This topic was created by diodesign .
We're obliged to all those readers who've offered condolences at the loss of our heroic playmonaut, who disappeared in the English Channel last week during a Low Orbit Helium Assisted Navigator (LOHAN) mission.
Feel free to share your thoughts here.
C.
Dearly Beloved Bretheren,
We are gathered here to remember the life experience of our Playmonaught who boldly went and explored the heavens. Our sympathies are with his friends at this painful time.
Let us hope & pray that his end was quick and painless.
Now let us repair to the Hostelry and drink a glass to his honour.
In order to secure the safe return to the shore, and hopefully to increase the chances of rescue of the ones following in the footsteps of the heroic, albeit late, El Reg playmonaut (I will forever think of him as Bob, because, well, he probably did), may I suggest a flotation device me added to his capsule for future launches. Here's the one I'm thinking of: http://www.water-buoy.com/
Surely a small price to pay to increase the chances of survival in case of an unplanned splashdown, which is regrettably only too likely given that the launch site is situated *on a bloody island*.
Obligatory disclaimer: I have no connection with the company producing the Water Buoy, nor do I know any of the people working for them. I'm just concerned about the chances of survival of future generations of Playmonauts.
Pirates, because they might have rescued and abducted him.
JT_3K, if judicandus had been used as a predicative gerundive, then your diagnosis of a missing est would have been correct. However, it was used as an attributive gerundive — i.e. “the to-be-judged little man” — so the addition of an est there would have been ungrammatical. As the punctuation showed, the first three lines formed a single sentence, and that sentence’s verb is resurget.
Credit where credit is due: I merely made slight alterations to the last two stanzas of Dies iræ, which is a beautiful example of medieval Latin poetry. I’d like to think that I was the first to coin ludonauta in Latin, but I didn’t check to see if someone had done so before me.
If you’re familiar with Ambrose Bierce, his inimitable “translation” of Dies iræ is worth a read, too.
Maybe, just maybe, our 'naut will drift with the currents and eventually end up in one of the 'plastic islands' that have become an oceanic feature.
There must be other equally adrift Playmobil people out there in large communities having been washed overboard from small ships, lost at sea with a parachute or accidentally flushed.
Who knows whether the Lego people will be friendly?
I believe that I have solved the question of our Playmonaut's name...
Phlebas the Playmonaut, a fortnight dead,
Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep sea swell
And the profit and loss.
A current under sea
Picked his bones in whispers. As he rose and fell
He passes the stages of his age and youth
Entering the whirlpool.
Gentile or Jew
O you who turn the wheel and look windward,
Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you....
(On the night before the launch…)
I Tiresias, old man with wrinkled dugs
Perceived the scene, and foretold the rest —
I too awaited the expected guest.
He, the young man carbuncular, arrives,
The small test-pilot type, with one bold stare,
One of the few on whom assurance sits
As a silk hat on a Bradford millionaire.
The time is now propitious, as he guesses,
The meal is ended, she is bored and tired,
Endeavours to engage her in caresses
Which still are unreproved, if undesired.
Flushed and decided, he assaults at once;
Exploring hands encounter no defence;
His vanity requires no response,
And makes a welcome of indifference.
(And I Tiresias have foresuffered all
Enacted on this same divan or bed;
I who have sat by Thebes below the wall
And walked among the lowest of the dead.)
Bestows one final patronizing kiss,
And gropes his way, finding the stairs unlit…
No age or even DOB, nothing on whether he left a family, no summary of his education and exploits.
Also, not meaning be irreverent or anything (especially regarding the PARIS / LOHAN projects, which I revere), but have you thought about doing a 'Skyfall'-styple return from the dead? Just bring him back in a couple of months, no explanation need be offered if he gets right back into action, with perhaps a scar here and there.
I hear the after X-mas sales in the UK are popular, so you may want to pop down early...
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