h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

The first actor to play James Bond, 007 was Barry Nelson, an American!

It was the third episode, "Casino Royale", of the US series "Climax!".

James Bond was a CIA agent and Leiter (Clarence) was MI5.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0310853/

Good heavens! A Colonial playing Bond?!

>> The first actor to play James Bond, 007 was Barry Nelson, an American! <<

No no no, there was someone else who played Bond before that...Bob Holness!

Only he did it on the radio.

RF

<>

Maybe pedantic and useless.
I find the pendantry comes automatically.
Not sure about uselessness.

Sometimes it's not as easy to be useless as you might think.

For example, that comment about 'metric tonnes' being a tautology (because the spelling already implies that we're dealing with metric tonnes) is certainly pedantic, but it might not be useless. In fact it might actually be quite useful to someone who was wondering whether a sign saying 'max weight 7 tonnes' was metric or not.

i didn't say it was a tautology. the point was that in speech it would be a natural and sometimes needed qualifier that was not required in text.

sometimes folks take offence where none was given; something proven in abundance on the internet, and the reason i added both an explanation for my post and a *s* at the end.

is there something else i should have done?

No you didn't do anything wrong!
I knew you meant no offence, and none was taken, don't worry!

When I said it's easy to be pedantic I was really thinking of myself.

You might not have said it explicitly, but there is tautology going on with "metric tonnes", which you rightly pointed out, which is fair enough.

What does the *s* mean?

*s* means smile. like and the h2g2 smiley.

that's the second time i've been asked that in the last month or so. is this one of those 'who were the beatles?' things? am i on the wrong end of generational change on the internet?

The beatles? What's that?

WG. it's cool.

btw it is less a tautology than a redundancy. yeah, i know. i'm pushing it. *w*

which is 'wink' for those who don't remember the beatles.

*o*

I don't get the need for three keystrokes to create *s*, compared to one mouseclick to create .

Is this not an example of inferior technology not coping with the migration to a superior medium?

*l*

the beatles were a later name of the quarrymen.

the latter is a pun. they 'dig rock'. i am ashamed to admit the pun never occurred to me until recently, and i don't recall it being alluded to in any source i have read.

actually its an example of me never finding out how to make smileys in here, prolly because i have a personal detestation of them.

That's fine, but where is *s* and *w* in common usage? I've been around these internet tube thingies for a while and I've never come across those.



btw, this is my favorite emoticon (or ascii art). When you look at it say "d'oh!"


(_8(|)

Bob Holness was in the radio adaptation of Moonraker in 1956, making him the SECOND actor to portray James Bond after Barry Nelson.

So, there! =P~~~~

so far as i know it is used wherever internet acronyms are used. which is..well...everywhere. goes back at least as far as the telnet days, but since it is also used in shorthand, might precede the whole computer thing altogether. acros are usually less keystrokes than emoticons and are unaffected by line breaks and font displays etc. unless i missed a big chunk of the last 14 years, macro and quick link smileys only started appearing relatively recently on forums and chat sites, say the last 5 years or so.

is this a wind up?

basic guide to interent acros here. http://netforbeginners.about.com/cs/netiquette101/a/abbreviations_3.htm

Not at all. I think I may have seen (and used) *g* for "grin". But I really haven't ever come across *s* or *w*.


I started off in BBSes. There was a news item recently that celebrated 10 years of the : - ) smiley (spaces added so it doesn't get an image).

I thought Forrest Gump invented the smiley