--------------- FIDO MESSAGE AREA==> TOPIC: 159 WRITING Ref: F5G00020 Date: 04/10/98 From: MICHAEL NELLIS Time: 09:20am \/To: CHRIS KLING (Read 2 times) Subj: Leave It To The Reader? Hi, Chris. CK> Don, I'm glad to see that you rose to the occassion on this CK> thorny issue, and didn't beat around the bush in the CK> prickly manner that others may have used. Petal be glad CK> when this "punfest" is cut down, hoping that we all can CK> save vase. That must be a very primrose to be proper for this thread. We can probably get away with this punfest, BTW, just so long as we stick to the topic and don't branch off and bud other threads. We must compost ourselves with integrity in keeping with the echo guidelines. Come on, Chris! Think hard and you can come up with answer to this message! No lawn down on the job, now! * SLMR 2.1a * "Stars in heaven, I'm an idiot!" -Col Baslim --- Maximus/2 3.01 * Origin: Juxtaposition BBS. Lasalle, Quebec, Canada (1:167/133) --------------- FIDO MESSAGE AREA==> TOPIC: 159 WRITING Ref: F5G00021 Date: 04/12/98 From: VERN FAULKNER Time: 04:18pm \/To: MICHAEL NELLIS (Read 2 times) Subj: Of Screaming, and Cats VF> Query: do you mean "catamount" as in the long-extinct puddy- VF> tat that roamed the New England area in a time before McDonalds, MN> It's famous for its scream because it sounds just like a women when it MN> does it. Other names for the same critter, if anyone is interested, is MN> mountain lion, puma (in the Southwest U.S.) and more commonly: cougar. Er, a "Catamount" is a prehistoric animal. Quite extinct. Entirely different from the very live cougar. A cougar and a puma are, IF I am not mistaken, different beasts. --- Maximus/2 3.01 * Origin: Fox n' Dragon Inn BBS (472-8313, Victoria, BC) (1:340/44) --------------- FIDO MESSAGE AREA==> TOPIC: 159 WRITING Ref: F5G00022 Date: 04/12/98 From: MARK SENDERAK Time: 02:01pm \/To: CARL THAMES (Read 2 times) Subj: Re: CHARACTER BUILDING -=> Quoting Carl Thames to Mark Senderak <=- CT> Are you talking about the submitted script or the shooting script? I was talking about taking the video of the movie, sitting down with a legal pad, a stiff drink and the remote control and actually outlining the movie in your own words. When completed you will learn the "formula" so to speak of where and why things happen at certain points in a film. unfortunaately, even when I describe this exercise to wannabee screenwriters, and they actually seem to be listening at the time, 90% of them can't grok it! CT> Can you buy shooting scripts anywhere? I know there is often a HUGE CT> difference between the script-as-submitted and the script-that's-shot. LOL that's an understatement! as far as I know the only way to actually get your hands on a shooting script is to be the writer or work on the production. There are a few shops here in Hollywood that sell copies of scripts and their inventories are immense. Usually if you have a script, and watch the film you can pick out the differences. Sometimes it's easy because the Directors vision of the story is so different from the writers. Other times, it's damn near impossible. CT> Is there a difference in "LETHAL WEAPON?" Which One? On the present one, #4, I'd say just about the normal little changes that normally take place during production. Nothing abnormal or extensive. A line here, a camera angle there, just normal sh__. ... It's been lovely, but I have to scream now. ___ Blue Wave/DOS v2.30 [NR] --- Maximus 3.00 * Origin: Mysteria * Tujunga, Ca * 818-353-8891 (1:102/943) --------------- FIDO MESSAGE AREA==> TOPIC: 159 WRITING Ref: F5G00023 Date: 04/15/98 From: MAUREEN SAK Time: 04:31pm \/To: ALL (Read 2 times) Subj: I'm not being rude Sorry folks, I'm *not* ignoring those of you who were kind enough to respond to my inability to write dialogue. All the advice has been most helpful. I just bought a new computer, and in transfering my files I somehow scrambled my mail packets. Whine, pout, snivel. I *know* I had mail I hadn't responded to. Anyhoo, I should have the bugs worked out in a week or so. I'll be back to lurking about then. Mau ... Crawling back into my hole now. --- Blue Wave/Max v2.12 * Origin: RASCAL BBS [Calgary, Alberta - (403)686-2550] (1:134/122) --------------- FIDO MESSAGE AREA==> TOPIC: 159 WRITING Ref: F5G00024 Date: 04/17/98 From: CARL THAMES Time: 09:27am \/To: MICHAEL NELLIS (Read 2 times) Subj: Batting average MN>Hi, everyone . . . left. I know what you mean. It feels like FIDO is going away, dang it. MN>Just how do you calculate a batting average? Does it include pop flies MN>or "hits" right into somebody's glove? Does it include "hits" where the MN>batter is thrown out at first, or just real hits where the batter gets MN>on base? It's only a hit when the batter gets on base. The one part I don't understand for certain is whether or not it's a hit when the defensive player is charged with an error. i.e. the batter hits the ball directly to a player, and the player drops it, allowing him to get on base. Anybody? * SLMR 2.1a * Insanity - the other alternative. --- PCBoard (R) v15.21/M 2 * Origin: Wheels BBS, The Beast! 