Is anyone a liability (pregnant, small child, elderly, etc.)?
Liability? You need a few of those around in that situation. They are the ones you eat first.
Eat the pregnant lady; placenta is so nourishing, and you'll be doing your part for the pro-choice cause. Avoid the elderly, as they are kinda stringy.
Little kids, though? Tasty, if you can catch 'em and they aren't too grubby.
they are kinda stringy
Okay for making jerky, though.
Yeah, but if you're trapped in a tunnel with a bunch of sweaty people, you're gonna have a hard time drying the meat.
I'm totally on the other side of the liability issue. Unless you are in a situation where you need strength and toughness, kill the biggest, toughest guy first. It establishes your dominance, and removes a possible challenger. Also, in an emergency, no one's going to call you on shiving him in the back.
The liabilities, OTOH, give everyone else someone safe to care about. Helps build community. If there aren't any liabilities, you should take your first opportunity and (secretly) create one by maiming someone cute and cuddly.
4 sounds much dirtier than it actually is.
But wow, they weren't trapped in the subway tunnel, they were trapped in the tram! Hanging in midair above the East River! That would be awesome, like being in a Hitchcock film.
I imagine myself causing the emergency the other passengers need to survive, and wonder how terror might manifest in each individual passenger. Who would scream? Who would cry? Who would throw themselves on the electric rail to escape my mayhem?
What about simply pitching you onto the electric rail? Problem solved. Plus, barbecue!
I tend to freak out on inclines when they're moving, so count me in as freaking out. If I could master my freaking out, I'm good at organizing random groups of people, I think, but I'd be personally fighting off a panic attack.
So I hope there'd be children there, because if there worry, I'd find it easier to ward off a panic attack by comforting them.
Plus, moms with kids always have apple juice and nourishing cheerios.
I always suspected you wanted to eat me. But now! Now I know!
I once dated a guy who admitted that every time he gets on the subway, he fantasizes the entire world being destroyed except for the people on that train and he'd have to choose the most genetically superior woman on board to mate with and repopulate the world.
Luckily, he told me this after we broke up.
12: Don't flatter yourself, I'd totally devour the pregnant chick first.
So I hope there'd be children there, because if there worry, I'd find it easier to ward off a panic attack by comforting them.
Told you. I am so taking over a small country and establishing a hereditary dictatorship at some point in my life.
And you're all welcome to visit.
Bitch, you just want her placenta like Tom Cruise!
Hanging in midair above the East River! That would be awesome, like being in a Hitchcock film.
Or the first Spiderman movie.
Is Roosevelt Island now cut off from civilization? We could still have this effect, on a larger scale.
Has Roosevelt Island ever not been cut off from civilization? When you take the train there you have to come up something like 20 flights of escalators. Eeeeerie.
Fuck, I cannot type today. 'if there were.' CALA SMART!
Sorry Matt, Roosevelt Island is linked to Queens by a bridge -- that would be more difficult to take out than the tram, the Lord of the Flies reenactment will have to wait.
Unless you are in a situation where you need strength and toughness, kill the biggest, toughest guy first. It establishes your dominance, and removes a possible challenger.
SCMT treasures his anonymity.
16: Shh! Don't out my secret identity!
17: Do you mean "Is the tram not running?" Also, I was watching the local news coverage of the tram-stoppage and I've seen a good number of Hitchcock movies, and they weren't similar at all. If only.
23: From the article, the tram seems to be not running -- so what do people on the Island without cars do? In light of 18, I guess they take 20 flights of escalators and a train.
In unrelated news, I clicked through the link I provided in 21, and now I want to kick Jonah in the nuts.
20: That bridge to Queens is unbelievably creepy. There are random holes in the walkway, things hanging down like they're going to hit you in the head, and a path leading into a power plant, a sanitation facility, and, well, my best friends' apartment, which has its own terrors. I've been to Roosevelt Island twice now, and both times I've been suddenly filled with dread.
Damn damn damn! Not Hitchcock -- I was thinking about that movie, I guess it's a James Bond movie, with the suspenseful standoff where the heroes are in one tram -- suspended over a chasm -- and the villains are in the other tram, either behind them or on the opposite wire. What is that film?!!
Also I'm pretty sure there is a subway station on Roosevelt Island. I could swear I've taken the subway there. Probably the train that goes to 21st St. Queensbridge, which used to be the Q, but I don't know what it is after they reshuffled all the yellow and orange lines and made 21st St. no longer terminal.
I've taken it. It's the F, but unfortunately that tunnel is so deep that sometimes it gets flooded. They can't stop in the Queens-bound direction, so you take the F all the way into Queens, take a Manhattan-bound F (which is apparently not as deep) and stop at RI.
