Goldfingers

No!  Nothing To Do With James Bond
Although if that <ahem> slightly click-baitey title draws a few more victims visitors in, then who am I to complain?*
     No, what I am doing is revisiting an earlier post from this afternoon, where I went on - and on - about King Midas, all that he touched turned to gold (see? fingers of gold), yaddah-yaddah, terrible curse, blah blah, FTSE crashed upon gold being more common than salt, etcetera.  Art?

The Stock Exchange: last refuge for Nazis?

     Except that not everything he touched turned to gold, did it?  He was breathing in air, wasn't he?  And it didn't turn into a diffuse fog of gold particles, clog his lungs up and asphyxiate him, did it?  Ergo, he can ingest without consequences; all he needs is for his servants to pour wine into his gob or stuff scran into his piehole.  He's a king, after all, and you can't tell me he doesn't have football crowds of servants waiting on him hand and foot.
     Nor are we told what happens if he touches something already made of gold, which Conrad is curious about.  Would it simply sit there?  Revert to lead?  Reverse the polarity of the neutron flow, implode reality and destroy the universe in a micro-second?
     Of course, I may be over-thinking this -

The idiot at work

     Now, time to give the motley a fish and chip supper!

When Bad Means Good Part 2
     I refer, obviously, to this afternoon's post about the Beeb and it's proffering a list of 7 films that fall into the So-bad-they're-good category, without mentioning what's on the list.  I did give a link but you lot are idle scofflaws who need spoonfeeding the facts.
     Number One was "The Room", which has received the singular honour of a film being made about it's being made.  It is, apparently, an incoherent mess from beginning to end.  Art?

A bit out in the open air, frankly

     The FBMAIBM is "The Disaster Artist" and stars James Franco.  This will doubtless ensure a huge boom in people watching "The Room", meaning it might make a profit.
     The only film on the list that I've seen is "Plan 9 From Outer Space", which again has the honour of having a film been made about it's being made - "Ed Wood", which again probably resulted in an enormous increase in the number of people seeing the original.  Art?

It's actually in black and white

     This film, too, is an incoherent mess; it is, however, hilarious to watch.
     Now, you can bash these films all you want, but both Tommy Wiseau and Ed Wood had a vision, passion, commitment and willingness to see things through, which is more than you can say for directing hacks like Uwe "Tax Break" Boll or Joel "Where's My Cheque?" Schumacher.**

     Actually, thinking about it, if 'The Room' ends up making a profit - a breakdown of it's box office is impossible to come by - then Tommy Wiseau might turn out to have gold fingers after all.

Now, I think I'd better finagle a bit of science-fiction in here, and space-opera at that, because folks from the FB Space Opera page might come visit.

Their title page

"Cities In Flight" By James Blish
If you have any history with BOOJUM! then you will recall that this collection of James Blish's 4 'Okie' novels is one of my favourite sci-fi reads.  It might not come across as space-opera initially, but allow me to state my case.
     For one thing, Ol' Jim was going to blow the entire concept on a single 10,000 word short story.  Art?

Ol' Jim with a couple of space cadets

     The editor he submitted it to roundly rejected what Ol' Jim calls a "Wagnerian concept", so he went away and turned the short story into novels.
     How does it qualify as space opera?  Apart from one critic calling it "A real, honest, pure, gee-whiz space-opera".  Well, the collection spans about 2,000 years, with "Earthman, Come Home" itself spanning about 300.  The action travels from Earth to the Magellanic Clouds, satellite galaxies of the Milky Way.  The first part of E,CH involves massed battles between spaceships of the Earth Police (more accurately a space navy) and the obsolete but fanatical and more numerous warships from the Duchy of Gort.

This kind of thing

     Then you have the Hruntan Empire, which is human - the surname is Hungarian - and entire planets being used as spaceships, and a mass drive on Earth by rebelling Okie cities, and a Vegan Orbital Fort - Vega being the old power in the galaxy before Earth -
     It has real potential as a television series - it's waaaaay too long to be a film.  Fans of 'The Expanse' with incredibly deep pockets out there, take note!



*  Your local curmudgeon, that's who.  Don't worry, I'll find something to complain about.
**  Good news!  Boll recently retired from film-making.  Tommy, now's your chance!