573-443-8173 (1:289/250) --------------- FIDO MESSAGE AREA==> TOPIC: 159 WRITING Ref: F5G00025 Date: 04/17/98 From: CARL THAMES Time: 09:27am \/To: MICHAEL NELLIS (Read 2 times) Subj: Help MN>CT> When I was living in Texas I heard of an organization that was MN>CT> interested in building The Great Wall of Texas, which was to involve MN>CT> building a high wall all the way around Texas. The single largest MN>CT> contributor at the time was Oklahoma.... MN>A couple of years ago, when Parizeau was still in and just starting to MN>make noise about holding his ill-fated referendum, I wrote to a local MN>guy about whether or not Quebec was going to build a wall or dig a ditch MN>around its borders. MN>He said he'd vote for the ditch; and once it was complete we could line MN>it with all the politicians and then fill it in. Works for me. The only possible problem is one of scope. To properly allow for all the mass available, the ditch would have to look something like the Marianis (sp?) trench.... * SLMR 2.1a * "Lunch? Lunch! I thought he said LAUNCH!" --- PCBoard (R) v15.21/M 2 * Origin: Wheels BBS, The Beast! 573-443-8173 (1:289/250) --------------- FIDO MESSAGE AREA==> TOPIC: 159 WRITING Ref: F5G00026 Date: 04/17/98 From: CARL THAMES Time: 09:27am \/To: MICHAEL NELLIS (Read 2 times) Subj: Heart conditions /Ia MN>CT> Well, it seems that North America produces approx. 53% of the Oxygen e MN>CT> use, the rest coming from the ocean. MN>Fifty three percent of the O2? No way! Are you sure you don't mean the MN>Amazon Basin? Else you meant carbon dioxide. Lord knows, the way some MN>of those bozos talk. . . . Well, that was from the end of a Stephen Segal movie, so consider the source. From the diatribe he delivered, I can only assume that the numbers were right, though. It looked so totally out of context for the film that it looked like something he negotiated into his contract. i.e. "I'll do your movie if you allow me to pop off for two minutes at the end of it." Since he's a huge box-office draw, they probably shrugged, looked at each other and sighed, and said, "Okay." MN>CT> Considering the rate at which MN>CT> we're polluting the ocean, it makes one pause.... MN>Yes, but it's a queer mixture. On the one hand, we're pumping in tons MN>and tons of industrial pollutants, and on the other, tons and tons of MN>fertilizing agents. Then too, some of it's hard to tell which is which. I've heard that both cause equal problems. Having too much O2 production is just as bad as not enough. I talked to a guy who works at a local sewer plant, and part of their function is to regulate the amount of O2 producing agents that are allowed to go out with the effluent. They use chlorine gas to kill it off when it starts rising. MN>CT> So we could convert a carbon dioxide atmosphere into something MN>CT> resembling ours in a matter of WEEKS? Whoa.... MN>Ah--under _ideal_ conditions; which do not exist in nature, but yes. Doh. The old, "Yeah, it works, but not in nature" thing again. MN>Don't forget that we are dealing with a geometric doubling rate. If you MN>remember the story of the Chinese games maker who invented checkers or MN>chess, and who, when receiving the gratitude of the king, asked for one MN>grain of rice doubled per square on the board. The formula to figure MN>out how much rice that would make is 2^63 + 1. MN>> (2^63)+1 MN>Answer: 9.22337203685477581E+18 MN>Ten to the eighteenth power is a billion billion. Lot of rice krispie MN>squares in that order. There were two possible endings to that story. In one, the games maker was filthy rich and lived happily for the rest of his life. In the other, he lost his head. Knowing what I know about the Chinese, I would put money on that latter.... MN>CT> MN>CT> As it is, the pandemic of AIDS will kill off a significant part o MN>CT> MN>CT> the population of the planet within in the next ten years anyway. MN>CT> MN> More resources for the rest of us. MN>CT> And fewer people to dig them out of the ground.... MN>Recycling. There's going to be a lot empty high rise buildings wasting MN>away. :-) I told a