Simple Tricks and Nonsense

The other day my brain wandered all the way back to a dim, cobwebby memory of my childhood in the 1970s, to something I thought I recalled seeing in those long ago days of macrame' and man-perms... a made-for-TV movie that had something to do with two kids and a sea turtle into whose shell they carved their initials... and then as grown-ups these two encounter a gargantuan monster turtle, which naturally enough is revealed in the very final shot to be their turtle, for it still had their initials in its shell...

Now, I tend to have surprisingly good recall of the stuff I saw and heard as a kid -- uncannily good, according to The Girlfriend, who despite being only two years younger than me remembers practically nothing of the '70s -- and my memories of TV are often especially clear, despite not having seen some of this stuff since it was originally broadcast. There was, for instance, an episode of Space: 1999 in which a monster pulled screaming astronauts underneath its body and then spat back a smoking, human-shaped pile of cinders. (It's called "Dragon's Domain," and looking at the comments over on YouTube, it appears I wasn't the only one who was completely traumatized by it.) And then there was an episode of the Patrick Duffy series Man from Atlantis in which people were infested by mind-controlling "spores" that looked like little blue lights. I remember KISS Meets the Phantom of the Park and The Paul Lynde Halloween Special (which also featured KISS, interestingly enough). Hell, I even remember a cheapo TV movie about Captain Nemo of 20,000 Leagues fame going up against a submarine-based laser weapon controlled by some kind of alien. All of those things are -- and always have been -- pretty clear in my mind. I've always known that those experiences did happen, that those movies and episodes existed. I retained at least a vague idea of the plotlines and casts and titles. But this turtle thing... all I had of it were the kids and the initials carved into the shell, and that stinger ending. I couldn't remember a title or a plot. Just... images. I briefly wondered if maybe I had dreamed the whole thing -- there are certain, very intense dreams I had years ago that I still recall in flashes, and I considered the possibility that this turtle movie was one of those.

There was only one way to be sure... so I fired up the Google-ator and typed in three words: "tv movie turtle." And lo and behold, one of the very first items it returned was a cult-site review of something called The Bermuda Depths:

Broadcasted on Friday, January 27, 1978 on the ABC Friday Night Movie, THE BERMUDA DEPTHS is an American made-for-TV movie that was released theatrically in some foreign countries soon afterwards. Often sought out as the "giant turtle movie" or "that movie with the girl with glowing green eyes" by IMDB.com and Ebay searchers who cannot remember the film's title...

Well, that's all I needed to read. The review goes on to describe in great detail a story that doesn't ring even small, unobtrusive bells. But I know that was my turtle movie. And from the sound of the review, it was very surrealistic, which explains my impression that it could have been a dream.

Curiosity aroused, I clicked the mouse a few more times... and learned that, of course, this thing is available on DVD as one of the manufacture-on-demand offerings from the Warner Archive, only $14.95. I filed that little tidbit away, thinking I may take a gamble one of these days and buy a copy, just to see what the heck it is that's lurking in the musty corner of my memory. And that's basically where this story would've ended... if later the same day I hadn't spotted a news item about a man finding a turtle into which his son had carved his initials... in 1965.

Sometimes the echoes and resonances get to be a little spooky.

Turning now to non-space-shuttle-related space news, did you hear the big announcement a couple weeks ago that a start-up called Planetary Resources seriously intends to attempt mining near-Earth asteroids for useful materials within the next few years? It sounds far-fetched, I know. Asteroid mining has been the stuff of science fiction for decades -- I remember reading about grizzled space-suited prospectors in the novels of Robert Heinlein and Larry Niven when I was young -- and there are plenty of skeptics out there rolling their eyes at what looks to them like either a scam or a set-up for inevitable disappointment. But there are supporters, too, and plenty of them, from what I can tell. (Planetary Resources reported on its Twitter feed that it has received over 2,000 resumes since the announcement.) No less a space authority than the Bad Astronomer, Phil Plait, thinks the company can pull it off, based on what he's seen of their proposals so far. And so do I, for whatever my interested layperson's opinion is worth.

