Question

From wikipedia

The exact role which Brackett played in writing the script for Empire is the subject of some dispute. What is agreed on by all is that George Lucas asked Brackett to write the screenplay based on his story outline. It is also known that Brackett wrote a finished first draft which was delivered to Lucas shortly before Brackett's death from cancer on March 18, 1978. Two drafts of a new screenplay were written by Lucas and, following the delivery of the screenplay for Raiders of the Lost Ark, turned over to Lawrence Kasdan for a new approach. Both Brackett and Kasdan (though not Lucas) were given credit for the final script.

Many reviewers[who?] believed that they could detect traces of Brackett's influence in both the dialogue and the treatment of the space opera genre in Empire.[5] However, Laurent Bouzereau, in his book Star Wars: The Annotated Screenplays, states that Lucas disliked the direction of Brackett's screenplay and discarded it. He then produced two screenplays before turning the results over to Kasdan, who did not work directly with Brackett's script at all. It is speculation if Lucas' assignment of credit to Brackett was a mere courtesy, a mark of respect for the work she had done during her illness, or a contractual obligation.[6]

Brackett's screenplay has never been officially or legally published. According to Stephen Haffner, owner of the press that printed Martian Quest: The Early Brackett, it can be read at one of two locations: the Jack Williamson Special Collections library at Eastern New Mexico University in Portales, New Mexico (but may not be copied or checked out); and the archives at Lucasfilm, Ltd. in California.

What have people who have actually read either copy said about the degree of influence Brackett had on Empire?

A Hat Tip to Ballantine/Del Rey

In the 1970s, Del Rey published the following Cordwainer Smith books:

Norstrilia (1975)
The Best of Cordwainer Smith (1975)
Quest of the Three Worlds (1978)
The Instrumentality of Mankind (1979)
( Read more... )

I can stop any time I want to

Two more:
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Hung up on a statistical detail

Eric, the idiot vampire [1] from JF Lewis's 2009 Revamped, explains why he takes the steps he does to limit how often he has to hunt amongst the general population:

"Because of what I am, I murder, on average, roughly one hundred and thirty people a year." He further estimates that in the four decades he has been around, he's killed in excess of ten thousand people.

Note that he is unusual in wanting to mitigate the effect he has on regular humans (and he feels kind of bad that when it comes down to it, he'd rather keep on killing people than end his unlife) and that other vampires, like Eric's daughter Greta, make no such efforts. Off hand, there are at least (Eric, Tabitha, Phillip, Roger, Veruca, Greta, Kyle, Gabriella) eight vampires running around Void City and probably more. Even if they made the same effort Eric does, which they do not, that's over a thousand murders a year, or something like 7% of all the murders committed in the US in a given year. That's more murders than are committed in all Canada in any given year and that's the low estimate.

How many cities in the US can you stick a thousand extra murders a year without it standing out like a big red flag? True, Phillip has a spell up that prevents any of the humans in Void City from seeing the supernatural for what it is but I don't think it hides the fact people are being murdered, judging by what happens after Eric eats a newscaster. Can we work backwards to figure out what the minimum population size of Void City has to be?

(The easy answer is Phillip, no dummy, cast his spell so it conceals Void City's murder problem from the nation as a whole. Some of his comments about the spell are in line with that model)




1: Not his fault; he was embalmed before he rose, but he's still the kind of guy who can go 40 years before discovering a highly significant fact about his own physique, that when he's peeved, he gheaf vagb n ong-jvatrq qrzbavp xvyyvat znpuvar. Nobody mentioned it to him because they figured he knew.

Heh

More cities

And this I cannot explain at all

Anyone care to comment on the inexplicable relative popularity of the Merovingians prior to about 1905?

A video from Planetary Resources

If I wait until Planetary Resources has recovered a valuable nugget

of rare materials and then hijack their robot rocket with a robot rocket of my own, what laws, if any, apply?

FedEx is usually here by 2 but not today

[Poll #1837375]

FedEx is usually here by 2 but not today

[Poll #1837375]

No FedEx.

And it's 5:02. This is my amazed face.

Will PuTTY

Run on a playbook?

This is my amazed face

No FedEx door tag.

As pointed out in email

No id for the alley but at least we know the names of the victims:

I have been reading a book on the development of the English language recently and I’ve become fascinated with the idea of word etymology — the study of words and their origins. It’s no secret that English is a great borrower of foreign words but I’m not enough of an expert to really understand what that means for my day-to-day use of the language. Simply reading about word history didn’t help me, so I decided that I really needed to see some examples.

Torontonian vows to intervene in upcoming Kitchener election

Toronto Mayor Rob Ford says he will work to defeat the Liberal candidate in the byelection.

Ford, a proud supporter of the Progressive Conservatives, threatened last year to unleash “Ford Nation” on McGuinty if the premier didn’t give Toronto more money.

“There is going to be a byelection out in Kitchener-Waterloo, and I’m going to do everything in my power to make sure a certain party does not win so they don’t get a majority government,” Ford said.