What if Gandalf fought Luke, pt. 2 (The Star Wars Blogathon)

Briane Pagel on Staree


READ PART ONE here.


Dark, bottomless pits of pitch-black, his eyes appeared to be as the tiny bits of light that formed what used to be Gandalf whorled around, growing and dimming, pulsating and throbbing, always in the shape of the wizard but never the wizard himself.

"I don't like this,"  Han says.

Sam agrees but doesn't want to admit it.

"Steady," Luke says, and his hands remain in front of him, held up, palms forward.  His face, calm, impassive, conveys no nervousness.

"Are you still there, wizard?" He asks.

There is no immediate answer.  The bits of light grow dimmer and seem to wane, and almost the shape of the older-than-old man they took over can be seen through the shape they have become.  The kitchen is gloomy and dark in the candlelight.

"Are you still?" Luke persists.

Then many things happen at once, there is a flash, many flashes, more flashes than one could count: in the span of a millisecond a billion beings have all become enraged and engorged with their own power and they have realized that they have that power and more, drawing power from the very air around them -- for where must the power come from that fuels them? -- and commanding it to be a part of them, bending the energy contained in the atoms that themselves are only slightly smaller than the beings, bending it to their own whims, and the flashes are those beings cooperating with each other at a speed greater than any person could think, and holding more energy than entire planets have consumed in their existence, those beings use in that millisecond an infinitesimal portion of their power and blow the top off of the Hill, destroying the home that has stood for generations and destroying a good portion of the Hill with it and sending a bowcrested wave of force pushing dirt and rocks and trees out from the epicenter, which is the form of the old man who is no longer an old man, towards the rest of the Shire, centuries-old trees uprooted and smashing into centuries-old houses and crushing the people who live in them, walls falling on sleeping wives and mothers, on fathers and sons just getting up to begin their farming day in the hour before the sun rises -- the sky, which had begun to turn a hazy violet now blotted out by the cloud of dirt sent into the air by the explosion that has rent the world.

But just before that happens, Luke senses that it will happen and pulls Han and Sam to him and calls on the same power -- the same power that is blasting outward and upward and downward, that is roaring its anger at having been entrapped -- Luke calls on that power, siphoning an even smaller amount of it away from the billion tiny souls and using their own destruction to protect himself and his friends from the terrible eruption.

And just before that happens, Luke knows it will happen because he is able to see, in the black of the eyes of the used-to-be-wizard a glimmer of warning.

For long minutes, the dust rains down on them, larger clods pelting the force-field that still stands, making visible the invisible energy lines that are shaped not by Luke's outstretched hand but by his mind, which knows how to wheedle the power away from the beings that now want him to stop using them.

"You steal from US still?" a billion voices say as one.

"I work with you," says Luke.  He stands, then, and slowly, gracefully, takes his saber from its hilt. A touch, a flick, and a shaft of solid light that does not depend on these beings for its existence springs up, sizzling and crackling as dust motes swirl into it.

"That is, if you want me to," Luke says softly.  "If you want me to."

The beings understand that Luke's words are both promise and threat.

********************************************************************************

So I'll probably be posting these about every other day to finish up the questions, God willing and the river don't rise.

Question 92:

What famous person was the Russian astronaut in Armageddon referencing when he said that he didn't know the man because he'd never seen Star Wars?








Also: Andrew found the link for the hilarious commercial for "Blue Milk." Watch it or you'll regret it forever.  Well, for like 15 second  until you move on to something else.


  Today's rules:

1. 
2.Mention Andrew Leon's class' book on your blog, get 1,000 points (leave me a link.)


 UPDATED STANDINGS including points from Rhyming Day:

Andrew Leon: 95,411 1/4. (Andrew's the author of the great YA book, The House On The Corner. Click here to go to his blog.)

 P.T. Dilloway: 62,121. Author Patrick Dilloway blogs here, and wrote the excellent book Where You Belong, available here.)

Michael Offutt, 16,3021/2, author of  the great sci-fi book Slipstream, which you can read about on Goodreads)

Rusty Webb: 4,022, Blogger at The Blutonian Death Egg, author of the great novella A Dead God's Wrath.

(The Great 100-ish Day, 100-question Star Wars Blogathon, #64)

It's quiet out there.

A little too quiet.

I was going to talk a little bit about the origin of the phrase "a little too quiet," a well-known trope, but in investigating where that phrase came from, I ran across a link to "The Hounds of the Morrigan," which had a reference to the Celtic Goddess of War in it; apparently, in that book, whenever the Celtic Goddess of War focused on something, her ears absorbed all the sound around her, so her enemies would know she was focusing on them because things would get...a little too quiet.

Then I wondered if that was an invention of the author or the "real" (?) stuff of myth, so I went to look up the Celtic Goddess of War, and I found this site which lists not one, not two, but 10 gods/goddesses of war, including Banba, whose particular godhood was dedicated to repelling invaders, as well as being the deification of soil.

Celtic mythology also has innumerable gods and goddesses dedicated to sex, fertility, and love, which is the way to go with a religion, if you ask me, and which include Achtland, who as a mortal found no man could satisfy her, so she married one of the Tuatha de Danann, a sort of cross between Irish gods and Tolkien's elves.  After that, it was said, she found "great delight" ... in brushing her husband's long silken hair.

Hmmm.

Anyway, that all got me thinking about the lasting impact of what we do and say and write, something that's on my mind a lot.  That book, The Hounds of The Morrigan, sounds inventive -- but was released something like 20 years ago, if not more.  I frequently wander through bookstores and libraries and look at all the books I've never even heard of and wonder if those authors wonder the impact of what they're doing, if those authors put their books out there hoping they'd be Twilight or Harry Potter or Great Expecatations, only to find out that they're...

...not.

That's the kind of thoughts I get when I give a WHAMMY! question and nobody answers.  There were 990 pageviews yesterday, and two comments.  I don't imagine that what I'm doing here is Great Expectations, or even Twilight, but I do wonder, sometimes, when we throw these ideas out into the air, do they land?  And do they take root when they do?  Think of all the things humans create and briefly talk about and then never visit again, and consider how many of them you will remember for a week.  A month?  A year?

Ten years?

Fifty years?

Does the likelihood of being remembered-- that's the best way to measure an impact, isn't it? -- increase as we increase our output? Or does a greater volume mean a weaker impact?

The amount of things we're throwing into the universe as ideas grows exponentially.  In 1977, when Star Wars was released, there were 47 other theatrical releases.  There were 48 movies released in 2011... by April, 2011.