The company's plan, while unquestionably ambitious, sounds feasible and logical. Like the Apollo program, it comprises a series of incremental steps, each building on the previous one to expand the scale and scope of the overall operation. The first step involves placing a number of small, inexpensive telescopes in orbit to search for suitable targets. (This is supposed to happen by the end of next year.) Next, robot probes, adapted from the telescopes to help save on R&D expenses, would be dispatched to the target objects to get a closer look and do a little prospecting. Then comes the critical step: beginning to exploit the asteroids that are found to have the proper compositions. While much of the press coverage has focused on the so-called platinum-group metals that are believed to be abundant in asteroids, Planetary Resources actually appears to be more interested in finding "volatiles," non-metallic materials with low boiling points that also happen to be critical supplies for spacecraft... materials such as water. Again, scientists believe water ought to be present in at least some asteroids, bound up in minerals or even in good old-fashioned ice. PR wants to extract that water so it can be stored in space-going supply depots and made available -- for a price, of course -- to passing spacecraft for use as fuel or, in the case of manned missions, to replenish the crew's supplies. In theory, at least, this would be much more practical and cheaper than lifting that heavy stuff out of Earth's gravity well on board a rocket. A crew on the way to Mars would need to bring only a small store of water to get them started, and then rendezvous with one (or more) of these depots to "top off" their tanks while they're en route to their destination.

But what about those precious metals? Planetary Resources fully intends to exploit those as well, but the company's plans are a bit less developed on this point (i.e., nobody is quite sure how to do it yet). One solution would be to send an automated operation out to the asteroid to dig up, process, and return the ores to Earth. Another idea is to move the asteroid closer to us, into orbit around the Earth or more likely the Moon. I'm sure the idea of changing a near-Earth asteroid's course to bring it even closer to us would make some people nervous -- what a great idea for a James Bond villain who wants to destroy civilization! -- but consider the other side of that equation: if we can learn to move them closer, we can also learn to move the dangerous ones away from us.

Now, all of this promises to be very expensive -- everything involving space is -- and the skeptics are basing their negative arguments on that, saying, essentially, that there's no way for Planetary Resources' investors to make a profit. They say that no matter how difficult mineral extraction may be here on Earth, it's always going to be cheaper than doing it out there. But here's the thing: we don't really know that for sure. Once we figure out the technology and techniques, asteroid mining may not be as difficult as it presently sounds. Or the amount of exotic materials returning to Earth may be enough -- or even more than enough -- to fully justify the expense and difficulty. Consider the environmental benefits of no longer having to rip apart mountains here at home to find what we need. Finally -- and this is the really exciting part, to me, because for a change someone is thinking of the future of our species instead of their stock portfolio -- Planetary Resources claims its investors aren't interested in making a profit so much as building an infrastructure for a permanent human presence out there, among the stars. This is about exploration. This is about getting off this rock, or at least trying to protect it a little better. This is about "space... the final frontier." In other words, this is all of my youthful idealism about space travel coming back around in the vision of a bunch of rich guys (filmmaker and deep-sea adventurer James Cameron among them, hence the title of this blog entry) who think we ought to be doing Big Things, or at least attempting to do them. I love everything about this. I really hope they pull it off.

A few other items of interest:

