NP: Amazing Grace (James Horner, mp3 - thanks, Jeron!)

Okay, that got just a little bit out of hand...

NP: Philadelphia, Shore

and I would like to know how one proforms a score?

NP -- Return of the Jedi, Williams

1644: JJH's distant ancestor is born. He would later go on to make nit-picky comments about Bernard's wonderful score...

The Thirty Year War ended in 1648, too.

NP: The Illustrated Man, Goldsmith

In 1649, Charles I was executed in England.
In 1650, Charlotte of Hesse (1650-1714) was born. She later married Christian V of Denmark (1646-1699) in 1667. (From the Geneology of the Dutch Royal Family)

Did you know that gold is one of the few things on Earth that has no practical use? In then follows that we use as a means of exchange the most worthless thing on the planet...

NP: Works: II, Hisaishi ****˝

NP: Farewell My Concubine: Chinese Film Themes, Various *****

NP (at time of editing): The Dig, Michael Land ****

quote:

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Originally posted by John Dunham:
...and there it goes again. Why does this thread keep dying out like that?

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quote:

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Originally posted by Marian Schedenig:
Well, how vital to YOU expect to be at the age of 1654?

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Quite, thank you. I'll be composing scores for holofilms when you're long in your grave.

1. You are absolutely forbidden to talk about anything related to movie music.

June, 1968.

I had finished the tenth grade, and was having a relatively boring summer vacation, when my friend Rich phoned me.
"Wanna help out with a hoax?" he asked.
"A WHAT?" I replied.
"Me, Craig and Bob wanna pull a UFO hoax! We're putting our money together, but we need one or two more partners. Wanna help?"
I was hooked.
Before I could say "Flying Saucer", I had chipped in $50.00 worth of birthday gift money to be part of this plan. We bought a money order, and mailed it to Hughes Aircraft. We had ordered a weather balloon. Three weeks later, when the balloon arrived, we spent the rest of the cash on two large mirrors, four highway flares, a rented tank full of helium, and a pack of cigarettes.
Rich lived on a farm in the deep valley behind town. In his father's barn was an antique fire engine with a spindle of metal cable mounted on the rear.
On a clear August evening near sunset, we attached the balloon to the metal cable and began filling it with helium. As I held the balloon in my hands and it slowly filled with the gas, I suddenly felt my feet lift off of the ground. The balloon had picked me up, and I was dangling from it!
"HELP!" I screamed! I thought that I was going to be airborne! My wrist had been caught in the metal cable. Rich and Craig untangled me, and I fell with a "thud!" to the ground.
"Wow!" Rich hooted!
Craig and Bob were both laughing so hard that they fell to the ground beside me.
Realizing that the balloon was filled to capacity, we released it for about 20 feet, and then attached the mirrors to the cable beneath the balloon. There we also attached, at increments of 5 feet each, two highway flares (which we lit as they were attached), and beneath them we attached M80's (high-powered "cherry bomb" explosives that I stole from my Dad's garage) with lit cigarettes stuck on their fuses.
We rapidly released the balloon to the full length of the metal cable, and watched it fly up, up, high into the dusky sunset.
Our work was done.
We piled into Craig's car, and drove into town.
With all of the windows open, we slowly drove through town, observing the townsfolk as they discovered the bright pink light in the sky.
The two mirrors beneath the balloon dangled, pointing the highway fuse's bright pink light directly up to the silvery surface of the weather balloon, causing an unearthly glow in the sky.
We even pointed it out to some of the people who had not spotted it just yet.
"LOOK UP THERE!" I yelled at a senior citizen who was half-asleep on his front porch rocking chair. He slowly looked into the sky, and when he saw the bright pink object, he jumped up and started screaming at everyone inside the house.
Within half an hour, the majority of the town's population had made their way to the top of the hill to see the "UFO"!
That's when the M80's exploded.
A bright, white light, followed three seconds later by an explosive BOOM! that ROCKED the valley, and it hit several times.
Some of the townsfolk thought that this was The War Of The Worlds!

The next morning, the newspaper, radio and TV news reported a UFO sighting!

The Great Hedge of India

Only the British, wishing to divide one part of India from another, would do so not with a wall, or barbed wire patrolled by armed guards, but with a hedge.

You must understand, this was the Everest of hedges, coming at the height of the British Empire in the 1870s. More than 1400 miles long, 14 feet high, and 10 feet deep, it started in what is now Pakistan and snaked down, past Delhi and Agra, to somewhere in the middle of India, north-east of Bombay.

The Great Hedge was planted to help control the salt trade, which the British ruling authorities taxed. At the time, one Indian civil servant spoke of “an immense impenetrable hedge of thorny trees and bushes”.

The Great Hedge entailed the digging of two million cubic feet of earth and the transportation of 150,000 tons of thorny bushes. At its fullest growth in 1872, it required a workforce of more than 14,000 men to maintain and patrol it.

Amazingly, the British Indian Civil Service, one of the cleverest and most meticulous bureaucracies in British colonial history, documented every aspect of Raj history except this, and it was only in 1997 when the British explorer Roy Moxham discovered a large customs map of 1879 India, that the existence of the, up until then legendary hedge was verified. Subsequent investigation uncovered further evidence of the Great Hedge of India.

Oh, and Daniel2, I love the line "it was also the largest man-made object in history to have been almost completely forgotten."

quote:

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Originally posted by JJH:
I just wanted you all to know that I just went to the bathroom.

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So, do you have a computer in your bathroom, or did you go back to post this message?

Chris, I'm absolutely sure you BELIEVE that's what happened, but the Aliens are well-known by now to manipulate the memory of their test subjects to tell stories like yours. At that time, they were just experimenting with extraterrestrial substances, many of which don't have any effect on the human body for the first 33 years...

nope,
no compooter (haha, I KILL me!) in the bathroom.

I stepped away from the compooter, walked to the bathroom, answered Mother Nature's call, and came back and typed my message.

time to step away from this, lest this post get too detailed for Jeron.

BTW -- I just got back from driving past the Nevada Test Site, so you'll have to forgive me if radiation poisoning causes my posts to become more and more nonsensical, because Aliens want it that way because Jeron is their supreme overlord, because forkin' fork fork....

this sounds like something Linus would believe in.

quote:

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religion has bred a culture of intolerance, prejudice and fanaticism.

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I think that's a pretty poor generalization of religious people.

There are many people with no religion, or of certain political proclivities (jeez, is that even a word?), that are just as intolerant, prejudiced, and fanatical if not moreso than the most staunchly zealous religious person.

Many just mask it under the term "open-mindedness."

but still, it annoys me to no end how a Christian can put forth his or her views in a calm, rational manner in context of an normal conversation, and still be seen as ramming faith down someone's throat, whereas when an "enlightened" person along and does the same thing, purer words were never spoken.

I got a crap load of this in grad school from non-believers who rationalized the heck out of everything. Jezz, my girlfriend at the time would launch into tirades at me (she was truly a stupid liberal - in the improper American political context) and yet, sing the words to DC Talk or Jars of Clay songs I had blaring in the car. But no, make even a passing mention of the degradation of societal moral values, and you're just a bit to the right of Hitler.