I saw recently an article in Entertainment Weekly that noted that Titanic had the most consecutive weeks at number 1 at the box office, followed by Beverly Hills Cop.

Beverly Hills Cop.  Really?

Sweetie's explanation for that, which I buy into, is that there were fewer movies then on fewer screens, so it was easier to stay at number 1.  (Four of the top 5 in that category were released between 1980 and 1990).

I still remember Beverly Hills Cop.  And Star Wars.  But was the impact of those movies heightened because there was so little competition?

Anyway, that's my musing today, brought on by the eerie quiet amongst the competitors on the Blogathon:  Consider whether abundance equates with lack of concern.

And then answer question #64, worth 24 points:

What was Grand Moff Tarkin's homeworld?

UPDATES/RULINGS: Because nobody answered the WHAMMY! question, I have not penalized Andrew for wagering but not answering, especially since it was unclear whether he would be the only person entering.

I'M EXTENDING THE DEADLINE BY ONE WEEK!  Write your blogfest entry! The Tri(?)weekly Blogfest Challenge -- prize is $10 -- is to post something on the theme of "Han shot first, but Time-Traveling Elvis shot second" by April 29.  Leave a link to your post in the comments to this post. You'll get 100 points for posting it, plus 5 for mentioning the blogathon.  Get it in by next Sunday, whatever day that is.

You can get 1,000 points by mentioning the Yellow Hill fundraiser on your blog; here's the post where I explain that, and you can  click here to go directly to the Yellow Hill fundraising page.  If you don't want the points, you can in the alternative link to/mention it and get a free book of mine.(Find my books here.) (If you've done this, leave me a link and I'll get you the points.)  This one ends in a week.

And I'm going to put another bounty out: 500 points if you get Julian Darius, or anyone from Martian Lit, to leave a comment here. 

Here are the Star Wars Blogathon standings; check your point total here. 

Will it help drive up participation if I post more Leias in bikinis?   Because I'll do that:

 

Eisenhower, Tesla, $1 trillion in gold, and a time-traveling kid. Can I finish in style, or what? (A To Z Challenge, Star Wars Blogathon.)

I guess this is the end?  Or tomorrow? I'm not sure.  I saw where Andrew Leon had his Y post up on Friday, and PT Dilloway said you're not supposed to post on Sunday, so I'm not sure where that leaves me with this post, but frankly I'm too excited to wait until Monday to post this, and also I didn't post anything Friday, so here's the penultimate post in my ongoing exploration of alien alphabets, an exploration that has increasingly little to do with alien alphabets and increasingly more to do with aliens in general, but what're you going to do, sue me?

Go ahead; I can always use the extra work.

Anyhow, what I'm so excited about today is the discovery of exopolitics and specifically a lawyer who practices exopolitics to the point where is is considered an expert on them.

But before we get into exopolitics specifically, a word on how I learned about it: Via The Time-Traveling Lawyer:

A lot of people have a hard time trusting lawyers as it is, but what about one who claims he was part of a secret government time travel program when he was a kid?

Since 2004, Seattle attorney Andrew Basiago has been publicly claiming that from the time he was 7 to when he was 12, he participated in "Project Pegasus," a secret U.S. government program that he says worked on teleportation and time travel under the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

That's the lead paragraph in the HuffPo story on this exciting development in time-travel, law, and my ability to not do any work ever again ever, because we have teleportation and we can use it to time-travel.

Basiago's achievements as a lawyer are not inconsequential and are related to the ongoing alien theme here, in that in 2008, Basiago published a paper (described here as a landmark one, at that, which it is) proving that there is life on Mars. When not writing books and helping others write books, Basiago also found time (get it?!) to travel back to Abe Lincoln's era, when he was a kid, doing so 7 or 8 times, including trip's to Ford's Theater on the night of the assassination.  He finds proof that he did this in a photograph of Gettysburg he says shows him:

That's him on the left, apparently wearing sneakers because while the Department of Defense was in charge of teleporting kids to Civil War Battlefields (possibly holographically, it's all a bit confusing), they weren't in charge of making sure kids were dressed appropriately for the occasion.  Said Basiago:

"I had been dressed in period clothing, as a Union bugle boy.... I attracted so much attention at the Lincoln speech site at Gettysburg -- wearing over-sized men's street shoes -- that I left the area around the dais and walked about 100 paces over to where I was photographed in the Josephine Cogg image of Lincoln at Gettysburg."

Here's the complete photo that detail is taken from:

And here is a picture of himself at about that age that Andrew Basiago himself presented:

  Basiago did this time-traveling, as I said, possibly holographically (asked how he came back, he couldn't really answer) but definitely using some old stuff Nikola Tesla left behind.

Tesla, the man responsible for beating Edison and thus for our using alternating current as opposed to direct current as the standard for electricity, was interested in teleportation and had an early theory that presaged quantum mechanics, suggesting that light could be a particle and wave.  He proposed a "Wall Of Light" that could be used to travel in time and space, and that's what Basiago says the Department of Defense built based on Tesla's writings.

Tesla was certainly bright; he invented alternating current (and proved it was safe by letting it run through his body in tests), came up with a radio-controlled toy boat, and found a way to transmit electricity directly through the Earth (which, remember, we're calling Planet Awesome now).  Tesla discovered "terrestrial stationary waves."  From History.com:

By this discovery he proved that the Earth could be used as a conductor and made to resonate at a certain electrical frequency. He also lit 200 lamps without wires from a distance of 25 miles (40 km) and created man-made lightning, producing flashes measuring 135 feet (41 metres).

Tesla's genius was so unpredictable and outrageous that people weren't ever sure what to believe about him;

Caustic criticism greeted his speculations concerning communication with other planets, his assertions that he could split the Earth like an apple, and his claim of having invented a death ray capable of destroying 10,000 airplanes at a distance of 250 miles.

Nonetheless, the government was so worried that after Tesla's death, the FBI monitored his estate to make sure none of his writings fell into the hands of the Axis.

So if anyone could make a "Wall Of Light" that would teleport people around, it would be Tesla.

What really caught my eye in reading bits and pieces about Tesla was this phrase:

Tesla always claimed to a Venusian probably arrived on a space ship


Which I found on this site, which goes on to claim all kinds of stuff about Tesla's claims to be an alien and to have talked to aliens; I wasn't able to find anything on any credible site about whether Tesla actually claimed he was from another planet.

