Starship Asterisk*

JohnD wrote:

• Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to thee,
  Whether the summer clothe the general earth
  With greenness, or the redbreast sit and sing
  Betwixt the tufts of snow on the bare branch
  Of mossy apple-tree, while the nigh thatch
  Smokes in the sun-thaw; whether the eave-drops fall
  Heard only in the trances of the blast,
  Or if the secret ministry of frost
  Shall hang them up in silent icicles,
  Quietly shining to the quiet Moon.

(Frost at Midnight, Coleridge; last lines)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Horn_Blows_at_Midnight wrote:
Athanael (Jack Benny): Hey... I'm getting wet!

Click to play embedded YouTube video.

<<The Horn Blows at Midnight (1945) is a comedy fantasy starring Jack Benny. Its biggest claim to fame, apart from its star, is its failure at the box office, and this fact was exploited often for laughs in Benny's popular radio comedy series The Jack Benny Program. The plot involves the third trumpet player in the orchestra of a radio program, named the Paradise Coffee Program, who falls asleep listening to the reading of the advertisement: "The coffee that makes you sleep." He dreams he is the angel Athanael, a trumpeter in the orchestra of heaven, who is such a terrible musician that he is relieved of his position and sent on a mission to Earth to blow the "Last Trumpet" at midnight, signaling the end of the world. Complications arise when two fallen angels named Osidro and Doremus want to continue their physical existence of pursuing pleasures. While Athanael encounters experiences of mortal life, such as eating food and the need for money, the fallen angels try to prevent Athanael from going through with his mission by having his trumpet stolen. The script was re-worked into an episode of radio's Ford Theater, broadcast March 04, 1949. The radio story focuses on Athaniel's moral dilemma about whether or not the people of Earth, just suffering World War II, deserved to be extinguished with the Earth or given another chance.>>

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chimes_at_Midnight wrote:

Click to play embedded YouTube video.

<<Chimes at Midnight, also known as Falstaff and Campanadas a medianoche (Spanish title), is a 1965 film directed by and starring Orson Welles. Focused on William Shakespeare's recurring character Sir John Falstaff, the film stars Welles himself as Falstaff, Keith Baxter plays Prince Hal (who will later become Henry V), and John Gielgud plays Henry IV. Jeanne Moreau appears as Doll Tearsheet and Margaret Rutherford as Mistress Quickly. The film's narration, spoken by Ralph Richardson, is taken from the chronicler Raphael Holinshed.

• ___ King Henry IV, Part i Act 1, Scene
  
  HOTSPUR: By heaven, methinks it were an easy leap,
  . To pluck bright honour from the pale-faced moon,
  . Or dive into the bottom of the deep,
  . Where fathom-line could never touch the ground,
  . And pluck up drowned honour by the locks;
  . So he that doth redeem her thence might wear
  . Without corrival, all her dignities:
  . But out upon this half-faced fellowship!

Near the end of the film, Welles slightly alters a scene from Henry V, Act 2, Scene 2 in which Henry V pardons an imprisoned street rabble-rouser just before his expedition to invade France. In Welles' version it is stated that this man is Falstaff, and the incident he is pardoning is Falstaff's disturbance of Henry's coronation. Although both the pardoned prisoner and Falstaff are said to drink wine, Shakespeare's original has no implication the pardoned prisoner is Falstaff. In both Welles' film and in Henry V, this scene is followed by the death of Falstaff.

Welles held this film in high regard and considered it along with The Trial (1962) as his best work. As he remarked in 1982, "If I wanted to get into heaven on the basis of one movie, that's the one I'd offer up." Many critics, including Peter Bogdanovich and Jonathan Rosenbaum, also consider it Welles's finest work. The scene depicting the Battle of Shrewsbury has been particularly admired, serving as an inspiration for movies like Braveheart and Saving Private Ryan.>>

oldfield1 wrote:
I get that the asterisk is the south pole, but what is the white collumn to the lower right?

JohnD wrote:
Art,

I thought that Coleridges's "silent icicles, Quietly shining to the quiet Moon." were an intruiguing quote, relevant in the light of the Moon'sa ice.

Your knowledge of obscure (very obscure!) 40s movies is also intriguing, but why is a fallen angel saying, "I'm getting wet" relevant?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gabriel wrote:
<<In Abrahamic religions, Gabriel is an archangel who serves as a messenger from God. He first appears in the Book of Daniel, delivering explanations of Daniel's visions. In the Gospel of Luke Gabriel foretold the births of both John the Baptist and of Jesus.

Islam believes that Gabriel was the medium through whom God revealed the Qur'an to Muhammad. He is called the chief of the four favoured angels and the spirit of truth. In Islamic tradition, though not specified in the Qur'an, the trumpeter sounding the trump of doom is not Gabriel, but Israfel.

