April 2008 Archives

I just learned from the blog of Irene Gallo, the art director for Tor Books, that the illustrative artist John Berkey has died. Irene mentions something about him being in poor health in recent years, but so far, I haven't been able to find any further details about his age or cause of death.

Berkey is probably best known for painting some of the very earliest pieces of promotional art associated with Star Wars -- the image above was a poster concept for the movie, which ended up instead becoming the iconic cover of the film's novelization -- but his work was pretty commonly seen on all kinds of books and posters in the late '70s and early '80s, and it was a big influence on my developing sense of aesthetics. Several of his paintings still live in my memory; when I read of his death, I instantly recalled an image of his that appeared on Navy recruitment posters throughout my high school and early college years, and also this painting,which was the cover of a National Geographic coffee-table book called Our Universe. A friend of mine owned a copy of that book; as I recall, I borrowed it several times, but about all I remember about it now was that awesome cover painting.

Berkey's work was more impressionistic than realistic, but one of the things it always conveyed was a true sense of mass. His starships and ocean-going craft and floating cities always felt huge and immensely powerful. It was a perfect style for the time of its greatest popularity, when Star Wars, with its mile-long Star Destroyers and moon-sized Death Star, set the tone for so much science fiction.

I don't recall seeing any new work from Berkey in years, and I don't know if that's because he's been ill or otherwise not working, or if his stuff just fell out of fashion. I rediscovered him a few years ago when I ran across a used art book at Sammy's, and I spent several days marveling at how many of his paintings were familiar, and how much I still like them. That Star Wars piece above, for the record, is one of my favorites out of the hundreds of Original Trilogy-related paintings produced over the years; this companion piece is, too, even if it inaccurately depicts several Corellian YT-1300 light freighters at the Battle of Yavin, rather than just the one we all know actually was there...

The first summer I worked at that movie theater job I'm always yammering on about was amazing. It was amazing for a lot of reasons: I had my first "real" job, I was positively goofy about this particular girl I happened to know, and I was making friendships with a posse of guys I'm still friendly with nearly 20 years later... it was simply one of the best times of my life. But one of the biggest reasons the summer of '89 was so great was that the movies that were running in the background of all those coming-of-age moments were great, too. I've never done the research, so this is entirely subjective on my part, but I can't think of any other summertime movie season that has been so chock-full of flicks that were both (a) immensely successful and (b) so damn good (or at least so really damn enjoyable, which isn't necessarily the same thing). The line-up for the Memorial-Day-to-Labor-Day period that year included: Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Batman, Lethal Weapon 2, Dead Poets Society, The Abyss, License to Kill, Honey I Shrunk the Kids, When Harry Met Sally..., and probably a dozen more I'm not remembering right now. There were just so many titles coming out that summer that caught my -- and everybody else's -- attention, and we at the theater were all so aware of what was coming up. I miss being so plugged in to the scene. Or to any scene, really. Every weekend brought some new wonder, some new zap of electric anticipation for both us theater-drones and the patrons queuing up in the lobby. It was an exciting time to be working in the movie industry, and to be a movie fan.

However, at the risk of sounding like a grumpy old curmudgeon who's always going on about how much better things were back in his day, it's been one long, slow downward slope ever since. I still reflexively get excited at the approach of the summer season, but year by year, summer by summer, the ratio of disappointment to awesomeness has been creeping upwards. Worse, it's getting to the point where the upcoming releases aren't even that interesting to begin with. (Of course, this problem isn't confined to just the summer months; The Girlfriend and I used to go to the movies at least once a week, and sometimes two or three times, but over the last couple of years we've scaled back to about once a month. And it's not because we're all that busy -- although we are -- it's mostly a function of how few flicks are coming out that we really want to see...)

Let's examine this summer's schedule (which officially kicks off this Friday with the release of Iron Man) and see what catches our eye, shall we?

Coming home tonight after a late evening out, I was thinking about this song:

That's Pat Benatar's "Shadows of the Night," if you don't know it. I've always liked this one; it's probably my favorite Benatar tune, even though it was one of her lesser hits and seems to be somewhat unknown these days (at least, I rarely hear it out there in the world; whenever the oldies station -- sigh -- plays a Benatar song, it's almost invariably either "Hit Me with Your Best Shot" or "Love Is a Battlefield"). I groove on its combination of romantic melody and rock 'n' roll bombast, I guess. I vaguely remembered the video showed her in a cockpit singing into an old-fashioned microphone, but wow, it turns out to be quite the little epic, doesn't it?

