From The Rocky Mountain News:
Sergei Ivanov, the man considered to be a leading contender to succeed President Vladimir Putin, criticized a landmark Soviet-US arms treaty Wednesday as a “relic of the Cold War,” and promised that Russia would have a “sword” capable of piercing a U.S. missile shield.
Because evidently poisoning a US missile shield with polonium-210 would require a bit too much leg work.
BAM!
Thanks. I’ll be here all week. Whereas a pro-democracy Russia? Maybe nyet.
Yeah, and your point is? Got anything in the Ural airspace we shouldn’t see? Something mysteriously hidden from satellite observation?
Asshat.
Going rogue before our very eyes.
TW: into84, yes, all over again, but without Ron at the helm.
Panda bear in my home country made for good sport also.
Oh, and our glorious Chairman Mao had biggest rocket to crack US whore defenses.
To: Vladimir Putin
From: Central Europe
Re: Org Chart Update
We’re now in the western division. Get used to it.
. . . I will in workers’ commune all week be.
Be sure to not tip your Red Guards female server.
Putin has a successor?
Ya mean like, Raoul Castro? Waddya mean?
In Russia, sword pierces you!
(Oh wait. Not so funny.)
Maybe our missile defense shield is like that personal force shield thing in Dune where really fast things can’t penetrate it but a properly wielded blade can.
Damn, now I’m stuck with an eyewick of Sting in his underwear prancing around.
You’ll pay for that, Charles.
Yeah. You couldn’t reference the Sci-Fi Miniseries instead? Sure, it had a banal Irulan sub-plot but there was no Sting and no iterations of “The Sleeper Must Awake!”
What’s happening in Russia makes me very sad. We simply should not be enemies, but they seem to insist on it.
It’s a fascinating place. Churchill’s famous line, if anything, is an understatement.
And Irulan wasn’t played by the delicious Virginia Madsen, as she was in the movie.
You’ve obviously never cavorted in your underwear shouting “I WILL kill him!” Lemme tell ya, the naughty librarians of the sci-fi club found it irresistable.
Of course, my physique was a lot better in those days.
Stilgar to Paul Muad’Dib: “Y have called a big one.”
Stilgar to Paul Muad’Dib: “You have called a big one.”
What a terrible movie.
No fucking joke.
Way to make a highly intelligent novel look and sound like a tweener’s fanfic.
And yes, we have no Virginia Madsen in the series, but the Dune Messiah/Children of Dune mashup sequel had a positively gorgeous gorgeosity playing Alia. Yum.
He did insist recently that he wouldn’t stand for another term. But then Octavian wasn’t dictator or rex, but princeps; yet everyone knew what the deal was. Actually one guy kind of in charge in Russia for awhile wouldn’t be so bad as long as personal and business freedoms persisted and the rule of law was respected. Alas, this doesn’t seem to be the case.
I <a href=”gorgeous gorgeosity playing Alia” target=”_blank”>hear</a> you on that. Actually, I rather liked Chani too.
Oops.
Had the Head Borg from “First Contact” as Lady Jessica, though.
And the hell with Chani, Ghanima was a babe…
SB: position44
What, Kama Sutra references now?
Russia is like one of those neighbors that gets all upset if your friends park in front of their house. It’s not like they have any friends that are gonna park there.
happyfeet, this might be more true than one might think, since “just plain crazy” is as the root of both things more than we’d like to see.
mojo, don’t go knocking Ms. Krige, she was a babe in her day too. As for Ghanima, I thought about mentioning her, but decided that might be creepy since I have no idea how old she is (and I suspected I’m about 15 years older and I ain’t old).
mmmmmmmm…Head Borg….
It was really cool when the mini-crane lowered her torso onto her chassis. Really cool. Sucker snapped into place like a piece of German machinery.
I must be alone in my experience of that particular Trek movie, having come away with the impression that the Head Borg’s ickiness far outweighed her come-hither-ness.
I am however, certain that even Star Trek V was not as bad as Lynch’s Dune.
I hated the entire concept of the Borg Queen. I thought the Borg were much scarier when they were completely decentralized. How do you begin to interact with such a thing? Putting a human face, as it were, on the Borg made them much less alien.
Telling a story about an enemy that doesn’t have a n identifiable face or voice can be done, but it isn’t easy. Which is of course why the “Borg Queen” was introduced.
Another way of looking at it, though, is that her power exposes how the superiority of a hive mind is a lie. Under the Borg Queen, the Collective was a fair reflection of how collectives have always operated in the real world.
Another thing, if I’m right about the nature of the missile defense shield, we had better make sure we keep the sharks with frickin’ “lasers” away from it.
charles austin wrote:
Yeah, but didn’t that shield explode rather spectacularly when hit by an energy weapon or something?
…oh, you already remembered that part.
Under the Borg Queen, the Collective was a fair reflection of how collectives have always operated in the real world.
And don’t forget, the Borg resulted from a Quest For Perfection that they couldn’t stop. They figured the more civilizations they hoovered up, the more perfection (grammatically impossible) they’d acquire.
Until they totally lost their humanity and became “the ultimate consumers.” I loved how Trek kept trying to demonize capitalism, first with the Ferengi (who became clowns) and the Borg, who became a metaphor for the horrors of collectivism.
Trek sure got better after whazziz name died. Shook off most of that hippy idealism and started questioning Federation superiority and the Prime Directive.
Gene Roddenberry