52 The real Lakeside Farms is closed during the winter, more's the pity.

127 The Thrusterbusters take their name from a menu item mentioned during a fast-food sketch on Mystery Science Theater 3000 ("Would you like to try our smooth 'n creamy Thrusterbuster?").

129 You can't blame me for this little innuendo; for some ungodly reason, George Lucas maintains that the musical style employed by such groups as the Mos Eisley cantina band in Star Wars is "jizz".

153 Refers back to a scene in Revolutionary Girl Utena in which Saionji stands up in the sidecar of Touga's motorcycle and is admonished (as if Touga really cared).

162 Sure, it's obvious, but it's also traditional; "Vlad" was the name of Mark "Haywire" Luchini's battered late-'70s Impala back in the day.

202 He did, though. Utena will find out how in Interlude at the Hotel Monolith.

302 Though New Avalon has more of them per capita than any other city in the Federation, airships are a fairly common sight over most major human- and Salusian-dominated cities in the 25th century.

310 Dorothy's statistic is from the most recent "The Federation's 100 Most Beautiful Cities" feature article in Condé Nast Travler magazine, which runs every June. Yedor, the capital city of Minbar, came in first in 2404 and is almost always in the top 10. Other perennial contenders include New Avalon, Kandor (capital city of New Krypton), and Berlin, Niogi.

358 No disrespect or parody is intended with the phonetic rendering of this character's accent. It's just the way a lot of people who run Chinese restaurants of my experience tend to talk in English.

377 Azalynn doesn't eat like this out of gluttony; to maintain her Dantrovian metabolism, she has to, or hibernate.

393 The Imperial Tower is part of the same chain as New Avalon's Imperial Hotel Monolith. The empire the chain's name refers to is Salusia's - the flagship hotel is the Imperial Hotel in Saenar, Salusia's Crown City.

477 Alas, the real Toronto moose did go after the art exhibition was complete.

498 Charles Kuralt, A Life on the Road.

509 Since the dueling platform isn't quite technically in Cephiro, this question's actually a bit moot.

517 777, actually.

533 In the original series, the Student Council meetings featured, at one time or another:

• A high-stakes card game
• A tea party with thrown confetti
• Whole, and then sliced, apples on chairs
• A blindfolded knife-throwing competition
• A rainstorm (with color-coded umbrellas)
• Massaging Barcaloungers
• A baseball diamond (current inning: 2 strikes, 3 balls, 1 out)
• An electric fan propelling a wall of pinwheels
• A random scattering of chairs
• An active railway crossing (with locomotive)
• 99 balloons (not all of them red)

542 Saionji and Miki are parodying the absurdly solemn invocation the Ohtori Academy Student Council used to make every time they were shown ascending in the elevator to their council chambers in the academy belltower: If a chick cannot crack its shell, it will die without ever leaving the egg. We are the chick; the world is our egg. Crack the world's shell! For the revolution of the world! I can only assume that it's a bit less corny in Japanese.

584 Truss did this at the Pizza Pizza in the real Ontario Science Centre. Unlike Kate, he shrugged and ate it anyway.

642 Boston used to have a Marché, but it closed.

683 Toronto is the best city for girlwatching I've ever visited. I don't know why. Maybe it's something in the water.

702 Well, sort of. Anthy's birthday is actually February 29.

803 The Crush, about which more presently, is named after a Joe Satriani song (originally released on his 1988 EP Dreaming #11).

876 Since Cephiro has an Aristotelian cosmology, its moon - which is on one of the innermost of the crystal spheres surrounding the world - has never had to contend with the relentless march of celestial impacts that has left our own moon so interestingly scuffed.

969 Dios appears to have absorbed a little bit of Utena's exposure to Dennis Miller as well.

1007 "Brave heart!" was the signature valediction of the Fifth Doctor on Doctor Who.

1021 I like repeating passages like this sometimes; I think it adds a certain thematic flavor, rather like the occasional repeated shot one sees in film. Some people assume I'm making some kind of cut-and-paste error when I do it, though, which is a bit bemusing.

1043 The radioactive elements glow in the dark.

1060 As seen in Twilight.

1197 The style (though not the colors) of this dress were inspired by the costume worn by the Giant Robo character Ginrei in some of that show's promotional artwork (and in one of the two versions of the Ginrei bonus figurine included with the Giant Robo toy that inspired Tiny Robo).

1209 Between tigers and Juri, Kate is understandably fond of orange.

1222 When I wrote this, I was actually thinking of "The Dance of the Soviet Sailors" from Reinhold Glière's opera The Red Poppy.

1239 We will learn why in Interlude at the Hotel Monolith.

1281 Dorothy's builder had a habit of making her perform as a torch singer in a nightclub he liked; as if that wasn't bad enough, during one such outing he was assassinated before her eyes.