• SpaceX hopes to launch its Dragon capsule to the International Space Station this coming Saturday, May 19. If all goes well, the Dragon will become the first commercial spaceship -- designed, built, owned and operated by a private company -- to call at the ISS. The Dragon is supposed to undergo a series of manuevers before attempting to dock with the station, in order to prove its operational readiness. Then, if successful, it will close with the ISS, where station astronauts will capture it using their robotic manipulator arm (similar to the one that was carried by the shuttles) and bring it into a docking port. The capsule is carrying a load of cargo for the station, including food, water, and fresh clothing, which the astronauts will swap out for items they're sending back to Earth. After two weeks at the station, the capsule will detach and return for a splashdown and recovery in the Pacific. If you're interested, SpaceX has a detail-packed press kit available for download, and the LA Times put up a pretty nifty infographic that illustrates the Dragon and its operations (including its size relative to the shuttle orbiter, always an interesting comparison).
• Speaking of SpaceX, there was an announcement last week that the company is going to partner with Bigelow Aerospace, the company that's been experimenting with inflatable space habitats for several years, to provide a Dragon-based taxi service to and from a Bigelow-constructed space station of some kind, likely a hotel for wealthy joyriders.
• And lastly, I ran across a pretty interesting piece the other day about yet another commercial spacecraft currently being developed, Sierra Nevada Corporation's Dream Chaser, which the company hopes to begin flight-testing this summer with a eye toward an orbital demonstration by 2016. Unlike all the other new spaceship designs we've heard about since the shuttle's retirement was announced, Dream Chaser is not an Apollo-style capsule. Rather, it's in a category of strange aircraft known as "lifting bodies," which resemble ordinary airplanes but with very stubby little wings, almost no wings at all in fact; they rely on the shape of their fuselages to provide them with lift. NASA has experimented with them off and on for decades (my fellow children of the 1970s may remember that Steve Austin became the Six Million Dollar Man after crashing one of them) and incorporated lessons learned from them into the shuttle orbiter design. Dream Chaser is designed to be launched on top of a rocket, thus avoiding the dangerous debris shower that doomed shuttle Columbia, but glide back through the atmosphere and land on a runway the way the shuttles did. I have to say I personally am thrilled that somebody is still looking into a shuttle-type approach. I'm pretty excited about SpaceX and Dragon -- that's a fantastic story of the little guys triumphing, assuming the demo flight on Saturday works out -- but it seems to me that a true spacecraft ought to be flyable, and not just come plummeting out of the sky into the ocean or some deserted patch of land somewhere. I'll be watching Sierra Nevada closely...

Oh, yeah, extra credit to the first Loyal Reader who can identify what we're looking at in the image up there at the top of the entry...

Spotted something interesting and/or amusing over on Boing Boing yesterday: It's an image of the card that actor and stand-up comedian Tom Wilson, who played the lunkheaded bully Biff Tanner in the classic Back to the Future movie trilogy, reportedly hands out when he's approached by BTTF fans, rather than waste time answering questions he's responded to a million times already:


At first glance, this seems kind of dickish, and that's apparently how Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing interpreted it (Cory's comment was "I wonder, though, how many of the fans who approach him with these questions ask them because they really care about the answer, and how many are using the questions as a conversational gambit, and really just want to speak briefly with him because they admire his work?"). However, having talked to a few actors associated with cult and/or genre films in my time, I really can't condemn Wilson for taking this approach. It's got to become very tiresome for these people to constantly hear the same old inquiries, especially when they're all related to a movie they made 25 years ago, and especially when many of the questions aren't even about them, their roles, or their performances, but instead pertain to bigger stars than themselves or the technical matters of movie-making. But then, my reaction to this may be skewing more sympathetic because I have an idea of the tone Wilson probably intends. Here's something I first saw a year or two ago but never got around to blogging about, in which Wilson addresses these same questions in a somewhat different format:

The Tower Theatre, Salt Lake's local art cinema and the closest thing to a revival house we have in these parts, has just released the schedule for this year's "Summer of 35mm," its annual program of cult favorites and Hollywood classics, and it's a hell of a line-up this year:

I've seen all of this year's selections before, but there are only a couple of these I wouldn't want to see again (Clue, which I didn't care much for, and The Royal Tenenbaums -- I just don't get Wes Anderson's precious little yuppy autobiographies), and there are several here I've never before seen on the big screen, notably Chinatown. The new releases this summer may not be doing much for me, but that doesn't mean I won't be spending plenty of time at the movies... I hope!

How about we discuss something a little less dire now, okay?

I started thinking this morning about something I said a while back in that long entry about my personal history with the Titanic story. Specifically, I opined that the late actor Richard Jordan made a better Dirk Pitt in the 1980 movie Raise the Titanic than Matthew McConnaughey did in his 2005 film, Sahara. Dirk Pitt, to refresh everyone's memories, is the fictional hero of a long-running series of adventure novels by a guy named Clive Cussler. While I doubt even the hardest-core Cussler enthusiast would ever argue (at least not with a serious face) that the Pitt novels are anything resembling "good" literature, I've always found them to be reliably entertaining summertime/airport reads, in large part because the central character is so vividly drawn by the author. Readers of these books know Dirk Pitt.

