Keskustelujen arkisto

Daniel wrote:
> Matay's lawyers argued that Disneyland had to protect children
> from emotional distress -- such as that caused by seeing Mickey
> Mouse without his head on.

According to a tabloid newspaper, Disney employees who dress up
as characters are not allowed to remove their costume heads in
public, even though it may reach 130 degrees in the costume and
even if they throw up. Probably the person suing Disney (a for-
mer Mouseketeer -- Billy Jean Matay) knew about this rule and
decided to take advantage of it.

I think the tabloid newspaper was either the Globe or National
Enquirer, published last week. It said "Secrets of Disney" (or
something like that) on the cover. The title of the article
caught my attention at the supermarket, so I read it there.

Have a great weekend!

Eric

Rob Gibson <(Email removed)> writes:
> Imagine a rope tied between earth and the moon that people can
> crawl along to get from one to the other. What might cause a
> problem with such a notion...

I wish we still had astronomer William Hathaway on this List, to
give the definitive answers to these issues! Since he's no longer
a member, I'll try to step in, but I suspect many other members
can call me to task for the errors which I shall likely commit below
as I try to comment on your objections to this story.

> One, the earth rotates independently of the moon. That's why the
> moon appears to move across the sky.
But the moon itself always keeps the same face pointed towards the
earth, which is half of what you want. An example of *exactly* what
you want is the planet Pluto and its moon Charon (some would call
Pluto/Charon actually a dual planet system, rather than a planet and a
satellite). Pluto and Charon each keep the same face pointed towards
the other. Charon thus always stays in the same place in Pluto's
sky, and vice versa. Neither one rises or sets as seen from the
other. This spin-orbit coupling comes about as a result of the
dissapation of rotational energy through the friction induced by the
mutual tides each body raises on the other. Now, let's all send a
greeting to any List members living there: <in a squeaky voice>
"Hiya', Pluto!"

> Two, the orbit of the moon about the earth is an ellipse, hence the
> distance between the earth and the moon changes constantly.
It isn't that much of an ellipse, and in a case of spin-orbit coupling
such as noted above, it would have decayed to an even more nearly
circular one. Anyway, the rope between the two planets would have a
certain elasticity, due to its non-neglible value of Young's modulus.
Ropes stretch and contract, as tension is applied and then relaxed.

> Three, there is no atmosphere for most of the distance between them.
Do we know for sure how far apart the two planets are? The earth's
atmosphere is still dense enough at about 6 km altitude to be
breathable. Of course, for a small planet, the atmosphere would be
a lot less dense (in fact, probably non-existent). Note that the
atmospheric pressure measured by the Mars probe is only about 5 or 6
mm of mercury, isn't it? So we're sort of violating physics by just
agreeing that there's an atmosphere at all. It's not much more of a
violation to assume that this hypothetical atmosphere would extend
halfway to the other planet, so they would have an atmosphere around
them for the whole distance.

> Alternately, were there an atmosphere for the entire distance between
> them, then the friction of that atmosphere (against the surface of the
> smaller astronomical body rotating around the larger one) would cause
> the orbit to decay and the smaller body to crash into the larger one.
The atmosphere would be in the same orbit about the planet's mutual
barycenter as the planets themselves would be. Neither planet would
be moving through the mutual atmosphere; the atmosphere would be moving
along with them. But you're right about there being friction; this
comes about from tides, which is how the two planets got locked into
spin resonance in the first place (see # 1). Tidal friction will
continue to dissipate gravitational potential energy, and the two
bodies will move closer to one another, until the tidal forces are
so strong that one body completely tears apart. (The distance at which
this happens is called the Roche limit.) Then you will be left with
one body (the larger one) and a ring system, like Saturn. Of course,
this will all happen over an astronomical time frame, so everyone in
the story will have been dead for millions of years before it becomes
a problem!

> Other problems:
> birds cannot fly through empty space; even if they could, see #3.
> If a bird can achieve escape velocity to "fly" between the asteroids,
> then neither asteroid has anywhere near sufficient mass to retain an
> atmosphere.
As noted above, the problem of an asteroid's having insufficient mass
to retain an atmosphere is the real scientific inaccuracy of this story,
regardless of whether we're talking about a single asteroid or two of
them, tethered by a rope. We must assume that somehow an atmosphere
has been created around the asteroid so recently that it has not yet
escaped into space. Perhaps this was the result of a cometary impact.
The main difference between a comet and an asteroid is that asteroids
are rocks whereas comets are a mixture of rocks and ice. This ice is
a frozen mixture of all sorts of volatile materials. Let's just postu-
late that a collision with a comet released enough water and oxygen
recently for this story to take place.

