Simple Tricks and Nonsense

Come Back to the Engine Room, Jimmy Doohan, Jimmy Doohan

Being the devoted fanboy that I am, I've been monitoring the InterWeb Thingie over the past week to see what people have been saying about James "Scotty" Doohan. For anyone who may be interested, here are the highlights:

First, I'd like to frighten a lot of my readers by showing off the depths of my geekiness. I'm going to do this by correcting the AP obituary that ran in many news sources the day of Jimmy's death, specifically the statement that "[Doohan's] only other TV series besides Star Trek was another space adventure, Space Command, in 1953."

That's untrue. In fact, Jimmy appeared in a third space adventure called Jason of Star Command, which ran on in the late '70s just before the Star Trek franchise really started rolling again. JOSC was a live-action, Saturday-morning program spun-off from another kidvid series, Space Academy (which, interestingly enough, also starred a has-been from a 1960s primetime sci-fi series, Johnathan Harris of Lost in Space).

It's no big deal that Jason didn't get mentioned in the obit -- Jimmy himself probably didn't care too much about this particular credit -- but it annoys me that the writer couldn't spend thirty seconds on the Internet Movie Database before he started banging out the prose. If you're going to make a blanket statement about how many TV series an actor worked in, you really should have your facts straight.

[Ed. note: I was just verifying that the link to the AP story still works and I see that the obit has been updated to include a note about Jason of Star Command. But I already had my correction written -- and I like to show off that "unsettling command" of pop-cultural detritus I've heard I possess -- so I'm leaving it here.]

Anyway, moving on, I've been rather surprised and disappointed that Jimmy's former co-stars haven't had much to say, at least not publicly, on his passing. Shatner offered up a couple of less-than-inspiring words on his Website's message board, which I guess isn't too surprising given the bad blood between him and Doohan. (Call me a romantic, but I was really hoping The Shat would use the occasion of Jimmy's death to try and put right old wrongs, but from what I understand, he's never fully acknowledged that there even were any wrongs. As they say on our planet, c'est la vie, I suppose.) Nichelle Nichols' site hasn't been updated in over a year, and Walter "Chekov" Koenig's site is basically just an autograph mill. Leonard Nimoy has a site dedicated to his photography work, but it contains nothing personal or Star Trek-related. The only member of the classic Trek cast that's made a fitting statement, in my opinion, is George Takei, a.k.a. Sulu. His tribute is a nice piece of work, heartfelt and honest. Of the several remarks he makes about Jimmy, I like this one best:

For a time, before he moved to Redmond, Washington, Jimmy was my special drinking buddy. We shared some blissful times together. He loved his Scotch. He was of Irish ancestry but he said he had imbibed enough of the libation of Scotland to qualify him as a Scotsman. When his doctor told him he had to quit drinking Scotch, he dutifully complied. He switched to vodka.

Wil Wheaton, the Trek alum with the greatest Web presence, didn't say too much, but what he did say was nice:

Everyone who watched Star Trek liked Scotty, but everyone who met him loved Jimmy...

I'm sure I'm not the only person today who feels like they lost a friend.

Meanwhile, if you're one of those people who just doesn't quite get the big deal about Star Trek, you might be interested in a very personal Doohan tribute by guy who calls himself Stax. He puts the Trek phenomenon into perspective and explains why people like him and myself care so much about the death of a mere television actor:

...Doohan was an integral part of something that transcended being a mere pop culture phenomenon. Britney Spears is a pop culture phenomenon; Star Trek is almost a religion. It is like the Elvis of fanboy crazes, where it is no longer really just about what it was (entertainment) but what effect it had on your life personally. "Scotty" was a key member of that special family...

...While Star Trek is clearly larger than any one person, even creator Gene Roddenberry, and will likely continue on in some form in the coming years, it is sobering to see the individuals who comprised the initial wave of Trek begin to leave us: Roddenberry, DeForest Kelley and now Doohan. We'll always have those episodes and films, those memories, to remind us of why Star Trek was more than just a show for us.

I disagree with his remark about Trek continuing -- I genuinely think it's over -- but everything else he says in that excerpt is dead on the money.

And then there are the words of the inimitable Lileks:

It’s impossible to understate Doohan's appeal - if you sneak into a NASA control room during a mission and ask the controllers how many chose their profession because of Scotty, half the hands in the room would go up. No one wanted to go into space because of that whiny little red-head kid on Lost in Space. It takes something indefinable to be a Kirk, it takes med school to be a McCoy, it takes green blood to be Spock, but Scotty – aye. Any man could be Scotty, if he applied himself. And he'd be among manly things, too. In a hundred years from now, no one will remember Brad Pitt. But they’ll have a picture of Scotty taped up in the break room off the moon shuttle.

I think he may be a little harsh in his opinion of Brad Pitt -- history will be the judge of that, I suppose -- but again, I agree with his Doohan-related sentiments.

One final note: Jimmy Doohan, who spent so much of his professional life pretending to be in space, will make it into space for real later this year when some of his ashes will be sealed into an aluminum capsule and launched into low orbit by a Houston-based company that specializes in this sort of thing. The capsule will eventually re-enter the atmosphere and burn up. What a beautiful way to end your corporeal existence... as a shooting star.

And now, I want to leave you with a classic Scotty moment. Enjoy!

Of Local Interest...

For my local (or formerly local) readers, as well as anyone who may want a taste of the Utah action, here are a few interesting tidbits you may not have heard about:

First comes the amusing news that former child actor Gary Coleman of Diff'rent Strokes fame has abandoned the smoggy enclaves of California and moved to a small town in Utah County, a.k.a. "Happy Valley," the most Utahiest place in all of Utah. I can't find an article about this to link to, but there have been rumors about it for a couple of months now, and Fox-13 News went looking for his new house on last night's broadcast, so I believe it's for real. (They interviewed a teenage girl who works at a Subway he allegedly frequents; she says he's a really nice guy who favors turkey and bacon sandwiches. She also says she's never seen Diff'rent Strokes, but her parents have told her about it. Oy. Kids these days.)

Gary is reportedly looking for someplace quiet where he can live in peace, unencumbered by the "Whole LA Thing." Utah County certainly fits that bill, although I wonder if he won't soon find it's too quiet down there even for his needs. I mean, hell, Anne and I were turned away from a UC Sizzler once because they were already closed for the night... at 8:30. On a Friday. And that was in Orem, one of the more metropolitan parts of that region, not out in the sticks where Gary is supposed to be. After a couple of experiences like that, Mr. Coleman might reflect that open-all-night LA has its charms, too. Best of luck, though, Gary, and welcome to the state.

Turning to people I've actually met, I was saddened earlier this week to hear of the death of Sandra Lloyd, who was a well-known figure around my hometown of Riverton for a good part of my life. She worked in the town hall for years -- I remember my mother and she having many gossipy, small-town-type conversations while Mom paid the water bill and I fidgeted around, regretting that I'd said "yes" when asked if I wanted to tag along on the errands-run. Later, Sandra became the mayor of Riverton just as our small country town was beginning its painful metamorphosis into a sprawling suburban bedroom community. She was in a bad position during those years, caught between very large forces that no one individual could do much to control. As a lifelong resident, she wanted to retain as much of the old Riverton as she could. As mayor, it was her responsibility to craft a vision of the new Riverton, one that was inevitably going to be very different than it had been. A lot of her decisions and initiatives were not popular, and I myself didn't like every idea she came up with. But I respect her for doing her best, for really trying to find compromises and workarounds, and for genuinely caring about what the town once was and what it was going to become.