All of which goes to show that we need a Bureau of Exopolitics, and luckily for us, there is one:

 Dr.Michael E. Salla, is a pioneer in the development of 'Exopolitics', the political study of the key actors, institutions and processes associated with extraterrestrial life. His interest in exopolitics evolved out of his investigation of the sources of international conflict and its relationship to an extraterrestrial presence that is not acknowledged to the general public, elected officials or even senior military officials.
His groundbreaking Exopolitics: Political Implications of the Extraterrestrial Presence (Dandelion Books, 2004) was the first published book on exopolitics and explained the political implications of extraterrestrial life. His more recent, Exposing U.S. Government Policies on Extraterrestrial Life (Exopolitics Institute, 2009) takes exopolitics to a new level of sophistication by revealing how the world's most powerful nation secretly manages information concerning extraterrestrial life and technology. Dr. Salla is an internationally recognized scholar.

 At Exopolitics.org, you can find the accumulated knowledge you'll need to also become an expert on Expolitics, including links to articles about how Canadian newspapers deliberately insert typos to make exopoliticians look bad,and articles like:

 Exopolitics Comment 117 (April 10, 2012) Pentagon plans for Alien invasion exist according to military professor. (1100 words). 

Or

 Exopolitics Study 13 (Jan 18, 2012) Trillion dollar lawsuit exposes secret Bilderberg Gold Treaty & funding of extraterrestrial project  

All the best countries have an Exopolitics site, even Portugal. And it's a good thing, too, because without such organizations, we might never have known about the lawsuit filed in 2011 which asserted that the Chinese Nationalists during World War II gave the US $134,500,000,000 in gold, and which gold was apparently converted to US Bonds and then intercepted when two Japanese tourists carrying that amount of bonds were caught on a train in Italy.

Here's the crazy thing: That lawsuit exists.

It's case number 11 CIV 8500, and was filed by "Neil F. Keenan, Individually and as Agent for The Dragon Family, citizens of foreign states"

(I will point out that the article I linked to before doesn't explain what The Dragon Family is and I will also remind you of David Icke's Reptoid Hypothesis.)

And the lawsuit names sixteen different defendants ranging from Silvio Berlusconi,

To the then-head of the United Nations.

Here is the actual first paragraph of the Complaint:

This is a civil claim arising out of the concerted, knowing, malicious scheme and international conspiracy engaged in by the Defendants for the designed purpose of defrauding plaintiff KEENAN, the designated Agent of his Principal, the "Dragon Family," for the express purpose of expropriating, stealing and converting certain negotiable financial instruments lawfully owned by the Dragon Family and entrusted to KEENAN in early 2009. 

These assets ... had been intended for participation in select, registered and authorized Private Placement Investment Programs (or "PPPs") for the benefit of a wide range of global humanitarian purposes. At the time of the criminal and deceitful acts of the Defendants, the approximate face value of the stolen DFFI was One Hundred Forty-Five and One Half Billion ($145,500,000,000.00) United States Dollars with an approximate accrued interest value of One Trillion ($1,000,000,000,000.00) United States Dollars.

 So while most of the Exopolitics sites call this a billion dollar suit, it's actually a trillion dollar suit.  It's a thousand times more important than Exopoliticians claim.

(Is that a cover-up? You decide...)(Yes, it is.)

That case is still pending as we sit here today, and it's an important one to follow because it makes clear the link between Eisenhower's so-called "emergency dental visit" when he actually met with aliens,  and the plan for the secretive Dragon Family to use the US court system to finally blow the lid off this international conspiracy by deliberately letting the gold be stolen:

 The Chinese gold transferred to the US Federal Reserve Bank in the mid-1930s is only the tip of the iceberg. Entrusting the Federal Reserve notes and bonds to Keenan appears to have been calculated gamble. In fact,.. the actions of the Dragon Family [are ]an “elaborate sting operation.”  They were fully aware that their bonds would very likely be taken from Keenan at some point, but believed that the eventual lawsuit would be the catalyst for the rest of the world learning about the way in which China’s and other national gold reserves have been secretly taken out of circulation for decades. 

The method that the world has been using to take the Chinese gold out of circulation appears to be the "Bilderberg Treaty." 

Supposedly just a get-together of the rich and powerful to discuss events, the Bilderberg Group actually, according to Expoltics.org Study Paper 13, met first to keep 85% of the world's gold reserves hidden from the public and used for "black ops."

Black Ops like "Operation Paperclip," a Henry Kissinger-led project to recruit Nazi scientists to the Allied war effort while Nelson Rockefeller was looking for looted Nazi gold in South America.

(I am having a serious amount of fun just typing this post.)

Rockefeller and Kissinger would go on to bigger positions, of course, but all of Rockefeller's subsequent work as a billionaire spy/politician was simply a cover for his role in coordinating the US' response to extraterrestrial life -- a role that was necessary, given that the aforementioned meeting between Ike and the aliens had been prompted by the aliens' concern over America's growing thermonuclear ability.  (The aliens didn't like nukes, the dirty hippies!)

I know it all sounds confusing, but that's because you haven't properly studied your Exopolitics.  Also, a little confusion is to be expected when the military is mucking around with the time stream, as they obviously are.  Remember David Basiago, from way back at the beginning of this post?  He very coherently pointed out that some of the proof of time-travel can be seen, for example, in the very fact that Iraq never had weapons of mass destruction:

"I only know about how the time travel technology was used during my involvement with Project Pegasus, so this is only speculation," he said. "But it's possible that 'forward intelligence' showed [Iraq leader Saddam] Hussein using the weapons of mass destruction, but our military went in and toppled him before he could use them."

 "Forward intelligence" is code for time travel. But you knew that, right?

Here is the WHAMMY! question today, but first:  Andrew Leon correctly pointed out that he's the only one who wagered -- so only he can get any points.  But as the Random Numbers have decreed that Answer Number 4 will WHAMMY!, if you want to get your answer in quickly, you can maybe make him WHAMMY! even though you cannot get (or lose) any points for answering (in)correctly.

I don't know what happened to everyone.  They're probably all reading Michael Offutt's Slipstream, which I finally bought and started reading last night; I'm five pages in and it's really good.

So here's the question:


What was the number of the protocol droid that greeted Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan after they boarded the Trade Federation craft, and which actress provided the voice?

Remember: don't answer on the blog; email me the answer at thetroublewithroy[at]yahoo.com

 NOTES:

I'M EXTENDING THE DEADLINE BY ONE WEEK!  Write your blogfest entry! The Tri(?)weekly Blogfest Challenge -- prize is $10 -- is to post something on the theme of "Han shot first, but Time-Traveling Elvis shot second" by April 29.  Leave a link to your post in the comments to this post. You'll get 100 points for posting it, plus 5 for mentioning the blogathon.  Get it in by next Sunday, whatever day that is.

