The face of former Canadian Prime Minister Sir Wilfrid Laurier is similar enough to Mr. Spock that some people deface Canadian five-dollar bills to make Laurier look like Spock.


The government even changed the picture of Laurier on the bill to a less Spock-like version in response.

Occasionally Stuart Ashen prefaces a video review of an '80s-related object with a snippet from the song "Secrets From the Night".


Given that there are many '80s songs I'm not familiar with, I thought it was legit. But no....


It was made specifically for the video to sound like an '80s song.



Amazing...

I've known about most of the Star Trek/Gargoyles connections for years, but today I stumbled upon a new one...


Eliza's parents, Peter and Diane Maza, are named after married couple Peter Morwood and Diane Duane, both writers for both the Gargoyles series and Star Trek novelists in their own right.



I confess to knowing little of Peter, never having read his solo Trek novel. Diane is a different story entirely. I've read quite a few of her novels and in particular recommend her Rihannsu series if you want to read a different version of the Romulan empire, albeit one that goes completely off the rails of canon.

Today's new word is "Disneybounding": dressing in the clothes of a Disney character without it being a complete cosplay. No makeup, no masks, no props, just clothes.


You can do your own image search, there's some real creativity out there.

Peter's is fairly good on the ST novel scale, and of course Diane was one of the very best before I stopped reading new ST novels some 15 years ago.

Not all "amazing" things are good. For example...

Chitty Chitty Bang Bang's Adventure in Tinker Town

As a diehard Chitty fan, I am appalled.

I know it's not the Link thread, but here are some links anyway...

Chitty as a Transformer
The Mario cast ride Chitty
Brain Blessed as Baron Bomburst on stage
I never knew there was such a thing as "steampunk minstrels" either, but there are, so enjoy!
Hushabye Mountain cover by Jason Manford
Title theme sung in Japanese
Title theme on an organ (I can totally see this song being played in a carousel...)
Somewhat playful orchestral version of the title theme

Ocarina of Time has special animations if you hit Bongo Bongo with Ice Arrows!


Twenty years later, I'm still learning things about this game...


If one part of his body is frozen by an Ice Arrow, Bongo Bongo will stop attaching you and start punching the frozen part of himself until the ice shatters.

So today Ashens released a video review of "Strange Things To Do And Make"...


That's not the amazing thing. The amazing thing is that I recognized the art style from a book I had as a child...


Cover Up: Things to Put On Yourself


Both books are by Diana Gribble. Don't ask me how my parents got a copy of an Australian kids book in the '80s, I have no idea.

As a math enthusiast I've long known of the trammel of Archimedes, but today I learned that they're also known as "nothing grinders" or "do nothing machines."


That's Mathologer for you.

I've had many laptops and other devices that use power cords with C5 connectors in their power bricks. But today's amazing thing that I learned today is that some people actually call them Mickey Mouse connectors because of their shape!

There exists a "rock opera" treatment of War of the Worlds.

Uh. Well then.

It's Leslie Bricusse day in the Amazing Things thread!


Who's Leslie Bricusse, I hear you ask. Why, he's only one of the best unsung lyricists and musical composers out there.


I know him best through his collaboration with Anthony Newley for the soundtrack of the Rex Harrison Doctor Doolittle movie (fan video with Doctor Who clips, just because), but the amazing thing I learned today is how much more he did...



Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, again with Newley
Peter Pan (the 1976 version, not the Mary Martin version you're more familiar with. Mia Farrow as Peter Pan, Danny Kaye as Captain Hook, etc.)
Babes in Toyland (the 1986 Drew Barrymore version, not the Disney one) again with Newley
"Goldfinger" from the Bond film, again with Newley
"Somewhere in My Memory" from Home Alone, with John Williams (I linked to an orchestral version, I watched Home Alone as a child so many times that I'm rather sick of the movie now, but the song is still nice)

"Christmas at Hogwarts", with John Williams

Irish People Try Space Food


The important part is the mint chocolate chip freeze dried ice cream. It occurred to me that I haven't seen this combination called "peppermint bon bon" lately, so I looked it up.



"Peppermint bon bon" is a Minnesota/Wisconsin thing.


Don't ask me where we got the name, maybe it was the same guy that decided that we should play "duck, duck, grey duck" instead of "duck, duck, goose."


Informal PNQ: Does your area have a local nickname for a common food that's not derived from a local brand?

I may have mentioned a few times how much I like the DuckTales Moon theme...



The new show includes a callback to the moon theme when looking at the moon!


It's short, but it's there.

Over at the Straight Dope forum they used the Alex Trebek announcement as an opportunity to discuss who will be the next "big" celebrity to die. The amazing thing was the number of celebrities that I didn't know were still alive, Kirk Douglas and Doris Day especially.

So I was wandering around the ephemera of early fiverdom and found "5MV at Con*Cept 2002." The assumption that Enterprise would make it to seven seasons amused me greatly. Maybe not amazing, but good for a laugh.

LeVar Burton and Adam West guest-starred in the same episode of Murder, She Wrote!


My mother was the MSW fan, I know Angela Lansbury more for her work at Disney (oh, and her early musical work such as The Harvey Girls and Till the Clouds Roll By, of course).

ZFG (I remember when he was still ZeldaFreakGlitcha, FYI) shows us that in Ocarina of Time the Song of Time doesn't just make Time Blocks disappear, it actually sends them to the other time period (adult to child or child to adult). It's not a trigger to make something go away, it's a trigger that toggles a temporal teleportation.



And since (in normal play) you don't find Time Blocks until after the time skip and you have access to both time periods, there's no paradox. Yikes. You learn something new every day.

D.C. Fontana only died recently!


She was a cornerstone of TOS, writing "Journey to Babel" and "The Enterprise Incident" among others.

The term "negative space wedgie" is a staple at TV Tropes, but I didn't know it came from the Star Drek parody.