Jamie123

I'm going to get "roasted as a racist" for saying this, but I'd love - just once - to see Song of the South in its entirety. I've only ever seen the Brer Rabbit segments, and the "zippety doo dah" scene on The Wonderful World of Disney when I was a kid. I believe they did once release it as a DVD, but you can't get it for love nor money now. These days Disney prefers to pretend that the movie never existed.

Unfortunate it may be, but it's not gone unnoticed that this version does at least make some sense out of the bizarre cover artwork of the original authorized US edition of Lord of the Rings.

(Emus? What was that artist smoking when he read the books!?)

I watched the '90's version with my wife at a drive-in theater.  Dutifully averting our eyes at the nude scene, we noticed all the cars' windows had fogged up at that scene, as all the ladies distracted their men from what was on the screen.
All the women cried when whatsername said goodbye to the Jacksicle and pushed it into the water. 
All the men cried when ancient wrinkley whatsername climbed up onto the railing and tossed the gem into the ocean. 
I pretty much cry whenever I hear Nearer, My God, To Thee.  

Titanic?
OK, you have my attention. 
Random factoid:  the actor who played Colonel Gracie in the Cameron film, played Lookout Fleet in ANTR.
But I’m surprised you didn’t mention the 1953 film of the same name.  Or the Nazi version, filmed on the Cap Arcona, which two years later would be sunk with a loss of life three times as great as Titanic’s (most of the victims being Scandinavian concentration camp survivors who were machine-gunned in the water by Allied pilots who didn’t know their identities).

Thanks for the link!  I was aware of the film but haven’t seen it in its entirety.  I believe I’ve read that William Macquitty recycled a few of the shots/footage in ANTR.
And yeah, there’s been a lot of speciation about damage from the fire supposedly being responsible for the collapse of the bulkhead between boiler rooms 6 and 5 partway into the sinking.  I believe the fire had itself actually been extinguished, sometime around the day before the ship sank.  Titanic certainly wasn’t going to beat the speed record set by Cunard’s greyhounds; but if Elizabeth Lines was telling the truth, Captain Smith and line President Bruce Ismay did discuss beating the time set by the older sister ship’s (Olympic’s) maiden crossing from the year before. 

You're absolutely right - there was a Nazi version of Titanic, and YouTube has it complete with subtitles!
It's very interesting: the nasty British owners want the ship to make the shortest ever Atlantic crossing in order to manipulate stock prices - so they order the captain to go full steam. The hero - a German crew member - tries to make them see reason, but their greed has blinded them. In the aftermath they all blame the conveniently drownded captain and walk away scot free. Germans good, British and Americans bad.
But its more interesting even than this: the director was arrested during filming for criticizing the Nazis, and was later found hanged in his prison cell (a la Epstein). The movie was never actually shown in Germany by order of Joseph Goebbels, who eventually banned the movie entirely.
Perhaps if they'd included a giant octopus, things would have gone differently...
The idea that Titanic was attempting to break some speed record seems to have stuck in our collective consciousness - if I remember rightly, there's even some mention of it in the Cameron movie. But the White Star ships were never designed for speed. They were luxury liners. If the ship arrived to soon, you missed out on some of the luxury.
One theory that's gained traction recently is that a fire had broken out in one of the coal storage bunkers. This may sound alarming, but it wasn't. Coal fires were always happening in steam ships. The way to put out such a fire out was not to douse it with water, but to shovel the burning coal as fast as you could into the furnace. This of course makes more steam, which in turn makes the propellers go round faster, which is why Titanic was travelling so fast, and wasn't able to avoid the iceberg.

You're absolutely right - there was a Nazi version of Titanic, and YouTube has it complete with subtitles!
It's very interesting: the nasty British owners want the ship to make the shortest ever Atlantic crossing in order to manipulate stock prices - so they order the captain to go full steam. The hero - a German crew member - tries to make them see reason, but their greed has blinded them. In the aftermath they all blame the conveniently drownded captain and walk away scot free. Germans good, British and Americans bad.
But its more interesting even than this: the director was arrested during filming for criticizing the Nazis, and was later found hanged in his prison cell (a la Epstein). The movie was never actually shown in Germany by order of Joseph Goebbels, who eventually banned the movie entirely.
Perhaps if they'd included a giant octopus, things would have gone differently...
The idea that Titanic was attempting to break some speed record seems to have stuck in our collective consciousness - if I remember rightly, there's even some mention of it in the Cameron movie. But the White Star ships were never designed for speed. They were luxury liners. If the ship arrived to soon, you missed out on some of the luxury.
One theory that's gained traction recently is that a fire had broken out in one of the coal storage bunkers. This may sound alarming, but it wasn't. Coal fires were always happening in steam ships. The way to put out such a fire out was not to douse it with water, but to shovel the burning coal as fast as you could into the furnace. This of course makes more steam, which in turn makes the propellers go round faster, which is why Titanic was travelling so fast, and wasn't able to avoid the iceberg.

