Quotulatiousness

October 13, 2009

Nobel committee defends award to Obama

Filed under: Football, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 13:08

It’s still enough of a news item that members of the Nobel committee who awarded the Peace Prize to Barack Obama feel the need to defend their choice:

Members of the Norwegian committee that gave Barack Obama the Nobel Peace Prize are strongly defending their choice against a storm of criticism that the award was premature and a potential liability for the U.S. president.

Asked to comment on the uproar following Friday’s announcement, four members of the five-seat panel told The Associated Press that they had expected the decision to generate both surprise and criticism.

Three of them rejected the notion that Obama hadn’t accomplished anything to deserve the award, while the fourth declined to answer that question. A fifth member didn’t answer calls seeking comment.

Now that he’s bagged the Peace prize, there’s a grassroots effort underway to make Barack Obama a write-in candidate for the Heisman trophy:

From a reader:

I just went to this link and, in the “Type your nominee here!” field, entered “Barack Obama.” The winner of this Nissan-sponsored promotion will actually receive one official vote for the Heisman award as sort of the people’s choice.

You can actually go back and vote once each day between now and the Heisman award in December.

Update: I missed one of the best Fark.com headlines from last week — This Sunday, the Pope will canonize five new saints, including one from Hawaii. Wait, what? After only eight months in office?.

Just fill in the technobabble later

Filed under: Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:41

Charles Stross explains why he isn’t a Star Trek fan:

I have a confession to make: I hate Star Trek.

Let me clarify: when I was young — I’m dating myself here — I quite liked the original TV series. But when the movie-length trailer for ST:TNG first aired in the UK in the late eighties? It was hate on first sight. And since then, it’s also been hate on sight between me and just about every space operatic show on television. ST:Voyager and whatever the space station opera; check. Babylon Five? Ditto. Battlestar Galactica? Didn’t even bother turning on the TV. I hate them all.

I finally found out why:

At his recent keynote speech at the New York Television Festival, former Star Trek writer and creator of the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica Ron Moore revealed the secret formula to writing for Trek.

He described how the writers would just insert “tech” into the scripts whenever they needed to resolve a story or plot line, then they’d have consultants fill in the appropriate words (aka technobabble) later.

“It became the solution to so many plot lines and so many stories,” Moore said. “It was so mechanical that we had science consultants who would just come up with the words for us and we’d just write ‘tech’ in the script. You know, Picard would say ‘Commander La Forge, tech the tech to the warp drive.’ I’m serious. If you look at those scripts, you’ll see that.”

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