And hey, while we're at it, let's postulate that ducks have four fingers
and can talk, too! :)

Wilmer Rivers

<<I would suggest to you that when $crooge built the money bin, he wanted to
m,ake sure it was impervious to anything. So he called his friends at NASA
and bought some used industrial strength tiles like they use on the Space
Shuttle and used that for the money bin, all anachronisms aside. =)>>

Well, not to bring this up again, but Barks *did* say Duckburg
technology was a bit more advanced (which makes sense, given the presence of
Gyro Gearloose and a few other advanced thinkers, from Ludwig von Drake to
Prof. Einmug). And we know from several Barks stories that the money bin *is*
impervious to almost everything...which is why, for instance, $crooge had to
find the lemming with the safe door's combination. (Though, knowing $crooge,
he'd probably be almost as obsessive about the prospect of drilling through a
door he paid good money for...)

And I'd think virtually all kids, even as young as 5 (and certainly the
11-year-old) would know, as I did, that Disney characters are "just pretend."
I'm inclined to agree that it was someone's idea to sue a big corporation
with billions of dollars rather than for any practical purpose. (I've never
heard of anyone suing a Santa Claus who took off his beard, even though young
kids would be more likely to believe in him than in Mickey Mouse. Then again,
a Santa wouldn't have billions of dollars worth of assets unless he really
*did* have a magic workshop at the North Pole...as seems to be the case in
the Disney universe.)

As one might expect of a largely self-educated man, Barks' stories
became more scientifically accurate as he grew older. (One could compare him
to Herge in that way: his complete fantasy views of real countries in TINTIN
IN THE LAND OF THE SOVIETS and TINTIN IN THE CONGO as compared to the
realistic (though with fantasy elements) TINTIN IN TIBET...or, for that
matter, his very accurately anticipated linar mission in DESTINATION
MOON/EXPLORERS ON THE MOON.) Barks' early Duck stories had people (well,
ducks) in space without even helmets; later on they wore full space suits (as
the real-life astronauts were doing by then).

Rich Morrissey

Issue #94 (July 1997) of "Zio Paperone" carried the last piece of "artwork"
[if thus can be considered, which I honestly doubt ;-)] done by Barks for
Duckdom which was as yet still unpublished in Italy: a page called "Daisy's
dazed days" which tells a silly story from Daisy's diary mixing text and
pictures in a sort of chriptography (!?). This appeared on "Four Color" #
1055 (November 1959 - January 1960) and, as I just said, had never ever been
published before in Italy.
Although we Italians had lost nothing not seeing it (the only worthy part
IMHO is the title, a nice word joke indeed), for us Barks fans it was a nice
scoop anyway: I remember someone on this Mailing List time ago -was he
Harry?- claiming his desire to have (a copy of) every Disney drawing Barks
ever made; and that is understandable ;-).

But the funniest part was the CONTEST AMONG READERS proposed by good Lidia
Cannatella: no translation was given, and the readers were invited to submit
their own.
Now, as all you know, Lidia is aware of a slight criticism on my side on her
translations of Don Rosa's stories. So could I avoid this chance to show her
what a layman like me could do with translations? ;-)

You can see that I **had to** submit my translation, in fact a really poor
one. Well, expecially the title was **untraslatable** in its entirety: it is
more than an allitteration if I understand the pronounciation: the three
words almost sound the same, am I right? But I tried and tried and
nevertheless I could **not** come out even with a simply allitterating title
in Italian.

But one must **never** underestimate Lidia's good nature, so she **called me
again** on the telephone congratulating with me for my translation (! so she
has really even **more** than a good nature!!!!) and even asking me for a
photograph (!) to put in "Zio Paperone" together with my name as one of the
five best solutors of the translation contest!!!

Well, I **really** wanted to refuse because, you see, at least three
important full professors in Italian Universities who work in Group Theory
like me are readers of "Zio Paperone" and I really did not want them to know
that I lose time on translating Daisy's diary instead of studying finite
groups! But she insisted so much that at last we came to an agreement: I
would send her my picture provided she prints together with it the URL of my
WWW pages on Disney comics! [Harry+Frank+Ole+Per: I **did* try to bribe her
into publishing the full credits for "Topolino" in the "Dark Ages", but she
said it was out of question :-( ]

So look forward for "Zio Paperone" #97 (October 1997) for my smiling face :-)

Marco

http://marcobar.cce.unifi.it

I'm a big Isaac Asimov fan, in addition to all the other things I'm a fan of.
So imagine my surprise as I'm reading a collection of his letters ("Yours,
Isaac Asimov") to find this letter:

2 April 1992

I read comic books in the local luncheonette while eating lunch when I was
actively teaching at the Boston U. School of Medicine. Donald Duck was my
favorite.