A couple of thoughts:

• I don't know what kind of planes are featured in Pat's daydream, but they're not P-51 Mustangs, as shown on that poster she's looking at in the framing scenes.
• This was made in 1982, the year after Raiders of the Lost Ark came out. Could the Nazi theme have possibly been inspired by Raiders' success? It seem like there were a lot of Nazis and 1930s/1940s things in pop culture around that time, but did Raiders begin that or was it merely another example of the same zeitgeist?
• Did you catch Judge Reinhold and Bill Paxton as the pilot in the red cap and the Nazi radio operator, respectively?
• And finally, is it just me or are women in 1940s-style flying gear damn sexy? Maybe it's me...

I grew up in a place -- Riverton, Utah -- that, up until the late '80s or so, was very much like the stereotypical small town you see in movies and old TV sitcoms. I lived on a pleasant road lined (at that time) with big shade trees; there was a single grocery store whose staff knew my mother by name; and my dad did a lot of barter work with the neighbors, trading his mechanical knowledge for labor to help build our barn, among other things. But even then, Riverton's small-town atmosphere was something of a fading illusion -- traffic along that tree-lined road grew heavier with each passing year, and tract houses were quietly springing up like mushrooms after the rain.

The community to the south of Riverton, however, a place called Bluffdale... well, that really was a small town. Bluffdale didn't even have its own grocery store, or a school for its children, or much of anything really except alfalfa fields and cows and pick-up trucks. Bluffdale old-timers still refer to driving the three miles over to Riverton for groceries as "going to town," as if they were trekking in from the Outback to the Big City. This is where my lovely Anne, a.k.a. The Girlfriend, grew up, playing with the neighbor kids that were her age, babysitting the ones that were younger, being watched over herself by the ones that were older.

It was the sort of upbringing that leaves deep and lasting roots. Many of Anne's "old gang" still live right there in the old neighborhood, and the ones who have moved on in search of greener pastures -- or any kind of pastures, considering that Bluffdale is now "developing" just like its big brother Riverton -- seem to keep in better touch with their childhood friends than most. When something bad happens to one of them, the word gets around. And people do what they can to help.

A while back, Anne got the word that something very bad indeed had happened to one of the old gang. A guy named Nate Pemberton lost his wife Jenni and their unborn fourth child to something called an "amniotic embolism," a rare and not-very-well-understood complication of pregnancy that kills nearly 80 percent of the women it afflicts. Just to make things more interesting, the couple didn't have any health insurance. So now, in addition to trying to deal with his grief and raise their other three kids alone, Nate has to find a way, somehow, to cover a bundle of very large medical bills.

To try to help Nate, the old gang and the larger community of Bluffdale old-timers have set up a fund in the name of Jennifer M. Pemberton at Zions Bank to collect donations. (If you live out of state, there's also a PayPal account that will feed into the same fund). More impressively, they're mounting a benefit concert headlined by local country-western performer J. Marc Bailey. Now, I'm not a big fan of country music, but I have seen Marc perform -- I've also met him via a mutual acquaintance -- and I can attest that he puts on a good show. He's had some rock 'n' roll influences and his music isn't strictly country. This ought to be a decent night's entertainment, and of course it's for a good cause. If you're interested either in contributing or attending the concert, you can find the details on this memorial blog or e-mail me and I'll make sure you get the facts you need.

I have to confess that I don't actually know Nate. I knew who the Pembertons were back in the day, but due to a quirk of timing they were all either ahead of me or behind me in school, so I never actually got acquainted with them. However, Anne knows them and the news about Nate's troubles shook her. Shook me a little, too, to be honest. The word "tragedy" gets thrown around pretty easily these days, but if this story doesn't qualify as a genuine tragedy, I don't know what would. I don't want to taint this noble cause with politics, but it seems to me the story of Jenni and Nate Pemberton is a damn good example of why we need to get serious about renovating our healthcare system in this country. It's absolute nonsense that a country that calls itself the "richest nation on Earth" can't set up something so good working people from small towns don't have to worry about bill collectors pounding on their doors during the worst year of their lives. Stories like Nate's are pretty common, and the injustice of them always makes me angry. The Europeans consider access to healthcare a basic human right, and they never have to worry about losing their homes when something unexpected happens. So why can't we Americans, who used to lead the world in just about every way you can think of but lately seem to be sitting on the sidelines, say the same thing?

Forgive the mini-rant. As I said, these stories get my dander up. Anyway, if anyone reading this knows the Pembertons or lives in the Salt Lake/Provo area and wants to see a good concert, or even if you're a total stranger who's just looking for a way to spend some of that free money George W. is sending to us this month, please check out that blog I mentioned and throw a couple of dollars into the hat. It's a good cause. And it's a way to keep that small-town atmosphere alive just a little while longer...

Via Chris Roberson, here's an awesome piece of art by a guy named Dusty Abell that probably won't mean a damn thing to any of the younger folks out there in InternetLand, but ought to bring a smile to the faces of all us aging thirtysomethings.

