May 2007 Archives

Just in case there's anyone out there who still has any sort of appetite for Star Wars-related crap, a couple of quickie links:

Since I seem to be time-travelling today anyhow (I've already been to 1999 and 1976), let's take a moment to consider the future...

You know, I like to think I've got pretty good recall of all the various things I was exposed to during my childhood, especially the pop-cultural stuff, but even I have forgotten a lot of the truly weird crap that was floating around in the 1970s. Consider, for example, this animated musical tribute to our nation's 1976 Bicentennial:

I think my favorite bit is the cornucopia spewing forth hamburgers, hot dogs, and console television sets. That's America in a nutshell, isn't it?

According to the digital clock-sign at the train station this morning, it was 4.21 AM, January 1, 1999. Oh, goodie, now I can relive all the madness that led up to the premiere of The Phantom Menace...

(Seriously, that would be fun, don't you think? The final few moments of unadulterated excitement before Star Wars fandom broke down into testy pro and con factions...)

Okay, so we all know intellectually that those imaginary spaceships we love in movies and on TV would be really frakkin' big if they were real, but do you have a genuine, visceral sense for how big? Have a look at the image below:

That's the handiwork of one Jason Fortuny, who decided to see how the U.S.S. Enterprise (the Next Generation version) would relate to his home town of Seattle. Various sources put the ship's official length at 643 meters. As you can see, that's gobsmackingly big in relation to real-world objects we can actually relate to, about seven city blocks long. Click the image to see it larger, and then click through to Jason's site to see the ship's silhouette laid over a GoogleEarth map of the city. Neat stuff...

Just a little PSA for anyone who lives in the Salt Lake area: the Virgin Megastore at Gateway is going out of business, and everything in the place is currently 25% off. Even with that hefty of a discount, the prices are still higher than you'd pay online -- no doubt that's why they're going out of business -- but a sharp-eyed shopper might be able to land some bargains. I myself picked up those groovy multi-disc collector's editions of Rebel Without a Cause, The Maltese Falcon, and Forbidden Planet, as well as Edward Scissorhands for The Girlfriend. Just in case you were wondering...

So, Monday night, The Girlfriend and I were at her apartment catching up on the season finale of 24. (Last week was a busy one, so I taped all the season finales; tonight we're planning to see how Lost wrapped up. And yes, I recorded these shows on good old-fashioned VHS tape. None of them fancy digital video hard-drive doohickeys for this grumpy old curmudgeon!) We were down to the final five tension-filled minutes when we heard something that can only be described using one of those comic-book sound-effect tags: crackBOOOOOM!!!

This was followed by the couch lurching sharply sideways.

Anne and I looked at each other with the same "what the hell was that?" expression, then she asked if I thought we ought to go outside. This seemed a prudent course of action...

All right, all right, the people have spoken (well, three of you have, anyway), so here you go: more Star Wars crap!

In honor of the 30th anniversary of my all-time favorite film -- and if you don't know what that is by now, then you haven't been paying attention -- allow me to present a whole mess of related links. You folks out there in InternetLand enjoy looking at this stuff tonight; me, I'll be off watching the movie itself. My bootlegged copy of the original, unrevised version, of course...

The blogosphere is, not surprisingly, sagging under the weight of personal 30th anniversary remembrances today, so I thought I'd offer a few links to some "official" coverage:

So, it occurs to me that the Big Anniversary Entry I posted earlier this morning is somewhat vague about my own personal experiences with Star Wars in the late '70s and early '80s, and some folks who are just joining us may wonder why. Well, it's because I've written about that subject before, of course:

I was seven years old in the summer of 1977, the prime age of susceptibility to a story featuring young, swashbuckling heroes, strange-looking creatures, and scary -- but not too scary -- villains. (See also Potter, Harry, Modern kids and.) I'm sure I must've seen a few movies on the big screen before then -- I vaguely recall a couple of early-70s live-action Disney films about people in really bad polyester knits -- but the first truly memorable film I saw in a theater...

Wait. Stop.

I'm not going to continue with that thought. My experience of seeing Star Wars for the first time couldn't have been much different than a lot of other people's. We were all kids, we'd never seen anything like it, we stood in lines that went around the block (literally, in my case -- I saw the film at the long-lost Centre Theatre in Salt Lake; there was no lobby to speak of, and the only place to queue up was outside, on the street), big spectacle, big excitement, tiny little brains melting, lifelong obsessions forming, blah blah blah.