My friends live just over the bridge in Queens, and the F stop on Roosevelt Island is actually the closest. What a weird neighborhood that is.
now I want to kick Jonah in the nuts.
Only now?
It'd been a while since I last thought about it.
Watching the coverage of that tram story, it occurs to me that this fundamental and familiar imaginative situation--being trapped with strangers--is now completely altered by the fact of cellphones, which permit and virtually require inside/outside communications. You can set the conditions, inside a tunnel, for instance, so that you render them inoperable, but they are now part of every situation even when they don't work.
Has this capacity to be simultaneously talking with anybody anywhere while doing anything anywhere been explored in fiction? I haven't seen it yet, but I'm sure it has.
AWB -- you probably know this already but there is a lovely community garden at the north end of RI, with stunning view of Manhattan, useful for relaxing.
Damn, I totally know that Bond movie. Is it "On her Majesty's Secret Service?"
Hey cool, I clicked MW's link in 21 and discovered that pre-anonymity me is the only person ever to have left a comment on the TMRM post he cites.
33 - hey, that's the one with George Lazenby.
32: I've also heard the abandoned insane asylum there is a real treat. (No kidding, it has its own cemetery and everything!)
And the movie that most closely follows the book. Too bad about Lazenby's distractingly asymetical jaw; otherwise, it would be one of my favorite Bond flicks.
I can't remember for sure if the tram scene is in it, though.
From Russia with Love follows the book pretty closely too, though. That's definitely my favorite Bond movie.
Yeah, that's a good one. The shoe-dagger thing always excited me as a young lad.
Goldfinger is so ridiculously awesome, though. "You expect me to talk?" "No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to die!" That's some classic dialogue there.
The shoe-dagger thing always excited me as a young lad.
Heh.
It's true. Footwear doesn't perform nearly enough functions.
What puzzles me, now that cellphones are so small, is why the Get Smart shoe-phone never came on the market?
The Get Smart shoe-phone is like a threesome with your cousin... it might seem like a good idea at the time, but not so much when it's against your face.
Lotte Lenya in a maid uniform with a shoe-dagger! Pirate Jenny all grown up...
Oh, right, that was her! I didn't know who she was when I was younger.
I loved the way The Wild, Wild West always managed to find an iron age/clockwork version of the technical gimmick of the moment. West always had cool stuff in his shoes. Now that we've past through many a technical era since the 1870s, the possibilities for science-fiction-of-the-past are almost endless. It's just one of the reasons I've thought for years there ought to be "period" Bond flicks. Like the way Chandler has been done in different periods: contemporary(Big Sleep), up-to-date (Long Goodbye), back in period (The ones w/ Mitchum).
The Roosevelt Island smallpox hospital (not insane asylum, unless there is an insane asylum and a smallpox hospital, which would be cool) is beautiful. I got to see part of it when I did this weird high-concept interactive theater/scavenger hunt thing on RI a few years back. Also, stunning views of the Chysler Building.
Is the RI smallpox hospital where Typhoid Mary was imprisoned? There was a great Nova about it, might have been American Experience. Anthony Bourdain wrote a book about it.
Wouldn't it be cool to have an insane asylum in your shoe? Like the goldfish in the pimp-boot heel, but it's a bunch of people in straight jackets trying to get out; little animatronic lunnies smashing their tiny heads against the inside of your heel. So wicked.
No, Typhoid Mary was imprisoned on North Brother Island. So says Snopes.
And, yes, Google says that RI does have an insane asylum and a smallpox hospital. Just went up in my estimation.
Here is a photo of an interesting building on Roosevelt Island. Is this the smallpox hospital?
I'd be interested in seeing a "period" Bond flick--and the comparatively constrained plot in Casino Royale would make that book a good candidate for one, but of course I've given up hope for the upcoming remake--but there's something decadent and resigned about period pieces. Maybe that would be preferable to the farcical absurdities that the Bond franchise has been putting out recently (James Bond is NOT a Navy Seal!!): I dunno.
Ah, yes it is. and here is a better picture.
52: I've never been to either, but my friend across the river in Queens moved there just so she could have daily access to abandoned hospitals and old cemeteries, which are fetishes for her as a photographer. I fear she'll get so inured that she'll stop taking pictures of them.
Good point about decadent and resigned, but a Bond could be, this isn't by any means to say would be, so much more subtle and sensual and intelligent.
46: I'm confused. Big Sleep was published in 1939 and filmed in 1946. You classify it as contemporary. Are you seeing that the story of the film also takes place in the year it was filmed, rather than the year it was written? Or are those years just close enough together to say that it was filmed contemporarily with being written?