Her biggest achievement, as far as I'm concerned, was spearheading an initiative that saved my old elementary school from the wrecking ball after the school district abandoned it. Built in the 1920s with several additions over the years, the school served generations of kids, including my own grandmother, who attended high school there. The district shut it down about ten years ago because, they said, it would be too expensive to bring it up to earthquake-safety standards. (Personally, I think that was just an excuse. It seems to me the district has implemented a policy of "all-new, nothing old"; like everyone else in Utah right now, these folks are obsessed with shiny novelties and to hell with our historical treasures.) In any event, Mayor Lloyd lobbied hard to convince the town council and the citizenry that Riverton should buy the old school and turn it into something that would be of use to the whole community. The end result -- after a big debate, a helluva lot of money and a year-long renovation and remodelling project -- is the Riverton City Civic Center, which now houses the city offices/town hall and various public facilities. I have my quibbles about the details of what's been done to the building for its new use, but I'm glad that it survived in any form. It's one of the few historic structures left in a town that never had much notable architecture to begin with, and which has lost just about everything else we old-timers remember.

In one of those sweet final gestures that always get to my sentimental heart, Sandra Lloyd's body will lie in state Friday night in the old school building she fought so hard to preserve. I think she would've been pleased by that.

And now finally, as long as we've been discussing development and the transmogrification of my old rural stomping grounds into pre-packaged suburban sameness, I've just heard the horrifying news that a big chunk of Riverton's neighbor to the north, South Jordan, is about to become a big open-air shopping center called -- get this -- "The District." (No relation to the district I was just grumbling about, I'm sure.) If that name leaves you underwhelmed, consider that this new mall will be designed and constructed by the same people that brought downtown Salt Lake its first open-air mall, which goes by a similarly non-striking name: "The Gateway". Just as South Jordan has never had any "districts," and thus no historical precedent for this silly, pretentious name, Salt Lake's Gateway isn't really a gateway to anything. It's located in a slowly gentrifying warehouse district right smack in the middle of the east and west sides of town, built on the site of an old rail yard. (I suppose you could say that the rail yard and its accompanying train stations was a gateway into the city, except no one ever referred to them in this manner, at least not that I'm aware of.) I don't want to go too far down this tangent, but I've got to say that I really hate the yuppie-sounding place-names that developers tack onto their projects, names that have no relation to anything historic or individual about the location. I also hate how so many new developments are called something-Pointe, with an "e" on the end. There's always an "e," because you know that a terminal "e" makes the place fancier than calling it a plain old "point." Not that anything built at the bottom of a big flat bowl of a valley has any right to be called a "point..."

All my Grumpy Old Fartiness aside, however, I do have to grudgingly admit that this new shopping center actually will be a good and necessary thing. The old farming towns on the southwest side of the Salt Lake Valley are booming, and if the growth in Herriman and South Jordan isn't enough justification, there's also an entirely new city literally rising from the dust out that way, too. If I lived in one of those places, I'd be pretty unhappy about having to drive all the way across the valley to go to a movie or buy clothes. Still, it's very difficult for me to imagine something so huge going up on the south end of the valley, where nothing has ever been huge except the arch of the summer sky. The site that will soon be home to The District isn't far from where my friend Keith used to live, and it's precisely where my dad used to pick up a few extra bucks in his spare time by cutting and baling hay. And a year from now it will be covered by a Target, a grocery store, a variety of "midsize" retail outlets -- whatever that means -- a 20-screen movie theater owned by local magnate Larry Miller, and its own "Main Street."

Like I said, hard to imagine...

How Could She Tell?

Yeah, yeah, I know: all these blog entries in a single day make it look like I've nothing better to do. Can't be helped. Some days are just bloggier than others, and anyway, this is too funny not to share.

I've just had a co-worker who knows virtually nothing about me come up and ask me a question about the dank underworld of comic books. She said I seemed like the sort of person who "knows [my] way around a comic-book shop." She approached the whole thing, I might add, with the air of someone about to make her first drug deal, or at least with the concern that she was about to deliver me a grave insult.

(She needn't have worried. As it so happens, I have spent quite a bit of time in comic-book shops, although not so much in recent years.)

Later, I emailed her and asked what it was about me that made her think I might be her go-to guy on this matter. Here's her reply:

You seem to have a unsettling command of the detritus of pop culture, an preoccupation I share. Don’t tell me you can’t pick freaks like us out of a crowd.

She makes it sound like we fannish types are the Immortals from Highlander, sensing one another's Quickening from across the room. That's just silly. I like to think I'm perfectly ordinary-looking, when I'm not wearing a t-shirt with an incriminating logo.

I do, however, like the phrase "unsettling command of the detritus of pop culture." I've been thinking lately of reworking the description at the top of this page; I might have to try and work that in...

Define "Majority"

Did you see the recent poll that says 51% of all Americans now believe the White House "deliberately misled" us about those weapons of mass destruction? I've believed that all the way along, myself. Not that it matters much at this point.

Nevertheless, that poll number is interesting. Mark Evanier thinks so, too, and he's raised a very good question in regards to it:

...as more and more of Bush's negative ratings hit that magic number of half-the-nation-plus-one, I wonder about something. [I wonder] how many Bush supporters who thought 51% in the last election was a mandate or even a landslide will now argue that 51% or even anything below 55% or so isn't really a majority.

For the record, I'm not trying to be a smartass here. I'm just considering a semantic point: in this age when nothing is free of the taint of political spin, when each side of the debate jockeys endlessly for the slightest edge over the other, can we even agree anymore what constitutes a majority? And what does it mean for our society if we can't even find consensus on that?

Priorities

After a two-and-a-half year hiatus, America resumed manned spaceflight yesterday morning with a picture-perfect launch of space shuttle Discovery. You'd think that would be a fairly big deal, wouldn't you? I certainly did. However, when I tuned into my 10 o'clock news last night, the lead stories were about an Amber Alert in the Sugarhouse area and a legal decision involving the goofball who kidnapped Elizabeth Smart. Yes, that's right: instead of the cool video footage I hoped to see from Discovery's new external-tank-cam, I found myself looking once again at Utah's overexposed ambassador of sticky namby-pambiness, Elizabeth's father Ed. I wanted to scream. In fact, I think I may have, very quietly so as not to wake the S.O. in the other room. Ed Smart has that effect on me.

Now, I'm not saying these missing-children stories aren't important, and I'm not naive enough to believe that everyone shares my interest or belief in the relevance of spaceflight. But I do believe our media's choice of lead stories says something about where our culture is at right now, psychologically speaking, and it's not a place I find particularly inspiring. Instead of looking upwards, we're looking inwards. Instead of can-do optimism and a spirit of adventure, we feel fear and anxiety. And instead of celebrating what human beings can accomplish through pluck and applied intelligence, the news wallows in sensational stories about all the bad things that happen to little blond girls. (They're always blond, have you noticed? You'd think that nothing ever happens to brunettes, redheads, or -- gasp! -- little-girls-of-color!)

I don't know about you, but I personally find this a pretty damn depressing state of affairs. More later...

The Greatest Cartoon Ever! Well, One of Them, Anyhow...