In English-speaking culture, the image of Gabriel as the angel that shall blow the trumpet blast that initiates the end of time and the general resurrection at the Last Judgment, which has no source in the Hebrew Bible or the New Testament, is a familiar trope; (This might be taken from Norse Heimdall who according to legends, will sound the Gjallarhorn, alerting the Æsir to the onset of Ragnarök where the world ends and is reborn.) it ranges from its first appearance in English in John Milton's Paradise Lost (1667) to African-American spirituals. Four years later "Blow, Gabriel, Blow" was introduced by Ethel Merman in Cole Porter's Anything Goes (1934). The mathematical figure given the modern name "Gabriel's Horn", was invented by Evangelista Torricelli (1608–1647); it is a paradoxical solid of revolution that has infinite surface area, but finite volume.>>

emc wrote:Does discovering water on the moon further validate this theory?

Chris Peterson wrote:
Icy bodies have been hitting the Moon for billions of years.
It is hardly surprising that we find near-surface water there.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._Freeze wrote:

<<Mr. Freeze, real name Dr. Victor Fries, is a DC Comics supervillain, an enemy of Batman. Created by Bob Kane, he first appeared in Batman #121 (February 1959). Originally called Mr. Zero, he was renamed and popularized by the 1960s Batman television series, in which he was played by George Sanders, Otto Preminger and Eli Wallach. In the 1997 film, Batman & Robin, he was portrayed by Arnold Schwarzenegger. His character was used because the series creators had originally wanted to use the character of Two-Face (aka Harvey Dent), but network executives thought the character would be too scary for the numerous children who watched the show; as a result, an alternative villain with a physical deformity and a more serious personality, Mr Freeze, was substituted.

Freeze is a scientist who must wear a cryogenic suit in order to survive, and bases his crimes around a "cold" or "ice" theme, complete with a "cold gun" that freezes its targets solid. Batman: The Animated Series retold Mr. Freeze’s origin introducing his terminally ill, cryogenic-ally frozen wife, which greater explained his obsession with ice and need to build a criminal empire to raise research funds. The episode was seen as groundbreaking for a Saturday morning cartoon and helped set the tone for the complex moral motivations seen constantly in the rest of the series. This back-story was also made canon in the comics and has been Fries' official origin in almost every incarnation of Batman since. This leads many fans to think of him as the most sympathetic villain.>>

oldfield1 wrote:I get that the asterisk is the south pole, but what is the white collumn to the lower right?

Indigo_Sunrise wrote:
So, if the white column is the south pole, then the red asterisk is what? Where the water sample was found?

Indigo_Sunrise wrote:
Maybe a bit of further explanation in the description is needed, for those of us that are not all-knowing.

Chris Peterson wrote:

emc wrote:Does discovering water on the moon further validate this theory?

I don't think so. There is very little water on the Earth, and what is here in nearly all on or in the crust. This would have been largely volatilized, and what might have survived can represent only the tiniest fraction of lunar material- and even less surficial lunar material. Also, when the Moon was formed, it is very possible that the Earth hadn't collected much water yet.

Icy bodies have been hitting the Moon for billions of years. It is hardly surprising that we find near-surface water there.

Ann wrote:
Is there any way of assessing how much water there is in the Earth's crust versus how much there is in the Moon's crust? To make the comparison easier, let's talk about percentages. What's the percentage of water in the Earth's crust versus the percentage of water in the Moon's crust?

Ann wrote:Is there any way of assessing how much water there is in the Earth's crust versus how much there is in the Moon's crust? To make the comparison easier, let's talk about percentages. What's the percentage of water in the Earth's crust versus the percentage of water in the Moon's crust?

APOD Robot wrote: Water Ice Detected Beneath Moons Surface

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deadly_Desert wrote:

The Land of Oz

---

<<The Deadly Desert is the magical desert that completely surrounds the Land of Oz. On maps, the Eastern quadrant of the desert is called the Deadly Desert, while the other three quadrants of desert are called the Shifting Sands, the Impassable Desert, and the Great Sandy Waste.

The desert was originally merely a desert, being as dangerous as any natural desert but no more. Indeed, in The Marvelous Land of Oz, Mombi tries to escape through it and Glinda chases her over the sands, but in Ozma of Oz, it has become a magical desert with life-destroying sands, a feature that remained constant through the rest of the series. Anyone who sets foot into the sand of any of these deserts turns into sand themselves. The desert is used as a literary device to explain why Oz is essentially cut off from the rest of the world. However, it has been crossed several times by people from within Oz and from the outside world, with applied ingenuity, with magical assistance, or through unusual natural phenomena.>>