SFLIS Minutes - June 27, 2001

- We start with some comments on the background music for today's meeting.
  Pretty bad - generic oldies.
- Legends was closed for the game day Saturday, but that didn't deter the
  dedicated gamers.  They ended up playing out on the parking lot, and got
  lots of strange looks from people passing by.  Maybe the object of the game
  was to see if anyone could get into the store.
  Nobody died.
  Nobody's characters died, that is.
- Sunday July 1 is an anime day.  Showing "a bunch of stuff."  Fliers were
  passed around.
- Movies/TV:
  Tomb Raider - the 15 minute shower scene didn't seem that long.
    The computer graphics weren't as bad as in The Mummy.
    The movie had more acting than talking - her main job was to look cool.
  Has anyone seen Dr. Dolittle?  How about Dogs and Cats?
  Did anyone watch Witchblade?  No, but people have seen the movie.  Why are
    the bullets automatically attracted to her gauntlets?  Because that's
    how magic armor works.
  AI - Artificial Intelligence or Anime Iowa?
  The History Channel has a program on the history of power tools, duct tape,
    WD-40, etc.  What happened to WD 1 throuth 39?  WD stands for Water
    Displacement.  (Maybe)
  Oct. 16, Star Wars Episode 1 comes out on DVD.  Can you digitally remove
    Jarjar?  Are there any phantom edits?
  They're selling lots of Lord of the Rings books now.  And Bored of the Rings?
  Atlantis - Nobody here has seen it, although some people say it has
    similarities to certain Japanese animated stuff.  Like Nadia.
  Lots of Warner Brothers cartoons are no longer suitable for children.
    But they're keeping Pepe LePew.  Evidently it's ok to insult the French.
    How does it fare in Canada?
    They've been cautious about showing Dudley Doright in Canada.
    Iowa City needs a good cartoonist to make fun of it.  Something like
    Bloom County when they went hunting liberals.
- Was there another writers group meeting?
- Since we had rain every day for a month, are we going to have a drought now?
- Trek Fest is this weekend, June 29-30 in Riverside.
- We think Ray Bradbury is still alive.  81 right now.
- Bruce Campbell wrote a book that's out now.  On how to be a B-movie star,
  or something like that.
- Gateway Science Fiction Media Convention is going to have a blood drive.
- Acme rental vans have a GPS system.  Somebody rented one and exceeded the
  speed limit on 3 occasions.  Acme was able to tell from the records made
  by the GPS, and the person got a big fine.  What was the person's name -
  Coyote?
- What's the worst car-cell phone-tire combination?  Firestone tires,
  a Pinto?  A Yugo?
  This was followed by a discussion of stupid drivers doing stupid things,
  and blind go-cart drivers.  Pretty amusing.
- They upped the fine for employees parking in the UI hospital ramps before
  4:30.  We discussed some possible alternatives to parking there, like maybe
  drive to the end of your driveway and bike the rest of the way.
- What are the cooling towers for by the Newton Road parking ramp?
  Is there a hidden nuclear power plant?  Or a chilled water system.
- New tv transmitter, uses lots of electricity, generates a lot of heat.
  Can use it to de-ice the tower.  It won't cook your hot dogs, but it will
  vaporize them.
  A close captioning machine that gets stuff that people are supposed to say
  from a script in the computer instead of displaying what they actually
  say on screen.  For live programming, they usually use stenographers.
  And we thought up some more creative ways of doing it.
- What would a Bush-Quayle spelling bee be like?  But Texas has its own
  language - "it's like a whole other country."
  Is there any country entirely in Europe that's bigger than Texas?  Russia
  doesn't count since it's partly in Asia.
- And we declare this meeting dead.