If you're one of those readers who obsessively catalogs all my various likes and dislikes as expressed here on the blog -- and you know who you are -- let me state for the record that I think the greatest short-form animated films of all time are the classic Looney Tunes cartoons produced by Warner Brothers from the 1930s through the 1960s. You know, the stuff we used to watch on the old Bugs Bunny-Road Runner Show on Saturday mornings.

The math here is very simple: Disney shorts are too sappily sweet, Tom and Jerry aren't all that funny, and Popeye is just plain weird. But the Looney Tunes, especially the ones produced in the post-World War II years... ah, now those are absolutely pure expressions of the abstract concept called "humor." While there a few Looneys that haven't aged well, most of them are well-nigh timeless, with sharp, dual-layer jokes that satisfy both adult and child sensibilities, and even though I've seen them all about a million and a half times, they still make me laugh out loud.

Curiously, many of the ones I really love are the more obscure ones, the ones that do not star any of the iconic characters like Bugs, Daffy Duck, or Porky Pig.

For example, I love the pair from the mid-50s that feature Ralph Phillips, the overly-imaginative little boy who thinks up outrageous daydreams to escape from his tedious daily life. I love the one that recreates the old Jack Benny Show with mice (I thought that one was funny even before I knew who Jack Benny was), and the one with the big mean bulldog going all soft over a tiny little kitten. And, of course, I love "One Froggy Evening," in which a construction worker demolishing an old building finds an ancient time capsule that contains a very unusual frog.

You'll probably recognize that top-hatted, dancing amphibian -- nameless in the original cartoon, but who has come to be known as "Michigan J. Frog" -- as the mascot for the WB television network. The WB has recently decided to retire ol' Michie and freshen up their brand, but the original cartoon will no doubt live on (in fact, it appears on the recent Looney Tunes DVD collection). If you're interested, Mark Evanier uses the occasion of Michigan's retirement as an excuse to offer up a few fun facts about the character and the cartoon that spawned him. Mark even tracked down a photo of the little-known man who is purported to have been the frog's voice, and he recounts the true-life event that may have inspired this classic short...

Assorted Thoughts on Pioneer Day

Just in case you don't know, today is a holiday in Utah. Well, technically speaking, yesterday was the holiday, but since that was a Sunday and nothing much is allowed to happen here on Sundays, the festivities were bumped to today.

This isn't news to the locals who read this blog and who probably have the day off and won't even see this entry until tomorrow. But if you live somewhere else and are not of The Body -- apologies for the obscure Star Trek reference -- let me explain:

Pioneer Day is the local version of what other communities would call a "founder's day." It commemorates the 1847 arrival of the Mormon pioneers in the Salt Lake Valley and is traditionally observed with the same sorts of activities one usually does on the Fourth of July: picnics and barbecues with the family, semi-lame homegrown carnivals, fireworks at dusk, a big rodeo (this is the Wild, Wild West, after all), and, of course, a parade through the streets of downtown Salt Lake. Utahns love parades, and the Days of '47 Parade, as it is formally called (and which is actually underway as I type this) is the biggest in the state.

I believe it may be one of the biggest in the country, too. Like other big, well-known parades, it features floats, high-school marching bands, bagpipers, equestrian groups, and antique cars, as well as entries specific to Utah, like representations of local industries and historically authentic Mormon handcarts drawn by costumed re-enactors.

In recent years, the parade has drawn some fire from people who think it excludes non-Mormons and ignores the various "gentile" groups that played a role in the state's history. This has been remedied somewhat by a self-consciously PC effort to spotlight different local sub-cultures, so now, in addition to cowboys and blond moppets, the parade also features Polynesian dancers, Americans Indians, and Greek business boosters. (Floats representing Irish pubs, the gay community, and Bruce Campbell fans remain conspicuously absent, however.)

Pioneer Day itself has also been criticized because many Utahns seem to make a bigger fuss about it than that other little holiday that has the misfortune of occurring in July, and this really rubs some citizens the wrong way. These critics usually stop short of suggesting that Utah Mormons are outright treasonous because the local celebration trumps the national one in local hearts and minds, but it's pretty obviously what they're thinking. At the very least, they find something questionable about the prevailing attitudes in the state. Many of them seem to believe that Mormons would happily secede from the Union and set up an independent theocracy out here in the desert, if given half a chance; this is hopelessly outdated thinking, and not at all based on recent observations. While the Mormons may have disdained federal rule back in Brigham Young's day, modern-day Mormons -- Utahns in general, really -- are almost hysterically patriotic. It seems to me that most people around these parts tend to view Pioneer Day as a de facto extension of Independence Day, and American flags abound on both days. That's right, folks, we Utahns like the Fourth of July so much, we celebrate it twice a year!

I'm not exaggerating, at least not by much. When I was a kid, I honestly had some difficulty distinguishing between the two holidays because their trappings are so similar. The flags, the fireworks, the hotdogs and midway-style games at the park, and the salt-water taffy thrown at you with deadly accuracy from passing parade-floats... it's really all the same, regardless of whether it's the beginning of July or the end. The Days of '47 Parade even includes many of the same entries that appear in Utah's Independence Day celebrations.

I used to enjoy these two holidays much more than I do now. Partly, that was because of the afore-mentioned candy -- how can a child not like the thoughts of taffy raining down from a summer-blue sky? But I also enjoyed the festivities that went along with the July holidays. You see, when I was a kid, Riverton and its neighboring town Draper had a kind of sweethearts-deal about the July holidays. Riverton put on a parade, fair, and fireworks show for the Fourth, while Draper did the same a couple weeks later for the Twenty-fourth. Residents of each town visited the other for their respective celebrations, you saw a lot of familiar faces, and it was all very small-townish and quaint.

These days, Riverton and Draper still host their traditional alternating celebrations, but both towns have grown so much in recent years that old-timers like me no longer recognize faces in the crowd, and the various events have become too slick and professional-looking. Instead of farmers riding tractors bedecked with crepe-paper streamers, the small-town parades are now dominated by cars carrying politicians and car-dealers.

As for the big celebrations in Salt Lake... well, I never have understood the fuss that's made over the Days of '47 Parade. People actually camp out overnight for this thing, sleeping on hard sidewalks (or not sleeping at all) and enduring the sun and heat of Salt Lake in July, just to get "good" seats at curbside. Hell, I wasn't even willing to do that for the final Star Wars premiere of all time, let alone an event that happens every year and can be more comfortably viewed on television. But then I guess I am kind of an old party-poop that way.

Or maybe I'm just bitter because I'm at the office today instead of outside, eating hot dogs and taffy... anything's possible.

I Made Love to a Screaming Brain!

Pop quiz: who's the coolest actor working in the film industry today? I'm thinking of someone who has appeared in both blockbusters and art-house movies, a journeyman actor who both headlines and does small character roles, a man who commands a legion of die-hard fans, and who is the very definition of "suave."

Am I referring to Sean Connery? Nah, I said someone who's still working today, and all the signs indicate that Sir Sean has retired. Harrison Ford? Hasn't worked in several years, apparently content to spend his days playing Rescue Ranger in his helicopter. Tom Cruise? Please... the word "suave" hardly applies to someone who publicly abuses a sofa in the name of mid-life-crisis/publicity-stunt love. No, the person I have in mind is someone you could actually imagine yourself hanging out with, a regular guy who just happens to have landed a job a whole lot of people think they want (but would probably hate if they got it), and who has managed, somehow, against all odds, to forge a decades-long career in an industry that is finished with most people within a couple of years.

