1ACV08: The Garbage Menace

1ACV08: The Garbage Menace

Review by Haynes Lee, [email] {hl}

SYPNOSIS (Canadian TV Guide): It's up to Fry, Leela, and Bender to take out the trash after Farnsworth's invention warns Earthlings that a huge asteroid composed of 20th century garbage is coming back to the future.

REVIEW: Good episode character development of Professor Farnsworth with good 20th century references.

GRADE: A-

DYN: - portrait of Farnsworth has him with red hair like Fry and the obligatory pens in his shirt pocket? - AOL still sucks? __ - news show is \/2 News (root 2 or 1.414 News)?

CULTURAL REFERENCES: The Simpsons: well, d'uh! Armegeddon, "Bart's Comet": pretty much the same premise

COMMENTS: One of Ron Popeil's feats in the 20th century was the invention of the informercial.

Philo T. Farnsworth, one of the 20th century pioneers of television, is also credited with other invetions such as the electron microscope.

Jupiter and Saturn wouldn't smell very good. They both have a high methane content.

Smell can't travel through the vacuum of space.

Morvo is an alien/barbarian in the Quake game.

TWENTIETH CENTURY TECHNOLOGY: - overhead projector - Farnsworth's telescope postitioned by cranks and gears - Bender steals televuision set - the Internet! - Supercomputer (if that term isn't getting archaic now) - pencil on mayor's desk - printing press and rollers for making newspapers

URBAN FOLKLORE REFERENCE T. 800ft diameter asteroid passed within 500K miles of hitting earth in 1989.

eof

This may not exactly be a DYN, but the idea of the Death Clock is examined in great detail in a short story by Robert Heinlein called "Life-Line," originally published in 1939. In the story, the doctor invents a machine that can trace a body's vibrations through time and accurately predict when a person will die. Being a Heinlein story, the hero gets involved in all kinds of bureaucracy as a result. But the machine is right.

I'm not sure where you can find the story, but I found it in a 1979 edition of "Isaac Assimov Presents the Great SF Stories Vol. 1." I highly recommend the entire series.

-Amanda

In alt.tv.futurama Amanda explod

Why on earth not? Smell is particulate. Now, granted, there generally aren't many folks who would be breathing through their nose in the vacuum of space, but there's nothing keeping oderous particulate matter from travelling through it.

Watch who you're quoting. I never pointed out that smell can't travel through the vacuum of space.

Although it is an intriguing question....

-Amanda

Preivously, on 'alt.tv.simpsons',

While particles do travel through any medium, to be able to smell those particle requires a certain concentration of them in the air - and while the particle would travel from Jupiter or Saturn to Earth, the concentration will drop off with the square of the distance, roughly....so maybe one or two particles a year from Jupiter will make it to earth.

</end chem eng mode>

Michael K. N:

Ahh, but! The recent speculation about Mars "seeding" early Earth with spores takes into account the fact that the sun's huge gravitation force _pulls_ the outer planets' particulate matter _towards_ the Earth. Smelling Mecury or Venus would be tough.... but Mars (+ the other outers)? Hell - we get (miniscule) _meteors_ worth of particulate matter every day!

-William R.

In alt.tv.futurama Michael K. Neylon explod

|While particles do travel through any medium, to be able to smell those |particle requires a certain concentration of them in the air - and while |the particle would travel from Jupiter or Saturn to Earth, the concentration |will drop off with the square of the distance, roughly....so maybe one or |two particles a year from Jupiter will make it to earth.

I'll grant you that, but that's more a matter of "jupiter is too far away to smell".. not "smell cannot travel in a vacuum". Well, that and the particles in question would never survive re-entering an atmosphere. But still.

I will not rest until every nit has been picked!

But in this case, the odor is not traveling through space...the smelloscope uses an advanced technology that locates the odors. the odors are not brought down to earth via the smelloscope, the smelloscope somehow accesses the smells where they reside. possibly creating a sort of "genetic code" of the smell, and coding/decoding it on earth to recreate the smell?

In article , alphajerk wrote:

I would further speculate that the smelloscope is not necesarily reproducing the true odour of the celestial objects. It is common for insturments to adjust a signal to match the senses of the operator. For example it would not make sense for an infrared telescope (designed for humans) to require infrared- sensitive eyes. The image would generally be displayed as shades of grey or a "false color" image where different ranges of infrared wavelengths would be represented as different colors.

Perhaps the smelloscope senses something about the object that is indicative of its odour (reflection spectrum, nuclear spin moment, whatever...) and converts that to a smell in the range that can be sensed by humans. It would be most useful for comparing the properties of celestial objects... Perhaps we would find that fruit odours indicate the presence of valuable minerals near the surface!

alphajerk wrote in article ...