I'm not 100% sure - it's been a few years since I read his autobiography, but
that would have had to have been in the late 40s or early 50s. A good time to
be a fan.

-Augie, amazed at where his fandoms cross =)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Augie De Blieck Jr. * (Email removed) * (Email removed)
VR.5 FAQkeeper - Watch VR.5 on The Sci-Fi Channel Tuesday Nights,
10 p.m. EST! Read the FAQ: http://www.nic.com/~augie/vr5/index.htm

Augie writes in V97#170:
So are ypou suggesting some sort of Freudian thing whereby Don transmuted
himself into the $crooge character for but an instant?

Weeeell, he does have a no.1 dime on a velvet cushion under a hand blown
glass dome thing all sitting on a small column in his studio...

Shaun:-)

SATU TAMS reminisced:
<<That Daniel's story about the Disney-trauma -lawsuit does and doesn't
sound unbelievable, first, I've gotten the impression that the
unbelievable lawsuits are very common in the USA, and secondly, in a
small town in Finland the public library refused the subscribtion of Aku
Ankka -weekly because Donald didn't wear trousers... So, there are many
ways of trying to protect the young ones from the hard world outside!
(The town did become a laugh of the year in that matter, and they learned
something from it: few years ago they published their communal report in
the form of a comicbook!)>>

Here you put your finger on another important difference between incidents
like this in America and in other countries. In Finland, the town that was
scandalized by Donald's lack of pants was laughed at for its overprotective
attitude. In America, such attitudes are often taken with deadly
seriousness! In fact, an entire "complaint industry" seems to have
accumulated over time, in which single-issue groups pipe their complaints
through a complaisant media.

This Sunday morning's paper contains a column about blind people attacking
Disney for its planned live-action movie of "Mr. Magoo." One indignant
individual even cited Mr. Magoo's (theoretically) humorous nearsightedness as
the cause of an extremely difficult childhood. Now, I personally don't find
Mr. Magoo (at least the TV version) to be all that funny, but shouldn't
advocates for the blind be focusing their attention on ASSISTING the blind?
Will the release of this movie touch off a nationwide spate of
blindness-bashing?

The Finnish town showed that it realized the absurdity of its stance by its
later actions. I'm afraid that it will be a cold day in Hades before groups
like the Southern Baptists and the anti-Magoo forces have the same glimmers
of self-recognition.

AUGIE DE BLIECK said (regarding "Money to Burn"):
<<...It's easier and cheaper in
animation to just have two simple viewpoints: Ducks on ground and duck in
space. Just keep intercutting between the two and the rest will work it's
way
out. To get a similar view of $crooge on the money bin sighting Duckburg
would
require another background painting and another angle from which to animnate

$crooge.>>

True enough, but I think that this would have been a perfect excuse to spend
a few extra bucks, don't you? This wasn't exactly the "typical" half-hour
episode.

<<I would suggest to you that when $crooge built the money bin, he
wanted to m,ake sure it was impervious to anything. So he called his
friends at NASA and bought some used industrial strength tiles like they use
on
the Space Shuttle and used that for the money bin, all anachronisms aside.
=)>>

I don't doubt it for a moment... In the first chapter of the "Firefly Fruit"
serial, Scrooge's money drained out of the bin because "this building doesn't
have a basement!" So it is conceivable that the bin's bottom consists solely
of a layer of heat-(and-anything-else)-impervious material. (But then, how
could the explosion of Scrooge's cannon crack something that is "impervious"
sufficiently enough to allow money to drain out?)

<<Now, do you remember these quotes off-hand, or do you keep a database
somewhere?>>

I recall them completely from memory... therefore, a word or two may be
"off". But it's the thought that counts. :-)

RICH MORRISSEY pointed out:
<<As one might expect of a largely self-educated man, Barks' stories
became more scientifically accurate as he grew older. (One could compare him
to Herge in that way: his complete fantasy views of real countries in TINTIN
IN THE LAND OF THE SOVIETS and TINTIN IN THE CONGO as compared to the
realistic (though with fantasy elements) TINTIN IN TIBET...or, for that
matter, his very accurately anticipated linar mission in DESTINATION
MOON/EXPLORERS ON THE MOON.) Barks' early Duck stories had people (well,
ducks) in space without even helmets; later on they wore full space suits (as
the real-life astronauts were doing by then).>>

This is an excellent analogy! With Herge, this changeover occurred sometime
in the 30's ("The Blue Lotus," "The Broken Ear"), when he began to be
influenced strongly by outside events in the real world such as the
Sino-Japanese war, the South American wars, etc., and made his stories more
"realistic" as a result of that influence. I would imagine that the birth of
the Space Age and the concurrent upswing in interest about space travel (with
the accompanying articles, etc. in popular magazines) spurred Barks to more
scientific accuracy. Of course, there was still a VERY strong fantasy tinge
in Barks' later space stories, sometimes even to excess; however, Barks did
take new knowledge about the physical realities of space travel into account.