I'm talking about the one and only... Bruce Campbell.

What's that, you say? You've never heard of Bruce Campbell? Well, you obviously need to get out more. Go on, go. Go now and rent a few movies. Never heard of Bruce Campbell, sheesh!

I'm just kidding. Seriously, don't feel bad if you don't know who he is. He's not exactly in the same league as those other three I just mentioned. Bruce Campbell works almost exclusively in what used to be called "B-movies," but are more widely referred to as "low-budget crap." He's best known to genre fans for playing Ash, the world's stupidest hero in The Evil Dead films, but if the average person recognizes his face at all, it's probably from a recurring role on Hercules: The Legendary Journeys and its spin-off, Xena: Warrior Princess. (He was Autolycus, the dashing King of Thieves, if that rings any bells for you.)

In spite of having a filmography composed almost entirely of obscure dreck -- or perhaps because of this -- Bruce is a superstar here in my hometown of Salt Lake. For some bizarre reason, this stodgy, strait-laced, button-down city of mine is home to a lot of a people who dwell on the fringes of mainstream popular culture. People who groove on dark, sometimes disturbing, underground music, and who like their movies cultish and bizarre. To them, Bruce Campbell is a minor deity. And did I mention there is a lot of them here?

Consider, for instance, the first time I saw Bruce in the flesh, a few years ago when he came to Salt Lake to sign copies of his memoir, If Chins Could Kill: Confessions of a B-movie Actor. As I recall, the signing was only supposed to last for a couple of hours, but so many people showed up at Sam Weller's Zion Bookstore that it took nearly seven hours before everyone present received their twenty seconds of Bruce-time. It was a bizarre experience, half grueling ordeal and half free-wheeling party. The bookstore ended up ordering pizza around midnight for all the loyal fanboys (and quite a few fangirls) who waited in line, and, to his credit, Bruce himself refused to leave until he'd signed something for everyone who came. Now, I don't know about you, but I think it really says something about the man that he was willing to hang around so long and wear his signing-hand down to the bones, rather than disappoint any of his fans. I've encountered other celebrities who won't spare one extra second from their busy lives to mingle with the people who make them celebrities in the first place. These individuals stick so rigidly to their schedules that if they're only supposed to sign autographs for one hour, you can bet that at the 1:01:00 mark, they're sipping champagne in first-class and waiting for the plane to start rolling, and to hell with anybody left standing in line back at the venue. (I won't name names, but if the words "William Shatner" come to your mind, I won't dissuade you from thinking that's who I'm talking about.)

Bruce ain't that kind of guy. But he's not superhuman, either, and I imagine one seven-hour autographing marathon is probably enough for a single lifetime. Thus, I understand why Bruce's most recent Salt Lake appearance, two weeks ago on July 9th, was so much more regimented than his previous one. I didn't begrudge the movie-theater venue, the new procedures, the requirement for tickets, the limitation to only one autographed item per person -- all these rules made sense after the chaos at Sam Weller's a few years ago. But they did lead to a very different atmosphere than before -- much less spontaneous, much more formal. Not as delirious and, hence, not as much fun.

That's not to say that Anne and I had no fun at all. On the contrary. Bruce is a funny, outspoken man, with no condescending movie-star attitude issues. He's self-deprecating to a fault, and he likes to gossip and tell you exactly where the bear does his business while wandering the forest. In addition, you've got the always-amusing spectacle of Bruce Campbell fans, a generally motley crowd that tends towards tatoos and piercings. Think Trekkies crossed with punk-rockers and miscellaneous fetishists, and you'll get a pretty good idea of what Deadites are like. And how can you not have fun at a combination book-signing/movie premiere where the products being pushed are a novel called Make Love the Bruce Campbell Way (all about a struggling actor named, oddly enough, Bruce Campbell) and a movie titled Man with the Screaming Brain?

So, yes, we had a good time meeting Bruce (again), receiving signed copies of his latest literary endeavor, and viewing his latest film. I even got the photos that I missed out on last time (I forgot to take my camera when Bruce was at Sam Weller's). But the whole affair was perhaps just a little too efficient, a little too much like the more openly commercial meet-n-greets hosted by Creation, the biggest producer of fan conventions in the biz. Those events are very much the antithesis of what Bruce Campbell has always been about, and I hope he doesn't journey much farther down that dark path.

Incidentally, Man with the Screaming Brain is as ridiculous as it sounds, a low-budget (what else?) thriller (I guess that's what you'd call it) shot in Bulgaria. It's essentially a love triangle between a man who has two minds inhabiting the same body (think of the Steve Martin movie All of Me), a fembot, and a psycho Gypsy woman in a wedding dress. There's lots of action, a rib-tickling performance from Stacy Keach as a mad scientist, and Bruce's old Evil Dead buddy Ted Raimi... and that's about all there really is to say about this movie. It's entertaining enough if you find it running on cable some rainy Saturday afternoon, and I imagine it would be pretty funny after a couple of beers. But it's no classic, not even for this type of movie.

I haven't read the book yet.

Oh, and in case you're still wondering what I meant when I said Bruce Campbell had been in a couple of blockbusters, he's had cameos in both Spider-Man movies, which were directed by his old Evil Dead buddy, Sam Raimi. Yes, that's Ted's brother... one of the things I love about the low-budget cult-movie scene is the way everyone is related in some fashion.

And if you still can't place Bruce Campbell's face, don't forget to check out those photos...

The Things We Forget We've Lost

Here's another great quote from James Lileks, who frequently annoys me with his politics but is mucho sympatico when it comes to his sense of nostalgia, respect and curiosity about the past. He's talking about a screen-capture from an old movie he viewed recently (the image helpfully appears in the body of the relevant Bleat, if you're curious):

There’s the bygone world: the obligatory suit, the man sitting in a chair on the sidewalk selling the papers, the trolley in the background, the policebox from the 20s that's been painted sixteen times. Instantly recognizable; you could fit in quickly. But utterly gone in ways we can't even begin to imagine.

What did all the coins in their pockets look like? The trolley tokens, the brand of gum (okay, we can probably guess that), the feel of the pink and slightly furry paper receipt from the cleaners, the perfume of the woman who just passed, the odor of hair cream, and so forth. No one knew those things were important, and I suppose they weren't - until they were gone and forgotten.

As he so often does, James has perfectly captured a notion I've often pondered but never gotten around to articulating: that history isn't composed entirely of dates or headlines or politicians or battles. It's isn't even made up mostly of those things. The way I see it, history is made of details, thousands if not millions of tiny little experiential details just like the ones that surround us daily. We pay only passing attention to things like smells or environmental noise or even the materials that our clothes and various accessaries are made of, but if you think about it -- really concentrate and think about it -- you'll realize that we are constantly losing little bits of the Way Things Used to Be, and most people probably aren't even aware of it.

Take sounds, which have changed radically in only the last couple of decades. Everyone who is in their mid-30s like myself grew up with telephones that sat on a table or hung on a wall, and when they rang, they literally rang. There was a physical bell inside them that was struck by a little mechanical hammer device that was actuated by a current of electricity. The sound, if you used to know it, remains unforgettable today. But when was the last time you actually heard it, outside of a movie? That sound has become virtually extinct, supplanted by weird little electronic trills, or digitized music, or even -- and I love this -- synthetic versions of an old-fashioned mechanical telephone bell.