In case you've forgotten (or never knew them), these are the heroes and villains of all those great live-action TV adventures that used to alternate with cartoons on Saturday mornings back in the '70s. Children's television back then was blissfully un-self-conscious, utterly lacking in the cynical sense of irony, marketing potential, and self-aware references to other pop culture that infest today's kidvid stuff. It was also incredibly low-budget, heartbreakingly earnest, and broadly (i.e., poorly) acted. But it was wonderful stuff anyhow. Mostly fantasy or science fiction in nature, it stretched the imaginations of many a wide-eyed young viewer, and I didn't realize how much I missed these shows until just now. I feel sorry for modern-day kids; Saturday mornings these days just suck.

Click on the image to blow it up large and see how many of these characters you can name. The complete roster is below the fold...

A couple of days ago, I brought you the wonder of a Japan-ified "Smoke on the Water." Now as a little Saturday morning wake-me-up I present The Ramones' "Blitzkrieg Bop" played -- quite well, incidentally -- by two guys with ukeleles. Why? I dunno... it just amuses me:

The Bad Astronomer reminds us that today is the 18th anniversary of the launch of the Hubble Space Telescope. It's hard to believe that Hubble has been sending back incredible photos of the universe around us for nearly two decades. Time flies.

To celebrate the anniversary, NASA has released 59 images of galaxies colliding with other galaxies, the largest collection of Hubble images ever released to the public in a single package. The image above contains some highlights. Click on it to see 'em large, or go here for the complete gallery.

Good stuff, Maynard!

The text that didn't get reproduced from the quiz site (and which inspired the title of this entry) reads: "You are a Master! You're either an old man or a serious throwback!"

Um, yeah. We won't comment any further on that...

Roger Von Bergendorff, the guy who lapsed into a coma after handling deadly ricin in a Las Vegas hotel room, has been arrested and charged with possession of a biological toxin, as well as possessing unregistered firearms and firearms not identified by serial number. According to this article, he also had a couple of homemade silencers and drawings of a device for injecting the ricin into victims. He has supposedly admitted to making the ricin in Utah, "possibly in the basement of his cousin's Riverton home" -- which, if you'll recall, is only a short distance from my own home.

All in all, Von Bergendorff comes across as something of a poseur, a guy with a big mouth and a vivid imagination rather than a genuine killer, something like the character in Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil who is always threatening to pour poison into the city's water supply just to make himself seem more important. But still... it does give me a bit of a chill to think that somewhere right in my hometown, there was a guy who nursed private grudges and cooked up vengeance plans that sound like something out of a John le Carre novel. It's all too easy to imagine this guy roaming the aisles of Peterson's, the local grocery store, poking people with his little poison-spitter, and then laughing a few days later when the TV news is doing around-the-clock coverage while authorities try to figure out what the hell is going on with all the sick and dying people in an otherwise unremarkable bedroom community on the south end of the valley...

In honor of Salt Lake's fourth annual Japanese Festival this Saturday, here's an example of cross-cultural pollination that you simply have to experience to believe:

Cheerfully ganked from Javi.

Before I shut down for the night, three items that caught my interest:

1. Roger Ebert, the best film critic still working today, now has a blog.

2. Salt Lake has a "disappointing" skyline.

3. And if you've ever wondered whatever happened to one of the best-known writer/directors of the 1980s, it seems that these days John Hughes is making like Howard Hughes. Too bad...

Incidentally, does anyone else wonder what Ferris, Cameron, and Sloane are up to these days? I've often had the thought that it'd be very interesting if Ferris has become a burned-out, work-obsessed capitalist and his old buddy Cameron shows up to remind him of the life-changing lesson he taught 20 years ago...

Nah, it'd never work.

In Sunday's tribute to Charlton Heston, I mentioned something called the Big Money Movie. I think I've written about that before, but in case you didn't catch the reference, the BMM was a local movie show here in Salt Lake that aired every weekday afternoon back in the mid-70s or thereabouts. The host was a funny little guy named Bernie Calderwood; his job was to introduce the day's title and then, about midway through the show, to pull a phone number out of a rotating drum and call a lucky viewer at home. If the person answered and could tell Bernie what movie he was running or answer a trivia question or something, they won some cash (hence the "big money" part of the show's title).

As best I can recall, the selection of films was exactly what you'd expect for a mid-afternoon slot in a (then) small television market (I'd imagine we probably qualify as "mid-sized" now), i.e., anything the station could get for cheap. That meant beat-up prints of decades-old back-catalog classics and a lot of B-grade genre flicks. I saw a lot of movies on the old BMM that I still adore, but the ones that are really standing out in my memory this afternoon are the adaptations of Edgar Allan Poe stories that starred Vincent Price and were directed by the legendary Roger Corman.

