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Mar262008

Has D.B. Cooper’s Parachute Been Found?

I have a real affection for unsolved mysteries, the kinds of stories that forever fascinate people so long as we never definitively learn what actually happened. Did Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan run out of fuel, crash in open water, and drown, or did they manage to set down on some uncharted rock somewhere and live as castaways, at least for a time? Were Butch and Sundance killed in a shootout with government troops in Bolivia or did one or both of them manage to slip away and return to the U.S., where they assumed new identities and lived to be old men? Was Brushy Bill Roberts really Billy the Kid, as he claimed, or was he just crazy? The possibilities are invariably more exciting than mundane (and frequently very grim) fact, which is why I always find myself rejoicing a bit when some new piece of evidence in these cases raises more questions than it solves.

Consider, for example, this story about the discovery of an old parachute in southwestern Washington. In a nutshell, some kids found a ‘chute partly buried in the woods near where the notorious hijacker D.B. Cooper is believed to have jumped from a 727 way back in 1971 with $200,000 in cash, and there’s some speculation that the ‘chute may have been his.

That’s pretty cool on its own, but here’s the interesting thing about today’s news: Some of Cooper’s money was found on a beach near Vancouver in 1980; the official theory has long been that Cooper did not survive his jump and the recovered cash had washed down the Washougal River to arrive on the beach. But if Cooper came down in the area where this parachute has been found, there’s no way that recovered cash could have naturally ended up in the Washougal. In other words, Cooper may have survived his landing and somehow lost some of his dough miles away, or else somebody else found the money and later dropped some of it in the Washougal. Either way, it’s a far more interesting thought than the image of a dead hijacker hanging in a tree somewhere with a broken neck and his ill-gotten booty falling into a river. (For the record, I like to believe that Cooper survived, eluded capture, and lived it up somewhere. I also like to think that Butch Cassidy returned to the States and visited his sister in 1925, just as she claimed. What can I say? I’m a romantic with a thing for lovable rogues.)

The FBI is currently examining the parachute to determine if it’s the right type and age to have been Cooper’s. I hope it is, for the sake of a good story…

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Mar252008

So, About All the YouTube Clips Lately…

I know LOLcritters aren’t to everyone’s liking, but many of them amuse me, and this one seems really appropriate given the nature of my last several posts:

***IMAGE MISSING***

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Mar252008

The The Impotence of Proofreading

In case you missed a memo, let me remind everyone that I earn my meager wages working as a proofreader. That means I’m a professional nitpicker, or, as the various people who are beholden to my demands would say, “a big pain in the ass who holds up the process over minuscule stuff that nobody cares about and who doesn’t understand the aesthetics of the piece.” Yeah, whatever. Adding a comma or making the capitalization in that heading consistent with how it’s done in all the other headings is not going to affect your precious aesthetics; on the contrary, I think consistency will make the piece more pleasing.

You’ll forgive me if I come across as hostile, but the sad truth is that I don’t often feel very appreciated by my coworkers, and no one outside the biz is ever impressed when I tell them what my job is. Hell, few people understand what it is that proofreaders actually do; some even go so far as to wonder why we’re necessary when Word has a perfectly good spellchecker built right in. As an answer to that argument, allow me to present the following explanation of why spellcheckers can’t yet replace a real, literate human eye, and most probably never will unless there’s some kind of major breakthrough in AI tech… which I’m not too worried about:

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Mar242008

I Love Public Transit

Yeah, this is pretty much what my commute home tonight was like. Only instead of a cute little puppet, I was being eyeballed by a scruffy guy who smelled suspiciously like onions and cheap bourbon…

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Mar242008

A Shat Sampler

For my own tribute to The Greatest Thespian of Our Time — and I’m only being somewhat facetious here, because I honestly do think William Shatner is much better than most people give him credit for, at least when he’s really trying and not just collecting a paycheck — I’d like to present some of his finest moments in front of the camera.

Continue Reading…

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Mar242008

Happy Seventy-seven, Bill!

The Shat is

Ack! I am ashamed to admit that I’ve been remiss in my fanboyish duties: I forgot to observe The Shat’s seventy-seventh birthday on Saturday!

Luckily, E.E. Knight was on the ball; to honor the One True Kirk, he posted up a photographic tribute to the lovely ladies of the original Star Trek. I could be a little nitpicky with some of these choices — several of these ladies were Spock’s, Scotty’s, or even Chekov’s love interests, not the captain’s, and some of them were simply there on the show and not any kind of love interest at all — but that would be churlish. It’s a fun entry with some nice eye candy (well, it’s nice if you like 60s-style women, which, as it happens, I do).