The heavy metallic clack of manual typewriters or the rat-a-tat-tat of electric typewriters -- gone. The sounds of our automobile engines -- still there, but changed. Trust me, a modern-day vehicle sounds nothing like a comparable car from the 1960s, and even less like a Model A or Model T.

How about smells? Perfumes and cosmetic fragrances come and go, and odors that were once commonplace and pleasant have a tendency to become unforgivably alien after a time. Part of the reason why Grandma always smelled weird is because she was probably still using scents that had been fashionable in her youth but were abandoned by the time we came along.

Flavors? They change, too. If you were paying attention in the '80s, you no doubt recall the New Coke debacle. But can you recall what New Coke actually tasted like? Can you recall what original Coke tasted like before they started making it with corn syrup instead of cane sugar?

You could play this game all day once you really get going, but my point is that, as much as I personally kvetch about the loss of buildings and landmarks, they are only a small fraction of the great mass of tiny things that pass into oblivion every day. Their loss goes unnoticed most of the time, but even though these casualties of progress are often the smallest of things, they seem to present the largest barrier to our really understanding -- or grokking, to use a totally geeky term -- the past.

We can gaze at an old photo for hours, trying to imagine ourselves there in that moment, standing in that setting, wearing those clothes, hearing that Model T in the background, but we'll never be able to really do it, because we've forgotten or never knew what all those little details were actually like. Most people probably don't care about those missing details, but to someone like myself, who is interested in the past and would like to really, completely know what it was like to live fifty or a hundred or a thousand years ago, this is an incredibly frustrating realization.

Just as frustrating is the realization that the effect works both ways. If I ever have children, I'll never be able to share with them exactly what it was like before they were born because all those subtle, ephemeral things that make up my current world will be gone by the time the kids are old enough to understand what the hell I'm trying to say here. I can keep journals and take lots of photos and even save favorite pieces of clothing and other souvenirs, but it will only ever be an incomplete picture of this moment, this now.

Maybe I think too much about this sort of thing, but I find these changes all very sad in some deep, fundamental way. It's no wonder that the elderly so often seem to be completely out of touch with the world. It's because they are. Even if they've stayed up on new technology and current events and such, they're still disconnected at some basic, mundane level, because all the little details they used to know -- things as simple as a particular brand of toothpaste with a particular taste and texture -- are gone. Old people must surely feel some sense of loss because of that, even if it's only on an unconscious level. And someday, everyone reading this will be in the exact same position.

Except, of course, for those of us freaks who are already starting to feel that way...

Happy Exploration Day!

The news about James Doohan diverted my attention earlier, but I couldn't let today pass without acknowledging something very important: this is the 36th anniversary of the day human beings first set foot on another world, namely Earth's own Moon.

My three loyal readers may recall that I wrote a fairly curmudgeonly entry about this subject last year. I still feel the way I did back then: annoyed that this significant historical event gets so little attention, disgusted that so few people seem to care about the lunar missions or space exploration in general, saddened that the great beginning we made so long ago has slowly but surely been pissed away. Although robotic space probes like Deep Impact are doing astounding things and generating lots of interesting new data, human beings have turned away from the ocean of space after doing nothing more than dipping a toe. Everything we've done up there since July 20, 1969 has been a gradual slump into our current state of vaguely disappointed apathy. Thirty-six years ago, brave men hurled themselves a quarter of a million miles from our homeworld in the name of national pride, and we all rode along with them in spirit. Today, the space shuttle remains grounded because of well-intentioned faintheartedness, the International Space Station is a boondoggle in search of a purpose, and President Bush's promise that we're going back to the Moon and then on to Mars has failed to generate any popular attention at all.

The bitter fact is, our cultural sights have fallen away from the skies. People these days, Americans anyhow, seem to have little interest in doing great things simply for the sake of doing them. Oh, everyone gets excited enough about the photos sent back by our mechanical proxies, but no one seems to want to go in person, to see the Martian sunrise with their own eyes instead of digitally and remotely. They question the cost, the safety, and the point of sending people when the robots do such a good job. I submit that while these are all important considerations and it is indisputable that the robots do more than we mere mortals currently can, it is also important to send human beings into space. Because that's what human beings ought to do.

Our species has always been defined, as much as anything, by our curiosity, our need to see what's on the other side of the horizon with our own eyes. Once upon a time, Americans believed in the concept of manifest destiny, the notion that it was our inevitable purpose to conquer the frontier of our nation. That idea has fallen out of favor in recent times for a number of reasons, not least of which is the closing of the frontier in the early part of the 20th Century.

Now, in the early part of the 21st Century, there are only two frontiers left: the deep oceans and outer space. Both are difficult to reach and even more difficult to live in. But I like to think that we can find a way -- that we will find a way -- to open both of those frontiers and put them to good use, because it's what we're supposed to do. I'd like to think that humanity's true manifest destiny is to leave our cradle someday and move out into the stars. What can I say? I'm an old Trekkie at heart. I really would like to call down to Scotty in the engine room and ask for warp speed. But it won't happen in my lifetime.

It may not happen at all if people don't get excited about exploration again. Not space exploration per se, but exploration in general, the idea that there are more things to learn and discover than how to fit an extra gig of music into an ever-smaller package. I'd like to see people come to understand again that it is human nature to feel curious and that curiosity leads to pivotal and noble achievements. I think a good way to begin rediscovering the spirit that brought humans to the New World would be to designate this day a national holiday. On July 20 of every year, we ought to commemorate all the great journeys that forged human history, and all the brave people who undertook them. Let this day be dedicated to the first nomads who wandered out of Africa and across the land-bridge into North America, to the Chinese and the Vikings and the ancient tribesmen who explored the seas without written record, to the Greeks and Romans and, yes, the Muslims who charted the limits of the Old World, to the Europeans who dared cross the Atlantic in search of wealth and gained knowledge and a continent instead, to men like Jacques Piccard and Robert Ballard who plunge into the depths and to men like Chuck Yeager and Neil Armstrong who soar into the heavens. We can call it... Exploration Day.

I've just been outside and the Moon is full and huge. It looks like a yellow volleyball floating up over the jagged Wasatch Range that embraces the eastern side of my home valley. It's calling to us, waiting for us to someday return. I can't think of a more beautiful or appropriate sight to see on this, the very first Exploration Day...

The Word is Given...

Jimmy Doohan died this morning at the age of 85. It's hardly a shock -- he's been suffering from Alzheimer's Disease and made his final public appearance slightly under a year ago -- but it still hurts. My beloved Scotty has beamed off to whatever adventure awaits us all beyond this life, and another piece of my childhood is gone. I'm fighting back tears as I type this at an all-too-public computer.

Doohan's signature role of Scotty -- more formally known as Montgomery Scott, Chief Engineer of the U.S.S. Enterprise -- was always one of my favorite characters on the original Star Trek series. I liked all the characters on the show, of course, but he was right up there with Kirk and Bones for me. And it's kind of difficult to explain why, given how poorly defined his character actually was. He was Scottish, he loved whiskey and his precious warp engines (his "wee bairns"), and he had an eye for the ladies (who didn't, on the old Trek?). Beyond that, however, the viewer never really knew much about Mr. Scott. We learned more about his personal history during a single guest appearance on Star Trek: The Next Generation than we did from three television seasons and six movies featuring the original crew.

