Pirates As Puppets

A few weeks ago we went to see The Pirates!* (the exclamation point is part of the title).

I have enjoyed many superb stop-motion films from Aardman Animations, notably the Wallace and Gromit series. Most of them I have watched more than once. They were all quite funny. Nevertheless, they were missing something.

What I hadn't realized, until now, is that none of them featured a scene where characters posing as scientists bluff their way through delivering a lecture at the Royal Society in London.

Laughed my head off.

(It was all the funnier for the many hours I have spent listening to podcasts of history-of-science lectures at the Royal Society.)

See it.


*Officially known by two rather lame titles, The Pirates! Band of Misfits in 3D or The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists!. Let's just shorten it to two words for now.

Planetary Science Bake Sale?

I note that some people in the planetary science community are organizing a National Planetary Exploration Car Wash & Bake Sale on 9 June. The idea is to draw attention to recent funding difficulties in the field.

I confess some ambivalence. On the one hand, money in future budgets will be tight and the U.S. program of planetary missions will be reduced in scope and ambition compared to the past decade or two. On the other hand, planetary science is still better-funded than many another scientific discipline, and one does not see many of the other scientists holding bake sales.

On the gripping hand, my car is usually dirty. So if there is a Planetary Car Wash nearby, I wouldn't mind making a contribution.

A Simple Avengers Question

The next movie we saw this month was The Avengers. I will try to avoid major spoilers, but if you are worried about them, don't risk reading the comments.

So a large number of [BAD GUYS] are zooming around the skies of [A RATHER LARGE U.S. CITY] and running around the streets destroying buildings and terrified people with [THEIR WEAPONS].

Iron Man is flying overhead and doing lots of damage to [BAD GUYS] with repulsor rays and tiny missiles that fly out of his shoulders.

Captain America, Hawkeye, and Black Widow are mostly reduced to running around on the ground or hopping on top of the occasional bus. None of them can fly, they aren't protected by armor that we can see (one of them does have a shield), and their weapons seem inadequate for the scale of the threat they're facing.*

I began to wonder: Why doesn't Tony Stark make a bunch more Iron Man suits for other members of the Avengers?

It's established that he often builds new Iron Man suits, and that he's not the only guy who can operate one.

Seems like CA, H, BW and maybe others could be much more effective at fighting bad guys, even [BAD GUYS], if they had shiny metal suits.

Why not?





*Black Widow wears a number of cylinders around her wrists, but whatever their function is, we do not see it come into play during the film. There is a "suiting up" scene in which we glimpse a tracery of blue light playing across this wrist-thingy, but that's about it.