The Astronaut Farmer Straight Story" and came up with something profound in its simplicity . . . The Polishes set up a classic David and Goliath situation, leaving no question of whom the audience will root for. There are sufficient surprises along the way, so the ending is far from predictable. "The Astronaut Farmer"'s goofy quality makes it totally endearing. It's also super entertaining." Steve Dollar of the "New York Sun" said, "Even for a comedy with dramatic drive, "The Astronaut Farmer" demands that the audience suspend its disbelief on multiple fronts . . . What is believable, however, is the passion of
Chinese as a foreign language further. In a Biblical vein similar to Kircher's, he tried to demonstrate that Chinese was the Primitive or Adamic language. In his "An Historical Essay Endeavoring a Probability That the Language of the Empire of China Is the Primitive Language" (1669), he suggested that Chinese was the language spoken before the confusion of tongues. Inspired by these ideas, Leibniz and Bacon, among others, dreamt of inventing a "characteristica universalis" modelled on Chinese. Thus wrote Bacon: Leibniz placed high hopes on the Chinese characters: The serious study of the language in the West began with missionaries coming to China during the