We were all there, weren't we? And those of you who weren't have probably heard about it from someone who was. It was the defining communal experience of our generation, at least until the towers fell.

But here's the thing that was unique about my personal experience: I didn't actually want to see Star Wars. I had no interest in it whatsoever, and, in fact, I remember being frightened of it. I don't recall why, but something in the TV ads gave me a major case of the willies.

Read the rest here.

As fate would have it, today, in addition to the 30th anniversary of Star Wars, is also Towel Day, the international tribute to the late Douglas Adams. The 25th of May is a very hoopy day indeed.

Didn't believe me when I said that the suits at Fox had no idea how to market the original Star Wars? Then check out this vintage trailer:

I dig the ominous music. Sounds like it came from some disaster flick like The Poseidon Adventure or something. Not to mention the random alarm wail that's never actually heard in the film. The art of the movie trailer has come a long way in 30 years...

Thirty years ago today, a modestly budgeted little space adventure movie opened on a grand total of 32 screens nationwide.

That number seems hard to believe now, considering what that movie ultimately became; by contrast, Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End debuted last night on some 4,000 screens (according to this). There are technical reasons why the initial release was so small, but the simplest explanation is that things were done differently in 1977, and also that expectations for this particular film weren't very high. Science fiction had historically not done very well at the box office -- Planet of the Apes and its sequels being one notable exception -- and even when the opening weekend started looking like a record-breaker for the handful of theaters that were running it, the film's writer and director remained pessimistic about it succeeding over the long run. The studio heads he was working for largely agreed; they didn't even know how to market this oddball project, which was essentially a mash-up of Westerns, old Flash Gordon serials, and samurai pictures.

They needn't have worried, though. The public embraced the movie like nothing before or since. Word of mouth did their marketing work for them, and by the time the film "opened wide," audiences were clamoring to see it. It became a global phenomenon that would infiltrate every aspect of our culture and, for those who were lucky enough to be children in the late '70s and early '80s, it rose to the level of our shared mythology, a lingua franca that even non-geeks easily understand. I've met many people from other states, even other countries, and so long as they're roughly about my age, it seems like it doesn't matter whether we truly have anything in common. We always have this movie to discuss.

The movie in question, in case you haven't guessed way before now, is Star Wars. And yes, kids, that is what it was originally called back in '77 -- not "Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope." Just Star Wars.

It is not just fanboy enthusiasm on my part that makes this day worth noting, because this one movie, whose creator, George Lucas, has reportedly never been satisfied with it, changed everything about movies. The way they're made, the way they're marketed, and the way they're received.

Just in case anyone couldn't be bothered to click that link in the previous entry, I thought I'd go ahead and post up the intro for one of my favorite childhood series, The Six Million Dollar Man. I haven't seen the show in years, and I have half a hunch that it wouldn't hold up to my adult scrutiny, but I think this opening is still insanely dramatic and exciting:

I love those animated "computer graphics." My three Loyal Readers probably know what I'm going to say next: I still have my old Steve Austin doll. I've got his arch-enemy Maskatron, too, and the inflatable command base, "Bionic Mission Vehicle," and the rocket ship that turns into a medical bay. I never did have the Bigfoot doll, though... I might have to go questing on eBay...

In the emerging field of private space tourism, Burt Rutan's SpaceShipOne and Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic venture tend to get all the attention, but there are other entrepeneurs out there who've decided it's time to find a way to get human beings off this rock, if only for a few minutes.

One of those is Jim Benson, whose Benson Space Company has been working on a space ship modelled after NASA's HL-20 "lifting body" concept.

Today, however, I'm reading that BSC is abandoning its lifting-body work and will instead base its Dream Chaser sub-orbital spacecraft on a melding of several other vehicles with impressive track records -- the X-2 and X-15 experimental planes, and the venerable T-38 trainer. And it'll look something like this:

Here's a vintage photo of a B-24 fresh off the assembly line, ca. 1944. Why? 'Cause I think it's a cool photo, and because, if you'll recall, I took a ride on one of these babies a few years back and I have a real soft spot for the model:

Click to embiggen. Source here.

