>Given that we're dealing 400 years in the future, anything's possible.
> Personally, given the kind of society you tend to portray in UF, I'm
>surprised that a drinking age exists. (Or, as a Dutchman I knew put
>it, "old enough to walk to the pub".)

These things come and go in cycles. A generation thinks its predecessors were too strict with it when it was young, so it repeals a bunch of age-restriction laws. The next generation thinks it's in so much trouble now because its predecessors weren't firm enough, so it puts them back.

At present, Earth (and indeed much of human civilization in the galaxy) is in a fairly permissive phase - weapons laws are fairly relaxed in most places, as are drug and sex (legality of variations, age of consent) laws. There's a wide range between different nations - the Republic of Zeta Cygni is practically the Wild West when it comes to weapons control, for instance, while you won't find that level of permissiveness on, say, New Japan - but on the whole, things like that are easier to manage in the early 2400s than they are here in the real early 21st century.

>Then there's bassists like the kind I try to be, for whom the bass is
>the principal instrument of expression, and who do the job of laying
>down a bassline but then go above and beyond that by adding
>considerably to the music; see Jeff Ament of Pearl Jam (probably the
>closest thing I have to a role model, musically) or Flea (whom I wish
>I could play like but I'm just not fast enough and probably never will
>be). That beautiful, melodic intro to "Jeremy" is played on a Hamer
>12-string bass.

Unfortunately you've mentioned a couple of bands I don't have much use for, but I think I get what you mean all the same. Two unusual bassists I can think of offhand are Stuart Hamm (who plays bass for Joe Satriani when Joe's on tour, and has a solo career too) and Peter Hook (bassist for New Order, who flagrantly abuses his bass by playing as if he were a lead guitarist instead :).

>Paris only has twenty arrondissements in the twentieth century?

Covered elsewhere.

>Well, a Detian mind has perfect recall, which helps one of my major
>stumbling blocks in learning a foreign language, vocabulary.
>Internalizing a word can sometimes be trying if I don't use it
>frequently.

I'm not entirely sure this is true - our Detian friends seem to forget things entirely too often for it to be the case - but there does seem still to be a residual linguistic aptitude lurking in the condition for at least some of its recipients. (Kaitlyn has it too - at 16, she's fluent in four languages and has a smattering of three others.)

>Well, here's to more. Farscape is the best genre (sf/f/horror) show
>on television right now

I like it a lot, but don't watch it often - it has a similar problem to Babylon 5, in that it has an ongoing arc and the occasional major change happens, so if you miss chunks, you end up with that "what the fuck is going on?" syndrome. :)

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor in Chief, Netadmin
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/