You, sir, are an idiot. Smells don't have genetic codes. They--

Wait...what if the smell-o-scope were to precisely focus intense laser energy on a point where aromatic particles are believed to be, it vaporises those particles, and checks the IR chromatography for that chemical, then duplicates it in the smell-o-scoppe cruet.

The main problem is that there would be a huge delay between when the laser was aimed and when it reached its destination, and when it came back, and when it created the chemical. Not only would that cause a problem with the immense rime that it would take, but it would alse cause a problem with the movements of the bodies. The planets would move enough so that it would be impossible to correctly aim it without solving the many-body problem.

You, sir are an idiot!

On 14 May 1999 00:15:28 GMT, "Andrew Gill" wrote:

<You, sir, are an idiot. Smells don't have genetic codes. They-

Hence the usage of said "brackets." True, I'm no rocket scientist, and besides, why are you so serious...were discussing a friggin' SMELL-O-SCOPE!

As a further addendum, I'd like to say that it'd be a good thing to be able to smell strawberries and pine fresh scent on distant planets.

alphajerk wrote in article ...

and

[pulls out his pre-made card]

|------|

|------|

be

Pine scents?  On second thought...maybe you ARE an idiot. <g>
                                                          ^^^
                       FYI--this should set off your sarcasm
detector...

and besides, you speak of lasers and IR but you're strictly thinking in Y2K terms...the setting of futurama is a little ways past that.

On 14 May 1999 00:15:28 GMT, "Andrew Gill" wrote:

On 12 May 1999 01:50:31 , Haynes Lee wrote:

actually, Morvo is a Metaluna Mutant, a biologically produced servant/soldier to the Metalunans in the classic 1955 sci-fi feature THIS ISLAND EARTH (of course, he also appears in MST3K: THE MOVIE, as well :) )

other things of note:

opening classic animation: Elmer Fudd doing his classic Deems Taylor impression from the Looney Tunes cartoon "A Corny Concerto" (itself a takeoff of Disney's FANTASIA).

BEST LINE - Bender: Well, let's get lootin'!

Did you also notice that Professor Wormstrom got his three Chinese interns?

The beanie baby's name that Fry held up is "Stripes the Tiger"

Btw, tonight's episode was awesome. I was rofl when Farnsworth said "we can place the bomb here between the coffee grounds and american online floppy disks"

I just KNEW that they would show a pic of the young Farnsworth looking like Fry!

Scott Henrichs wrote in message news:[email]...

Did anyone else notice the Beatles' Yellow Submarine?

Haynes Lee wrote in message ...

Uh, no he's not. There's shamblers and scrags and spawn, but no morvo. What made you think there was?

Haynes Lee wrote in message news:[email]... <snippy>

<snippy snippy>

Oh crud, I had to go and crosspost this (kicks Haynes Lee)

grosse wrote in message news:cT5_2.4297$[email]...

Haynes Lee wrote in :

So? Methane is odorless. The bad smell of gas is due to small amounts of additives - mercaptanes (thiols), which do smell terrible (most books describe their smell as "rotten garlic", but it's in fact even worse), and these these additives are there to make gas leaks easily detectable.

Another thing is, Jupiter and Saturn surface is very cold. Below -100oC, I believe. Nothing smells at the temperature this low, as there simply isn't enough substance in the gas phase.

No, but so what? Theoretically you can tell the composition of something by its spectrum. And you can tell the smell by the composition. Sort of. There are probably other things that will prevent this from working, but anyway.

Another DYN:

The four great inventions depicted on the Academy of Inventors seal:

light bulb wheel mousetrap spray-on hair

Another one (I can't believe no one has mentioned this yet):

The holographic projection was taken right of Return of The Jedi.

--Ricky

On 11 May 1999, Steve VanDevender wrote:

Haynes Lee wrote in article ...

Two comments:

1.) The internet isn't just for pornography. It's also for spreading jokes about wearing sunscreen. (I've always wanted to say that!)

2.) Did anyone else notice a connection between the garbage solution and ``The Alice's Restaurant Massacree?'' Namely, how Guthrie says:

``...at the bottom of the cliff was another plie of garbage, and we decided that one big plie was better than two little piles, and rather than bring that one up, we decided to throw ours down.''

In alt.tv.simpsons, on the "Re: 1ACV08: The Garbage Menace" thread, Andrew Gill wrote:

It's also got a death clock, over a thousand years before Dr. Farnsworth came up with the idea. The morbidly curious can go to <http://www.deathclock.com> to see when they'll shuffle off this mortal coil.

-Benjamin Robinson (Who isn't making many long-term plans after 2045 or so...)

Benjamin Robinson wrote in article ...