I'm joking about all this of course. What I'd really do if I had that kind of money is sell our house (along with its wonky garage door) and buy a large luxury bungalow, so my wife (who suffers from arthritis) wouldn't need to go up and down stairs. I'd also have a large indoor swimming pool so she could exercise easily. I'd also take her on a cruise - a long cruise on a very large and luxurious boat. We'd definitely go to Venice at some point, and ride in a gondola. I'd then take her to Memphis Tennessee to the Grand Old Opry (though obviously not by boat) and to Utah, and somehow arrange for her to meet her hero and heroine Donny and Marie Osmond. I'd offer to put my older daughter (actually stepdaughter, but she's like my daughter) through college - but since I doubt she'd want that, I'd give her the money anyway and let her chose how to spend it herself. I'd set up a college fund for my younger daughter. When the time came, I'd give each girl exactly the wedding she wanted.
And then I'd bribe someone to go to boring faculty meetings for me...

The film makers have generally speaking done the Titanic story justice. Who can forget A Night to Remember (it would be a contradiction in terms if you didn't) and the Kate Winslet/Leonardo DiCaprio version of the 1990s - especially with Celine Dion's haunting song.
But don't lets forget the less well known adaptations. First of all there's this:
The Legend of Titanic is told in flashback by a mouse who was on board, and who helped the hero and heroine to get together, despite a dastardly villain who hired sharks (I'm not joking)...actual sharks...in prison uniforms to sink the ship at exactly midnight. (If it's ever explained why it had to be exactly midnight, I missed it). There are whales in the story too, not to mention a giant octopus who saves the day. And NOBODY DIES!! (Or did they? The old device of the "unreliable narrator" is at work here.) I'm not making any of this up...watch it yourself and see!
(Well actually I suggest you don't waste time watching it all - it's time you'll never see again. But if you can see the head shark in his prison togs at 56:37 and some giant octopus heroism at 1:08:42.)
Having said all that, it is just about possible to get through this entire movie without gnawing your arms and legs off. So kudos to the makers there!
(Or so I suppose: I'll shame the devil by admitting I did skip over some of it.) 
As for this one though...
It starts out with a blatant and badly-made rip-off of Cinderella - complete with ugly sisters and cute anthropomorphic mice - until 10 minutes in when a bunch of rapping animals deliver the all-important message that "it's party time". At this point I had to stop. I couldn't face any more. I'd have been of little use to my family in a straitjacket, confined to a padded cell.
If you do manage to get through it, please tell me how it ends! 🤡

And if you use petrol, you can get a hundred cups of tea to the gallon!

You're right.
Guess that puts me in....
 
................
 
the dog house. 

I'm joking about all this of course. What I'd really do if I had that kind of money is sell our house (along with its wonky garage door) and buy a large luxury bungalow, so my wife (who suffers from arthritis) wouldn't need to go up and down stairs. I'd also have a large indoor swimming pool so she could exercise easily. I'd also take her on a cruise - a long cruise on a very large and luxurious boat. We'd definitely go to Venice at some point, and ride in a gondola. I'd then take her to Memphis Tennessee to the Grand Old Opry (though obviously not by boat) and to Utah, and somehow arrange for her to meet her hero and heroine Donny and Marie Osmond. I'd offer to put my older daughter (actually stepdaughter, but she's like my daughter) through college - but since I doubt she'd want that, I'd give her the money anyway and let her chose how to spend it herself. I'd set up a college fund for my younger daughter. When the time came, I'd give each girl exactly the wedding she wanted.
And then I'd bribe someone to go to boring faculty meetings for me...

Officially networking and cyber security, but that's mostly because those subjects pay. On the side I'm very interested in information theory and computational linguistics, and type-token systems in general. At the moment I have little time to spend on such things, though I did manage to get a paper on vocabulary prediction submitted to a journal back in April. (It's still "under review".) If I had more free time I'd go more in those directions.
At least I think I would.
My problem is I have the heart and temperament of a polymath, but not the brains to be one.

All this talk of adorable kittens has reminded me of the "Jojobags' Pig" phenomenon, discovered by @Vort a few years ago. By chance I came upon the very cute-kitten picture:
 
Instructions:
1. Shrink the picture using the ctrl key and the mouse wheel.
2. Screw your eyes up tight.
3. The "pig" emerges!
Simples!