The "Poe movies," as I think of them, are really amazing pieces of filmmaking: visually sumptuous and dripping with creepy atmosphere (if a bit sedate by modern standards) that become even more remarkable when you know the details of their creation. (Basically, they had budgets of about $1.98, but Corman cleverly "borrowed" sets, props, and costumes from A-level productions after they'd shut down for the day. Guerrilla filmmaking at its best, baby!) The films are rightly noted for their male stars, which included the always charming Price (he was in six of the seven Poe films produced by Corman) as well as Ray Milland, Boris Karloff, Peter Lorre, and Basil Rathbone, not to mention a very young Jack Nicholson. But it was the female co-stars who drew much of my interest, even as a boy. They were, in a word, beautiful, voluptuous and powerfully feminine in a way that today's emaciated and generally plain-jane starlets simply cannot match. And one of the most memorable of these unsung heroines was the lady who appears in the photo above, Hazel Court. She appeared in three of the Poe films: The Premature Burial, The Masque of the Red Death, and, most impressively, as a conniving and very bitchy Lenore in The Raven. (The still above, with a sleepy-looking Boris Karloff, is from The Raven.)

Hazel, unlike some of the younger actresses who appeared in these movies, was more than a pretty face and nice cleavage, though; she had real presence and was more than capable of shining alongside the Hollywood legends with whom she shared the screen. She's as much fun in The Raven as any of the "triad of terror" (Price, Karloff, and Lorre).

Hazel Court passed away last week at her home in Lake Tahoe; she was 82.

Remember a couple of weeks ago when the hot thing sweeping the InterWebs was those deeply unsettling images of Homer Simpson and Mario as they'd appear if they were "real"? The creator of those images has struck again, this time giving us an "untooned" version of Jessica Rabbit from the classic movie Who Framed Roger Rabbit?. As one might expect, she's much less grotesque than the other two...

[Ed. note: I know I'm a couple weeks late for the funeral and pretty much the entire blogosphere has already had its say on the late actor Charlton Heston, but I feel I would be highly remiss if I didn't recognize his passing here in my little corner of the InterWebs. So just imagine that it's two weeks ago and this is current news, okay?]

One of the great treasures of my childhood was the time I spent watching old movies on television with my mom. I'm thinking in particular of the days before the home video revolution, when the viewer actually had very little control over the viewing experience. If you didn't like whatever was on KSL's Big Money Movie that day, you found something else to do. And if you did like the film, you really had to pay attention and savor it because there was no telling when it might air again.

I think that's probably the biggest difference between The Way Things Used to Be and the on-demand world we now enjoy, the way we take it for granted that you can watch the same flick over and over, whenever you feel like it. When I was a kid, we just didn't have that luxury, and I honestly think movies meant more to film lovers back then because of the relative scarcity of any given title.

There were, however, three pictures that you could count on seeing pretty regularly, because they always aired at least once a year, usually around holidays: The Wizard of Oz, Ben-Hur, and The Ten Commandments. As it happened, my mom loved all three of them, and, in the case of the two Heston films, could even recall seeing them on the big screen when they were new. (Somewhere down in the Bennion Archives, I have the Ben-Hur souvenir program that she bought in the lobby of the late, lamented Villa Theatre way back in 1959.) Squashing these epic movies down into the confines of a 24-inch TV screen robbed them of much of their grandeur, of course, but I didn't fully understand that at the time. I thought they were neat, partly because watching them was an annual tradition, partly because my mom was so enthusiastic about them and my early tastes were heavily influenced by hers, but mostly because I liked Charlton Heston, who died April 5th at the age of 84.

Here's a weird little novelty, courtesy of Lileks. No introduction from me would really do it justice, so just watch:

Remember when everyone thought the future was going to be, well, futuristic? We've lowered our sights in so many ways. Sigh... at least they haven't de-wrinkled our prunes yet. (Um, wouldn't a smooth prune just be a plum? Duh, guys.)

Since I seem to wallowing in stereotypically masculine interests today anyhow, what with the airplanes and all, I thought I'd throw this up, too:

That's the eternally yummy Raquel Welch, circa mid-1960s or so. I have no idea if this is a still from a movie or a modeling gig or what. But... it's Raquel Welch... in a serape and a gun belt... mmmmm...

Oh, come on, it's Friday afternoon! What better time for a big ol' slice of cheesecake? Stop looking at me like that...

While I was seeking out links for the previous entry, I came across the photo below and thought it was too awesome not to share:

Hm... I just read some news that kind of startled me: the Air Force is retiring its F-117A Nighthawk fighter planes -- a.k.a. "the stealth fighter" -- this month. Next week, in fact. Monday, to be precise.