Farnsworth

mortal

Bah. Life expectancy statistics are terrible. They're calculated based on death date, rather than birth date. I once did a study of what the life expectancy would be if you reverse-engineered the birthdates from the life expectancy of certain years. The equation worked out to:

y=10^(.0027x+1.6856), where x is the number of years after 1852.7 (the first year for which I had data) that you were born. 2087 is much more pleasent to think about than 2050 or so...

Born in 1972? That comes out to ~101.8 years, or 2073.8.

Plus, that's not factoring in other things like:

Are you a smoker? Do you drink more than one drink a day? Do you drink less than one glass a day? Do you have ties with the mafia? Are you now, or have you ever been overweight? (It has not been proven that losing weight will increase your life expectancy.)

Haynes Lee wrote in article ...

Movie reference:

At the end, right before the commecial for the next futurama, there was a shot of the garbage asteroid floating past the camera. During this time, the song "We'll meet again" is playing.

This is kinda a reference to the 1964 Stanely Kubrick movie "Dr. Strangelove; or how I learned to stop worrying and love the bomb."

At the end of that movie, A series of nuclear explosions is shown with "We'll meet again" playing.

"Johnny Rhyne" wrote:

Just for the sake of getting all the facts down. The song is sung (in its most famous version - I'm not _sure_ that this was the one used here) by Vera Lynn.

CountV

Not "kinda". Definitely, I'd say.

Roger Waters: "Does anybody here remember Vera Lynn? Remember how she said that we would meet again some sunny day?"

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Sort of. "We'll Meet Again" was indeed the final song in "Dr. Stangelove or How I Discovered How Annoying It Is To Type The Whole Title"........BUT, I believe the intent of using that song for the asteroid's passing by Earth was to suggest that this *new* asteroid will eventually return to threaten New New York again sometime in the future, just as the 20th century garbage ball returned to New New York after 1000 years...................a kind of "Circle Of Life" thingy. I recognized the song from Dr. Strangelove and it brought up funny memories from that film, but it seemed funnier to me in the context described above. Anyone? Anyone? --------------------------------------------------------------------------- *Fry : <gasps> "Bart Simpson dolls!!!!' *Bender : <pulls cord> *Bart doll : "Eat my shorts!" *Bender : "Okay." <eats shorts> "Mmmmmm....."

[email] (Mac) wrote:

I don't see why these two aspect should be mutually exclusive in any way.

CountV

Group: alt.tv.futurama Date: Sat, May 15, 1999, 3:06am From: [email] (CountV) Re: 1ACV08: The Garbage Menace [email] (Mac) wrote: "We'll Meet Again" was indeed the final song in "Dr. Stangelove or How I Discovered How Annoying It Is To Type The Whole Title"........BUT, I believe the intent of using that song for the asteroid's passing by Earth was to suggest that this *new* asteroid will eventually return to threaten New New York again sometime in the future, just as the 20th century garbage ball returned to New New York after 1000 years...................a kind of "Circle Of Life" thingy. I recognized the song from Dr. Strangelove and it brought up funny memories from that film, but it seemed funnier to me in the context described above. Anyone? Anyone? I don't see why these two aspect should be mutually exclusive in any way. CountV They don't HAVE to be....! BUT I still don't see the Dr. Strangelove connection other than the song being used for the end of both shows....... It just makes more sense to me that it implied what I said before, that it and New New York will "meet again......don't know where......don't know when!" (singing mode off) Anyway, I'm not trying to start anything, hust pointing out another possibility (which happens to make more sense for me). If the episode had to do with a bomber-shuttle recieving false orders from a lunatic and a mad scientist who has developed a doomsday device, then I would agree the use of the song would be appropriate for a final homage to Dr. Strangelove, but it wasn't, it was clearly a homage (ripoff?) of Armageddon.......BUT, thinking about it now, its like Six Degrees Of Kevin Bacon, but in this case, find another way to connect Dr. Strangelove and Futurama in a way other than the song..... Here goes : Futurama was a homage to Armageddon, Armageddon featured a scene where Steve Buscemi's character goes nuts and decides to ride on top of a nuclear bomb while doing an impression of Slim Picken's in Dr. Strangelove!!!! I found it! I see the connection now! Nevermind.

On Sat, 15 May 1999 14:59:05 -0400 (EDT), [email] (Mac) wrote:

I got the impression in "Dr. Strangelove etc. etc." that it was using the song as a "circle of life" thingy as well. At the end, as the bombs were dropping, they were already planning on the next war. In other words, even those that survived the bombs would do it all over again eventually.

Haynes Lee wrote:

Just so long as you don't ask me to smell Urectum.

That's why it took until the year 3000 to invent a way to smell celestial objects . . . STUPID!