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Star Trek Voyager: The Frasier Generation
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Sep. 21st, 2007 @ 09:14 am
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I saw this today and had to share. It's really funny. The cast of Frasier 'doing' Star Trek.
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Fraud and Warp Coils: Part Three (Dilithium Crystals all over the Roundabout)
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Mar. 22nd, 2007 @ 02:18 pm
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To recap: it's September 1995. We'd just survived eight months in France and then this happened. Someone stole my identity and grabbed our life savings. And in the midst of everything we have to get our car serviced - including something which sounded very much like a warp coil....
We had to go through with it. Being robbed was one thing but having a dodgy warp coil was something far, far worse.
John, my brother-in-law, came over just before half eight as arranged. I think he wanted to hear the latest instalment of the Crime of the Century. He'd follow us in and then drive us back.
Off we set with the car playing up as usual - I’m sure it knew it was going to the garage. Certainly its behaviour was reminiscent of Gypsy en route to the vet - plenty of complaining and digging in of tyres. About halfway there the engine cut out, just as I was pulling out at a junction. I quickly restarted the car - I was getting pretty quick with all the practice - and was just slipping into gear when.... Crash! A thumping noise and the car lurched forward.
The warp coil!
Shit!
I looked at Shelagh and I could tell she was thinking the same thing - of all the times for the warp coil to blow, it had to be on the way to the garage! Why couldn't it wait another ten minutes?
I tentatively tried the engine again - ever the optimist - and was relieved to hear it start. Perhaps it wasn't irretrievable after all? We limped off the junction and found a patch of ground where we could park safely. John pulled in behind us.
I wearily pushed open the door and was in the process of struggling with the bonnet when I heard John apologising.
What?
"Sorry, I thought you'd pulled out. I took my eye off the road for a while and..."
And ran into the back of us.
My first traffic accident. Years and years of safe driving behind me and then my brother-in-law smashes into the back of me while I'm stationary at a road junction.
But at least it wasn't the warp coil.
Which at that moment was a considerable plus.
We surveyed the slightly crumpled back bumper, the smashed tail lights and the boot which no longer fastened. Minor damage. Nothing compared with ringing up a garage and fighting to make yourself understood in halting French - please come and collect the car, the warp engine's blown and there's dilithium crystals all over the roundabout.
So, we resumed our journey. We toyed with idea of adding the damage to the list of things to be looked at by the garage but quickly dismissed the idea. They'd probably say it was too expensive. And John was confident he could knock everything back into shape himself.
We left the car at the garage and arranged to return at four.
(next instalment: A New and Unexpected Clue)
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Fraud and Warp Coils: Part Two (Citroen have Warp technology?)
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Mar. 16th, 2007 @ 02:52 pm
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To recap: it's September 1995. We'd just survived eight months in France and then this happened. Someone stole my identity and grabbed our life savings. And in the midst of everything we have to get our car serviced...
I scanned the Yellow Pages again. This time looking to see what services they did advertise. Perhaps they didn't use révision any more? Perhaps they'd anglicised it to le service as they'd done with le parking and le shopping?
I found plenty of garages offering 'service' - but when I checked the dictionary I found this could mean after sales service. But I also noticed the word entretien appearing again and again in the ads. I looked that up in our dictionary and found ... car service. I could not believe it! I checked the dictionary again for 'car service' and found révision - no mention of entretien at all. My faith in our dictionary crashed. What good was it if they didn't cross-reference all the terms? Were we really supposed to check through all the French words just in case there was another word for the one we wanted?
But we did have a new word and with it a new lead.
The next day we decided to take a detour from our normal shopping route and cruise the main road outside St. Gaudens where all the big garages and car dealers were. With any luck we'd find one offering entretiens for Citroens.
We soon found one offering entretiens pour tous marques. At last! Armed with our revised script, we entered.
"Do you service cars?" seemed on the superfluous side as an opening question at a garage specialising in nothing but the servicing of cars, so we skipped that one and went onto the next.
"How much does it cost to service a Citroen AX?"
"What kind of service?" came the reply, or words to that general effect.
The conversation was wavering but still on script.
"A full service," I countered.
"Non. " He shook his head.
This was not the right answer. 'Non' could only be used on questions one, three, eight and nine. I knew - I had the script. And would have pointed out his error if he hadn't then asked me how many kilometres we'd driven.