Each lady gets her own poll question — the adolescent and somewhat misogynistic “would you hit it?” — but many of the answer options are funny, especially the bizarrely meta-textual ones. (My favorite is the first option for Elinor Donahue: “I’d hit it until Robert Young told me to stop hitting it for medical reasons. Then I’d ignore him because he only plays a doctor on TV.” You see, Elinor played Robert Young’s daughter on Father Knows Best, and Young played the title character in Marcus Welby, M.D., so that one’s funny on something like six different levels. At least I think so. But then I really am a geek…)

Anyhow, click on over to Knight’s tribute, and join me in wishing Bill a belated happy birthday. Let’s hope there are many more to come!

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Mar212008

A Peek at the New Wolf Man

One more quick item before I shut down for the night:

Stephen Sommers, who scored big with his goofy-fun remake of The Mummy and then flopped even bigger with the dismal Van Helsing, is once again looking to the classic Universal monsters for inspiration. This time, it’s The Wolf Man getting an upgrade. I’ve got to admit, I wasn’t too crazy about this idea when I first heard it. I don’t usually care for remakes, Sommers has a spotty record, and the 1941 Wolf Man with Lon Chaney, Jr., has always been my favorite of the Universal monster movies.

But then I heard Benicio del Toro would be playing Lon Chaney part, and my interest level rose a hair. Then I heard the legendary Rick Baker — who brought An American Werewolf in London to life, among many other projects — would be doing the make-up effects and that he intended to remain true to the look of the original, and my interest level climbed a bit more.
Then I saw a photo of del Toro in Baker’s make-up:

Benecio del Toro as The Wolf Man

Holy crap! Is that not way-cool? Suddenly, I’m actually looking forward to this project. Let’s hope it’s a lot more like The Mummy than Van Helsing, though…

Via. Another pic of del Toro’s make-up, as well as one of Lon Chaney for comparison, can be found here.

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Mar212008

The Original Futurama Theme

Ah, the awful work day is over. Let’s talk about something a bit more uplifting, shall we? How about television?

The late, lamented Futurama has always been something of a conundrum for me. It’s a show I really wanted to like: an animated science fiction/comedy series created by the guy who brought us The Simpsons, a spoof of and loving homage to all the futuristicky space crap I’ve always loved, a niche thing that appeals only to a particular elite (read: cult) who actually recognize all the subtle nods to the big SF films and TV of the last 40 years. Oh, and it features the voice talents of the lovely Katey Sagal, a.k.a. Peggy Bundy from Married with Children, one of my guilty pleasures for years. How could I not love Futurama?

I don’t know, but somehow I don’t. The overall design of the show — the look of the environment, the Galaxy Express spaceship, the characters — amuses me, and I occasionally snicker at the sociopathic robot Bender or the frankly bizarre Dr. Zoidberg, but I don’t very often laugh deeply, not the way I do at The Simpsons or some other sitcoms. Hell, I find Two and a Half Men a lot funnier than Futurama. (I don’t know if that says more about Futurama or me, though, and I don’t know that it’s something I ought to be admitting, either…).

I do, however, love Futurama‘s opening credits. Like the title sequence for The Simpsons, this sequence is a tour of the world in which the show takes place, set to a catchy, somewhat goofy theme song. Also like The Simpsons, the opening credits for Futurama feature a gag that changes every episode, in this case the text under the main title itself. Here’s a typical example:

***VIDEO MISSING***

But’s here’s an interesting bit of trivia for you: that theme song is apparently based on a much older piece of music. Naturally, somebody out there on the InterWebs has tracked down that piece of music and made it available to the entire world… click through for more!

According to this guy, the original piece is something called “Psyche Rock” by Pierre Henry and Michel Colombier, an early experiment in electronic music that was recorded in 1967. Here’s the video, which even boasts some similar imagery to the Futurama opening:

See more funny videos at CollegeHumor

 

Funny, I always thought the Futurama theme was a variant of “Louie Louie.” Shows you what I know…

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Mar212008

Restless Kind

On the days when I’m just buried at work — days when my inbox is overflowing and people keep prairie-dogging over the walls of my cube to try and convince me that they’re going to have a heart attack if I don’t do their project RIGHT NOW, ahead of all the other projects that belong to all the other people who are also having heart attacks, and I’m wondering at just what point in my life the road diverged and I ended up on this particular path, and oh by the way, is there an alternate-universe version of me who’s having a lot more fun right at this very moment in time? — yes, on days just like the one I’m having today, I find myself drawn irresistably to the pop-rock music of my formative years in the mid-1980s. You know, the stuff that’s heavy on the crunchy-sounding rhythm guitars and always has a wailing solo after the third verse, but never gets really hard enough to cross the line into true metal? Yeah, I’ll admit to listening to a lot of that stuff regardless of what kind of day I’m having, but on days like this one, I really get dedicated about it.

