You are caught in a snow blizzard and take refuge in a Coaching Inn.
The landlord shows you to a table for the evening meal and you find you are sharing a table with…
Well for me it would be the late Sir Terry Pratchett. Author of my favourite book, ‘Night Watch’. I will regret all my life I never had the chance to meet him.
But who would you choose to share that meal with, be they dead or alive?
Comments
No problem with that one
Isambard Kingdom Brunel
As a fellow engineer i'm sure that we would have a lot to talk about.
Samantha
My would be
Lord Edward FitzGerald
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord_Edward_FitzGerald
https://mewswithaview.wordpress.com/
I know exactly who I'd dine with.
I'd sup with the Devil !
my daughter
Did meet him at a convention a couple of years before he passed (jealous!)
I cover your Pratchett and raise you Douglas Adams, another stolen far too soon.
There again, Michael Palin would be an excellent dinner companion too.
Sam, I think old IKB would actually be a bit of a bore, his wife though was apparently a lively soul! And Bev, the Devil? you dine with Her often enough as it is - lol
Mads
Madeline Anafrid Bell
IKB a bit of a bore?
I'm sure that we could have had a lively debate on the pro's and con's of two things. 1) The Broad Gauge and 2) The Atmospheric Railway.
An alternative would be Tommy Flowers. The man was a genius.
https://interestingengineering.com/tommy-flowers-the-man-who...
As a friend of the National Museum of Computing where there is a Collossus today.
Some parts of it are still classified.
Samantha.
Michael Palin
Michael Palin would be good. John Cleese would probably have me laughing til my stomach hurt, and Terry Gilliam would be fascinating to talk about film with. I think any of the Pythons would make for ab entertaining dining experience. But probably not Terry Jones in his Mr. Creosote persona, for obvious reasons.
~hugs, Veronica
.
(But there's a lot of offbeat comics I'd love to meet. Johnathan Winters, Ernie Kovacs, Spike Mulligan, Groucho... Not sure why it's them and not great scientists or authors, wise philosophers or famous historical figures.)
What borders on pure insanity?
Canada and Mexico.
.
I am undecided......
Between Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson.
D. Eden
Dum Vivimus, Vivamus
I think
That I would want to dine with H.G. Wells or Jules Verne, probably leaning toward Wells since he liked to inject social commentary as much as I do. Still either of them would make for a fascinating dinner conversation and I'd love to know what they would think of the modern world and where we might go from here.
*big hugs*
Amethyst
Don't take me too seriously. I'm just kitten around. :3
Bertrand Russell
Without a doubt! Mathematician, philosopher, peace activist. His symbol for nuclear disarmament (semaphore symbols for N and D combined
is frequently mistaken for a "Peace" symbol.
Liz
judas
i would like to dine with Judas Iscariot. The only one of the twelve who really believed. Wasn't actually trying betray just start the revolution to free the Jews from Roman tyranny. That is why he killed himself. Because he realised that betrayal was what he accomplished and not a revolution.
ed
ed
before she passed
i traded emails once or twice with Elisabeth moon. I would have liked to meet her in person.
as for living authors that is easy, Tom cunliffe...who I also trade emails with regularly, sigh maybe one day.
While I like the series of a few other authors I dont really want to meet them. Jk rowlings books made good movies but I wouldnt want to meet her.
1984 Dune was a good movie, but the author of book hated it and remade the movies in 2000(which were kinda hard to follow, confusing, and dark)
My all time fav author and writer would be gene roddenberry though. He alone pioneered scific from obscurity into primetime with his "wagontrain to the stars" without him much of the sci fic we all enjoy today, including much of the fantasy would probably not be around.
I sort of did this
I had something like this happen at a small science fiction con once. Ended up sharing a table with Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. Unfortunately, the room was too busy and loud for conversation, and in fact, Pournelle had turned his hearing aids off and couldn't hear anything.
I think my choice, today, is Walt Kelly, creator of Pogo. Or one of the Pythons, some inspired silliness is needed.
Hugs,
Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
Sir Richard Burton
The explorer, not the actor. The stories he could tell! I'd probably want a large salt shaker though.
Or maybe Jim Bridger. No salt needed; he made no bones about telling some stretchers but the places and things he saw were amazing.
It's been said...
Never meet your heroes. You'll probably be disappointed. For me though, there'd be no disappointment.
I'd meet with the one man I ever loved. George "Mikey" Pearsoll. My hero, the best man I ever met in all my life, in all my travels and the only man I could ever say I truly loved. I knew him as a friend, a mentor, a shirttail cousin twice or more removed, a brother from another mother, but he knew and accepted that I felt the way I felt for him. It wasn't anything we felt we could act on, but he knew...he even told me once. If I had been born female, I'd have grabbed him up so fast his head would have spun and I'd have had his babies gladly and loved them as I loved him...but I couldn't...and then he died...WAY too soon...he was younger than me.
So nobody famous, but the love of my life. THAT'S who I'd want that dinner with.
Cathy
As a T-woman, I do have a Y chromosome... it's just in cursive, pink script.
Hmm, that is a tough one...
I would say H.P. Lovecraft, but I suspect that me being trans, he would probably want nothing to do with me. Same goes for Tolkien, I suspect. Assuming it was possible to overcome the language barrier, maybe Bodicca, or Sappho?
Really Really Tough
After I was thinking about various possibilities, Hugh Ross (the astronomer) came to mind. It would be nice to sit with him and tell him off, and how!
Once, I was eating at a small Chinese place in Harvard Square (Cambridge, MA). A table over, a couple older people were discussing general relativity (IIRC). I'm not good with faces, for people I don't know well, but one of them looked to me like Kip Thorne. So I braved up and asked if he was. No, but he was often confused with Kip Thorne, he answered.
Albert Einstein would have been nice to dine with. I'm more sympathetic than most about Einstein's "God does not play dice with the universe," and his talk of the spooky action-at-a-distance aspect of quantum theory. But also, standard quantum theory, just following the formalism, leads to the emulation of both. It's one version of the multiverse theories.
-- Daphne Xu (a page of contents)