You can get 1,000 points by mentioning the Yellow Hill fundraiser on your blog; here's the post where I explain that, and you can  click here to go directly to the Yellow Hill fundraising page.  If you don't want the points, you can in the alternative link to/mention it and get a free book of mine.(Find my books here.) (If you've done this, leave me a link and I'll get you the points.)  This one ends in a week.

And I'm going to put another bounty out: 500 points if you get Julian Darius, or anyone from Martian Lit, to leave a comment here. 

Here are the Star Wars Blogathon standings; check your point total here.


 

It's a TRAP! A new entry in the Triweekly Blogfest, and, yeah, I missed yesterday. (A To Z Challenge, Star Wars Blogathon)

So, we're not even trying to pretend this is alphabetical anymore...

First up, Rusty Webb's entry in the Triweekly Blogfest Challenge has been posted.  You can find it on his blog, and here's the intro:

   McGillicutty’s bar is my favorite place on earth. And Greedo from Star Wars is my hero. Those are pretty much the only two things I have an opinion about. Funny, until last week, all I knew was that I loved my bar. The Greedo thing was something that never crossed my mind. 

I didn't think someone could do a gritty reboot of the Star Wars cantina scene, but darned if Rusty didn't nail it.  He did the picture, too.  Read the whole entry here. It won't take you long, and it's worth it.

Entries in the current challenge have to be posted by tomorrow; any blog entry on the theme "Han Shot First... But Time-Traveling Elvis shot SECOND" will qualify.  My own meager effort is here, and PT Dilloway's clever entry is here.

Did I mention the winner gets a $10 gift card to Amazon? Because that might be important. Post your entry, leave a link, and I'll announce the winners Monday or so.

Then, on to the vaguely-alien-alphabet-related posts I sometimes muster up for this A To Z Challenge thing.  I know there's rules and all for the Challenge, but as Balmudo said in Grease, the rules is there ain't no rules, and I have tried to live by those words Every. Day. Of. My. Life.


Things seem more serious if you overpunctuate them, have you noticed????

I started thinking today what topic I might post about alien alphabets ("there ain't no rules") and then I had to take a break and help Mr Bunches set up his Mouse Trap game so he could make the trap work without even bothering to really play it, in blatant defiance of the front page of the rules which say, and I quote:

*IMPORTANT*

BUILDING THE MOUSE TRAP IS PART OF GAME 

PLAY. DO NOT PRE-ASSEMBLE THE TRAP.

Mr Bunches is a kindred spirit when it comes to rules like that.  He'll play games the way he wants, thank you very little.  (See what I did there? You thought I was going to thank you but I didn't, really, you rules nerds.)

Anyway, as I sit here watching him play Mouse Trap, which I really thought was one word up until this point, and not being allowed to play:

Me:  Do I get a turn?

Mr Bunches:  No.

Me: When do I get to play?
 
Mr Bunches: Go sit down.

I began writing this post, and instead of alien languages I began to wonder "Does science have in place a plan to catch an alien?"

I mean, what else would science be up to, once they decided (probably wrongly) to not blow up the moon?

Surely, I figured, things have advanced since E.T. was lured into a house using whatever candy paid the most for the sponsorship, right?

It seems though, that with everything else science has let me down about (tidal pools, cloning myself so I can have a day off and nobody knows), science is woefully lagging in the alien trapping department, leaving it up to Russian fisherman and some guy on Squidoo to lead the way into this Brave New Frontier I'll call "Screw You, Aliens, Don't Mess With Earthlings."

Before I begin, though, are we really going to go with Earthlings as our title when we meet other races? Because that seems kind of wimply.  Earthling.  Doesn't exactly inspire confidence or intimidate anyone, does it?  We should hold a world wide contest to come up with a better name.  I submit "Awesomeizers."  Rolls off the tongue.

Oh, and on a related note, I also vote we start calling our planet, instead of a synonym for dirt, "Planet Awesome."

Here on Planet Awesome, great strides are being made in the field of alien capturing not by the government, or "science," but by private industry, the way God The Capitalist would want it.  (When you start a small business, Jesus smiles and an angel gets its wings, then declares bankruptcy two years later.)

I am referring to "A Practical Guide For Those Interested in Capturing Live Alien Beings From Another Planet," the best-rated site on this subject, far outpacing my own "Extremely IMpractical Guide for Those Who Have Better Things To Do Than Capture Alien Beings From This Planet."  Not sure where the marketing was when we came up with that, but heads will roll when I get around to having a marketing department.

The whole article is too long for me to care about, or read, but I could see immediately that there were a lot of very practical tips, such as this one:

 

How To Get Started Quickly 

 There is no shortcut to finding and capturing aliens.

That part goes on to say that finding aliens will take  "dedication" and "work," two things I'm not known for.  Another thing I'm missing? A rape van:

 If you truly want to capture an alien, consider investing in the following: An older late 80's or early 90's SUV or cargo van in excellent running condition- This means a good starter, heavy duty altenator and a minimum of computerized systems in the vehicle. 

That's the actual picture they supplied of the van they suggest you use.

The van is necessary to avoid electromagnetic influences and/or walking into Chris Hansen's trap house.   You'll also want a lead-lined vest, which you can get from your local medical supplier if you don't already have one.  But you already have one, right?

 Other equipment they suggest? A cage or holding pen.  You'd be surprised how many people leave that off  the list.

So you've got your cage, your stun gun, your weird-vest, and your windowless van, you've registered with the local authorities and introduced yourself to your neighbors, let's get alien capturin'.

In addition to overcoming your fear of aliens by watching movies about alien abductions (an actual tip), you'll also want to place an ad for someone to sleep near you in your van while you hover over them with a stun gun.  Really:

Stakeout and Capture The next step, after you have gained the prospects confidence and cooperation in this matter, is to plan your effort to capture the alien. After all, nobody wants to get abducted in their sleep and your service could put an end to this problem. In most cases, this means staking out the prospects residence, which may sometimes involve one or two months of effort before you produce results. You absolutely want another person involved in this phase, a helper that can provide company, alleviate fear and help subdue the alien. If you do not have a friend, you could place an ad or hire a helper from a temp service.

Here, I've written your Craig's List ad for you:

HELP WANTED:  I've got the van, and the stun gun, and have located a 'prospect.'  I just need someone to camp outside that house with me for a few weeks and then help subdue the 'alien.' Cops and weirdos not welcome.

