Welcome back to the Friday Forum. It seemed to work last week, so let's try it again.
Please remember that, when it comes to the state of the world, not everyone will agree with you. You're free to state, discuss, and defend your viewpoint (provided it does not violate the Constitution), but please don't use that fact to attack others.
Fandom News
(Link)
Ah, do you remember the golden age? When you could have a film about Nazis that featured a stand in for the kookiest Republican presidential candidate, and it was taken for granted that she'd be fighting against them? Aye, them were the days.
I'm talking, of course, about the frankly hilarious 2012 movie Iron Sky. The first official teaser trailer for the sequel (Iron Sky: The Coming Race) dropped this week; it has Adolf Hitler riding a T. rex, and if we can trust the 2015 pre-teaser, features both the Hollow Earth and a race of reptile people living there. Fake!Sarah Palin is one of them, so I guess she was on Hitler's side all along after all? Alas, my golden era is already tainted...!
(I expect a full critique of Blondie the T. rex's anatomy. Come on, paleogeeks, I know you're out there.)
Silly News
(Link)
You all, I'm sure, remember the astonishing discovery of the TRAPPIST-1 star system, a small red star with seven earth-sized worlds around it. It has its own website, featuring this gorgeous NASA travel poster that accurately shows the fact that, y'know, this place has seven planets inside the orbit of Mercury, they're going to show up in each other's skies the size of our moon.
The issue with this system is that, with so much mass so close together, most models show the planets colliding and destroying each other within half a million years - which, obviously, hasn't happened. Luckily, astronomers are clever types, and a paper pre-printed this week suggests a way for them to be, y'know, still there: a "resonant chain", where the orbits of all seven worlds are gravitationally linked so they counter-balance each other. It's quite funky - but not entirely silly, and this section is called 'Silly News'.
The silliness comes with how this has been announced to the world. The image above links to the video in which the orbits of the planets have been transformed into music - a piano note for each complete orbit, a drumbeat for each time a planet passes its neighbours. It's a gloriously ridiculous way to showcase an astrophysical hypothesis; I love it.
Serious News
(America & France)
This week, FBI Director James Comey was fired by Twitter Personality & President Trump. Comey is simultaneously the man who decided to publically announce that he was once again investigating Hillary Clinton mere days before the election (prompting widespread belief, given how close the votes turned out, that he pretty much chose the next president all by himself), and the man who was still investigating Russian involvement in swinging that same election at the time he was fired. He wasn't - quite - investigating Trump himself, but "firing the man who's checking whether your administration is influenced by a foreign power" ain't looking good.
It's made worse by Trump's letter, which includes this delightful paragraph:
While I greatly appreciate you informing me, on three separate occasions, that I am not under investigation, I nevertheless concur with the judgement of the Department of Justice that you are not able to effectively lead the Bureau.
... which comes off an awful lot like 'you thought saying what I wanted to hear made you safe; you were wrong'.
Personally, I've never believed the way Comey handled the email reopening was innocent; he knew full well what he was doing. But firing the man who is investigating whether you were elected on false pretences was never going to look good.
Meanwhile, in Europe, France has utterly disrespected the spirit of the times by not electing its far-right candidate as President. Weirdos. They did still join in the whole 'overturn the establishment' thing, though, voting in a President from a party/movement that only formed last year.
Do we still have any French Boarders around? It'd be interesting to hear an inside view on why the traditional parties didn't do well in the first round - and why the far-right didn't end up winning after all.
Not News
My town has a WWII memorial (we don't have a WWI one, because the town didn't exist at the time), and some of the names on it are... well:
I can't make up my mind whether this is "Savage" Ivy Muriel, the brutal cricketer whose last match against Australia is the subject of both legend and three separate police reports, or "Savage Ivy", the famous masked wrestler and/or vigilante who spends her days as Muriel the children's librarian.
What kind of cruel parents name their kid "Ernest Stammers"? I mean, there's no way he's coming out of that with his psyche intact.
Finally, the untold story that takes place after the Narnia you know and love. This gritty sequel explores Peter Pevensie's conscription in 1944, his first blooding on D-Day, his meteoric rise through the ranks of the British Army - and his tragic, noble death on the Somme (because, like, there's two World Wars? Who can be bothered to remember that? Hey, one of those writers was at the Somme, wasn't he, Rowling or Tolkein or something like that. Who was the one who wrote Narnia? Let's make it him, and Peter can tell him all the stories while he's dying. Man, we're brilliant.)
... I will give prizes to anyone who writes an encounter between High King Peter, Ernest St-st-st-stammers, and either of the Muriels in the battlefields of Europe.
hS