I teach at a university - which you probably think is a cushy job - which it probably is - but...oh the tedium of marking undergraduate assignments! Sometimes over 100 of them, all saying more-or-less the same thing with varying levels of articulation and accuracy, and having to assign fair marks to all of them - and give feedback! And defend those marks when the complaints come! The tedium of MEETINGS - listening to people argue for hours!
Perhaps if I had 5 million, I'd offer to pay my own salary but only do the bits of my job that I enjoy. So:
No more undergraduate marking. Just research dissertations. Nothing else. No more than one undergraduate lecture and a couple of undergraduate tutorials per week. I get to go to whatever conferences I want. (I'd pay my own travel and accommodation.) I get my own lab, for my own research students, picked by me. (I'd pay their stipends and their tuition fees.) No more going to meetings. I'd pay a student to sit in meetings for me, and tell me if anything happened that I needed to know about. Deedle deedle dum.

Some of the big cats I believe do that, but not felis catus. Or at least its extremely rare.
P.S. Pest control is why the cat was originally domesticated. If they didn't kill rats and mice, we would probably never have become our pets.

I teach at a university - which you probably think is a cushy job - which it probably is - but...oh the tedium of marking undergraduate assignments! Sometimes over 100 of them, all saying more-or-less the same thing with varying levels of articulation and accuracy, and having to assign fair marks to all of them - and give feedback! And defend those marks when the complaints come! The tedium of MEETINGS - listening to people argue for hours!
Perhaps if I had 5 million, I'd offer to pay my own salary but only do the bits of my job that I enjoy. So:
No more undergraduate marking. Just research dissertations. Nothing else. No more than one undergraduate lecture and a couple of undergraduate tutorials per week. I get to go to whatever conferences I want. (I'd pay my own travel and accommodation.) I get my own lab, for my own research students, picked by me. (I'd pay their stipends and their tuition fees.) No more going to meetings. I'd pay a student to sit in meetings for me, and tell me if anything happened that I needed to know about. Deedle deedle dum.

When I was a kid, we had a a Burmese cat called Chip. We actually had two of them - the other was called Coffee. They were both brown Burmese, but Coffee was a dark brown (like the colour of coffee) and Chip was a lighter colour - somewhat like a Siamese, but much more heavyset. I loved both of them, but Chip was by far the most intelligent and mischievous. For example, he would sometimes claw the cushions and keep on clawing even as everyone dashed to stop him - only bounding away at the last available moment.
Anyway, my brother's bedroom had a large built-in wardrobe, positioned such that room door and the wardrobe door - if they were both open - swung quite close to each other. On one occasion Chip had climbed to the top of the room door, and decided to jump from there to the top of the wardrobe door. As he sprang the door obeyed Newton's 3rd law, swinging back on its hinges and causing Chip to miss his landing. He fell about 7 feet to the floor - no great fall for a cat of course, but it was certainly not what he had expected!
I think the default programming in Chip's feline brain was  to interpret anything above ground that he was standing on as a tree branch. Unlike doors, tree branches are not hinged; they are fixed to trees. Furthermore, any branch large enough to take the weight of a large cat would not move much when the cat jumped. The cat's natural woodland habitat does not really contain anything equivalent to a hinge, so it does not appear in a cat's programming.
On the other hand, the cat's natural habitat does not contain glass either; yet cats quickly learn that while you can see through closed windows, you can't get through them. They sit on the windowsills gnashing their jaws at the sight of birds outside on the lawn, but they know full well they can't get them. Feral kittens - when you bring them inside for the first time - will hurl themselves at closed windows, but they quickly learn that this is pointless. So I daresay a wider experience of jumping from hinged doors would have taught Chip that a door does not behave as a tree-branch. So the programming is not - in fact - hard-wired. It can be overwritten.
Are we so very different? I remember when I was about 11, jumping into a moored dinghy, taking no account of the fact that as I landed on the foredeck the boat would tip towards me. Luckily the boat had a mast I was able to grab, otherwise I'd have gone into the water. My mental model of the boat was something which would support my weight without moving - so I suppose I was very like a cat on that occasion. From thereafter, my mental model of a small boat was different. I was "reprogrammed".
How does this relate to the "upper layers" - to use the OSI analogy? I don't know. I've tried writing this paragraph a few times, and I keep discovering that my ideas are flawed and deleting it. Did an extension of this kind of learning lead to quantum electrodynamics, or to the painting of the Mona Lisa? When you look at the higher primates - orangutans for instance - creatures not so very different from us - can you imagine them (perhaps in a few million years) discovering Lagrangian optimization, or writing the simian equivalent of Shakespearean sonnets?
(I'd already written that before I remembered someone already did imagine something very like that - it was called Planet of the Apes.)
Speaking of orangutans, did anyone see Judi Dench's program about Borneo last night? Well - I daresay you didn't because most of you are in the USA, but look out for it in case they show it there. Absolutely wonderful. 