Altman's Long Goodbye is in the 1970's, obviously wasn't written then, so up-to-date means takes place when it was filmed.
Finally, I haven't seen the Mitchum one's, but I'm guessing they also take place in the late 30's-early 40's despite being filmed in the 70's. So that's period, takes place at the same as contemporary but filmed much later. Also, Mitchum was playing Marlowe after Mitchum's 60th birthday. That's as bad as or worse than sixty-two year old Michael Douglas playing a Secret Service agent (In a Theatre Near You Tomorrow!).
Actually, that all makes sense, I just had to write it out to understand it.
Sorry, my writing doesn't seem to be getting any clearer with practice. Every surmise you made was correct. Ever see one of the Chandlers w/ Dick Powell?
Which was the one with the big poofy white cat? Wasn't that Goldfinger? If you pause the video/DVD just as something behind Goldfinger (or whoever the villain-with-cat is) explodes, in the scene in which Gowtvwc is holding said cat, you can see the cat FREAK THE FUCK OUT and dig its claws into the actor's arm, trying desperately to get the hell out of the scene. The actor holds onto the cat valiantly. It's the funniest scene in the entire oeuvre.
I seem to remember the cat from You Only Live Twice, where loser underlings are trapdoored into piranha tanks, just like in litigation firms, but that may appear in several films.
The fluffy white cat was the prop of Ernst Blofeld, number one of SPECTR, and so shows up in at least three films, including, "Her Majesty's SS," and a bunch of the sillier Moore flicks, which I know less well.
SPECTR s/b SPECTRE. I forgot extortion.
I had an assignment in high school physics where we had to watch a James Bond film and write a two page paper describing all of the scientific inaccuracies. The one I was assigned had someone suspended over a vat of boiling-cuz-it's-so-cold liquid with a sign that said WARNING: ABSOLUTE ZERO.
Diamonds Are Forever? Is that the one where he kills (or thinks he kills!) Blofeld at the beginning?
I know more about Bond films than I would have originally thought.
The beginning scenes of Diamonds are Forever are set in the desert, though--remember those appalling gay assassin characters?
Hmm, I just flipped through the book, and the bad guys there are various mob guys. I'm pretty sure that the movie version involved SPECTRE in some kind of insane outer-space weaponry scheme, though.
God, can my style be any more apologetic?
I'm not certain that I've ever made it all the way through a Bond movie.
I'm thinking of a different film, obviously. Which is the one where he thinks he kills Blofeld in the beginning?
Is Diamonds Are Forever the one set in Vegas?
Elitist.
Counter-evidence: For a very long time, the only DVD I owned was Dude, Where's My Car?
'Pos Trophari is teh elitest!
Drymala, I can't remember which one that was, alas. And it's possible that another of the DAF opening scenes has Bond killing a (fake) Blofeld. I hate that particular movie; the stereotypical gay characters just destroy it for me. And then there's the completely wierd chase sequence with moon-buggies across the Nevada desert and the Howard Hughes clone's bimbo-gymnast-slayers...
Yes, that's the one set in Vegas, towards the end.
I can't stand Bond films at all anymore, but I did see a bunch on tv years ago. Moonraker has a tram/cable car scene. I believe the guy with the metal teeth eats through the cables, and ends up falling in love with a woman who was trapped, or something like that.
Speaking of Lazenby... The article overlooks the offset jaw problem and the fact that everybody on the set thought he was an inexperienced dickhead.
I remember that scene in Moonraker! It might not be the only tram scene in the Bond canon, though. God, Moonraker is a stupid movie. There are some who prefer the disco-baroque period, but they are WRONG.
Nighthawks w/Sylvester Stallone & Rutger Hauer features not just a tram scene, but a Roosevelt Island tram scene!
Lazenby was great! I wouldn't go as far as saying he was better than Connery, though.
DAF is goodish, I think. It's interesting that the goofy/humourous turn actually started w DFA, and not w Moore.
Had a girlfriend once for whom Lazenby appeared to be a kind of litmus test. Fortunately for me, "Haven't seen it, loved the book" was a good enough answer until I discovered this particular quirk.
It totally is Diamonds are Forever. With Mr. Kidd and the other one. And the poofy cat.
Christopher Hitchens recently wrote a pretty decent article about Fleming in the Atlantic Monthly (Apr. 2006), in which he paid special attention to Fleming's fascination with boyish asses on women.
Even before I'd read the article, the adjective "jutting" was inextricably linked with Fleming's platonic asses, unfortunately.
Hitchens takes anality in Fleming a little ways for pseudo-and-non-committal-Freudianism, but prefers a decline-of-the-British-Empire-in-favor-of-the-new-American-hegemon narrative.