Nevertheless, I think regular viewers of the show always had a strong impression of what kind of man Scotty was, and it's only logical -- to use a Trekian catchphrase -- to credit Doohan for that. He's not someone you'd think of when compiling a list of great actors, but his talent breathed real life into a underwritten cypher, and the fans loved him for it.

Scotty was the regular joe of the Enterprise crew, a mechanical genius perhaps, but still the closest thing to a blue-collar character we ever saw in the Star Trek universe, at least until Chief O'Brien, a very Scotty-like character, came along mid-way through The Next Gen's run. He was stubborn and exasperating and irritatingly obsessive about his damn engines, but he was also sympathetic and loyal to a fault and slyly funny. He was the sort of guy you wanted at your back when the chips were down, and he was the sort of guy you wanted to share a drink with after the crisis had passed. And he was a mechanic, like my dad, and maybe that was part of his appeal for me, too.

(He was not, however, the guy you wanted to take clubbing with you. Assuming you could tear him away from his tech manuals, his generally poor on-screen experiences with women suggest that you wouldn't score with him as your wingman. No, if you're cruising for chicks, Kirk's your man...)

In later years, as Doohan's weight rose and he grew a mustache, both he and Scotty took on the air of a kindly old uncle, or even a grandfather, and the fans loved him even more. He was a near-constant fixture on the convention circuit for decades, unlike the show's big stars who only occasionally deigned to commune with the unwashed masses. Anne and I were lucky enough to meet him during an autograph session a few years ago; we found him to be a warm, pleasant man who genuinely appreciated the attention he was receiving for work that was far behind him at that point. He was no angel -- he smelled of scotch, and Anne is convinced that he scoped her out as he signed her photo, the old lecher -- but he was, like Scotty, lovable. You instinctively knew he was just plain decent.

For the record, I think Doohan's best moment as an actor, without a doubt, came in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Kahn, in a sequence that was butchered for the theatrical release but has since been restored for the Director's Edition DVD. A young crewman on his very first mission, Scotty's nephew, is killed during Kahn's initial attack on the Enterprise. Upon hearing the usual, "he's dead," from Dr. McCoy, Scotty gives the highest praise of which he is capable: "He stayed at his post. When the other trainees ran."

Doohan's voice cracks during the line reading and we can imagine he's remembering friends he lost during World War II (he was in the Canadian Army, part of the force that landed at Normandy on D-Day). It is a heart-breaking moment, more powerful in its way than the big death scene that comes later on in that picture, and probably the only time in the Star Trek franchise's long run that we really care about the death of a lowly "redshirt." And it's all because Doohan sells it. Like the whole Scotty character, the scenario is little more than a sketch, a cliche even, but the actor sells it. And this fan loved him for it.

Best speed for home, Jimmy.

Apologies, and What Happens When You Take Your Opinions Way Too Far

Hey, kids -- sorry about the relative paucity of activity around here lately. Real Life gave me the old one-two punch a couple weeks ago, which means I got too busy to blog as much as I wanted to. That wouldn't be a big deal, except that I've continued to run across interesting topics that I've wanted to blog about. The end result is a very frustrated blogger, who is currently feeling very behind and more than a little overwhelmed. I hope to churn out quite a bit of content in the next week or two, but chances are I'll have to abandon some of the ideas I've been wanting to play with in the interest of staying current. C'est la vie, I guess. We'll see how it goes.

In the meantime here's a little something for you to chew over: it seems that a 19-year-old Australian moviegoer lost the tip of his nose this past weekend in a brawl outside a movie theater. The fight escalated from a disagreement over whether the film Sin City was any good.

Now, I've gotten into some pretty heated discussions about the relative merits of particular movies before, but hot enough to resort to mutilation? That's just... well, I'm really not sure what it is, but it's a whole lot of something. I can't begin to imagine being so worked up about a piece of entertainment. If your opponent's facial features are starting to look tasty because he didn't like a movie you thought was great, I really think it's time to seek counseling. Or at the very least you need to learn the phrase "agree to disagree." After all, it's only a movie...

My Babies

I've always had a thing for a car without a roof. There's nothing I like better than driving through a balmy summer's twilight with the top down and the wind fluttering through what's left of my hair.

I come by it naturally enough, I suppose. My dad is an Old-Tyme Car Guy who still gets a kick out of souping up engines and burning rubber. He's owned motorcycles, hot-rods, antiques, classics, and clunkers over the years; I grew up surrounded by his collection and not realizing that it was unusual for one family to own a dozen or more cars. I never did acquire Dad's passion for tinkering -- I'm sorry to say I'm the sort who doesn't like to get his hands dirty -- but I love driving a stylish car and, thanks to my dad's collection, I've been fortunate enough to have access to some very stylish cars indeed.

My favorite of the family fleet is a 1963 Ford Galaxie 500 XL. Dad bought this car back in the early '80s. The body was a rusted-out hulk then, and Dad's original plan was to transplant the engine into something else and scrap the rest. However, he liked the smooth-as-baby-oil ride so much that he decided to keep the entire car and restore it. As so often happens to my dad's good intentions, though, the restoration got back-burnered and the Galaxie eventually ended up parked with all the other projects in "the junkyard" behind the garage. A few years passed. Then I earned my driver's license and Dad told me I could have one of the junkers out behind the garage to play with. I naturally selected the Galaxie -- the one that needed the most work. I didn't care, though; it was a ragtop, you see, and that automatically made it cool in my book.

I drove the rust-bucket version of this car to high school for a long time, and loved every mile of it. I probably would've been content to leave it a wreck forever, but in my senior year, that long-threatened restoration finally happened and the Galaxie became my Cruising Vessel. The car was an integral part of my self-image after that; I logged a lot of miles in it during my late teens and early twenties, and I had a lot of good times in its tuck-and-rolled seats. (Take that as you will.)

These days, sadly, I don't have a lot of time for the Cruising Vessel, and it has mostly reverted back to the care of my parents. But that doesn't mean I no longer have the experience of driving topless. Two years ago next month, I bought my first new (as opposed to used) car, a 2003 Ford Mustang, and yes, it's a ragtop, too. As Scarlett O'Hara declared that she would never again go hungry, I have decided that I will always drive a convertible, even if it's some kind of futuristic hydrogen-fueled landspeeder. I just love the damn things.

Which brings me, at long last, to the point of this little post: I have added a new photo of my two favorite cars to the gallery. Click, and enjoy the ragtoppy goodness...

(Incidentally, I am fully aware of the ironical fact that I've just made a big deal about how I like to drive with the top down, but both of the cars in the photo have their tops up. It was raining that day, and I managed to snap the pic during a rare moment of sunshine.)

Follow-up on the Previous...

Just thought my three loyal readers would like to know that Anne dropped into the offices of her apartment complex this afternoon and got the skinny on that accident I described earlier.

It seems the woman who piled her Grand Cherokee into the canal was taking a newly prescribed medication, which either put her to sleep or otherwise affected her mental functions. (She has no memory of what actually happened.) A resident of the complex who witnessed the crash said it was much as I speculated: the Jeep drifted into the driveway, rolled up onto the sidewalk and hammered through the fence without any sign that the driver tried to brake or steer away. The vehicle went airborne across the canal, flipped over, and slid down the bank into the water. I'm not sure if it was this witness or someone else, but someone from the complex earned their good-deed merit badge by plunging into the canal and holding the driver's head above water until help arrived. The woman's legs were pinned in the Jeep and she had to be cut out of the wreck, but her injuries were relatively minor, considering: a few broken bones and a lot of bruises.