I've actually had the same answer to this question for 25 years.
 
 

I have a dog. To be more precise, my children have a dog, and I pay for it. Let me tell you a little bit about my dog.
This dog is not a stupid animal. She obviously cannot do much of what a human can do; she is utterly unable to speak, she can't really understand what we're saying in anything but the most basic sense, and she's permanently stuck at a level of social awareness that most three-year-old children have gotten beyond. She seems to have only a vague sense of time. She obviously can remember past events, which guide her present actions. But her sense of the future is limited to anticipation of the immediate future, maybe the next few minutes. I can't tell that she spends any time at all pondering something as far away in time as, say, later this evening or tomorrow. But she is quite sensitive to emotion. She can tell when things are relaxed or when there is tension. She can tell when my daughter is upset, or when I'm frustrated, or when someone is angry. Being without language, her range of responses is limited, but she can and does respond to things, sometimes quite enthusiastically, and mostly in ways that would be considered appropriate. While I would only rarely characterize the dog's thinking as logical in any meaningful sense, I would certainly say it is rational.
I honestly do not think my dog is all that different from humans in how she thinks. In fact, I believe that her thinking is very similar to how we think, to the point that I would almost say that her thought processes are subset of our (human) thought processes. I suspect that the reason dog owners can intuit so well how their dogs are feeling is because it's possible for human thought to model dog thought very closely; you just select the doggy-appropriate components of your own human thoughts, and you get a very serviceable dog thought model.
What, then, sets human thought apart from dog thought? How is the human experience fundamentally different from that of a dog? Obviously, our language ability is huge, an immense chasm that separates human brains from dog brains, indeed that separates human brains from the brains of all or at least most other creatures. How about spatial awareness? No, some animals have that in similar measure to human beings, perhaps even more. How about the fact that we are children of God? Well, yes, that certainly must confer some unique attributes, but that begs the question: What are those unique attributes? Agency is a wonderful guess, and I suppose that must be true; we are moral agents, while animals appear not to be. But this is an effect, not an attribute. We are moral agents because we have certain abilities; we don't have those abilities because we are agents. The arrow points the other direction.
So again, what makes human thought unique, different from that of the higher animals that (other than language) seem to have many almost human-seeming mental abilities?
I am slowly becoming convinced that what sets human thought apart from that of higher vertebrates is our ability to abstract patterns out of highly disparate situations and then recognize commonality between those patterns. In short, I think our ability to analogize is a large part of what makes us human. I look at my relationship with my brother, some areas of concord and some of discord. I think of mowing my lawn, how some parts are straightforward and some present challenges. And then my brain somehow takes some problematic aspect of my relationship with my brother and some problematic aspect of mowing the lawn and says, "Hey, Vort! Pay attention! Interacting with your brother IS JUST LIKE mowing your lawn!" I can then respond, "Stupid brain, don't you know that my relationship with my brother is a different class of phenomenon from mowing my lawn? Can't you recognize that the two are completely dissimilar, utterly unrelated?" Or I can respond, "Hey, yeah, there really are similarities. This is worth thinking about." I do not believe that animals can do this to a very great extent, even smart animals.
I have a lot of thoughts on this topic. I'm creating this thread as a place to explain, examine, and hash out some of these thoughts. I had a fascinating conversation a few minutes ago with my 14-year-old, having to do with (I'm writing this so I don't forget) comparing operation of the human brain to the seven-level OSI model and supposing that conscious decision-making, personality, and processing of perception is sort of the "topmost layer" of this model. Consequences of this idea are highly intriguing to me. But it's all analogy.
Whether this thread goes anywhere, whether anyone cares about it, whether I even get back to it, remains to be seen. But I think the idea has merit and is worth exploring. Obviously, since I'm posting this, I don't expect this to be just me sounding off. I welcome anyone else's insights into this idea.

I had a very traumatic experience when I was a young girl of about 4 or 5 years of age. My parents had just given me two cute, adorable kittens. I still remember their coloring—brown and caramel tabbies. We lived on a dairy farm, so of course these were outdoor cats. One morning I went outside to play with my kittens. When I got to their “nest”, I saw that their heads had been torn off! I screamed and screamed! My parents came running, thinking something terrible had happened to me. I was devastated. My parents said it was most likely a tom cat that had killed them. This has stuck with me for over 60 years.

I must confess - I do sometimes come to this forum to "have a winge", but I'm glad there are people like you to make sure that my "winges" don't go unchallenged. 😁

That's pretty much how it went down.