And why is this startling, you may ask? Mostly because it doesn't seem like these weird little black arrowheads have been around all that long, but the article I read reveals that they've actually been in service for over twenty years, ever since 1983, although the Air Force denied their existence until 1988. (Makes you wonder how many UFO sightings prior to '88 were actually Nighthawks being tested out and then flown on secret missions, doesn't it?)

I'm not one to pay much attention to dreams -- I don't try to interpret them, I don't freight them with any real significance, and most the time I don't even remember them (I assume, however, that I do have them, because, as far as I can tell, I haven't gone mad like you're supposed to if you don't dream) -- but I had one this morning just before the alarm woke me that's really staying with me for some reason. It wasn't scary or anything, it was just... weird.

In the dream, I was in The Girlfriend's bedroom, trying to find the source of this freaky purple light emanating from beneath her bed. I got down on my knees and, after a moment's hesitation, lifted the bedskirt. There was an automated plasma torch under there, merrily slicing strips from this long bolt of fabric, which I somehow knew were going to be used to make underwear. I don't know what kind of underwear, or whether it was ladies' underwear or men's or sexy or utilitarian. Just that the fabric would end up as... underwear.

And then an ex-girlfriend that I haven't seen in probably 12 years showed up. She didn't do anything, she just walked into the room, gave me a little wave, and walked out the other door.

And that was it. Weird, huh? The ex-girlfriend's appearance makes a certain amount of sense -- the media coverage for Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is beginning to pick up, and I was involved with her back when Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade came out in '89, so reading those articles yesterday probably just stirred up some old memories -- but where the hell did the plasma torch and the underwear come from? I'm going to be pondering this one all day, I fear...

Just in case desktop computers, HDTV, and cellphones are insufficiently science-fiction-y for you, we're soon going to have light-emitting wallpaper and vat-grown hamburgers.

I am frankly flabbergasted by this stuff. And also by the fact that I just glanced out my window and it's freaking snowing. On a sunny day, no less. I love springtime in Utah...

My good friend and occasional writing partner Mike Chenoweth (more familiarly known in these parts as "Chenopup") has just launched a nifty entrepreneurial venture, a company called Reel Classroom, which will produce and sell educational DVDs targeted at those who want to become film and video professionals, as well as those who are already in the business and want to deepen their skill sets. The first two DVDs -- Introduction to Lighting for Film and Video and Green Screen Lighting -- are available now.

Both were written, directed, and edited by Mike, and they feature veteran gaffer Carl Gundestrup as your host and narrator. I've seen both DVDs myself, and think they're pretty interesting, even for people who have no intention of ever becoming gaffers or lighting techs. (Full disclosure: I actually appear on-screen in Green Screen Lighting, in all of my difficult-to-light glory!)

The Reel Classroom web site is live as of yesterday, so I'd like to ask my three loyal readers to do me a favor: click on over there and have a look around, see if there's anything there you might like for yourself, and generally do what you can to spread the word. If you know anyone who might be interested in learning about the film industry, let them know.

Among my various esoteric interests is a curious -- some would say morbid -- fascination for the infamous tragedies of history: Pompeii, the Hindenberg crash, and of course, the grandmother of disaster stories, the sinking of the RMS Titanic.

Today is the 96th anniversary of what author Walter Lord called "a night to remember," i.e., the night the supposedly unsinkable ship struck an iceberg while on her maiden -- and only -- voyage. (Technically, the ship hit the iceberg late on the night of April 14, but it took two and a half hours to go down, so it actually sank on the 15th.)

Public interest in this particular shipwreck never seems to wane, for some reason, and to this day people are still debating over what exactly happened out there in the North Atlantic. Oh, sure, everyone knows the ship hit a 'berg, but was it ripped open like a giant can of anchovies by a sharp spur of ice, as so many movies have depicted? Or was the damage actually something more... subtle? Caused by something innocuous that nobody thought would be a problem, like the stupidly mundane combination of rubber o-rings and freezing temperatures that brought down the space shuttle Challenger?

Here's a theory: it was the rivets that held the ship together. More precisely, according to two authors of an upcoming book, it was rivets made of inferior, brittle materials that shattered when the iceberg gently brushed -- not ripped into -- Titanic's side. According to this theory -- which is backed up by observations of the wreck itself on the ocean floor -- the ship wasn't torn open, as everyone has believed; rather, the broken rivets allowed the hull plates to simply open up along their seams. The end result was the same, of course.

Did you know that what they used to call "marital relations" is entirely dependent on the quality of what's in your cup? No, really. Check out this "educational film" from the Folgers company:

So, let's review: hubby is so disgusted by his morning ration of battery acid that he's apparently decided he never wants to have sex again, at least not with his wife. (There is that veiled threat about the girls at the office and their "hot plates," the implication obviously being that he's ready to throw the missus over for somebody who really knows how to brew some good joe.) Fortunately, she's not the sort to throw crockery at the jerk and move back in with her mother; instead, she wisely identifies the source of her husband's discontent and takes steps to remediate the problem. And sure enough, by nighttime he's all hepped up on go-juice and ready to rock her world.