Just trying out a new toy, a way to embed photos in my entries without the tedium of saving a copy from the source to my desktop and re-uploading it to my blog server, and without breaking InterWeb etiquette by "hotlinking" to other people's bandwidth. Details here, if you're interested in techy stuff.

Some of you may be asking, "why an old photo of Al Gore holding a brick-sized mobile telephone?" Well, why not? I remember when brick-phones were quite the novelty, and it amuses me to see how far we've come in such a relatively short time...

About two weeks ago, the Postal Service implemented its annual and much-ballyhooed rate increase, kicking the price of a 39-cent stamp to 41 cents. Anticipating that a significant number of consumers (like yours truly) would still have a bunch of 39-cent stamps in their possession, the brilliant, benevolent, and very handsome people who work for the USPS have of course taken steps to ensure that two-cent stamps are readily available for those who need them. The automated vending kiosks will be overstocked with the needed "fill-in" stamps for the next month or so as a favor to valued customers whose schedules prevent them from visiting human postal workers during regular business hours. Thus, bills continue to get mailed on time, inconvenience is minimized, customer loyalty is maintained, everyone is happy, and spontaneous renditions of "Kumbaya" can be heard echoing through post offices across the land.

Well, that's probably how it would work on the Bizarro World. Here on Earth, my local post master, in all his or her infinite wisdom, has devoted only a single slot of the vending machine to two-cent stamps, and that slot has, of course, been sold out for two weeks.

Idiots.

I just learned that Bo Diddley, the elderly blues-and-rock guitarist best known for the classics "Who Do You Love?" and "Bo Diddley," suffered a stroke following a performance on Saturday night. And even though articles like this one are optimistic that Diddley will play again, I personally think his career is over. He's 78 years old, and my personal experience with strokes was not a positive one (my grandmother had one when she was still relatively young -- early 60s, I believe -- and she ended up trapped in a half-paralyzed body, unable to speak, for the last 16 years of her life).

Diddley played Salt Lake not too long ago and I remember thinking that I really ought to make an effort to go see him, because at his age you never know if he's going to come around again. I really need to pay more attention to thoughts like that...

SFSignal has another sci-fi movie keyword quiz up:

1. Friendship / Hiding In Closet / Quarantine / Bicycle
2. Violence / Sociopath / Invented Language / Eye
3. Graphic Violence / Cyberpunk / Toxic Waste / Human Android Relationship
4. Dystopian / Totalitarian / Illegal Immigrant / Hope
5. Science Runs Amok / Theme Park / Tropical Island / Child In Peril
6. Science Runs Amok / Theme Park / Evil Robot / Gunslinger
7. Gang / Feral Child / Muscle Car / Australian Outback
8. Kidnapping / Asylum / Animal Rights / Time Travel
9. Interdimensional Travel / Escaped Mental Patient / Rocket Car / Watermelon
10. Lincoln Memorial / Totalitarianism / Ice Cave / Man Hunt

You remember the rules from before: Name the SF flick based on those keyword clues from the IMDB. I actually thought this quiz was quite a bit easier than the first one. My answers are below the cut. You might want to write yours down or something before you click through...

And I thought the multiple cover "collector's edition" TV Guide tributes to Star Trek a few years ago were a bit much: A British film magazine called (appropriately enough) Empire is issuing no less than 30 different covers this month to commemorate the 30th anniversary of Star Wars. They're unveiling one a day here.

Makes me glad I no longer feel the frenzied collecting urge as strongly as I once did; ten years ago, I would've needed each and every one of these as a tulip needs the sun. Nowadays... well, they'd be nice to have, but I'll live if I don't get around to picking them up. At least, I think I'll live... I suddenly seem to have spots in front of my eyes...

Evanier announced something interesting today: "Off and on... I'm going to link to videos of openings I liked for TV shows. In some cases, I didn't like the show but I liked the opening." This is an idea I've been toying with for quite a while, if for no other reason than to let me dig up YouTube clips of things I haven't seen in a long, long time and wallow in a momentary glow of nostalgia for all the dreck that shaped me into the charming fellow I am today. Without further ado, here's my first entry in this whole new category of blogging:

Just in case you read my pointless ramblings via an aggregator, or otherwise don't follow the comments, there's been an interesting development in regards to yesterday's entry on the new Flash Gordon series. I've been contacted by Andrea, the webmaster for EricJohnsonWeb.com, who informs me that the head shot of Eric I saw is seven years out of date. She directed me to this more recent photo, and, based on it, I've got to admit that I was wrong. A little older now, Mr. Johnson has definitely acquired what I would consider the proper "Flash Gordon look" since that Smallville shot was taken. So this latest incarnation of Alex Raymond's legendary adventure story has that much going for it at least.