She got lucky, and I'm glad for her. This story easily could've had a much worse ending...

Something You Don't See Everyday

So, to set the scene for today's Tale of Action and Intrigue, let me explain that my Significant Other lives in a large suburban apartment complex that's fronted by an irrigation canal. This canal is enclosed on both sides by a six-foot-tall wrought-iron fence, which is presumably intended to keep the neighborhood children out, since it doesn't do much good at keeping the neighborhood ducks in. Because this canal is so thoroughly segregated by the fence from normal day-to-day activity, I tend to forget it's even there, or at least I forget that it's a genuine hazard, and not just some kind of decorative flourish. I drive over it a dozen times a week on my way into or out of the complex, and I pay it no more mind than I do a fire hydrant or a telephone pole. Neither do the hundreds of other drivers who enter and leave through the complex's driveway every day.

But I can think of at least one person who will be painfully aware of that canal the next time she passes by. That would be the woman whose Jeep Grand Cherokee punched through the fence on Friday and tumbled end-over-end into the water.

The accident happened shortly before I arrived to meet Anne for our evening's plans. I could tell something was going on as I approached the complex, because there were several police cars lined up along the fenceline with their lightbars flashing. Then I saw the hole in the fence and the rear wheels of the Cherokee sticking up from the canal's opposite bank, the belly of the vehicle exposed and vulnerable in the harsh afternoon glare.

A sick feeling quivered through my own belly at the sight. I drove around to the rear entrance of the complex so as not to add to the confusion and walked back up front to see what was happening. (I get my curiosity about these things from my dad, who used to be quite the ambulance chaser before he saw one too many disturbing things and gave it up.) A dozen or so apartment residents were clustered at the inner fence, watching as a couple of fire fighters and a tow-truck driver tried to figure out how to get the crumpled SUV out of the canal.

How the vehicle got into its current position was hardly less of a mystery. Actually, the how of it was plain enough, judging from the tire tracks on the front sidewalk and the angle at which the Jeep had come to rest in the canal. It's the why I'm still wondering about. Obviously, the vehicle had been southbound along the road that runs past the apartments, moving at a pretty fast clip (I think the speed limit in that area is 40 mph). Just south of the entrance to the apartment complex, the canal angles to the southeast and crosses under the road at a diagonal. The tire tracks indicate the Jeep came into the apartment complex's driveway still moving southbound instead of turning west as if to enter the complex. The vehicle hopped the curb on the opposite side and continued in a more-or-less straight line along the sidewalk, passing between a telephone pole and the fence, which runs at an angle right there as the canal jogs into its diagonal course. The fence is composed of sections of vertical bars joined together at thicker posts, which I believe are buried in concrete. The Jeep knocked out an entire section of fencing and either went into an airborne tumble or rolled down the canal bank towards the water, where its nose jammed into the mud and flipped the vehcile over. Either way, it ended up on its back on the opposite bank, the nose in the water, the roof crushed down to trap the driver. If the Jeep had slipped a couple of feet further down the bank, the cabin probably would've flooded and drowned the woman inside. As it was, one of the other gawkers told me she was still alive, but that she'd been cut out of the wreck and airlifted to the hospital before I arrived.

Now, that's all pretty straightforward, but I'd still like to know why that woman ended up in that position. Did she fall asleep or reach below the dashboard or get distracted by a cell phone? Did she swerve to avoid another car? Was she drunk, stoned or stupid? No one could tell me.

The air was rich with the stink of spilled gasoline and stirred-up river mud. A Fire Department HazMat guy deployed a floating boom to keep the Jeep's leaking fuel supply from going downstream. I chatted with an elderly man who hadn't trimmed his nose hair since the Fall of Saigon. And children and adults alike waited to see how they were going to get that wreck the hell out of the fenced-in no-man's-land that separated their homes from the busy road.

In the end, the solution to the problem was obvious, and surprisingly easy. A crane truck was brought in and its boom angled up and over the inner fenceline. Two cables were paid out, an amusing process that required two men to grab the hooks at the bottom of the cables and pull for all they were worth. One of the men -- a cop with knobby knees sticking out from beneath very un-cop-like bike shorts -- skidded down the bank when his cable finally gave. He ended up doused to the waistline. The cables were attached to the front and rear axles of the wreck, and, after a dramatic pause while the crane operator double-checked everything, the Jeep was hoisted about twenty feet into the air. It hung there for a couple of minutes, draining green canal water and probably gasoline and oil and god-knows-what-else back into the canal, while debris dislodged during the lift floated downstream. (I watched a Full Throttle can and a bagel bob past me and disappear under the driveway bridge, a sight that was mundane, slightly funny, and oddly unnerving, all at the same time.)

When the Jeep was fully drained, the crane swung it over the fence and lowered it onto a flatbed truck. Five minutes later, the flatbed, the crane and all but one of the police cars was gone.

Now, four days later, the hole in the fence is blocked by a webwork of yellow police tape that flutters in the drafts from passing cars. The mangled remnants of the fence section that the runaway Jeep knocked out have been hauled off, too. I imagine the damage will be repaired within a week or so and that will be that. But I'd still like to know what happened, exactly. I watched the weekend newspapers in vain for some notice about it. If anyone out there knows anything about this woman driver, her condition, or why she drove into a canal, please let me know...

On the House

It never fails to amaze me how people can be absolute shits to each other during normal, non-apocalyptic circumstances, but they become so heartwarmingly, heartbreakingly human when something bad happens.

Oh, London...

I was planning to write a brief, light-hearted entry today to explain why I haven't been posting much this week, but that doesn't seem terribly important after seeing the headlines about the London terror attacks. This kind of madness makes me sad no matter where it occurs, but seeing it blacken the heart of one of my favorite places in all the world really hurts.

As far back as I can remember, I've always had a soft spot for Great Britain. I don't know why, but it probably originated, at least in part, with the re-runs of The Benny Hill Show and Good Neighbors (a.k.a. The Good Life) that I watched with my parents as a young boy. I loved the way the actors in those shows spoke, and the way everything looked familiar enough to be recognizable but subtly different enough to seem exotic. My love for this place I'd never seen with my own eyes deepened as I grew older and discovered the joys of well-known British exports like Monty Python, Douglas Adams, Charles Dickens, The Moody Blues, and Led Zeppelin. There was something about dry English wit that resonated with me, something about descriptions of damp, green places that appealed to me in my desert home. I don't generally believe in ancestral memories or reincarnation, but in the case of the British Isles, there was something going on there, some ineffable sense of connection.

That connection was confirmed and reinforced thirteen long years ago, when I became a student at the International Summer School at Cambridge. (That sounds more impressive than it really was; I was only there for a month, and I audited my classes and spent most of my time sight-seeing.) England was unfamiliar and strange in many ways -- I'm not above admitting that I experienced a certain amount of culture shock -- but in a lot of ways, it felt like I'd come home. That may have been in part because I was a young man on my first big adventure away from home. Everything was new and shiny and exciting. In addition, my homelife had been extremely difficult in the months leading up to my trip, and being away from it was a huge relief. And it helped immensely that I made good friends while I was there, one of whom I've managed to keep and who occasionally shows up right here on this blog. Aside from all those reasons, however, I just plain liked the place.

