead got made (in Romero's industrial film facility) is another fine example. Even Black Pearl works...a film in a genre that everyone had decided was dead and buried. (Although I have great hopes for Indy IV. ) OTOH, who knows how many times Hollywood has been burned by experimentation? If you know Police Academy 11 is going to generate a decent sum with low costs...well, I guess I can see why such a thing gets made. (For the record, there were seven of those. With a potential eighth one being planned!)

It seems logical, but I guess I don't truly know anything until I experience it. What is the motivation for people all over the world to promote a particular site, though? Since I've been having to fish these things out of the Beyond Pyracy stream, I've seen about 20 different IPs...ranging from Florida, Virginia, Pennsylvania, Asia, Latin America, China and more.

Me too. But then I always like a little surrealism. http://www.markck.com/images/amazeing/artw...theamazeing.htm I was annoyed because it didn't make any sense as I mentioned somewhere around here. Fortunately, it was just a ruse. Then it was very mysterious as to who Calypso might be. (What?! Leia is Luke's sister? I mean, I knew it had to be someone but...Leia?! How? )

*Sigh* Good luck. These people don't read this forum. They come in, register, post their junk and leave. Being able to see the IP addresses, I can tell you they come from all over the world. I wonder how they orchestrate this stuff? If you watch the patterns, you'll notice that the same basic stuff keeps coming up. It's like they have a network where they share forum addresses and then swarm in and attack.

As a VW Beetle owner, I completely agree Syren. :angry Watch The Love Bug. (I just saw it last night for the first time. What a fun movie. While Herbie sort of transforms, it's a bit different than Transformers.)

I really like books on tape. I find I retain more of them for some reason. I have a session on Descartes on my rental shelf at Simply Audiobooks.

A bovine strategic offensive machine? (What the heck is a cattle tank? Is this like de-tassling corn?) We used to build rafts at summer camp. They supplied us with fairly lightweight 4" - 6" diameter pieces of lumber, all cut to the same length and large rectangular pieces of polyfoam. We'd lash it together with ropes and go paddling around the lake. Neat. (Not too tough to do, either.) If you want a flat platform, nail a couple of sheets of plywood on top of the logs.

That is very nice, oderlesseye. I will be most interested to see the end result. King's Pirate...A cannon in your cabin! Planning to create a room with a view?

I doubt that will be the case any longer.... Which, when you think about it from Disney's POV, is a pretty good argument for changing it. Like the way stores measure their effectiveness in sales per square foot. In an amusement park, the metric would probably be riders per unit of time or some such.

The changes don't look all bad:

You can petition NetFlix? How do you do that?

Well, from the original site (mail.com), their poll results look like this so far (they do not indicate total responses, which is pretty annoying): Star Wars 32.1% E.T. 6.7% Jaws 6.5% Raiders of the Lost Ark 16.9% Jurassic Park 7.8% Forrest Gump 13.2% The Lion King 6.4% Transformers 10.1%

A note on this book: Be careful about what you accept as "fact" in Zack's book The Pirate Hunter (the title notwithstanding). It's an enjoyable book for pirate aficionados, but some of it is not provably true and (if I recall correctly) it doesn't cite sources. Check out this thread in Captain Twill for some discussion on the book. Note particularly the comments by Foxe, who has a whole site devoted to debunking pirate myths.