Interestingly, I failed to notice yesterday that Eric has, in fact, done some work I have some passing familiarity with, namely the Work and the Glory films. If you haven't heard of these, don't feel bad. I doubt that many people outside of Utah have.

I was just reading about the new shows CBS has coming up this fall, and I found something curious about this one:

MOONLIGHT, from prolific movie producer Joel Silver ("The Matrix" Trilogy), is about Mick St. John (Alex O'Loughlin, upcoming "White Out"), a captivating "undead" private investigator who uses his acute vampire senses to help the living - instead of feeding on them. In an agonizing twist of fate, Mick was "bitten" 60 years ago by his new bride, the seductive and beguiling Coraline (Amber Valletta, "Hitch"). Immortal and eternally as young, handsome and charismatic as he was then, Mick is sickened by Coraline and other vampires who view humans only as a source of nourishment. With only a handful of undead confidantes for company, including deceitful ally Josef (Rade Serbedzija, "24"), Mick fills his infinite days protecting the living, and trying not to think about how his life would have been if he hadn't followed his heart. However, after six decades of resisting, he wonders if it's time to pursue the love of a mortal. He has his eyes on Beth Turner, a beautiful, ambitious reporter who has been covering the ongoing plague of unusual murders. But would Beth even consider giving up a normal life to be with him, and can Mick risk the pain of seeing himself as a monster in her eyes? As Mick lives between two realities, fighting his adversaries among the undead and falling in love with Beth, he knows he needs to figure out a reason to keep "living."

You see, I remember that show being called Forever Knight when it aired about 15 years ago...

FYI to anyone reading this: the film's title is Blade Runner, not Bladerunner. I see this mistake made all over the place (most recently here) and it grates on my nerves like stainless-steel fingernails on a chalkboard.

Two words, people. Two.

That is all.

Remember a while back when I expressed cautious enthusiasm for the SciFi Channel's upcoming take on the venerable Flash Gordon character? Well, I'm no longer so optimistic about this project, not after seeing who the producers have cast as Flash and his lady love, Dale Arden.

Uber-cool B-movie star Bruce Campbell has done another Old Spice ad in the viral-video medium, and this one is even funnier than the first one:

So it occurred to me in the shower this morning that six of the big "tentpole" film releases this summer are "part threes": Spider-Man 3, Shrek the Third, Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End, Ocean's Thirteen, The Bourne Ultimatum, and Rush Hour 3. Sequels are the bread and butter of summertime movie-going, of course, but I can't recall any other year that had so many of them that were the same number in their respective series. Seems rather odd to me, like some kind of harmonic convergence or that planetary alignment that took place a few years ago, when the gravitational forces were all supposed to be amplified and wreck the Earth or some damn thing.

And another thing: back in my ticket-tearing days at the old Cinemark -- which began some 18 years ago (holy crap!) -- the summer blockbuster season started on Memorial Day weekend and ended on Labor Day weekend. Now, the season kicks off with the first weekend on May (as evidenced by the release of Spider-Man 3 a couple weeks ago) and looks like it will be pretty much over by the first weekend of August. That feels wrong to me. If this trend continues, we'll soon be seeing the the big mindless spectacles we all love so much around Valentine's Day instead of the Fourth of July, and that will just be... wrong. It'll be chaos, I tells ya! Dogs and cats living together! Yeargh!

One of the groovy things about having one of those new-fangled HDTVs is that I now get more channels than I used to, and I didn't even have to sign up for cable or The Dish. The secret is the digital transmissions that piggyback onto the plain ordinary old signal that merely mortal TVs pick up. Where I used to get only channel 5, for example, I now have 5.2 (a high-definition version of the same programming carried on analog 5) and 5.3 (a local weather channel and news headline ticker). It's pretty cool. And something that's really cool is channel 16.1, part of the ION television network. (My old TV didn't pick anything up at all on channel 16, so I don't know if this station has an analog equivalent or not. It's a completely new thing for me.)