 Having successfully caught your "alien," what's the first thing you should do next? I'd advise not crossing state lines because you don't want to federalize this.  Squidoo recommends turning yourself in, which is probably for the best:

Profits From Captured Aliens Before you actually capture your alien, make sure you have several sources available that would be happy to purchase a captured alien. Here are the top 4 entities that will pay you instantly for a live alien.
1. Your local FBI office. Get the phone number of key field officers in advance so you can call after you get a capture. DO NOT call them before your have a captured alien or you might end up arrested.
2. A local military base. Again, get the number of key people BEFORE you haul in your capture.
3. A local USDA office. This might not sound like an obvious choice but they are involved deeply with government research and can have access to CASH.
4. A local post office or federal building. Again, these government officials can get cash for you immediately.

Raise your hand if you always secretly suspected the Post Office made all its money off buying captive aliens from locals.  I knew it.

Luckily for us, the Russians are light-years (puns always intended!) behind us in alien-catching, not-at-all-creepy technology.  For one thing, they don't have our Post Office and its ready Cash-for-Aliens program.  All they have are fisherman.  This 2007 article on Pravda details a Close Encounter of The Nyet (it's the only Russian word I know) Kind:

Village residents from the Rostov region of Russia caught a weird creature two weeks ago after a strong storm in the Sea of Azov. The shark-looking creature was producing strange squeaky sounds. The fishermen originally believed that they had caught an alien and decided to film the monster with the help of a cell phone camera. The footage clearly shows the creatures’ head, body and long tail. The bizarre catch was weighing almost 100 kilograms, the Komsomolskaya Pravda reports. 

The Russians, despite probably having not read the Squidoo article, knew exactly what to do: they ate it.

From the article again:

However, ufologists and scientists were greatly disappointed when they found out that the fishermen had eaten the monster. They said that they were not scared of the creature so they decided to use it as food. One of the men said that it was the most delicious dish he had ever eaten. 

And now you know what's going to replace pink slime in your McNuggets.  Russian scientists ruled out the creature being a mermaid, which is good because that seems wrong, cooking and eating a mermaid, doesn't it?

That's all for now.  Here's question 62 in the Great Star Wars Blogathon:

What was the fake slogan Robot Chicken had Admiral Ackbar tell kids for his breakfast cereal?

It wasn't this:

 That's worth 50 points.  Commenters 3, and the last commenter get 10 bonus points.

DON'T FORGET TO MAKE YOUR WHAMMY! WAGERS TODAY!

Since I didn't put a point total on question 61, I've made it worth 25 -- the mid-range.  And I'm going to give it to PT Dilloway even though the "Completely Unofficial Star Wars Encylopedia" says the bounty hunter in disguise was infiltrating "Coruscant," because I don't know how you infiltrate a planet.

Write your blogfest entry! The Triweekly Blogfest Challenge -- prize is $10 -- is to post something on the theme of "Han shot first, but Time-Traveling Elvis shot second" by April 29.  Leave a link to your post in the comments to this post. You'll get 100 points for posting it, plus 5 for mentioning the blogathon.


You can get 1,000 points by mentioning the Yellow Hill fundraiser on your blog; here's the post where I explain that, and you can  click here to go directly to the Yellow Hill fundraising page.  If you don't want the points, you can in the alternative link to/mention it and get a free book of mine.(Find my books here.) (If you've done this, leave me a link and I'll get you the points.)

And I'm going to put another bounty out: 500 points if you get Julian Darius, or anyone from Martian Lit, to leave a comment here. 

Here are the Star Wars Blogathon standings; check your point total here.

W is for "Wait, didn't you do W yesterday?" (A To Z Challenge, Star Wars Blogathon)

Lots of people have ideas on how we could speak to aliens, or learn to do so, at least.  Wired Science, in an article I didn't know about when I wrote about the same thing, said scientists think should first learn to talk to dolphins.

eHow, on the other hand, takes a more serious approach, recommending that you meditate outside in your underwear.  That may seem weird, but it's just a preface to telling them you want to make the sexy times with them; eHow's tip number 7 is:

7

Ride in their ship if you like. You may not have a choice. Establish an ongoing relationship with them by telling them you want to participate in their breeding program.

Sure, that works for aliens, but when I tried it with girls in college, oh, the looks I got.

Even Forbes got into the act, interviewing scientists about the best way to talk with aliens. My two favorite ideas? Forget the holographic movie about life on Earth, and instead consider these old-school  proposals:

In 1820, German mathematician Karl Friedrich Gauss proposed cutting an enormous right triangle into the Siberian pine forest, creating a monument to the Pythagorean theorem big enough to see from outer space. Twenty years later, Austrian astronomer Joseph von Littrow expanded on that idea, suggesting the excavation of huge trenches in the Sahara desert, which would be filled with kerosene and set ablaze. 

That. Would. Be. Awesome.  Assuming that the aliens (a) see in our spectrum of light and (b) have angles.  Who says they'd have to have angles at all?  Maybe they never discovered the Pythagorean theorem.  Maybe they have Brifgel's Theorem, which states that straight lines are impossible to make because all time and space is curved, and so there is no such thing as a "right triangle."

Granted, part of that theory is stolen from Einstein, who had some thoughts on the matter, including the fact that your so-called "triangles" have more than 180 degrees in them and that when you throw a ball into the air you are actually traveling into a fifth dimension.

The name Brifgel, by the way, is my alien name; according to this site, to make your own alien name, you must use the first three letters of your first name, the first letter of your middle name, and the last three letters of your last name. Which makes the President's alien name Barhama, while his presumptive competitor, the word presumptive being applied by party leaders since Republicans can't believe that they have a choice between a Mormon and a black man for president this year which means that probably the record numbers of people turning in their US citizenship are Tea Partiers, is Wilmney.

Man, even Mitt Romney's alien name sounds stuffy and boring.

Which brings me to David Icke.

David Icke has a site on which he promises to "Expose the dreamworld we believe to be real," and the site looks every bit as Matrixian as that sounds, with all greens and blacks and headlines about things like "Vibrational Awakenings."  This is straight off his Wikipedia page, this being precisely the kind of thing I would actually trust Wikipedia for:

Icke was a well-known BBC television sports presenter and spokesman for the Green Party, when in 1990 a psychic told him he was a healer who had been placed on Earth for a purpose, and that the spirit world was going to pass messages to him so he could educate others. In March 1991 he held a press conference to announce that he was a "Son of the Godhead" – a phrase he said later the media had misunderstood – and the following month told the BBC's Terry Wogan show that the world would soon be devastated by tidal waves and earthquakes. He said the show changed his life, turning him from a respected household name into someone who was laughed at whenever he appeared in public.

