Just to Fill Space

So I just thought I'd give myself an even 108 for the year. So, um...Random Thoughts!

• Dr. Rurru, an obscure little manga I don't think is available over here, is oddly similar to World God Only Knows. Except Rurru's spazziness makes Elsie look like the chick from Medaka Box.
  
  One gag I wish had been carried over from the oneshot pilot is the part where Rurru doesn't want to activate the escape pod, because its two switches (to keep it from being activated accidentally?) sorta look like nipples, and she's embarrassed to touch them. It's more or less everything you've got to know about her character right there.


• So remember the Twilight Zone episode "To Serve Man"? Aside from the fact the alien is Eegah (Shtimlo!), the story's basic premise is sound, but the execution is flawed.
  
  First, "their alphabet has capital and small letters", though obviously quite possible (lots of people develop a cursive form, and it's far from rare to have some mix of cursive and non-cursive—e.g., hiragana come from cursive kanji), is a lame reason to have trouble translating it. How about, "it's a system of logograms with some 4000 basic characters?"
  
  Second, I don't really think many other languages have "serve" as an idiom actually meaning "present as a meal."


• Much better is the thing from the backstory of Halo, about the Covenant mistranslating "reclaimer" as "reclamation". Apparently Forerunner is like Semitic languages, and uses its active participle as an agentive form.
  
  Speaking of, the Arabic word for "poet", sha'ir (itself an active participle), was also the name for the pre-Islamic tribal medicine men—that's why the Arabian Nights-themed D&D setting uses it as the name for those mages who contract with genies. What's weird about it, though is, hataałi, the Navajo word for medicine man, means "singer". Or, I think, "he sings"—the Navajo agentive is usually a terpsimbrotos.


• Speaking of terpsimbrotoi (assuming that's the plural), isn't the French word for "dishwasher" one? "Lave-vaisselle" means "washes dishes", so...huh, apparently French sometimes uses a terpsimbrotos-agentive too. You know, when it doesn't use "-eur".


• Ah, crap, now that I've re-written my story to have fusion rockets, I gotta rewrite something. I was gonna have a "colony drop" variant (I don't regard it as SF without a Colony Drop, I'm a Gundam fan), except fusing all a ship's antimatter at once...but apparently fusion engines are too damned stable, and simply stop fusing when they're damaged.
  
  Huh, maybe just do it old school? Anything going at 3000 m/s packs its own weight in blam, and the cruising speed of military ships (which have the really big, scary fusion rockets) is .1 c, which is 10,000 times that...something going at that speed, that weighs nearly 8,000 tons, has a kinetic energy of approximately 820,000 megatons, or 1608 times all the nuclear testing of the 20th Century. Yeah, that oughta do it. Bwahahah.