Whole bunch of interesting comments

Fredrik Ekman ekman at lysator.liu.se
Fri Oct 28 16:47:04 CET 1994


Yipes! All you need to do around here is obviously to do a few days of 
exam studying and all of a sudden there are LOTS of messages that I just 
HAVE to reply to. And I was considering going into lurker mode...

First, about Madam Mim:

The six-page story that Jorgen mentioned luckily did not appear here in 
Sweden. But we did get a one-pager that was really awful instead. The 
first and only time I read it I just turned the page and was surprised 
not to find any more. I guess a story really is bad when you don't even 
understand that there IS a closing gag. Seriously, David; there ARE no 
good Madam Mim stories. At least I've never read one. And about the 
similarity in concept, I would assume that Jorgen is referring to the 537 
OTHER Madam Mim stories where she is doing about the same thing. And she 
is being so disgustingly nice to everyone!

Of course, she shouldn't be nice at all. That's just something that some 
jerk at Egmont invented, probably. As I suppose most of you know she is 
originally from the film The Sword in the Stone, and there she is evil. 
And I mean EVIL.

The film, in turn, is based on the brilliant novel with the same title by 
T. H. White. If you haven't read it, do so! Even if you didn't like the 
film. In the book, Madam Mim dresses all in black, has straight black 
hair, is very beautiful and has a pet raven. Now, who does that remind us 
of..?


About Mark Evanier, David wrote:
> Why don't we put him on the list right now?  He can always cancel it if 
> he doesn't like it...

No, not a good idea. Not that I think Per would do a thing like that. We 
COULD, however, ask nicely if he wants to join. Any takers? I WON'T do 
it, since I wrote a message to his CompuServe account recently and have 
not yet received an answer, which may mean one of three things:

1) ME gets a lot of fan email and doesn't reply to any of it.

2) He disregarded my message as being totally uninteresting and will 
probably not enjoy getting another from the same source.

3) He reads his CS email very rarely.

Anyway, it would be nice having him around, even as a lurker.


And Dwight mentioned how young Snow White is. It is funny that you should 
bring that up in the very same message where you request suggestions for 
what dubbed Disney films you should buy. What you would REALLY want is 
the original Swedish version. That one used a girl about the age 14 and 
uncle Walt himself declared that it was the best Snow White he had ever 
heard. Unfortunately that version does not exist on video and probably 
never will. The current version, redubbed during the eighties, has a 
middle-aged woman in the role and it sounds horrible.


Then Joel Swaan (a new aquaintance, Hi Joel!) wants to know what the 
European names for Peg-Leg Pete and Horace Horsecollar are. Well, Joel, I 
suggest that you look up the International Disney Comic Character Names 
list with FTP here at ftp.lysator.liu.se. The file is 
/pub/comics/disney/characters/interlingual, I think.


Finally (whew!) Anders wrote about the database:
> Is it really worth this effort just to be able to see those neat, dotted
> characters? I don't think so.

Well, I do! Again, we must ask ourselves for what purpose we are going 
through all this work (not that I am doing a lot anyway). If it's only 
for our own sake, then I suppose a, a and o will do, although I think it 
looks increadibly ugly. But think again. According to a very low 
estimate, approximately 40 million people have (theoretical) access to 
our FTP site through The Matrix. I really don't see the difference 
between this database and a printed index (except for practical things 
like easier searching). Would you opt for leaving out Swedish chars even 
if we were going to print it and distribute it worldwide? 

Anyway, if you MUST use 7-bit ASCII, then at least use {}|[]\, which 
conforms to the Swedish standard and will not cause ANY problems over 
mail. 

Now, I believe that the only other indexer who has any of these problems 
is Ole, so could we please hear your views on this the next time you get 
in touch, Ole? I believe you use Latin-1 already? If so, all YOU would 
need to do is to UUencode.


Now, that's IT. Vinke-vink!

  /F



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