friend of this possibility, and he said that it wouldn't happen because the affected regions reproduce faster than they are dying off. It makes sense. Considering that AIDS can take ten years to kill someone, that person can have a passle of kids by the time they're incapacitated. MN>CT> MN> Southeast Asia, center of child prostitution and sex slavery. MN>CT> Yup. Plus apparently the regular population breed like rabbits, much MN>CT> like other places. MN>They still start young in those places. Plenty of children are child MN>brides, and they live in a system where the elderly still need their MN>children to look after them in their old age. Both Europe and North America will have an opposite problem in about fifteen years. Apparently, there aren't enough young to feed the system which is designed to support the elderly here. Europe (at least the western part) is having an even worse problem. A friend of mine recently went to Paris, and he said that in the four days he was there he did not see ONE baby, baby carraige, or pregnant woman. That's rare, IMHO. I look around here and I know a LOT of couples who have no children. MN>CT> MN>Canada is working on legislation to extend its statutory rape and MN>CT> MN>pedophilia laws to include acts committed abroad. MN>CT> How could they collect evidence? Is this a matter of not allowing MN>CT> certain people to go to SE Asia? MN>They'd let the local cops make the bust and when the perp got back to MN>Canada he's face charges here. I don't know if that means in place of MN>or as well as, though. Wouldn't they need some kind of proof to convict them? How do they know the guy didn't do the scenic tour of Thailand rather than spending his two weeks banging his eyes loose in a child brothel? MN>CT> MN>Sometimes I wonder how I managed to survive adolescence. MN>CT> I feel the same. Some of the stuff I used to do would kill an MN>CT> intelligent person.... MN>Heh heh heh. Saved to my quotations file. Da Nada. MN>CT> Yeah, but you also have to consider that if a major segment of the MN>CT> population went away, a larger percentage of what was left would be MN>CT> focusing on food production, etc., rather than on entertainment devices. MN>Hmmmm. Not really. After all, we are pretty much in agreement that MN>those populations most likely to go away are in third world countries MN>where food production is a big problem. In our industrialized MN>societies, we produce enough grain to feed the world (most of it is MN>squandered in mismanagement, however). If a large segment of the third MN>world population goes away, there will actually be a glut of food. Good point, although amazing in many respects. MN>CT> Figures, don't it? Sometimes I think if it were raining soup, I'd get MN>CT> caught out in it with a fork....;-) MN>To quote John DeChancie's Castle Perilous series: Death's a bitch, then MN>you're reincarnated. Yup. Captures the total doom and gloom of the situation nicely. "Your life is gonna suck, and it's NEVER going to end, no matter what you do." * SLMR 2.1a * I'll just staple this note to his back-up diskette... --- PCBoard (R) v15.21/M 2 * Origin: Wheels BBS, The Beast! 573-443-8173 (1:289/250) --------------- FIDO MESSAGE AREA==> TOPIC: 159 WRITING Ref: F5G00027 Date: 04/17/98 From: CARL THAMES Time: 09:27am \/To: MICHAEL NELLIS (Read 2 times) Subj: Heart conditions /Ib MN>CT> That was the theme in "Alas Babylon" too. [...] MN>CT> They basically had to handle things themselves, which they did. Of MN>CT> interest, one of their major problems was finding enough salt. MN>Doh! It's always the little things that trip you up. Yup. The things we take for granted soon become huge problems. I would think that clean drinking water would head the list. MN>CT> [...] I think they figured out another way to seperate students from MN>CT> their money and went for it. MN>Yes, but I bet that the students never noticed. They're all up in arms MN>here in QC about cuts to education and major budgeting changes like MN>increasing tuition fees, but they don't stop to think about how much the MN>little stuff adds up. Same here. They keep raising the tuition and cutting their own costs. I think a bunch of people should just take off a semester and a lot of that crap would stop. MN>CT> Actually, the tickets they offered are $10 each, and you can't get our MN>CT> transcript if you have unpaid tickets. (The is because I'm ot MN>CT> a student there, and they can hold their breaths until I pay them ten MN>CT> bucks for parking. ;-) MN>At the university here, it all depends on where you park. If you are MN>caught in a parking