And what, you may be asking, is so cool about this channel 16.1? Only a nice assortment of the classic programs that I grew up loving. How does The Wonder Years every night at 9 pm sound to you? Or Kung Fu, Charlie's Angels, and the original Mission: Impossible?

Or how about the fact that I was channel-surfing last night and ran across my beloved original version of Battlestar Galactica, airing at 6 pm on Sunday night just the way it did back in '78? It was even a good episode, "The Living Legend," with Lloyd Bridges as Commander Cain in command of the Galactica's long-lost sister ship, the battlestar Pegasus.

I have the series on DVD, of course, but there was a certain small thrill that came from just running across it somewhere on television, instead of deliberately choosing to put the disc on. The only thing that would've made it better would've been if I'd laying belly-down on the floor in front of a roaring fire, resting my chin in my hands and feeling the ends of my shoelaces dangling across the backs of my legs, the way I remember doing it when I was eight.

Of course, a roaring fire last night would've been a little uncomfortable; it is drifting into summer, after all. But you get the idea.

I prefer to deal with locally owned, mom-and-pop establishments whenever I can. It's a matter of principle for me (the principle being that I think large national corporations are, by nature, more interested in serving their shareholders than their customers). I buy books at Sam Weller's, groceries at Harmons, and I get my morning caffeine fix from either The Coffee Garden or the Salt Lake Roasting Company. And when I finally decided several years ago to get myself some home Internet access, well, naturally, I went with a hometown service provider, a little outfit called ArosNet.

For five years, I had absolutely no complaint with Aros. My access was generally reliable, the folks in the accounting office were pleasant to deal with when I made my payments, and the one time I had to contact tech support, they bent over backwards to resolve my problem. I felt good writing out my checks, knowing that my money was going into the pockets of my neighbors instead of to some corporate overlord five states away. I imagined that I'd probably be writing checks to Aros for a very long time to come.

Believe it or not, the primary focus of my fanboy energies throughout most of the 1990s was not the Star Wars saga. Really. I know it's hard to accept, but it really wasn't. It wasn't even Star Trek, despite all the various TV spin-offs running at that time. No, for the better part of the final decade of the 20th Century, I was seriously preoccupied by a fictional universe called Highlander.

Highlander is tough to explain to the uninitiated. It has a fairly bizarre premise to begin with, and its cause isn't helped by the fact that all the different properties that fall under the Highlander brand tend to contradict each other, or at the very least don't share the same continuity. I'm not going to go into all that in this entry -- I'll explore that topic some other time -- but what you need to know (if you don't already) is that the entire franchise originated with a 1986 movie and was revisited in a television series by the same name that ran from 1992 through 1998.

When Highlander: The Series ceased production in '98, The Girlfriend and I were sufficiently wrapped up in the whole scene that we flew to LA to attend a big farewell convention dedicated to the show. It was an exciting event -- the entire regular cast was in attendance, as well as a lot of the more prominent guest stars, and, of course, fans from all over the country.

Just in case anyone is keeping track, I finished Slaughterhouse-Five the other night. It was the first time I've ever read it, and the more I think about it, the more I think I liked it. I'm not prepared to say much about it yet -- I'm afraid my brain's literary-analysis lobe has atrophied quite a bit since I finished college and embarked on a steady diet of non-fiction and lowbrow genre crap -- but I plan to write more after I ponder it for awhile. In the meantime, however, I recommend this classic American novel for those who, like me, missed reading it in school.

I've now moved on to a collection of Vonnegut's short fiction called Welcome to the Monkey House. As with Slaughterhouse, I'm enjoying it. Some of it, anyway; I find short-story collections are, by their very nature, pretty hit-and-miss, with some stories doing more for me than others. There are enough hits happening, however, that I think I'm becoming a definite admirer of Kurt Vonnegut. But there is one thing about him that I'm not getting. All the cover blurbs on these '70s-vintage paperbacks of mine rave about how funny he is, and I'm afraid I just don't see it. Humor is, of course, highly subjective and, I believe, often dependent on historical context -- in other words, I'm suggesting that maybe this stuff was knee-slapping in the era of Vietnam and Watergate but no longer carries the same punch. Or maybe it's just me. Either way, I'm not laughing much at Vonnegut's writing. I find his words truthful, elegant, frequently powerful, often clever, but not funny. He does have a way with an image, though. Consider this line from his story "Who Am I This Time?":

...his eyes (were) still on her. Those eyes burned up clothes faster than she could put them on.