 And this, too, is from the Wikipedians:

At the heart of his theories lies the idea that a secret group of reptilian humanoids called the Babylonian Brotherhood controls humanity, and that many prominent figures are reptilian, including George W. Bush, Queen Elizabeth II, Kris Kristofferson, and Boxcar Willie.

Wait, what?  I mean, I'm more than willing to believe that George Worst President Ever was controlled by reptilian humanoids

but let's not drag Boxcar Willie into this, what do you say?

Also, who is Boxcar Willie?

I googled him and found out he's a dead country-western singer, which means that the Babylonian Brotherhood is not very good at selecting their pawns.  Country-western singer?  You'd have been better off picking The George Baker Selection, because who could resist the seductive harmonies of Una Paloma Blanca?

After resigning from his broadcasting position, announcing that he was the son of the Godhead and sometimes intimating that he might be the actual son of God, then declaring that the world was going to end in 1997, Icke was criticized openly by the press and the public, which Icke seemed to think was unfair:

One of my very greatest fears as a child was being ridiculed in public. And there it was coming true. As a television presenter, I'd been respected. People come up to you in the street and shake your hand and talk to you in a respectful way. And suddenly, overnight, this was transformed into "Icke's a nutter." I couldn't walk down any street in Britain without being laughed at. It was a nightmare. My children were devastated because their dad was a figure of ridicule

 That seems sad until you consider that David Icke gives lectures that cost up to $100 to attend and which lure several thousand people to them and that his website draws 600,000 hits per week and is apparently doing okay financially.

And the alien connection?  According to Icke, the reptoid Babylonians are not just reptiles who ingest monatomic gold to speed up the processing of nerve impulses to make them supersmart, but are extradimensional extraterrestrial aliens who reside in the "lower levels" of the 4th dimension and who have themselves mated with humans and other aliens.  The reptoids -- Annunaki, I think they're called but I can't be sure because I've barely spent any time "researching" this -- are descended from reptilian aliens around the constellation Draco:

 Which makes perfect sense because everyone knows that constellations are like little star subdivisions and those stars in that constellation are probably only about 50 feet apart (less with a zoning variance, but the Constellation Council is notoriously stingy with those).

The Annunaki mate with humans to create the chosen ones for political reasons, so simply volunteering for their breeding program probably won't work, thanks for nothing, eHow!, and anyway maybe you don't want to because the Annunake also breed with an alien race called the Nordics which produces Aryan-almost-human people.

The Annunaki are, by the way, using the moon to control your mind, which is why if we'd all listened to Iranian-American mathematician's proposal to blow up the moon, we'd be better off in numerous ways.   Why do we even bother having a space program if we never use it to blow something up, is what I'd like to know.  Every single other program the government runs has blown something up at one time or another.

Yep. Every single one.  Medicare once deliberately exploded my grandpa's favorite rocking chair.  He swore that was a true story and that's why he hated the revenooers.

 So that is my W post. Or my second W post.  I'm not even sure where I'm going with this, but that probably doesn't matter because thanks to the Reptoids and Alien Nordics, I probably don't have free will anyway -- only a small portion of the people do, Icke points out, with the remainder of humanity being divided into sheeple that do what they're told, and "Red Dresses," software people whose bodies are only holographic projections.

 

I assume I'm one of those Red Dressed, because I can not lose any weight, no matter how hard I exercise.  And now I know it's not that I have pizza for breakfast, it's alien reptiles controlling me from the moon.  That's certainly a relief!

Here is Question 61 in the Great Star Wars Blogathon!

Who disguised himself as the bounty hunter Snoova, and what was he trying to infiltrate?

With apologies to Andrew, I'm not sure how I could make the questions any harder what with me not knowing much of anything about Star Wars and simply cribbing these from other sources. Commenter number 3 gets the 10 bonus points if (s)/he is not a reptilian alien or commenter number 2; the last commenter gets 10 points, and don't forget:

Write your blogfest entry! The Triweekly Blogfest Challenge -- prize is $10 -- is to post something on the theme of "Han shot first, but Time-Traveling Elvis shot second" by April 29.  Leave a link to your post in the comments to this post. You'll get 100 points for posting it, plus 5 for mentioning the blogathon.


You can get 1,000 points by mentioning the Yellow Hill fundraiser on your blog; here's the post where I explain that, and you can  click here to go directly to the Yellow Hill fundraising page.  If you don't want the points, you can in the alternative link to/mention it and get a free book of mine.(Find my books here.) (If you've done this, leave me a link and I'll get you the points.)

And I'm going to put another bounty out: 500 points if you get Julian Darius, or anyone from Martian Lit, to leave a comment here. 

Here are the Star Wars Blogathon standings; check your point total here.

Now, here's some more George Baker Selection:

V is for Voynich Manuscript. (A To Z, Star Wars Blogathon)

What will alien literature look like, do you think?

I'm a big fan of Martian Lit, a website that serves up a variety of nonfiction and fiction articles and stories with the conceit that it's all written by Martians, and which is the home of one of the best stories I've read in a long time, The Many Lives Of Yelena Moulin.  (My review of that story is here.)

But as good as the writing on that site is, I somehow doubt that it's what aliens would write, if they could (or do) write books and short stories, and (why not?) blogs.

Which is why I don't think the Voynich Manuscript is necessarily an alien book. (Well, one reason why.) But you can decide for yourself -- at least until I point out to you that it is, in fact, an alien manuscript and that's been proven.

The Voynich Manuscript is, to be brief, a book brought to light by a books dealer in 1912 or so; Wilfrid Voynich said he got an assortment of medieval manuscripts from a dealer in Europe, and the now-eponymous manuscript among them.  The book (a screen shot of which is at the left) contains illustrations and other sort-of-science-y items in it, and lots of writing, but the writing is in a language that nobody can understand.

Nobody.

The parchment in the manuscript dates back to the Middle Ages; some people suspect that Voynich may have forged it.  There have been many attempts to translate it and claims made that it was translated, but none of them have panned out.  The leading theory is not that it was written by an alien -- I sort of threw that in here -- but that it was written by Roger Bacon.

Here's another page:

Roger Bacon, according to this site, was a Fransiscan friar and early proponent of the scientific method.  He wrote a series of books at the request of Pope Clement IV, back when the Catholic Church wasn't afraid of science.  Why would he write a book in an indecipherable code that reportedly drove one researcher insane?  Again, from that site:

He kept much of his work secret from his fellow Franciscans, but nonetheless, in 1278 they imprisoned him on the charge of "suspected novelties" in his teaching. In his Letter on the Secret Works of Art and the Nullity of Magic, he wrote "The man is insane who writes a secret in any other way than one which will conceal it from the vulgar and make it intelligible only with difficulty even to scientific men and earnest students.... Certain persons have achieved concealment by means of letters not then used by their own race or others but arbitrarily invented by themselves."