Which of these two is the more foolish, the shallow man who is obviously on a caffeine-fueled emotional rollercoaster, or his doormat of a wife who'll do anything -- even turn to convenient, cheap, processed, better-living-through-modern-chemistry food substitutes -- just to avoid revealing that she flunked her Home Ec class three times in a row?

Did these quaintly ridiculous ad campaigns really work back in the day? Do they even still make Folgers Crystals, and is anyone dumb enough to use them? And what would happen to this guy if he someone served him some freshly ground French-press coffee, i.e., real coffee? Based on the evidence presented here, I imagine the sexual release would probably kill everyone within five feet of the sap...

One more for tonight: our esteemed colleague Jaquandor has declared me an excellent blogger:

Another terrific source of high-quality geekitude, Jason at Simple Tricks and Nonsense always brings the goods. Sometimes we agree on stuff, sometimes we don't.

To which I say, with all sincerity, thanks, man. That truly means a lot to me. I'm glad people out there enjoy what I do.

And to everyone else reading this, if you haven't checked out Jaquandor's blog, Byzantium's Shores, I highly recommend it. He's a fine writer and seems to be a good egg. Have a look, in particular, at his on-going project to "fix" the The Phantom Menace; basically he's writing a story treatment that retains the bulk of Uncle George's screenplay as we saw it, but with a few tweaks that would've made for a drastically improved film. As he says of me, I don't agree with everything he's doing -- I would've made far more substantial changes to Jar Jar Binks and the Gungan people than Jaq has chosen to do, and I probably would've jettisoned the midichlorians altogether rather than trying to find a way to make that idea work -- but that's the fun of these sort of geeky conversations. At least it used to be, back before everybody got so damn serious about them.

As you can imagine, this rewrite is a pretty lengthy process; he's doing it by installments and is about halfway through the film at this point. Here' s Part One to get you started...

My friend Erin recently started a blog, but her posting has been pretty sporadic and today she's reached that dark midnight of the blogger's soul, the blogistential crisis if you will, that all of us online dabblers eventually come to:

This will probably surprise no one:

I've pretty much stopped paying attention to the seemingly endless back-and-forth between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama -- at this point, I figure I've already decided who I prefer and I've frankly lost interest in following the campaign any further until a candidate is officially chosen at the Democratic National Convention in August -- which means that I only learned of "Bittergate" this morning when I saw that the blogosphere had been chattering about it all weekend. Basically, I guess Obama made a remark about small-town folks relying on guns, God, and anti-immigrant feelings to deal with their frustrated ambitions, and Hillary and McCain are feigning offense on behalf of those people he was talking about, branding Obama an "elitist." (In case you also missed this one, details are here.)

Now, I've read Obama's remarks and I personally don't think he said anything all that offensive (although I grant I may feel differently if I were one of those small-town people). While you never know what's going to piss people off, this whole thing strikes me as a tempest in a teapot that'll likely be forgotten by next week. However, the accusation of elitism has been reliably effective in bringing down politicians who display too much schooling in their speechifying, so, again, you never know what'll happen here. It's a phenomenon I've never fully understood, myself. I find our cultural distrust of intellect both mystifying and deplorable.

So does writer Peter David; he made some particularly cogent remarks on the subject today:

We have a situation wherein this country's anti-intellectualism has become so pervasive, so suffocating, that we have multi-millionaire Ivy league graduates trying to pretend they're just plain folks when clearly they're not. And people know they're not. This country was founded by men who knew they were the best and brightest, and the citizenry took pride and comfort in that. But television has put politicians into peoples' homes, and now we just want someone we're comfortable with. We don't want men and women who come across like professors; we want the guy who sat in the back of the class and goofs off, as if life was a sitcom. To put it in "Fast Times at Ridgemont High" terms, we should want to elect Mr. Hand; instead we opt for Jeff Spicoli.

Couldn't have said it better myself...

Do you remember Buran, the space shuttle the Russians built back in the '80s that looked so much like ours? Ever wonder what happened to it after the collapse of the USSR? Well, I have, and today I finally satisfied my curiosity.

As I fancy myself something of a clever wordsmith, at least on good days, I always admire a good turn of phrase, a line that perfectly describes the subject at hand or even -- bonus! -- makes me smile or laugh out loud.

I've encountered two such items in today's web surfing, which I'd like to share with you now.

