Excerpt from that wikipedia article on baculum:
“…and one reported case of a congenital os penis surgically removed from a 5 year old boy, who also had other developmental abnormalities, including a cleft scrotum.” (os-penis refers to formation of a bone, or calcificaiton, inside a penis. I think.)
I think we have the winner for the “Most Unfortunate Medical Condition of the Year”.
Well now, ain’t this shiny. You can view episodes of Firefly, Battlestar Galactica, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, Jericho, Lost in Space and Buffy the Vampire Slayer on IMDB.
I’m a bit confused by it too, but I think part of understanding time travel is understanding that each person has a different POV in time. Everything happened in the FIRST place because it does. The machines don’t know to go back in time until they are in that moment of decision making in the future. From their POV, it happened then. From the viewer’s POV it doesn’t look that way at all.
Am I getting it or am I still confused about the whole thing?
I totally see what you’re getting at, and maybe I’m just looking at it too linearly. It just seems that there would have to be a first time around, and in that first time there couldn’t be things from a future that were predicated on a particular time loop that had yet to be set in motion - that contained elements that required that future to already be set…OK, I give up. I seem to remember an episode of Star Trek Voyager where Captain Janeway said the same thing when someone was trying to explain to her what and why she needed to go back and correct something in the time line. She just said, don’t even try to explain, just tell me what I need to do so I can get back to my life…
Time travel works alright as a literary device but not a logical one. Time is not a line, it’s more a sphere. Each action has an infinite set of possibilities.
This could have all started with A.I. coming to power with no prior history of trying to kill John Connor. Since he’s the commander or something, they send a Terminator back to kill John because he’s a pain in the (sorryBarb). This could cause a causality loop, where they continue to play out the same circumstances over and over. The machines create themselves. There could be instances where the Terminator gets Sarah, where Reese is killed before having baby-making time, where Pugsly bites Sarah and she dies of some strange lizard disease. We’re just seeing a particular instance of the story being told on a linear plane.
If the machines weren’t machines they might even grasp the concept that even without John Connor, someone would still rise up and resist (for example, Sean).
Maybe this is totally off topic… but it makes me think of Borges, who was really concerned with the concept of reality and as part of that, time. That is, how do we experience time - is it linear, and if it is, how do we know it is? What about causality? What is memory? Do we exist because we remember? Is there any way to prove that time is chronological, a series of ordered occurrences?
I’m curious about what the Trinity said about the whole timeline issue. So if I take their meaning correctly, the humans had basically won and sending back the Governator was basically a last ditch effort to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat for the machines. However, in T2 they manage to send back the Agent Doggitator which was clearly a later model. So apparently the machines were not completely defeated and that point (when they sent back Ahnold) and still had some fight in them.
I do like the whole mind frak though of John Connor not being able to exist unless he was there to send back Reese and that the machines wouldn’t be there unless they sent back Ahnold…
Time is something to experience. When you think to hard on it you will get a headache. 
Science fiction writers have often used time travel to make the “reality” that the characters are trying to avoid. I think there is a lesson there. Do not mess with time.
Anyone read The Time Travelers Wife? This is a great book that gets you to understand the whole POV thing. The husband meets his wife when she is a girl and he is in his late thirties, I believe. She must wait to meet him in HIS present time for them to have their relationship. So when they meet, she has known him all her life, but he hasn’t yet gone back to her girlhood. Blows your mind, but you get it somehow. It’s a great read too, I think even you guys would like it. He wakes up naked when he time travels too, which makes sense to me and adds all kinds of complications right form the start.
I’ve always thought of it as a pure circle of time. There is no beginning or end. From the moment where a time traveller first appears in the past, an inexorable chain of events is set in motion. That’s probably not the best way to describe it, because there really is no cause or effect. I think that’s the real nature of time travel; changing the timeline is impossible because the act of attempting it creates a self-contained causal loop. All events affected by time travel must happen because they already did.
If the machines weren’t machines they might even grasp the concept that even without John Connor, someone would still rise up and resist (for example, Sean).
That couldn’t happen. The machines wouldn’t exist if they didn’t go back to attempt to kill John Connor, who in turn wouldn’t exist if Reese hadn’t gone back to stop them. In fact, if John Connor didn’t exist, Skynet never would have become self-aware (and possibly may not have ever existed), and Judgment Day never would have happened. So basically humanity was driven to the brink of extinction because Sarah Connor didn’t use contraception. 
How do we know that the events of T2 didn’t happen first from the future’s perspective? The T-1000 is sent back to kill John Connor, and when it failed, there was nothing better to send in its place (I believe it was supposed to be a prototype, meaning another wouldn’t be readily available). And so, using further research garnered from that encounter, a T-800 was sent back to kill Sarah, later in the future, but earlier in the past.
I do like the whole mind frak though of John Connor not being able to exist unless he was there to send back Reese and that the machines wouldn’t be there unless they sent back Ahnold…
Neither of which would have been sent back if the other hadn’t been sent back.
I think I’m getting a migraine. 
Doctor Who did something similar this last season. Someone from the Doctor’s future ran into him. He never met her before, but she had obviously known him for a long time (exactly how isn’t clear yet). There are other, more spoilery aspects of it that complicate the story even more:
[spoiler]She died soon after the first time he meets her, something she hadn’t known beforehand. Which meant that the first she met him, he will already know how she would die and never told her the whole time they knew each other.[/spoiler]
You earn your scifi fan geek bona fides for that answer. You get an aureate stellar object…
Any stellar object in particular?
pleasesayquasarpleasesayquasarpleasesayquasar
aw, it’s just a crappy little brown dwarf. 
Thanks anyway. 
You racist, how dare you. How can you say… wait what were we talking about? Oh, really? Ok, nevermind… Sorry.
At least it wasn’t a Red Giant.
It’s really a chicken or the egg thing. I wuz trying to come up with a scenario that occured without John or Sarah or whutever. AI gains power. A human force rises up so the machines send back a Terminator to destroy him/her leader. Down the line somewhere a loop is created and we witness one of those loops in the film.
The thing with Time Travel to me is that I believe in the theory that anything you do when you back in time you already did so it doesn’t matter what you do since you already did it. It also falls in line with the Grandfather theory (IE: You can’t go back in time and shoot your Grandfather, the gun will malfuction or you will be stopped or whatever, because it’s not meant to happen)
So I hope it’s like that cause then Time Travel would be coo’
Is Gort a sexually transmitted disease most common among Gornosexuals?
No you’re thinking of Gornorrhea.
even admiral frownypants busted up at that one
Turn that frown upside down is the motto of this clown.
Oh no. I resorted to rhyming. It’s time for bed.