Did the Voynich Manucript actually make a man insane? Maybe.  According to this site, Voynich turned a copy of the manuscript over to Dr. William Romaine Newbold. 

Dr. William Romaine Newbold, of the University of Pennsylvania, and one of the greatest students of medieval philosophy and science. Newbold possessed the advantage that he was familiar with medieval methods of thought, was versed in occult sciences, and, he was also a cryptographer. Newbold started work on deciphering the Voynich MS in 1919.

 I miss the days when university professors thought it was to their credit to be "versed in the occult sciences."  Hogwarts Forever!

Through a process of decoding, Newbold said that he found that

The biological drawings in the text were described asseminiferous tubes, the microscopic cells with nuclei, and even spermatozoa. Among the astronomical drawings were the descriptions of spiral nebulae, a coronary eclipse, and the comet of 1273. One of the more baffling things about this was that many of the drawings of plants, and of the galaxies appeared to have been invented.

 This was not without controversy, and a touch of the alienish:

Other assailants made particular note of the drawing that represented the nebula Andromeda. Based on the fact that the spiral nebula in Andromeda lies edge on to earthly observers, Bacon would have had to have an incredibly powerful telescope to view such a thing. But, as we have noted, no one was really claiming that he did.

 Isn't that exactly what one was claiming? How would Bacon (or whoever wrote the manuscript) know in the 13th century that Andromeda was a spiral galaxy without seeing it?

In any event, it's not clear where the claim that Newbold went insane as a result of working on the manuscript comes from.  His official biography mentions nothing of the idea. But this site says that he did go mad, without accrediting the statement.

So what does this all have to do with aliens?  Well, not to worry you overly much, but apparently the Voynich Manuscript was written by aliens speaking a garbled sort of Hebrew and they've predicted, via that book, how the world will end.  Lucky for us, right!?

The author of this site, who credibly determines that Jesus was visited by extraterrestrials:

"Credibly" should, by the way, be followed by the punctuation for sarcasm.  I would put that punctuation in here, but I haven't enough money to buy it.  I'm glad we live in a brave new world where punctuation can be part of the class warfare, with the rich able to denote their sarcasm via text, while we 99%ers have to just hope people get the gist of it.  (People never do.)

Anyway, the guy who posted that bona fide, iron-clad proof that Jesus is not only every superhero but also probably an alien, worked his way through a not-at-all entirely speculative translation (seriously, someone loan me $5 to buy a SarcMark) of the Voynich Manuscript, and has this to say about what that book tells us:

It isn't a pretty picture. It deals with what we know today as the End Times. Now, religiously, the time of the end is a period where the evil are destroyed and the good survive. Depending on whose ancient version you read, you will get variations of that theme. Our problem is that scientifically, this supposed "God-sent destruction" has been scientifically proven to be a cyclical destruction that comes from an explosion at the center of our galaxy. It comes every 13-26,000 years, and has been called by Dr. Paul LaViolette "a Galactic Superwave." The last large explosion brought our last Ice Age to a rapid end, flooding much of the planet. 

I don't know why scientists and theologians are always fighting when the Voynich Manuscript ties it all neatly into one Universal Theory of Everything (God particle indeed!) by noting that the supposed "God-sent" destruction has been scientifically proven to have ended the last Ice Age.

So there you have it: A mad Professor of the Occult at the University of Pennsylvania has decoded a mysterious book written by a monk at the direction of the Pope, which book contains detailed alien proof of the Galactic Superwave that will destroy us all on December 21, 2012.

What? That's what I got out of it.  Here is your Star Wars Question Of The Day (Question 59, for those counting), worth 32 points:

What was Mawhonic's species?

I don't even know who Mawhonic was, so 15 points for telling me what or who that is, as I don't have time to look it up.  Plus commenter number 2 gets 10 points if he/she isn't commenter 1, and the last commenter gets 10 points, also. 

CORRECTIONS/Updates:

Sith Lord Darth Dilloway has his entry in the Triweekly Blogfest Challenge up on his blog, and I like it.  Check it out here, and make sure you check out his A to Z Challenge entries; each one is fleshing out the fictional world in which his Scarlet Knight superhero lives; with the book coming out, you'll want to know the world pretty well when you read it.  (It makes the experience all the richer, you see. Like those maps Tolkien put in. Or the way Dickens encoded a secret message to his readers through Mr. Wopsle's dialogue, leading his followers to try to blow up the Parliament.)

Michael Offutt has had his points restored. He had a good excuse why he didn't answer the WHAMMY! question.

Rusty claimed he had 40,000 points. I don't quite buy that but I think he had 4,200, so I've restored his points and given him Lara's, as per her request, and given him 200 bonus points to help make up for my mistake.  Remember, people can give you points, so if there's someone in the standings who hasn't taken part much, ask them for your points.

Other ways to earn points:

Write your blogfest entry! The Triweekly Blogfest Challenge -- prize is $10 -- is to post something on the theme of "Han shot first, but Time-Traveling Elvis shot second" by April 29.  Leave a link to your post in the comments to this post. You'll get 100 points for posting it, plus 5 for mentioning the blogathon.


You can get 1,000 points by mentioning the Yellow Hill fundraiser on your blog; here's the post where I explain that, and you can  click here to go directly to the Yellow Hill fundraising page.  If you don't want the points, you can in the alternative link to/mention it and get a free book of mine.(Find my books here.) (If you've done this, leave me a link and I'll get you the points.)

And I'm going to put another bounty out: 500 points if you get Julian Darius, or anyone from Martian Lit, to leave a comment here. 

Here are the Star Wars Blogathon standings; check your point total here.

N is for "Now, how can I screw up this alphabet today?" (A To Z, Blogathon, Probably Other Stuff.)

That video is for the song "Ho Hey," by The Lumineers and it really has nothing to do with this post, but if you've read this blog for even five minutes you know that nothing on this blog really has anything to do with what the stated subject of any given post or blog is, so just roll with it, baby, as Steve Winwood would say.

About my references, and in response to Rusty Webb, whose drawings you should really check out because they're good, so good that I would hire Rusty to illustrate an animated series based on my life only in the animated series I would have the power of telekinesis for real instead of for pretend (to pretend to have telekinesis just throw stuff at people and act like you did it with your mind)(that last parenthetical statement brought to you by the antimatter version of Dale Carnegie's book)(I'm lost in my parentheses here so let's get back to the topic at hand)

Which is why Rusty is wrong and I am right that there's no difference between "Googling things" and "just knowing things." Recently, I asked people to let me know if they got a reference without googling it, and Rusty, who is on the side of people who believe that Googling things to learn about them is evil (I may be exaggerating, but only a little) took that as proof that I've converted to his side.