Oh, yeah, I like that. It's got a little noir flavor there, which makes sense in the story's context, it perfectly converys the man's expression, and it's a line that stays with you after you read it. Very nice.

But I still didn't laugh.

So, you remember a year or so back when a cruise ship repelled pirates using a new-fangled sound-based weapon? An entry today at the blog Danger Room features a report from someone who's actually been hit with the Long-Range Acoustic Device, a.k.a. "sonic blaster," as well as a a video of one in operation. There's not much to see in the video, but you can hear what the weapon sounds like. Oddly enough (or perhaps not, given my geekly inclinations), the weapon reminds me of the distinctive sound made by the giant, radioactive ants in the classic "big-bug" movie Them!; who knows, maybe that is the sound effect being played through the blaster, which is essentially just a souped-up loudspeaker.

Danger Room also recently posted a witness account and video of another "less-lethal" weapon being demonstrated, a "pain ray" that makes you feel as if your skin is boiling. That can be found here.

I honestly don't know how I feel about these weapons. I suppose it's a good thing that we are developing options that don't require genuinely injuring the target, but there's something very discomforting about these things. Something creepy. Maybe I'm just having trouble getting used to the idea that the science fiction I grew up on is becoming everyday life...

Here's a cool little item that I was planning to include in my recent round-up of space news, but somehow missed; it's a promotional trailer (ostensibly put out by NASA) hyping the planned return of human beings to the Moon:

Hm... according to this, Simple Tricks and Nonsense is ranked 2,393,955 out of however many sites there are out there in the vast, vast InterWeb. Not too bad, I suppose. Hey, I beat Greenberg, so that's something. (Just kidding, Brian...)

I'm thinking I may have to get a commemorative t-shirt to mark this occasion. How geeky would that be?

"Hero" is a word that's lost much of its meaning in recent years due to overuse and misuse. All too often, in my not-so-humble opinion, it's a label that gets applied to people who don't deserve it. The general public tends to confuse heroism with mere celebrity, while those who would influence the public aren't above trying to create artificial heroes when it suits their purposes or advances a cause.

But there are still genuine heroes in the world, even if we sometimes have to look backwards to see them. One of them died this week: Wally Schirra, age 84, of natural causes. Not a very heroic death, that, but everyone dies and most people do it in rather mundane fashions. What matters is what you do while you're alive. And he did some amazing things.

Telstar Logistics, the blog that got me thinking about maglevs the other day, has posted an account of what it's like to actually ride one, specifically the three-year-old Shanghai Maglev that connects the city to Pudong Airport:

...It was very shaky, despite the magnetic levitation. The train was going so fast that it is constantly bobbing horizontally as it seriously banks from side to side. The rolling/weaving makes it hard to walk around when it reaches top speed; indeed they don't want you to even stand up then. The tracks parallel the highway so cars look like they are going backwards. The entire train rides lasts less than 8 minutes. On the way in to Shanghai it took us 1.5 hours to travel the same distance in a taxi late at night.

I'm surprised (and, truth be told, disappointed) that the ride is so rough. I would've thought that it would be smoother than an ordinary train because of the levitation effect, but then, I suppose at those kinds of speeds it would be difficult (if not impossible) to avoid some kind of buffeting and turbulence from the airflow. Perhaps this is an engineering thing that could be solved, as opposed to a limitation of maglev technology? Anyone?

I'm not a big fan of Conan O'Brien -- as I believe I've mentioned before, I much prefer his cross-channel rival Craig Ferguson -- but I did enjoy his little tour of George Lucas' special-effects shop last night:

Well, that last one was depressing, wasn't it? Sorry about that... how about a game to try and break out of the funk?

John at SF Signal put this little exercise together:

I went to IMDB and looked up 15 movies. Listed below are four official "Plot Keywords" for each movie.

Your job: Name these movies!

