[X] My Assistant

[Guest_AlexBlackwell_*]

Researcher Touts Saturn’s Titan As New Exploration Goal
By Leonard David
Senior Space Writer, Space.com
posted: 14 March 2006
01:07 pm ET


"'Titan is just waiting for us…Titan wants us,' [Jonathan] Lunine suggested. 'There is no body in the outer solar system that is better designed for exploration than Titan.'"

[Guest_BruceMoomaw_*]

No, I'm just clever enough to come up with all of them independently. I just never get credit for any of them. (The eerie thing is that this actually did start being true in the late 1980s: I'd come up with joke after joke, tell it to my family, and then see somebody else come up with it independently elsewhere a few months later. In the case of the Raft of the Medusa, however -- although I can't read those blog entries Alex listed -- I'm willing to accept that I was working off a subconscious memory. All I can say is that it wasn't a conscious one.)

This is a bit reminiscent of Red Skelton, who was universally detested by his writers on his TV show. Once he was asked during an interview how he came up with all those clever jokes and replied, "God puts them into my mouth." The next week his writers handed him 40 blank pages of paper and told him to have God write his script for him. In my case God frequently DOES put them into my mouth; He just also makes sure I never get credit for any of them.