Word: hal
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...What satellite do you want?" says a strange voice, sounding like a foreign-language student with a bad cold. It issues from a small Apple II Plus computer named HAL, after the talking machine in 2001: A Space Odyssey...
...this movie are the actors, and not because they are maimed eaten, or resurrected as zombies. E.G. Marshall's role should garner the Laurence Olivier/Inchon bread winning award; even the Maalox commercials are a better fate than what happens to him here (hint: the cockroaches.) The other principal actors--Hal Holbrook, Fritz Weaver, Leslie Nielsen, and Adrienne Barbeau--fare little better, and the entire cast seems rather confused and uncomfortable with the material. The one mild surprise is King himself, who in his acting debut plays a doltish farmer in the "Jordy" sketch...
Arthur C. Clarke's sequel, 2010: Odyssey Two (Ballantine; $14.95), resumes the themes of his celebrated 2001, published 14 years ago. A joint Soviet-American expedition sets out to locate the spaceship Discovery and to examine the huge black monolith of 2001. The first part is easy; even Hal, the malevolent talking computer, which had to be electronically lobotomized in 2001, is reparable. But the crew can only watch as powers beyond its understanding transform Jupiter, which astronomers call "the star that failed," from an enormous sphere of gases into a small glowing sun capable of sustaining life...
Before Edmund Halley (pronounced Hal-ee) identified them in 1705 as periodic visitors to the inner solar system, comets were widely viewed as omens of disaster. Astronomers now look upon them as primordial chunks of matter that offer clues to the solar system's formation. The budget-conscious U.S. has bowed out of the race to intercept Halley's comet with a robot spacecraft, thus leaving the field to the Soviets, Western Europeans and Japanese. But NASA plans a relatively cheap ($2 million) alternative: diverting an unmanned ship already in orbit for an inspection of a comet called...
...room. Russell was five. The Depression began to howl. His mother took him and a sister to live with relatives in Newark and later in Baltimore. The world became a gray hell of treeless streets and schoolyard bullies. But Baker had a platoon of entertaining uncles. There was Uncle Hal the blowhard, who turned up en route he said, to a major business deal involving "a forest full of walnut of the finest, rarest quality. Its location was known only to him. He would need great cleverness to keep New York businessmen from wheedling its location...