The first comes from Phil Plait, the Bad Astronomer, who, in talking about yesterday's news that scientists have successfully tested an immensely powerful petawatt laser, explains that:

...one petawatt is 1000 terawatts; peta is a prefix people will get to know in a year or two once terabyte drives prove too small to store very many illegally downloaded BluRay movies.

That's a pretty good one, but the comparison that really earned a chuckle came from Boing Boing Gadgets:

[Item X] should cost more per ounce than heroin filtered through the limbic system of Tom Cruise.

Heroin filtered through Tom Cruise's limbic system? How absurd! How perfect! What kind of twisted, beautiful mind comes up with something like that? I can only doff my hat in wonder and respect...

I love this photo:

Why? Well, why not? It's in groovy black-and-white and has the slightly flattened, zoomed-in perspective that I often shoot with myself. There's some awesome mid-century googie architecture in the background, and it looks like that's probably the famous Randy's Donuts to the right. Oh, and there's frickin' Dr. Zaius sitting on a bus-bench in modern-day (well, 1968, anyway) Los Angeles. How could you not love this?

I found it here, via Boing Boing, of course. I recommend checking out all of the photos in that set. There's a lot of beautiful, nostalgic, and somewhat weird stuff. Be warned, though -- there is some hippie-style nudity. If that sort of thing bothers you.

This morning as I was driving over to the train station, I heard the song "Jessie's Girl" by my main man Rick Springfield... on KODJ. That's the local oldies station, if you don't know.

Then, coming home on the train tonight, I was serenaded by a couple of sweaty, pubescent twelve-year-old boys with dumb haircuts who were wearing baggy jeans and way-oversized hoodies covered in skulls. They were singing "I'm Turning Japanese."

I honestly don't know which of these two events made me feel more over the hill.

At least the kids weren't being mocking or ironic -- they were, in fact, behaving like this moldy chestnut was a really cool and funny song. Which it is. And at least Rick's back on the radio somewhere.

I'm rationalizing, aren't I?

Sigh. I'm going to go put on a sweater and lay in a supply of rocks for chasing the damn kids off my lawn...

Oh, boy... what a conundrum...

You see, I loathe the "competitive reality show" phenomenon that has overtaken primetime television in recent years. Survivor and its highly contrived ilk long ago wore out their welcome for me and the American Idol-style talent shows alternately bore and irritate me. However, I reserve a particularly strong flame of hatred for the mind-numbingly stupid modern-day variants of the traditional quiz-show format. I think it's the way they all try to generate artificial suspense by having the contestants deliberate for ridiculously long periods of time (usually not very believably -- I mean, come on, how hard is it to answer the lowest difficulty level of these softball questions? Is the sky is blue or green? You honestly don't know that one? Well, then just pick one!) while ominous "the clock is ticking and which wire is Jack Bauer going to clip" music plays in the background. This technique was developed for Regis Philbin's thankfully deceased Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, but it endures in the even-more-annoying Deal or No Deal, in which contestants essentially play three-card monte by choosing from a range of metal attache cases in hopes that one of them will contain a cool million bucks. (The difference, of course, is that the contestants aren't betting their own money and so have nothing, really, to lose by just picking one, a scenario that makes the delayed-response thing even more obnoxious. It's not like Howie Mandel is pulling cash out of their wallets for every wrong choice they make!)

Needless to say, I don't watch Deal if I can possibly avoid it -- which is sometimes tricky, because my parents love the damn thing, so I have to be careful about when I choose to visit them -- but now an item on the Official Star Wars blog has piqued my curiosity... not to mention my prurient interests.

If you've never seen the show, part of Deal's schtick is that the attache cases that may or may not contain the million-dollar winnings (well, the cases actually contain cards with a dollar amount written on them) are held by 26 lovely female models, all wearing identical dresses (I believe they're usually red). But according to the Star Wars blog, an upcoming episode will have the Deal models dressed in the classic Princess Leia slave-girl outfit from Return of the Jedi, a.k.a., the "metal bikini." Can any loyal fanboy whose puberty was haunted by sail-barge fantasies resist that diabolical kind of lure? Especially when Vader, Chewie, R2-D2, and Carrie Fisher herself are also supposed to be on hand? I guess we'll find out...

(As an aside, I will admit that the idea of a Star Wars-themed episode did make me smile, even if I dislike the show, because it brings back a lot of fond memories of How Things Used to Be. Back in the late '70s, every variety show on the air, from The Muppet Show to Donny and Marie did an SW episode. It seems like strange timing to do one now, though; I've been thinking lately that SW in general, and the original trilogy in particular, is fading from the pop-cultural radar now that the prequels are complete. Perhaps Deal or No Deal skews heavily among people in my demographic?)