During my month-long stay in Cambridge, I made three day-trips into London. I found it a beautiful, friendly city, in spite of its size and bustle, and looking at the BBC map of where the blasts occured dumps ice-water into my veins, because I know those places. I've ridden on the Picadilly line and on one of those iconic double-decker buses. I've stood on the platform at King's Cross station, laughing with my friends. (I recall one particular incident involving my buddy Robert, a liquified candy bar, and a set of closing train doors.) Because I have personal experience with these places, the news strikes close to home for me, just like it did when I watched the horrible video from New York and thought back to the afternoon I stood atop the World Trade Center and revelled at the wind in my face. Those bombs may as well have gone off here in Salt Lake, as far as I'm concerned.

I've grown tougher since 9/11, more accepting of the idea that the world has gone mad and there's not much I personally can do about it. That doesn't mean, however, that I don't care about new terrorist strikes or that I feel nothing at the sight of that peeled-open red bus. I feel deep sorrow and anger today, as well as compassion for the people of Britain. If anyone from that wonderful country is reading this, you have my condolences, my support, and my hope that those responsible are brought to justice quickly.

Deep Impact Succeeds!

Hi, kids -- I hope everyone out there in InternetLand had a good Fourth of July. The folks at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory certainly did. Their Deep Impact space mission (which I previewed for you a month ago) went off without a hitch, slamming its impactor probe into the comet Tempel 1 just before midnight Salt Lake time on Sunday, July 3rd. The boom resulting from an object the size of a washing machine connecting with an object half the size of Manhattan Island at roughly 23,000 miles an hour apparently surprised even the people who designed the probe:

The collision was photographed by the Deep Impact "fly-by spacecraft" (which, conveniently enough, is also the vehicle that released the impactor) as well as the Hubble telescope and a number of other probes, satellites, and observatories. As a result, the Internet today is awash in cool images like the one above. There's even video taken from the impactor as it approached its final destination. Think back to those missile-cams that so impressed us back during the '91 Gulf War and you'll get the idea. If you're interested in this stuff, you'll want to start with the mission home page, which includes a gallery of images, video, animation, and artwork. There's also lots of information about the impactor and the flyby spacecraft, Tempel 1 and comets in general, the technology used to make this happen, and the reasons why scientists thought it would be a good idea to deface one of the other objects in our solar system.

The Demolition of the Hand-Me-Down World

I see in the paper this morning that another local landmark, the old Geneva Steel mill, has fallen in the name of progress.

Now, before you start thinking my unquenchable sense of nostalgia has finally gotten the better of me and caused me to abandon all sense of perspective, let me state for the record that I'm not especially sentimental about decaying old industrial sites. Geneva was ugly when it was in operation, filling the skies of Utah County with orange haze and dumping god-only-knows into Utah Lake, and it was twice as ugly after it ceased operation and commenced to rotting. In addition, it was located in the next valley south of mine, so it's not like I was seeing it every day and acquiring the affection that comes through constant familiarity. Still, it was familiar, if not intimately so, and its demolition is just one more step in the on-going process that is erasing the landscape I grew up with.

I tend to think of that landscape as the "hand-me-down world," because I was surrounded as a child by artifacts, buildings, and institutions that were largely unchanged since the 1940s and '50s. It was as if the entire Wasatch Front -- the swath of Utah's greatest settlement that runs from Provo in the south to Ogden in the north, with Salt Lake in the middle -- was preserved in amber for decades, especially in the smaller communities like Riverton, where I grew up. There were newer buildings around, of course, housing developments and convenience stores and strip malls just like anywhere else, but change was slow and, for much of my life, the old outnumbered the new. I lived in an old house on a old street lined with old houses, and so did most of my friends. We went to school -- elementary school, at least -- in a building that had been used for that purpose for generations. Riverton's business district -- such as it was -- included several little one-story brick structures that had gone up around the turn of the century, and the alfalfa fields that interweaved with the town couldn't have looked much different in the '70s than they had appeared on the eve of World War II.

I never appreciated this landscape when I was younger. It was boring, I thought, and ugly. I can't deny that many of the old Riverton buildings I now miss so desperately fit the textbook definition of "blighted." A lot of them were deserted and boarded up, and the sidewalks around town often glittered with ancient bits of broken glass that lay untouched because no one was around to sweep them up. But it wasn't just the buildings or the fields that composed my lost world. It was a lot of other things, too, like the fact that my buddy Kurt Stephenson and I could rumage around in his grandfather's shed and come up with a working shortwave radio set that looked as if it came out of a B-17. Or that a mysterious ancient chain sprouted from the backyard tree where my dad built me a treehouse, no doubt wrapped around the trunk by some previous owner and gradually engulfed as the tree grew. Or that wandering through somebody's pasture you were as likely to run across the remains of a Model A as to see cow-patties.

I think the reason why I have such an affinity for history is because I used to be immersed in history. All of the old junk that cluttered my hand-me-down world was a tangible link to the past, specifically the past of my grandparents. This is going to sound strange, but the 1940s have never seemed all that far away to me. Looking back now I realize that I felt a sense of continuity with previous generations that I'm not sure exists anymore.

These days, everything is different here in Utah, and for a culture that claims to so revere its heritage, we seem to be in a race to see how quickly we can do away with all the reminders of it. Or at least all the unofficial, unsanctioned, non-museum'd reminders of it. The old landmarks are mostly gone, the fields sub-divided, the junk of the Greatest Generation hauled off to antique stores or the dump. Driving around the valley now, you'd think the entire place had just been constructed in the last decade, probably because much of it has been. Everything is shiny and sharp-edged, with none of the comfortable, worn-in atmosphere that I remember from childhood.

I believe that landscape influences one's sense of self, and I wonder what the children growing up in this new Utah think and feel about it. Do they identify themselves as part of a long continuum, as I always have? Or are they in some sense isolated in history, tied inexorably to the here and now because they have no way of directly experiencing the past, as I did? Do they see the world around them as temporary and disposable, and do they long for more permanency, or at least a sense of longevity? I wonder. And I feel sorry for them.

Fasten Your Seatbelts...

Sandra Day O'Connor announced this morning that she's retiring from the Supreme Court. I am now filled with dread anticipation for what the tone of the rest of this summer will likely be.

In a perfect world, President Bush would nominate a replacement that everyone save the most extreme could be happy with, and this would all be taken care of within a week or two. However, I have a hunch that he's going to nominate a hardcore right-winger, possibly a Christian evangelical and almost certainly someone opposed to abortion rights. As is his privelege, of course, on the grounds that he's acting according to his principles. But don't forget that members of the minority party will also be acting according to their principles when they oppose said nomination. I don't think you have to be a card-reader to predict the resulting battles are going to be ugly. Thermonuclear ugly.

I am so tired of the state of affairs in this country, tired of every freaking thing being a showdown between the forces of Good and Evil, whichever side you may personally define as the "good" one. I dream of a time when civility returns to our public discourse, when compromise is again possible, and when the side in power doesn't try to paint their opponents as traitors merely for having a different point-of-view. Maybe such a time will never come again; maybe it never existed before. But it seems to me that these things have gotten almost ridiculously rancorous in the last fifteen years, and I believe the sense of constant, high-stakes struggle in our politics is a cancer on America. I wish someone could find a cure for it.

Incidentally, there is a difference between "opposition" and "obstruction." Keep that in mind as the rhetorical slings and arrows begin to fly...