So why didn't the telepod merge Brundle with his gut flora?

[Orrex]

Bad enough that a fly got into the transmitter pod with him, but his intestinal microbes and skin mites et al would have turned him into something a lot yuckier than Brundlefly.

Maybe in the sequel.

[antiquie]

1. Especially considering

"The teleporter insists on inner pure. I was not pure."

[CIT13]

2. You do of course realize that "The Fly" was one of the dumbest movies ever made, right?

[Orrex]

3. Answer the question, DAMMIT!

[CIT13]

5. I did. It was a dumb movie. The only dumber thing I can think of was a Friday the 13th.

I forget which number it was, but it was the one that followed Freddie being killed and buried in a junk yard. The junk yard dog alerted on something, found the grave, and urinated on it, except that fire came out instead of piss. Also early in the opening a guy was fantasizing about a naked girl (best I can remember) floating above his water bed and Freddie somehow ended up inside the bed, ripped through it, and killed him. The water bed was clear and the kid was shown encased inside the water bed with no tear marks.

Now yes, that movie was dumb. But "The Fly" was even dumber. You can't apply logic to a situation that isn't based on logic. That would be like believing anything you hear on FOX.

[Orrex]

6. You can certainly assess a piece of fiction in terms of its internal logic

The issue shouldn't depend solely on how a work of science fiction adheres to reality; we can also critique a film's self-consistency, and that is the point I'm making.


I applaud your stick-in-the-mud enthusiasm, though.

[CIT13]

7. Hey, by all known physics, jumping into even near hyperspace is jumping into the future - by a lot.

And there's no way to explain how you can have a real-time conference call with Earth when you're in a different solar system. It just doesn't work that way. It takes eight minutes for light from the sun to reach Earth. But hey, with SciFi you just have to go with the imagination behind it, not the physics that make it silly.

My favorite goof of all times is from the 80's movie "War Games" where the kid is explaining how a modem works and picks the handset up off of the accoustic coupler without losing the connection. That's really lame.

[Orrex]

8. I confess that the Wargames one twanged my sensibiliities, too

Just watched it recently, in fact.

The modem that I owned in 1983 would disconnect if someone called the house four doors down from me, but apparently David Lightman's magical modem can do whatever the heck it wants!

[CIT13]

10. Hell, a Bell 212A at 1200 baud was a doozy. Fart and it would disconnect.

It was also fun waiting for each character to bounce back before you could type another (sarcasm intended). They don't even MAKE phones anymore with handsets that would fit an accoustic coupler. But hey, you couldn't walk out in traffic because you were absorbed in texting with a rotary phone, so it had its advantages.

And another thing... Since Tic-Tac-Toe worked in "Wargames", why didn't John Conner think of that to bring down Skynet?

[Orrex]

11. While we're at it...

Good luck having nature starting over again with bees after humankind destroyed itself. The ol' prof didn't foresee colony collapse disorder. Take that Professor Falken!

[CIT13]

14. My yard will support them. I don't poison it, and we all know that's what the problem is.

Tru Green, Monsanto, Lawn Doctor, DuPont, etc. They're all responsible for the die off. I had at least 20 honey bees within five feet of me yesterday afternoon. They know where to come for safe pollen.

[Orrex]

15. My yard is an oasis of non-chemical lawn treatment

Lots of clover that positively swarms with happy honeybees in the warmer months, and they've lately taken a shine to my wife's crop of sweet basil as well. I'd actually love to put a hive in our back yard, but I don't think that we're zoned for it.

Sadly, everything that I've read suggests two things:
1. The exact (or even the primary) cause is not known for certain
2. It seems that multiple factors are conspiring to cause CCD

Not long ago, people were sure that cell phones were the cause. Then a fungus was identified as the cause. Then it was pesticides. Now it's lawn treatments. Lots of uncertainty in our certainty, alas.


That's not to suggest that we aren't facing a real and serious problem, but the precise cause may not yet be as clear as we might hope.

[CIT13]

17. Ah, but we can eliminate certain possibilities in our own yards - poisons.

Oh, and if you don't have butterfly bushes, get some. You can whack them back to nothing in the fall (ours are still blooming) and they grow even fuller the next year. Monarchs, Swallow Tails, Bumbles, Hummingbirds, Honey Bees, and, if you are lucky (we are), Hummingbird Moths, all swarm the plants. Apparently there's something really yummy in there - something for everyone.

[Paulie]

21. That scene when he's showing off and picks up the handset

The computer is war dialing prefixes. So no real connection to lose.

[mockmonkey]

4. hmmm iBrundle!

Caption: Where's a Weatherman when you need one?

http://www.democraticunderground.com/1018495398

[Dr. Strange]

9. It wasn't in the script.

Look, machines can only do what you program them to do. The machine was told to merge Goldblum with the fly. There was nothing about microbes, skin mites, or dinosaurs. The machine did what it was told.

[Orrex]

12. No one told it to merge Brundlefly and the telepod either, tough guy.

But somehow the obedient machine figured it out.

Nice post, Stathis.

[sharp_stick]

13. It could be because the microbes

lack certain Eukaryotic necessities such as mitochondria and the machine is unable to merge cell types unless they contain the mitochondria.

The question then becomes why, if he bothered to program it do all that, he didn't spritz a little RAID into the box before climbing in is just a gross error in film making that I for one will NEVER forgive.

[Orrex]

16. I like that answer!

Still doesn't help with the mites, but it's a tidy explanation for his gut bugs.

He should definitely have implemented some sort of sterilization protocol, if he was going through all the trouble of dropping trou before transport. Hell, he'd have crud on the soles of his feet, not to mention in his lower intestine, that could result in a truly nauseating merge.

I don't know why they'd even bother with a DNA scan during transport. Better to do a spacial mapping/rebuilding of the object/creature instead of squashing its chromosomes. Seems like an extra, super-complicated step in an already complicated process.

[sharp_stick]

18. Absolutely over complicated

Now a mix between brundle and one of those ugly damned eyebrow mites would have been really creepy but they wouldn't have been able to do that nasty puke/eat scene.

#.US1DlQ3ADhI.tumblr

....Maybe we're overthinking this whole thing?

[ElboRuum]

20. He was guilty of a TUI...

Teleporting under the influence. He was drunk and feeling saucy.

[ElboRuum]

19. Better question...

If we are talking about the 80's remake, why did the computer try merging... sorry, it performed a fusion... of Brundle and the fly?

Now, I used to use these fuckers, and when they didn't know how to do something, they said something like this:

?SYNTAX ERROR IN 10
?OUT OF RANGE
?WHAT THE FUCK, MAN, I DON'T EVEN KNOW WHAT THIS IS...
?NOW YOU'RE JUST HAVING A GO, AREN'T YOU?

The point of the matter is that not even the mainframes of the time had the chutzpah to just GUESS at shit, least of all in the recombinant DNA arena. What it SHOULD have done was, shut down the pods the second the fly was detected, and when Brundle comes out to ask why the pods were shut down, the computer should have replied with "You're drunk. Go to bed."