I have not.

To put it as succinctly as I can: there is no better or worse way to learn something.  If you know the answer to a question, it doesn't matter how you got the answer (provided you didn't make a deal with the Devil, which I would disapprove of.)

So when testing one's knowledge, as in the Star Wars Blogathon, I take the stance that it doesn't matter how you get the answer -- whether you "knew it" from watching the movies, or "knew it" because you Googled it and then answered -- because at some point you learned it from some method.  People who oppose Googling to get answers place a premium on how you learned something, not that you learned it, but consider this:

Suppose you are out in public and begin choking, and I am the only person around -- me and my smartphone.

You make the universal gesture for "I'm choking because I really thought that this Cadbury Creme Egg would go down in one bite," and I say back:

"I'd like to help you but I missed the Health Class where they showed us the Heimlich Maneuver.  I'd be more than happy to put a splint on you and/or treat your rattlesnake bite by sucking out the poison, if you'd like."*

*Note: those are both actual things I remember how to do from my eighth grade health class.

In such a situation, I could google the Heimlich Maneuver, save your life, and probably get rewarded by your generous uncle you never knew you had, but if you are the type of person who thinks having previously known something is preferable to learning it when I need to know it, you'd no doubt like me to let you die rather than be saved by inferior knowledge.

Learning isn't done best one way or another, necessarily, and a true education is one that teaches you how to think and learn as you go on.  Our schools place too much of a premium on rote memorization and learning things that don't matter, and too little emphasis on learning how to learn.  That's why people think it's unfair to Google an answer to a quiz even though Googling an answer to a quiz is no different than learning it in some "traditional" way: because they have been conditioned to think that memorizing the answers ahead of time is somehow better knowledge.

I think that knowing how to find the answer is better in almost every walk of life. 

So the reason I wanted to know if people got the answer without Googling it wasn't because I think that's a better way to know something.  I simply wanted to know how dated my references were getting, since that particular reference is from a Steve Martin stand-up concert from about 30 years ago, one in which he says something about how he likes to open the show by doing one thing that's impossible and will therefore snort a Cadillac up his nose.

I couldn't find video of that, so here's this: 

Anyway, that's the entry for "N."  I was going to say something about the Voynich Manuscript, but that, like the dolphins, will have to wait for another day.

 Here's today's question, worth 24 points:

What academy was it that Luke wanted to go to, but Uncle Owen said he'd have to put it off?

Also, yesterday I didn't name a number of commenter to get the points, so on any day when I don't do that, I'm going to give the 10 points to the very last commenter, as judged by when I put up the next post.  That will encourage people to keep on commenting.  I get an email alert everytime someone comments, so more comments makes me look important in meetings.

Updates! 

Remember: You can get 1,000 points by mentioning the Yellow Hill fundraiser on your blog; here's the post where I explain that, and you can  click here to go directly to the Yellow Hill fundraising page.  If you don't want the points, you can in the alternative link to/mention it and get a free book of mine.(Find my books here.)


Stephen Hayes, last week's winner in the weekly drawing, chose Eclipse (by me!) and Slipstream (by Michael Offutt!) as his books for the week. 


Have you written your blogfest entry? The Triweekly Blogfest Challenge -- prize is $10 -- is to post something on the theme of "Han shot first, but Time-Traveling Elvis shot second" by April 29.


Here are the standings, with the curiously-absent Emperor Blutonatine still in first.

M is for "Not one single person commented that I put K after L in this alphabet." (A To Z, Star Wars Blogathon)

Not sure how to interpret that.  It's true, though -- after missing some days I then did "L is for..." and followed it with "K is for..." and you all took it in stride, so I'm just going to assume that you were assuming that I was doing my own alien alphabet in which K follows L, and I'll move on to M, which is for "My, wouldn't it be nice to help some people make a film with Bai Ling."

The film in question is Yellow Hill,

Yellow Hill: The Stranger's Tale is the first in a series of films.  In Yellow Hill, Bai Ling discovers the fate of her father from whom she was separated a decade earlier -- beginning an epic confrontation between Chinese settlers and a desperate mob.  They'll be modern Sergio-Leone-esque films.

The film is written and directed by Ross Bigley, the genius behind Petty Cash:




And needs funding.  Right now, you can donate at IndieGoGo, a crowdsourcing kind of site.  Click here to go directly to the Yellow Hill fundraising page. 

And for you people who don't have $5 to give (we all have $5 to give, right?) I'll do this:  Post a link to the Yellow Hill fundraising site on your blog and ask people to go to it, and I will award you 1,000 points in the Star Wars Blogathon. 

Not taking part in the Star Wars Blogathon?  Here's another sweet deal:  Post that link and ask people to go to it and I will give you one e-copy of any of my books, free. (Find my books here.)

That's M.  Now back to the Blogathon, where we have to expose who got WHAMMIED!

Answerer number 3 was...

Author PT Dilloway, who missed out by 26 minutes.  Michael, who didn't get any points for answering because he didn't place his wager in a comment before the question was posted (I told you this was complicated) nonetheless caused PT to WHAMMY!  There was no change in the overall standings, though.

In other matters:  Don't forget your blogfest entries, due 4/29: any post on the theme Han shot first, but Time-Traveling Elvis Shot Second gets you an entry.  Winner gets $10 from Amazon.

And the winner of the weekly drawing for commenters was Stephen Hayes, who hasn't yet attempted to answer a question but nonetheless wins two e-books of his choice from this list of authors:



A.  Me (list of books available here).
B.  Rusty Webb. (list of books available here.)
C.  Andrew Leon (List of books available here.)
D.  PT Dilloway. (List of books available here.)
E.  Cindy Borgne. (List of books available here.)
F.  Alex J. Cavanaugh. (List of books available here.)
G. Michael Offutt. (List of books available here.)
H.  Sandra Ulbrich Almazan. (List of books available here.)

And here's today's question, Question 52 of the Great 100-ish Day Star Wars Blogathon, worth 19 points:

How long before Young Eopies are able to walk on their own after birth?

A.  A month.
B.  12 parsecs.
C.  Wookies!
D.  A week.
E.  Several minutes.

For the record: I didn't even know what this question meant when I read it.   Here's Qui-Gon and an Eopie, and I still don't know anything more than I did:

Also: It's worse than I thought. I did K twice.  So I've pretty much blown this A To Z thing.