The Master

I’m about to reveal levels of geekery that few people know I possess — once upon a time, I was a fan of Dr. Who, the longest running science-fiction television series of all time. If you’ve never seen Who, I won’t be able to explain its appeal. And if you have seen it… well, I probably still won’t be able to explain its appeal. Made in England on a budget of about $1.98 per hour of screentime, the show is largely an exercise in cheese — cardboard sets, silly storylines, dialogue consisting mainly of doubletalk and nonsense, and really, really primitive visual effects. I’m talking an extra-grande Pizza Hut CheeseLover’s Stuft Crust job here. However, there are times when it feels really good to eat one of those artery-clogging babies, and Dr. Who is much the same. If viewed with the proper mind set, it’s really a fun show.

May192004

Captain of the Memphis Belle

[Ed. note: Yesterday I was gushing enthusiastically about the futuristic concept of human spaceflight. Today I’m going to wax nostalgic about ancient airplanes. Hey, it’s these little contradictions and paradoxes that make people interesting, right?]

Among my assorted interests, enthusiasms and oddities is a love of old propeller-driven airplanes, especially the “warbirds,” the combat aircraft of World War II. People who are familiar at all with that term usually think of the fighter planes of the era, but in my usual non-conformist fashion, I prefer the bombers.

May182004

Tony Randall

In addition to the rocket launch I mentioned in the last post, there is also sad news on the ‘net today. One of the faces I grew up with, the terrific Tony Randall, has passed away. Randall is best known for playing neat-freak Felix Unger on the TV version of The Odd Couple, and it’s mostly from this show that I know him. I fondly remember watching TOC with my folks. Randall inhabited the role so successfully that when I saw the original Odd Couple film in later years, I had a hard time accepting Jack Lemmon in the role. I recently saw a few re-runs of TOC and was disapppointed to find that they don’t play as well now as I remember them — this is always a problem with seeing something that you loved as a kid, and if you don’t believe me, just try sitting through an episode of Gilligan’s Island these days — but Randall was still funny.

May182004

Civilians in Space!

It is an exciting time for space enthusiasts. Last week’s flight of Burt Rutan’s SpaceShipOne caught my attention and started me thinking about the possibility of civilians doing what NASA has been unable to do, namely establish a significant human presence beyond the boundaries of our home planet. Today I see that Rutan isn’t alone in this venture. According to the BBC, an unmanned, amateur-built rocket has successfully reached an altitude of 100 kilometers (a little over 62 miles high), becoming the first amateur rocket to enter space.

May162004

Weekend Museum Tour

Yesterday Anne and I wanted to break our usual weekend routine so we took a field trip to the Springville Museum of Art. It’s a place we’ve known about for some time and have often threatened to check out, but we never managed to make it down there until yesterday. If you live in the Salt Lake or Provo area and are interested in visual arts, I highly recommend this little-known treasure.

May142004

Frasier Has Left The Building

As a rule, I really don’t care for television comedies. Most of them are too dumb, too snarky, too loud, or I find that I simply can’t identify with their premises or characters. But every once in a blue moon, a sit-com emerges that has charm and wit enough to draw my interest. One of those rare gems has just ended its long run, and I’m not talking about Friends. (Full disclosure: I never understood the fuss over Friends. I know that show has its fans — one of whom is my own Anne — but I just never could get over the fact that these supposedly-struggling twentysomethings lived in apartments as large as my parents’ house, in Manhattan no less. And I just never thought it was that funny. No accounting for taste, I guess.)

May142004

One Step Closer to the Stars

One of my earliest ambitions was to be a Starship Captain. At some point, however, I realized that the human race was still a helluva long way from building anything like James T. Kirk’s USS Enterprise, so I lowered my sights a bit and decided instead that I would become an astronaut. This was around the time that NASA was glide-testing its newest toy, the space shuttle Enterprise (which was named after the fictional Star Trek vessel), by taking it aloft on the back of a 747 and releasing it to fly, unpowered, back to the ground. It was an exciting time for a young boy who was interested in space, but too young to remember the Apollo missions. It seemed like we — the human race in general and Americans in particular — were on the verge of Great Things. I used to imagine myself piloting (or at least working aboard) a second-generation space shuttle, commuting between a busy spaceport on Earth and a wheel-shaped station in Earth orbit. I didn’t think this was a mere daydream. I was convinced that it would happen. It seemed inevitable that human beings would one day answer the same siren song that has always compelled us to see what was over the next hill, the same call that caused us to walk out of Africa and go sailing across the uncharted oceans. I used to believe that humans would go to the stars simply because they’re there, and that it would happen in my lifetime.

May122004

Abu Ghraib Watch

I think I may have found a new hero in the unlikeliest of places (or, more accurately, the unlikeliest party). Yesterday, during the Congressional hearings on this this Iraqi prison mess, Republican sentator Lindsey Graham, a former Air Force JAG, rose above the partisan horseshit and spoke volumes with but a single sentence. He said what I have been thinking ever since this scandal first broke: “When you are the good guys, you’ve got to act like the good guys.”

(If you’re masochistic enough to want to see the complete transcript of those hearings, click here.)

Josh Marshall‘s comment on Graham’s statement was, “Another way to put this might be to say that being the good guys is about what you do, not who you are. That’s a truth that the architects of this war, in subtler but I suspect more damaging ways, frequently failed to understand.”

May112004

The Blogosphere Speaks

I know I said I wasn’t going to keep hammering at this Abu Ghraib thing, but the Internet is awash in commentary on the subject and I’m finding a lot of thought-provoking material out there. If you’re interested in this subject, please read on for some quotes and links; otherwise, I invite you to come back later.

May112004

“I Don’t Like Spam.”

Read the title of this post in the appropriate Monty Python-esque voice, then behold this news: Simple Tricks and Nonsense has just endured its first legitimate spamming incident. For some reason, my review of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind attracted the attention of a penis-enlarging snake-oil salesman. Interesting…

The offending comments (which consisted of a dozen or so links to various unsavory websites) were easily deleted, but I really hope this doesn’t become a common occurence.

Archives

The Master

Captain of the Memphis Belle

Tony Randall

Civilians in Space!

Weekend Museum Tour

Frasier Has Left The Building

One Step Closer to the Stars

Abu Ghraib Watch

The Blogosphere Speaks

“I Don’t Like Spam.”

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