Yaxela

:D Come on, surely the first time you used a fliptop phone you shook it open a la Kirk?

OK; it's electric fields generated by electric devices. You know traditional TVs, right? They have Cathode Ray Tubes, which use electric fields to move a beam of electrons about the screen. Here, we use electric fields to move hot electrically charged gas, so we can form a hot screen of gassyness and hold it in place using electric fields. Touching it is an ouchie. :-)

Ringringringringringringring BANANAphone! Ringringringringringringring bananaphone! I get this feeling It's so appealing For us to get together and sing, sing! Operator, get me Bei-jing-jing-jing!

Congratulations you people! Wow.... WOW!

The Lash (see Winston Churchill for details)

We don't get Mr. Pibb here, but I think I'd still prefer Dr. Pepper. He's got his PhD, after all.

What about good old-fashioned root beer? Mmmmm.... root beer. Why are there no properly minty soft drinks? I think there should be a turquoise fizzy drink with peppermint and maybe caraway.

Ah, my grinder-obsessed friend, (would someone explain that to me?) not only can it be held between glass, but also can it be held between electric fields making it a proper forcefield. The only problem is that it's an effort to set up and takes a lot of energy. Oh, and there will need to some structure to generate the electric fields and ionise the gas... but it can be forcefieldy. Such is the joy of plasma.

That depends. Fanta is the very spirit of evil. Whereas Britvic is the finest thing known to mankind.

This is interesting... Fake Doctor Pepper Roundup

It is indeed made by Cadbury Schweppes, the chocolate-and-soft-drink equivalent of Microsoft. It's distributed by Pepsi in the USA and by Schweppes in the UK. Doctor Pepper. What's the WORST that could happen? Apart, of course, from choking on the bottle top and falling off a precipice onto the trigger for an intercontinental ballistic missile.

oooh! What's Sierra Mist? Sounds interesting.

Ah, now this is the bit that gets cool. There are such things as forcefields already in existence, in the form of the 'plasma window'. Because plasma (high energy ionised gas) carries a charge, it can be channeled into a thin plate of gas using electrical fields. This has been done to a limited extent and the plate of gas is called the 'plasma window'. It's VERY similar to forcefields and shields in ST... see the November 1, 1995 edition of the Journal of Applied Physics for more.

I love My Grandfather's Clock. I always thought it was limited to colliery bands, but I found out today it's treated as a bluegrass number on the American side of the pond... strangely addictive. My Grandfather's Clock

Rain