A glimmer of hope. He may have started ad libbing but he'd asked me a question I knew the answer to - 160,000. And I could see the way back on script. Obviously he wanted to know how many kilometres the car had done to determine the type of service required.
He then asked me how many kilometres were on the clock when we'd bought it? This was not so good. Why would he want to know that?
"155,000?" I answered dubiously, anxiously fingering the script trying to spot the next likely question.
Which was unintelligible. Equally so when he repeated it slowly. I looked at Shelagh and she looked at me. And then both of us looked back at the mechanic.
Who started speaking very quickly and waving his arms. We caught odd phrases, enough to know that something was très important and somehow the mileage was the key. It sounded like 'warp coil'.
"Did he just say warp coil?" I asked Shelagh.
"That's what I thought," she answered, relieved, I think, by the fact that she hadn't been the one to raise the question. We might not know much about the internal combustion engine but we knew all about warp coils. But did Citroen really have warp technology?
We turned to face the mechanic with renewed respect.
He was still in the throws of trying to explain what would happen if the warp coil failed while we were driving. But he didn't need to. We'd watched enough Star Trek to know that the warp engines would have to be taken off-line and the moment that happened a Romulan warbird would de-cloak off the starboard bow.
So, we definitely had to have the warp coil looked at. We nodded sagely.
He liked that. Expensive but necessary, he said.
"How expensive?" I asked.
"Perhaps 500 francs." And then he asked us what else needed servicing.
Not again!
"A full service?" I repeated, determined to claw the conversation back on script.
"Non, too expensive," he replied.
I couldn't help but wonder what kind of garage we’d walked into. I'd been so used to hearing reports in England about garages overcharging and performing unnecessary work, that I couldn't conceive of one turning down work on the grounds that it would cost too much.
I turned to our back-up list. After our last encounter at a garage, we'd prepared a list of car parts we'd like looking at - just in case.
I opened with vidange.
"Oui," he nodded.
Good start. "Brakes," I continued.
"Non, too expensive."
What? How could checking the brakes be too expensive! He then went on to explain he'd have to take the wheels off and if the brakes were Ok it would be a waste of time.
"Were there any problems with the brakes?" he continued.
Not really but...
He said he'd give them a road test if we wanted but nothing else unless he found a problem.
We struggled through the rest of our list. Meeting more nons and shakes than ouis and nods. Perhaps the French only serviced their cars when something fell off.
But we booked our rendez-vous. Nine o'clock, Tuesday. Today.
(next instalment: Dilithium Crystals all over the Roundabout)
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Actorspotting
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Oct. 6th, 2006 @ 10:14 am
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I am officially old, for I have become ... an actorspotter.
Sadder than a trainspotter, an actorspotter is someone who gets as much enjoyment out of identifying the cast as watching the programme. My mother used to be expert. She'd not only know the names and credits of the actors, she'd know who they married and whether they were dead or not. And would take great pleasure in sharing her knowledge with a running commentary. Cowboy enters stage left - he used to be married to x, never liked him. He should have never left y. Do you remember him in... And so on. I soon became used to the multilayered nature of films - the action and the commentary. It wasn't just a cowboy walking into that saloon it was a man with baggage - much of it filled with dirty laundry.
The old black and white films were particularly surreal. Man walks into a bar - he's dead. So's she. And her. Oo, and him. It was like watching a series of zombie films.
Then last week I was watching Black Jack an Australian cold case drama starring Colin Friels (not dead, but he used to play a cop in Water Rats...) and I started to notice the telltale signs. I was more interested in identifying the actress playing his daughter than the plot. Her smile was familiar - and that voice - and those mannerisms but ... I couldn't place her. For the next thirty minutes the action took a supporting role. Where had I seen her before? What was her name? It was a show I was sure I'd watched many times. An SF series?
Then it hit me. Farscape. Gigi Edgely, the Nebari. A ten pointer, for sure. My mother would have been proud. She'd never had to cope with actors made up as aliens. And Gigi looked very different without all the chalk white make-up and the blonde spiky wig.
But - he says searching around for a shiny silver lining - there is one huge advantage to actorspotting - the ability to spot the bad guy in a heartbeat. The moment Ronny Cox or Michael Cochrane walk on screen, I know they're going to do something bad. You'd think the TV detectives would have twigged by now. Wait a minute, weren't you the evil Vice President in Stargate and didn't you try and kill Picard? But they never learn. Obviously not actorspotters.
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