An explanation of two later Star Wars movies (Eps I-II) by "Weird Al" Yankovic, illustrated

You REALLY don't want me to sing.

I have a face for radio and a voice for print.

I do have an exceptional command of English thanks to my parents and grandparents.

I had sentence structure and English grammar drilled into me in school. Learning French reinforced my English lessons. It helps that about 30% of English comes directly from French. It made learning computer languages a snap.

That's funny. I prefer novels as I find TV programs, and most movies, insipid, vapid, and generally lacking in any redeeming feature. The commercials associated with them are worse still.

"Ceterum censeo Islam esse delendam."

Garde la Foi, mes amis! Nous nous sommes les sauveurs de la République! Maintenant et Toujours!
(Keep the Faith, my friends! We are the saviors of the Republic! Now and Forever!)
LonePalm, le Républicain du verre cassé (The Broken Glass Republican)

I found the second computer language to be the most difficult because you had to generalize concepts you had taken to be fundamental. Once you generalized them, then each new computer language just became “how do I do x.” My field was computer language design. I was on the 2nd place team for the design of DoD-I, which became Ada. The French team won the French Legion of Honor for designing the American defense language.

I’m part of TV fandom, and we analyze shows the way you analyze Shakespeare. Blakes 7, a British sci-fi show, was a Shakespearean tragedy. I ran an analysis newsletter on it for a while with a subscription list of the best and the brightest. Glorious fun. And making music videos was perfect because you could see that the characters acted 180 degrees off the way they self described when you watched their body English instead of listening to their words. In the years after the show ended, it was fascinating listening to the actors because they parroted their SCRIPTS, not the way they acted out their roles.

The women in fandom tend to be highly educated and incredibly creative. That’s really where I learned to write. When I took early retirement I had 7 offers of agents for my 1st screenplay, and I thank fandom for that.

I didn't mean to insinuate that the creators were vapid, just what their audience seemed to want.

This is like a winning entry in the Bulwer-Litton Fiction Contest for best opening to a bad novel. Only excellent writers even stand a chance.

Cool. Did you ever get to meet Admiral Hopper? They wanted to name Ada, Grace, she told them that they would do so over her dead body, after she got through with them. She was a formidable individual. I certainly wouldn't think about crossing her. I still have one of her nanoseconds around here somewhere.

"Ceterum censeo Islam esse delendam."

When I was running a computer languages group in Boston, I got BBN to pay for my speakers. But Grace was able to come and have the Navy pay her way. I picked her up at the airport and she gave me a clear description of who I was to write to thank them and what I was to say in the letter. I found her absolutely inspiring. Her talk was on the Archeology of Computer Systems, describing how the techniques that she had originally used had been forgotten as memory became more available, and then become useful again in the days of personal computers. She wore her Navy uniform and at the end of her talk she saluted. Blew me away! It must be 40 years now and I can still feel myself standing on the right side of a narrow room and watching her in front of me.

Another wonderful talk was by someone who did Sign Language and showed how you created humor by using similar, but not identical signs. It was shape not sound. And for poetry, it was turning the motion into ballet. Again, absolutely inspiring. Not exactly computer language but I couldn’t resist the temptation for the topic.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLYTtL1FB2XCphoR3BCIszdSlRFSQAOMPs

You might enjoy some of the videos in the computer playlist. I was building videos for the head of IBM Research, a project I got because of making all of these music videos. Breaking the Utah Teapot was Alan Norton’s brilliant attempt to create the laws of a world, set a scenario and then turn on the world to see what would happen. He used the Utah Teapot as an in joke because it was what all the graphic scientists were using in their research. John Cocke was an eccentric genius who was intensely beloved within IBM. He was interested in everything and seemed to know everything. At the end of the video I do a very unvideo-like thing of just letting John talk for one minute. Almost ununderstandable, but purely John. My husband was offered the job of following him and writing down what he said, but Paul wanted to do his own work. Everyone who took on that job became famous. Because I headed the professional society for languages, John thought I understood him and would walk me into a wall and talk at me and then walk away leaving me dumbstruck and confused. I wasn’t in the same league with any of those people.

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