Now, neither Jordan nor McConnaughey resembles Pitt as Cussler describes him: craggy features, thick black hair, and deep green eyes. In fact, the only actor that I can think of who really fits that description is Tom Selleck in his Magnum PI heyday. But no matter; oftentimes it's more important for an actor in a film adaptation to convey a character's spirit than to literally look the way the author visualized him. So, what do we know about Pitt's spirit?

Well, he's a romantic with a deep respect for history and its artifacts, as well as for the sea. He's a defender of justice, the sort of hero who stumbles into situations in which people are being mistreated and he won't rest until he's corrected the problem. He has a kind heart that endears him to women, but he can be single-minded and absolutely ruthless when he needs to be. He's frequently brash when the action is underway, but he's also methodical when he's trying to unravel a mystery or searching for a treasure. He's a rough-and-tumble man's man who enjoys a burrito with his pals, but given his background as the wealthy son of a U.S. senator (and occasional lover of another), he's equally comfortable rubbing elbows with the upper crust and enjoying the finer things.

Little of this is depicted in the two movies, which are both pretty light on the background character details. But again, we're looking for a sense of the character, if not the specifics. So, given all that, which one of these guys do you think looks more like like he has an explorer's heart and a gourmand's taste, who can gallantly offer his arm to a little old lady before cold-bloodedly shooting an assassin between the eyes? Is it this guy?

Or this one?

I suppose it's all a matter of personal taste, but to me, McConnaughey's Pitt looks more likely to scarf a bag of Cheetos and a six of Bud Light than sip a flute of Veuve Clicquot, and I just don't buy him as a rugged sea-faring man with a passion for history. Maybe it was Jordan's beard. Or the fact that he was my first exposure to the character. Or maybe it's just that the only thing I've ever really liked McConnaughey in was Dazed and Confused, and I can't see him as anything other than a laid-back goofball.

FAIR WARNING TO MY MORE SENSITIVE READERS: The following entry recounts something deeply unpleasant that happened to me a few nights ago. I posted a highly condensed form of this story already on my Facebook page, but it's still bothering me, and I want to discuss it in more detail. And -- here's where the warning comes in -- I've chosen to render it as accurately as my fallible, sleep-deprived, middle-aged human memory permits, which means I'm not going to pull any punches in the foul language department. I'm not talking the little four-letter swears we all learned in the third grade, either. No, this story involves the big two-dollar vulgarities, the kind that start fistfights (as, indeed, they were intended to here), as well as the unsavory spectacle of a couple of grown men acting like ten-year-olds. I'm not proud of my own role in this nastiness, even though I was just giving back what I got. The whole thing actually shook me pretty hard, which is why I'm still thinking about it three days later, and why I'm going to blog about it now. Anyhow, yeah... nasty words and poor behavior below the fold. Consider yourself warned.

So here's another cool pic I ran across earlier. That's Enterprise and the Shuttle Carrier Aircraft again, flying over Manhattan back in 1983. I had forgotten -- if I ever knew -- that, following the completion of the approach and landing tests and the beginning of regular shuttle operations, NASA sent Enterprise on a world tour, visiting airshows in France, Germany, Italy, the U.K., and Canada, as well as a number of U.S. states. She even appeared at the 1984 World's Fair held in Louisiana before being handed over to the Smithsonian Institution and becoming a taxidermied display piece in 1985.

None of which is here nor there, I just thought it was a neat vintage photo and wanted to share. It appears in a number of places around the 'net, but I grabbed it from the Twitter feed of Todd Lapin, a.k.a. the proprietor of the excellent Telstar Logistics blog, which I have been following for a number of years. Thanks, as always, for finding such interesting stuff, Todd!

I count myself among them:


Created by: Online PhD

Amusing quote of the day, taken from an article about Ryan Seacrest, the terminally bland television and radio personality whom many say is the new Dick Clark:

Seacrest has become so entwined with Clark's story that when news of [Clark's] death broke, it was hard not to picture Seacrest kneeling in some dark rite, screaming to the heavens as Clark's power possessed him, "Highlander"-style.

I long suspected Dick Clark must have been immortal, so, no, that's really not such a difficult thing to imagine at all. Hmm.