Compare to /Bugsy Malone/. It's a nice little bit.

I grew up in my grandparents' Italian restaurant. One of my earliest memories is helping my grandfather assemble the tree. It was made of wooden dowels painted white, and the branches were aluminum strips twisted in hard wires that jammed into holes in the dowels. All the branches were the same length, but the holes were at more and more vertical angles as you went up the dowels, to make the whole thing tree-shaped. The branches wouldn't go in unless you pointed them exactly the right direction, and that was somehow /great/. Every branch was like /yeah! that way!/ But the best part was a little spotlight that you put on the floor in the corner of the display window at the front of the restaurant and pointed at this space-age, shiny tree, and there was a four-color disk that turned on a rotisserie motor in front of the light, and I would sit there and stare at that light and watch the colors change, and listen to the motor grind and buzz, and I'd count the seconds it took to go all the way around to red again, because it sped up and slowed down seemingly at random. And I'd think about it and about what else you could point the light at, and wouldn't it be great if the light in the kitchen was like that? and the back porch light? and the car lights? That's Christmas.

A couple of weeks ago I was in a store with Juanita and they had laser things that you'd put on the lawn and point at the house to make tiny dim points of red and green light jump around everywhere, and for some reason it /didn't even remind me of the rotisserie light thing at all/. I didn't think about it until just now. It's like so much of the modern world: frantic and fast and tiny and dim and cold and easy to look away from. I don't know-- maybe I'd like it more if it had a noisy motor struggling in it, or if it got hot enough to burn your hand, or if it required some assembly.

I think you were right to wish for a shiny artificial tree that can be put away in a small box and taken out year after year forever. It's prettier. It's not wasteful. I mean, /Helicopter logging of Christmas tree farms?/

Besides the problem of scale, ornament Enterprise is missing her warp nacelles.

"How should Gabi use this power?" For good and never for evil. How do ya think?

"Superman would literally crush Lois Lane's body in his arms, while simultaneously ripping her open from crotch to sternum, gutting her like a trout. " --from Larry Niven's breakdown of the problems of superhero sex, /Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex/. http://www.rawbw.com/~svw/superman.html

I too wonder what the ethnic slur was.

I have a clip from one of those magic food (placebo product) infomercials where a man with an Australian accent claims that John Wayne's colon weighed fifty pounds when he died. Here: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/71327982/JohnWayneColon.mp3

It's funny to hear and so worth repeating, but it turns out to be hooey. I mean, fifty pounds, indeed. Elsewhere you can read that he got cancer not from a lifetime of packing his colon with steak and potatoes but from shooting a single desert movie in radioactive sand.

Potty-bot in Christopher Baldwin's webcomic Spacetrawler. It doesn't need to go to a fixed place to collect fuel; it brings the vacuum funnel to you.

It's a reference to the point of all advertising, which is: "Bored? Lonely? Why not buy something in a cardboard box?"

Now we can make accordions! And toilet seats!

Why do the world's ugliest dogs always look like Yoda?

Also traffic waves travel backward (!) on the freeway. This website has an animated graphic to help explain it: http://www.eskimo.com/~billb/amateur/traffic/traffic1.html

In 1999, when he was 68 years old, William Shatner got home and found his wife motionless at the bottom of the swimming pool. He jumped in and pulled her up and out and tried and tried to revive her though she was dead. Imagine his horror and exhaustion. Knowing about that time ruins any enjoyment I might have in making fun of his singing.
http://articles.latimes.com/1999/aug/11/local/me-64692
Also he once made a movie whose dialogue was entirely in Esperanto.

This is what everyone on Fox News looks like to me. Sometimes it's two or three machines in split-screen, all going at once, you know, to be all fair and balanced about it.

This is what everyone on Fox News looks like to me. Sometimes it's two or three machines in split-screen, all going at once, you know, to be all fair and balanced about it.

The ones you propose all feel friendly and fluffy, though. I nominate Primer. And Timequest (not the plodding religion-themed one but the one about the old man who invents time travel to go back and avert the JFK assassination, not for JFK's sake nor the world's but because when he was a toddler in 1963 he saw Jacqueline Kennedy on teevee after the assassination and she was so beautiful and sad and he /imprinted/ on her; it was for /her/). Navigator is also nice. And the Lost In Space movie --actually a time travel story-- is underrated and interestingly edgy. The first TimeCop movie is quite good. And The Time Traveler's Wife. And you're very right about no movie ever getting time travel right. Primer comes closest of all the ones I've seen.