1. Stripper Dancing With Snake / Owl / Broken Finger / Killer Robot
2. Future / Visceral / Claustrophobic / Impregnation
3. Messiah / Wuxia Fiction / Young Boy / War
4. Skin Care / Future Noir / Paraplegic / Perfection
5. Saving The World Mission / Extraterrestrial / Space Travel / Alien Space Craft
6. Advertising / Attempted Murder / Clairvoyant / Eye Surgery
7. Very Little Dialogue / Surrealism / Astronaut / Talking Computer
8. Prophecy / Cat / Subway / Cyberspace
9. Sunglases / Tabloid / Cat / Spoof
10. Cryogenics / Post Apocalyptic / Horseback Riding / Beach
11. Human Versus Computer / Gladiator / Frisbee / Video Game
12. Revenge / Spacecraft / Sandstorm / Midlife Crisis
13. Evolution / Prejudice / Wheelchair / New York City
14. End Of Civilization / Bikini / Big Ben / Inventor
15. Robot / Scientist / UFO / Washington Monument

Give it a try, kids, then check yourself against my answers after the break.

Springtime in Utah is marvelously chaotic. Yesterday at lunchtime it was 80-some-odd degrees and brilliantly sunshiney. Come evening, I was driving home from the train station with the top down, a strong wind buffetting the 'stang, and turbulent swirls of charcoal-colored clouds sweeping across the Wasatch Mountains in the east. This morning, the temperature is in the 40s, it's been raining sporadically since late last night, and the sky looks like a fresh bruise.

Normally, I love this variability -- I find it exciting, and most of the time I actually like the rain. It reminds me of England. But this morning, it's kind of bumming me out, and, oddly enough, I think it's for the exact same reason I usually like it: it reminds me of England. It's been almost 14 years since my big landmark month-long adventure there; I can't believe so much time has passed, or how quickly it's seemed to go. Back then, I really believed I would've returned by now, and that I would've gone lots of other places, too. I've crossed a few destinations off my list in the years since then, but not nearly as many as I once imagined I would.

I'm feeling melancholy today, I guess, and nostalgic and rambling and self-indulgent. In other words, all those things that define Simple Tricks and Nonsense. I probably shouldn't be boring my Three Loyal Readers with this whiny crap, and I apologize to you for doing it, but this is what's on my mind: things I thought I'd do by this point in my life and things I haven't yet done. Of course, it probably doesn't help my mood that I've started reading Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five, a book that's positively obsessed with death and time and finding a way to look back at things without turning to stone (if you haven't read it, trust me, that all makes sense in context). I find myself thinking of a song by Rush that I used to like, "Time Stand Still":

I've come across lots of interesting space-related items in the past few weeks (er, months), but I've been too busy or too preoccupied with other matters to mention any of them here, so I think it's time for another exciting installment of... Drive-By Blogging!

(I'm thinking of turning this into a regular feature here at Simple Tricks, by the way. It seems like there are always many more items that I want to comment on than I ever manage to actually devote entire entries to. Sigh...)

Andrew Sullivan reminds us of the way things used to be:

"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the president to explain to us what the exit strategy is," - George W. Bush, April 9, 1999, criticizing President Clinton for not setting a timetable for exiting Kosovo.

"I think it's also important for the president to lay out a timetable as to how long they will be involved and when they will be withdrawn," - George W. Bush, June 5, 1999.

Interesting how people change their tune, isn't it?

As far as I can tell, the following proclamation is legit:

The Congress, by Public Law 85-529, as amended, has designated May 1 of each year as "Loyalty Day." This Loyalty Day, and throughout the year, I ask all Americans to join me in reaffirming our allegiance to our Nation.

NOW, THEREFORE, I, GEORGE W. BUSH, President of the United States of America, do hereby proclaim May 1, 2007, as Loyalty Day. I call upon the people of the United States to participate in this national observance and to display the flag of the United States on Loyalty Day as a symbol of pride in our Nation.

Is it just me, or is there something seriously creepy about this? Doesn't a holiday to "reaffirm our allegiance to our Nation" actually conflict with the spirit of the most American of all American holidays, the Fourth of July (a.k.a. Independence Day, when we celebrate a bunch of guys who were willing to reject allegiance to their Nation -- the British Empire -- when it became necessary)?

Here's a follow-up to the previous entry, a video that looks like it was originally a news clip. It details the Japanese effort, shows how the technology works, and includes lots of footage of the prototype train racing along its 18-kilometer test track. The clip is several years old, and a little pessimistic on the funding issue, but it's neat stuff...

[Update: I've found another one, a compilation of home-video clips shot by curious tourists, several of them from ground level, right alongside the track, so you can really get a sense of the speed and relative quiet of this machine. It's on the other side of the break...]