1335 Alfred Bester's 1951 classic The Demolished Man, from which Babylon 5 creator J. Michael Straczynski took inspiration for the Psi Corps. Walter Koenig's recurring Psi Cop character on B5 was named for the author. Bester was one of the giants of early science fiction, and he put his hand to a great many things you may not know him in connection with today.

1355 Tomodachi (Japanese for "friend") is the name of an important planet in Steve Perry's Matador novels, though the UF version bears little, if any, resemblance to Perry's version. One link between the two is that both are accompanied by an orbital habitat called Chiisai Tomodachi, though in Perry's version, it's a space station, while the UF version has an artificial ring similar to Zeta Cygni II's. UF-Zardon also has a ring station, which is called, by analogy with Tomodachi's, Chiisai Zardon.

1434 A reference to Dorothy's source material; early on in the Big O TV series, Roger Smith threatens to throw Dorothy out of his car, to which she deadpans, "You may try, but I'm doubtful that a mere human would have the strength."

1592 The goth outfits for this piece were designed by Anne Cross.

1742 Dorothy's not a very good liar for someone with total conscious control of her facial expressions.

1748 When I wrote this piece, the Leafs had just moved from Maple Leaf Gardens to the bigger, slicker, characterless Air Canada Centre. The fictional Toronto Ice Arena is based much more on the former than the latter (I believe I even used a Maple Leaf Gardens seating chart to work out where Saionji and Utena were sitting).

1797 Rene-Philippe Target comes to us from a game of NHL 2000 Truss and I played on my Nintendo 64 back in the day. We were in a punchy mood when we created our Maple Leafs squad and decided to set the goaltender's height to the maximum and his weight to the minimum allowed by the character creator. He ended up, if memory serves, standing something like six foot ten and weighing around a hundred pounds. His name, apart from the obvious joke, comes from the ads for Target department stores that ran back then, which parodied the style of old Jacques Cousteau documentaries, including the line (delivered in a thick French accent), "Sanks to Team Tarzhay, zhere will be low prices now... and in ze futaire."

1818 This has always been one of my beefs at sporting events - the Ugly American fans who expect everybody to stand, hand on heart, during "The Star Spangled Banner", but then sit down, dig a beer out of the cooler, and yap during "O Canada".

1846 The members of The Crush of Love are all original creations, though the look and sound of their leader, Joe Graf, is based on guitarist Joe Satriani. (Joe's last name comes, thanks to a convoluted and largely irrelevant thought process, from tennis player Steffi Graf - who used to have a doubles partner named Gabriela Sabatini, which sounds a little like "Satriani". I told you it was irrelevant.)

1854 One of the beauties of a band that does mostly instrumentals is that the song titles can be pretty much anything. I had a lot of fun making up the titles for Crush songs; my favorite of the lot is probably "Blood Races, Time Stands Still", which, like 90% of rock 'n roll, is a song about sex.

1909 This is none other than a young John Jay McCandless. In a little more than a year he'll graduate high school, lie about his age, and join GENOM's White Legion rather than wait around on Earth until he turns 18 and be drafted into Earthforce; a few months after that, as a still-green stormtrooper recruit, he'll appear in The Vastru Encounter.

1972 Since before he was born, in other words - Ray is 35. Since his parents had season tickets before him and his mother never missed a game the year he was born, he considers himself to have been a Leafs fan in the womb.

2029 Zeiss Ikon cyberoptics appear in a few of the works of William Gibson.

2115 Mike Palmateer (#29) tended goal for the Leafs and the Washington Capitals in an injury-plagued career that lasted from 1976 to 1984. He was the Leafs' starting goalie from 1976 to 1980. Truss picked him for Roy's sweater.

2116 Karin Torborg's presence indicates that, as with Major League Baseball, women play in the 25th-century NHL.

2200 The pharmaceutical technology has evolved, but apparently not the technique.

2221 Precisely what happened to Jeff at this point is a matter of some speculation. It can be assumed that the police were not involved, since Dorothy never had to participate in a prosecution.

2321 Truss and I saw the real-life prototype for the maniacal Crunch & Munch vendor during a Bruins-Penguins game at the Fleetcenter (now the TD Banknorth Garden) in 1999.

2524 All of the stuff Saionji and Utena see while channel surfing, except for the news report about the Psi Act (well, and the robot orchestra), is adapted from an evening of channel surfing Truss and I once did in a Toronto hotel. Including the pimp opera (hence the wildly anachronistic Dr. Dre reference) and the Victorian porn channel.