Maybe it’s because the bombast effectively masks the background noise in my office environment, or maybe it’s because the simplistic lyrics about teenage sexual frustration and youthful machismo are easy to tune out when I’m trying to read copy. Or maybe, just maybe, some part of me is yearning for the time in my life when I didn’t have grey hairs because I can’t seem to figure out how to fit everything I need to do into an 18-hour period of wakefulness. A time when all that was on my mind was music and teenage sexual frustration and dreams of the future…

Well, you get the idea. I’m having a miserable damn day at work and that makes me pine for freedoms I never appreciated when I actually had them. It seems like the longer my to-do list becomes, the more frantically my overworked brain craves escape. I have a lot of fantasies of just walking away from the meat grinder and going vagabond, of tramping through Europe and driving with the top down and riding a Harley somewhere on a desert two-lane. Which would be a good trick, since I don’t actually own a Harley.

I’ve been listening to Night Ranger this afternoon, one song in particular, over and over. It’s synching up with my daydreams and fitting my melancholy mood in a way that’s almost scary. It’s a song called “Restless Kind.” I would’ve put up a YouTube clip, but I haven’t been able to find one. It wasn’t a big hit for the band, and I guess they never did a video for it. Too bad, because it’s actually quite pretty, and very appropriate for anyone who feels like taking an advance on their upcoming mid-life crisis. Here are the lyrics, at least, if you’re interested:

Continue Reading…

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Mar192008

In Memoriam: Arthur C. Clarke

Back in high school, my AP English teacher was fond of telling us that all fiction could be divided into “Literature with a capital L” — i.e., the good, important work, the books you read for AP English class — and everything else, which was, by implication, crap.

Needless to say, his list of “Literature with a capital L” did not include any science fiction titles. (Well, to be fair, it did include 1984 and Brave New World, which are technically SF, but they weren’t SF by my exacting standards of the time… no spaceships, you see.) This was 1987, way before geeks conquered the world, and SF was a ghetto genre that was widely dismissed as kid stuff, or else as disposable, escapist fare that couldn’t possibly provoke any worthwhile thoughts in its readers, and could possibly even be harmful to thinking. Even when you were reading the best the genre had to offer, there was something slightly shameful about being seen with it, as if you were just exiting a strip club and didn’t want to run into anyone you knew.

Nevertheless, I was a fan, dammit, and I was utterly incensed by the idea that the books and movies I loved above all others were considered second-class. I was a smart kid with good grades, college-bound for sure; reading SF certainly hadn’t caused any damage to my brain cells. Obviously, I needed to send a message, to strike a blow against the elistist literati who thought that dreary English moors made for better settings against which to explore the human heart than the surface of alien planets. It was, in the immortal words of Chris Knight, a moral imperative!

My message was to be a lengthy research paper on the genre, specifically on the giants of science fiction’s Golden Age: Robert A. Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, and Arthur C. Clarke. Through sheer logic and examples I no longer recall, I set out to prove that the work of these three men was just as significant and influential, just as important, and most of all just as literary, as anything produced by Faulkner or Fitzgerald or whoever else we’d been reading in class.

What can I say? I was young.

Looking at those three authors now, through eyes that have seen a hell of a lot more of life than the ones that eagerly watched my old teacher for any signs of capitulation in the face of my audacious act of rebellion, I suspect I would probably come to different conclusions than I did back then. I haven’t actually read these authors in years. But from what I recall of their work, Heinlein — always my favorite of the three, by the way — would probably strike me as a writer of excellent adventure stories that weren’t lacking in significant ideas but perhaps also were not as profound as my 17-year-old self believed. As for Asimov… well, I doubt I could get through an Asimov novel these days; even when I was 17, I thought his characters were little more than cardboard props, and I suspect his most famous works probably haven’t aged very well. No, out of my “holy trinity,” only Arthur C. Clarke, the legendary science fiction author who died yesterday at the age of 90, produced anything that I would dare to call “Literature.”

Continue Reading…

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