area your pass isn't good for, you get a ticket from MN>university security, but the streets and parking meters are patrolled by MN>the municpal police. Those tickets are forty odd bucks. Thirty for the MN>infraction, ten to process it. A municipal parking ticket is FORTY bux???? Here they're five, and it feels like robbery at that. MN>CT> MN>I usually park at the shopping center, MN>CT> Have they put up the, "Parking for Shopping Center patrons only, thers MN>CT> will be towed at the owner's expense" signs yet? MN>No, they haven't done that, yet. Early mornings, the problem is covered MN>by having a security agent wandering around in that section to tell MN>people they can't park there if they aren't going to shop there. Can they get one towed? The univ. here can, and frequently do. THAT costs at least fifty, depending on how many days it takes you to get the money together to ransom your car.... * SLMR 2.1a * MS-DOS..MR DOS's sister -- DR DOS..MS DOS's Gynecologist. --- PCBoard (R) v15.21/M 2 * Origin: Wheels BBS, The Beast! 573-443-8173 (1:289/250) --------------- FIDO MESSAGE AREA==> TOPIC: 159 WRITING Ref: F5G00028 Date: 04/17/98 From: CARL THAMES Time: 09:27am \/To: MICHAEL NELLIS (Read 2 times) Subj: Chinese Hegemony MN>CT> Sigh. Again, people wonder why I find the idea of living in a cave in MN>CT> the middle of the boonies attractive.... Old Joe was a special case, MN>CT> IMHO. When the people said, "Hey, he can't kill us all" his reply was MN>CT> simple: "Watch me." MN>I taped an airing of the news magazine _Witness_ that was on last week. MN>Scary stuff. I never thought any of that conspiracy theory paranoia MN>could have any application in real life; now I'm worried that they MN>aren't paranoid enough. I've heard similar, all proposed as absolute fact. If you think about it, it would take the entire population of the country to process most of the nonsense the conspiracy guys go on about. MN>Part of the show was an interview with two former agents of an ultra-top MN>secret agency called CSE--which is putatively Canadian--which operates a MN>system called _Echelon._ These two bozos stated that this system has MN>the ability to monitor ALL of the world's communications and screen MN>everything for certain words or phrases. Well, I've heard the same said about the internet and FIDO, so be prepared for the knock on the door.... MN>Apparently, the CSE is controlled by the NSA. If it's NSA, then it's American, not Canadian, although we do have agreements in place for intel exchange with Canada.... MN>I wonder how Zimmerman is coming along with that encryption protocol for MN>voice transmissions. Heheheheh. They will have to provide a key to the NSA and FBI before it can be used, though. * SLMR 2.1a * Reality Meter: [E\....F] Just as I suspected! --- PCBoard (R) v15.21/M 2 * Origin: Wheels BBS, The Beast! 573-443-8173 (1:289/250) --------------- FIDO MESSAGE AREA==> TOPIC: 159 WRITING Ref: F5G00029 Date: 04/17/98 From: CARL THAMES Time: 09:27am \/To: BARBARA SHAFFERMAN (Read 2 times) Subj: CENTURY MAGAZINE BS>CT> Back when, when I started submitting, I am sure our mail carrier BS>CT> thought I was stalking him. I didn't harrass the publishers, BS>CT> (much...;-) but that poor sucker must have thought I was some kind BS>CT> of groupie. Add to that the idea that we lived in a neighborhood BS>CT> that contained people who were known to rob mail carriers, and I'm BS>CT> surprised the guy didn't freak every time he saw me. BS>LOL. Just one more hazard to add to the list of hazards the mail carrier BS>must overcome. "Neither snow nor sleet nor frenzied author..........." Heheheheh. With the intense look on my face as he put the mail in the box, it probably looked like I was measuring him for a stew-pot. Just watching for that manilla envelope.... BS>You're lucky your carrier wasn't female like mine, or you would have BS>made the headlines as the subject of a sexual harrassment suit. They worry more about someone dragging them off somewhere, I think. You wouldn't think that carrying mail was dangerous, but apparently it is in many areas of the country. I remember one area in San Antonio where the USPS applied for and was approved to STOP delivering mail to a specific area. It was just too dangerous, and the mail carriers felt their lives were at risk just by being there. Makes you wonder why we have that huge military when you read about that kid of nonsense, and I'm about as liberal as it gets. * SLMR 2.1a * I don't see you, so don't pretend to be there. --- PCBoard (R) v15.21/M 2 * Origin: Wheels BBS, The Beast! 573-443-8173 (1:289/250)