2637 Utena's nervous habit of doing athletic stretches instead of simply fidgeting like a normal person is prominently featured a few times in her source series, and turns up elsewhere in her UF appearances; for some reason, it seems especially likely to manifest itself in hotel room scenes.

2913 While traveling in the Orient, Kent Allard learned the secret of the mysterious power to cloud the minds of men so that they cannot see him. Gryphon retained his knowledge of this technique after he and The Shadow were separated in Twilight and, in turn, taught it to Kate. In UF terms it's a Force discipline related to the classic Jedi mind trick. We can tell that it's the same technique The Shadow uses because Kate's shadow remains visible when the rest of her disappears.

3012 "The Aviary of Otherworldly Birds" would also make a good Crush song title. Or a Halo level.

3048 Though he'll have seen it eventually, assuming WPI actually got a chance to publish an '05 yearbook.

3051 As we have seen, it's actually dangerous to let Anthy cook.

3186 "Lady Marmalade", Labelle's Nightbirds (1974).

3191 I think this is the first outright reference to one of Cephiro's countries, further developing the fact that the Tenth World has many peculiar parallels to Midgard and especially Earth.

I can attest to that personally. Manassas, Virginia, where I live, has no fewer than ten (and possibly more) Chinese restaurants, including three places devoted solely to the all-you-can-eat paradigm. This is especially impressive when one considers that Manassas is a medium-sized town which, until not that long ago, was in the middle of a half-rural, half-suburban area. Apropos of nothing, I always judge the quality of a Chinese place's buffet by how well they do the General Tso's chicken, as that's one item that every place that offers a buffet, even if only for lunch, will have on the menu.

>>477 Alas, the real Toronto moose did go after the art exhibition was complete.<<

Washington, DC, had a similar exhibiton some years ago, based on the animal totems of the Republican and Democratic parties (the elephant and donkey, respectively). Apropos (again) of nothing, in the 19th century, the tiger (as in the Tammany Hall tiger, Tammany Hall in New York being the most powerful Democratic city machine in the country) was the Democrats' symbol. Charles Dana Gibson drew a famous political cartoon of the tiger beating up a thoroughly battered GOP elephant in the 1892 election that I hope Kate has a copy of. :)

>>584 Truss did this at the Pizza Pizza in the real Ontario Science Centre. Unlike Kate, he shrugged and ate it anyway.<<

Good man. I highly esteem garlic.

>>642 Boston used to have a Marché, but it closed.<<

I don't think the DC area has one, more's the pity. After all these descriptions, I'd love to visit one.

BTW, there's one Toronto landmark (at least to me) you didn't mention; the World's Biggest Bookstore near Eaton Centre on Yonge Street. I had the occasion to visit Toronto in 1991 (to attend a Stevie Nicks concert) and spent a day going up and down Yonge Street, mostly hitting the multitude of new and used bookstores, and spent a couple of hours in the aforementioned mega-bookstore. At that time, Borders was still pretty new to the DC area, and of course Amazon.com didn't exist, so I was pretty bowled over by the range of what was available there. Considering so many of the UF characters are bibiliophiles, I'd have thought they'd have spent some time there too if it still existed in 2405.

>.2524 All of the stuff Saionji and Utena see while channel surfing, except for the news report about the Psi Act (well, and the robot orchestra), is adapted from an evening of channel surfing Truss and I once did in a Toronto hotel. Including the pimp opera (hence the wildly anachronistic Dr. Dre reference) and the Victorian porn channel.<<

Who says it has to be anachronstic? :D You made a big thing yourself about how much of a fad for late-20th-century things of all sorts there is in the early 25th century.

Overall, I think this is one of my favorite stories in the whole Symphony. Thanks for the commentaries!

-Joe-

It might be more accurate to say that they're speaking Chinese, but using English words to do it. Since Chinese and English both have positional grammar, it's something they can latch onto pretty readily; since Chinese is as utterly devoid of grammatical inflection (verb conjugation and noun declension) as English is of tones, that's something they don't incorporate into their speech as readily, especially when it's not strictly necessary to get their point across. (Chinese is rather admirable in that -- it's a very efficient language.)

Singlish -- that's Singaporean English -- is this taken to the next level; if you hear English on the street, it's often spoken with Chinese grammar and syntax, and incorporates a lot of borrowed Hokkien and Malay, and calques from Hokkien slang. It may or may not be opaque to Americans, depending on how deep the Singlish is. (My wife reverts to Singlish when she speaks to her mother on the phone -- it's quite interesting to listen to.)

- Sean
"All tribal myths are true, for a given value of 'true.'"
-- Terry Pratchett, from _The Last Continent_

It's long out of print, of course, but there seem to be a few copies kicking around on Amazon if anyone is interested.

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
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