Monday, April 14, 2008

I went ape

For reasons of research on something I cannot yet speak of, I have been looking into physics. Specifically, I have been learning about orbital rendezvous and delta-v calculations – the sorts of tricky manouvre one does in rockets in space. You know, real space travel, not all those sci-fi cheats.

The Dr has patiently zoned out of my efforts to explain some of this stuff. She ignored almost all of the DVD of In The Shadow of the Moon, though she was rather moved by the former moon-walkers having trouble coming back to reality. They found God, they drank, they just fidgeted about – though none of them got a job in the music industry in the way that Polly ffaze-Avatron did.

As I’ve said before, the Dr considers all this space stuff to be “moon porn”. Not even my top facts impressed her – like that it took the Apollo missions three days to reach the moon; less time it took the first passenger flights to reach Australia.

I even foolishly attempted to explain to her the late Craig Hinton’s theories that Martian civilisation would have seemed somewhat Egyptian, what with the Ice Warriors and Khufu both being under the yoke of the Osirans. She likes Egyptians. She’s even quite tickled by the idea that the pyramids came from space. Just so long as it wasn’t from mid-70s low-budget Doctor Who space.

She’s also not a great fan of monkeys, and points out that they’re always the baddies. See, for example, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Pirates of the Caribbean or the apes that kidnap Mowgli. Against this, I can offer… er… Muggle Wump in The Twits and... um… Cheetah off of Tarzan. And Bernice’s friend the lemur.

Can anyone do any better?

More importantly, what a marvellous conjoinment of the Dr’s two horrors is this news of space monkeys.

The title for this post is, of course, the greatest Knock Knock joke ever.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Well, Monkey from "Monkey" was a hero!

On further reflection, it strikes me that portrayals of apes are fairly often sympathetic (Clyde from Every Which Way But Loose, Ape from George of the Jungle) even if they are nominally the baddie (cf. King Kong), but monkeys in the strictest sense are often timewasting annoyances at best (the ones in The Jungle Book), ranging all the way up to actively evil (Mrs Coulter's monkey in His Dark Materials).

Having said that, Wikipedia could probably help with the hunt for nice monkeys...

0tralala said...

I want to know what happens in someone's life that they conceive of the need for a list of fictional monkeys.

And I want it to happen to me.

Rob Stradling said...

Mighty Joe Young was a goodie, no?

Abu in "Aladdin".

Cornelius in "Planet...".

The space chimp that Sam becomes in an episode of "Quantum Leap".

Clyde in the "Any Which Way..." films.

Sylvester Stallone in "Rocky".