-- Christopher E. Barat
(Email removed)
http://members.aol.com/cebarat/home.htm
"WELCOME TO THE USS JUMPSTART... THE ONLY ROCKET WITH A CLUTCH!" -- Launchpad
McQuack, "DuckTales" episode "Money to Burn"

Wilmer Rivers wrote:

<< An example of *exactly* what you want is the planet Pluto and its moon
Charon (some would call Pluto/Charon actually a dual planet system, rather
than a planet and a satellite). Pluto and Charon each keep the same face
pointed towards the other. Charon thus always stays in the same place in
Pluto's sky, and vice versa. Neither one rises or sets as seen from the
other. This spin-orbit coupling comes about as a result of the
dissapation of rotational energy through the friction induced by the mutual
tides each body raises on the other. Now, let's all send a greeting to any
List members living there: <in a squeaky voice> "Hiya', Pluto!">>

Excellent explanation! Actually, I've long been convinced the Disney
dog was named after the planet, which Clyde Tombaugh discovered only a year
or two before the bloodhound appeared. The name would have been on everyone's
lips and was alliterative (at least, some early appearances refer to him as
"Pluto Pup," though now he's pretty definitely a grown dog, just as Mickey's
become a rather mature Mouse), so it stuck...just as other contemporary names
get applied to cartoon characters, like Snoopy's secretary Woodstock (named
in 1970).

Marco Barlotti wrote:

<<But the funniest part was the CONTEST AMONG READERS proposed by good Lidia
Cannatella: no translation was given, and the readers were invited to submit
their own. Now, as all you know, Lidia is aware of a slight criticism on my
side on her translations of Don Rosa's stories. So could I avoid this chance
to show her what a layman like me could do with translations? ;-)

You can see that I **had to** submit my translation, in fact a really poor
one....>>

<<But one must **never** underestimate Lidia's good nature, so she **called
me again** on the telephone congratulating with me for my translation (! so
she has really even **more** than a good nature!!!!) and even asking me for a
photograph (!) to put in "Zio Paperone" together with my name as one of the
five best solutors of the translation contest!!!>>

Congratulations! (I don't suppose there's any way to get "Zio Paperone"
in this country...?)

Augie De Blieck Jr. wrote:

<<I'm a big Isaac Asimov fan, in addition to all the other things I'm a fan
of. So imagine my surprise as I'm reading a collection of his letters
("Yours, Isaac Asimov") to find this letter:

2 April 1992

I read comic books in the local luncheonette while eating lunch when I
was actively teaching at the Boston U. School of Medicine. Donald Duck was
my favorite.

I'm not 100% sure - it's been a few years since I read his autobiography, but
that would have had to have been in the late 40s or early 50s. A good time
to be a fan.>>

Definitely! Asimov mentioned comics in his autobiography as being among
the things his parents sold at their newsstand (where he worked after
school), but not being among his main interests. He was 18 when Superman
first appeared, deep into the SF pulps, and selling his first stories.
However, his brother Stanley, who was 6 years younger (and edited "Yours,
Isaac Asimov!") had loved them.
So the fact that he read them later explains a reference he made in
another essay, about occasionally reading comic books, "and my favorite
character, in case you're interested, was Scrooge McDuck." Knowing that
Asimov was already 27 when Scrooge first appeared, I wondered about this for
some time...but this explains it!

And speaking of intersection of fandoms...another of my interests
(again, overlapping with Asimov) is P.G. Wodehouse, so I must say I loved the
Wodehouse tributes in the recent translation of the story where Donald
becomes (appropriately) a butler! Not only was the school he went to named
after Wodehouse (the creator of the immortal Sebastian Beach and Reginald
Jeeves), but Donald's new master is Lord Glossop, named for Bertie Wooster
(Jeeves' master)'s friends and occasional adversaries, Sir Roderick and Tuppy
Glossop. (Sir Roderick was a psychiatrist, which brings up *another*
interesting idea for Donald...but I'm getting off-topic enough as it is!

Rich Morrissey