I had a little surprise waiting in my e-mail inbox this morning and thought I'd share it with my three loyal readers. The gorgeous photo above was taken by my friend, Mike Gillilan; it's a panorama consisting of several overlapping images that have been digitally stitched together, then tweaked in the computer to produce a "high dynamic range image." I'll confess, I don't fully understand the HDR stuff -- hell, I don't even own a digital camera -- but as you can see, it produces some really striking results. Don't forget to click the image for the larger version...

Incidentally, in case you don't recognize this location, it's the Sandy TRAX station, a.k.a., the "end of the line, as far as we go," the southernmost terminus of the Salt Lake Valley's light-rail system. This is the station where Gillilan and I both begin our daily commutes. For the record, it looks much cooler in this photo than in the real world...

Following up on the possibility that a new clue to the fate of hijacker D.B. Cooper had been found, Earl Cossey, the man who packed the four parachutes given to Cooper on that night in 1971, says the 'chute discovered by some children in Washington state is definitely not one of Cooper's. Cooper's parachutes were made of nylon, and the mystery 'chute is silk. (I'm guessing that would make it much older than Cooper's, possibly even World War II-vintage.)

For the record, Cossey sounds like something of a dick. He apparently told some reporters that the 'chute really was Cooper's, just to yank their chains. I'm sure it must be tiresome being the go-to man whenever anyone turns up a rag that they think might be Cooper-related, but still... playing games like that strikes me as very uncool, especially when it might get somebody fired.

And for the other record, I still think Cooper survived his jump, made off with the bulk of the cash, and spent the rest of his days drinking margaritas in the sun... it makes for a better story that way.

To my knowledge, I've never really had a genuine, honest-to-gosh nemesis, but I'm beginning to think it just might be Matthew McConaughey. Yes, that Matthew McConaughey, the naked-bongo-playing goodtime-funboy with the perfect six-pack abs and the spotty box-office record.

And why, you may ask, would I elevate this inoffensively goofy would-be movie star to the level of "nemesis"? Well, first, he brought his special kind of blandness to Dirk Pitt, the literary swashbuckler whose adventures I devoured as a youth. Now, according to ScreenRant.com, he may be in line to transform another of my puberty-era heroes into one of his signature sleepy-eyed slacker doofuses (doofi?): Thomas Magnum, a.k.a. Magnum, P.I., the Ferrari-driving, Hawaii-based TV detective played in the 1980s by Tom Selleck.

Sigh.

There's been a new development in that story about the guy who was playing with the deadly toxin ricin in a Vegas hotel room, which I first wrote about here. The short version: an indictment has been issued in the case, but surprisingly not for Roger von Bergendorff, the man who was apparently brewing the stuff for god-only-knows-why and who fell into a coma after handling it. The indictment was actually for his cousin Thomas Tholen, the man who owns the house here in my hometown of Riverton where von Bergendorff lived for a time. Tholen is alleged to have known that his cousin was making the shit but he failed to report it and, further, made an "untruthful statement" in order to conceal it.

Authorities still won't say what they found in the Riverton house, or what von Bergendorff was planning to do with the ricin.

I understand, of course, that they have to remain mum until charges are brought -- if there are charges forthcoming, of course -- but I'm feeling very frustrated by the silence. After all, this was going on right in my own back yard; I'd like to know what was happening and why. The media seems to have all the details -- not to mention a conviction, at least as far as public opinion is concerned -- within hours of some perv killing a little kid, but when it comes to something that could have potentially sickened or killed half a damn town, nobody's saying a word. (That's not to say the death of a child is insignificant, only that there's a real disparity in what the public hears about and what it doesn't, and I don't really understand why. It seems like somebody's priorities are out of whack to me.)

I'll continue to impatiently monitor the news feeds for any new details on this... I don't really have much choice, do I?

Man oh man... this photo of an 1983-vintage home computer desk, which I just spotted over at Boing Boing, brings back a lot of memories. A lot of memories. I didn't have exactly this same set-up -- I had the Atari 800XL instead of the 800 model pictured here; my peripherals were a bit more spread out around my bedroom; and I never had a set of those groovy Burger King Jedi glasses -- but there's an extremely familiar vibe emanating from this image. I don't even have to close my eyes to journey back, to once again hear Sammy Hagar blasting from my old Fisher cassette deck as I bang away at the clickety-clackety keyboard (sometimes I miss the weirdly satisfying noise and effort associated with that old keyboard; modern ones are so mushy in comparison...), working on one of my embarrassing early short stories that all seemed to be ripped-off Doctor Who plots infused with some good old-fashioned teenage angst. The hard copies of those stories disappeared long ago, but I think there might still be electronic ghosts of them around, locked away on the dozen or so ancient five-inch floppy discs I know I've got somewhere in the Bennion Archives. If only I had a working five-inch drive and the know-how to capture the data to my modern PC! Embarrassing or not, I'd like to see them again...

I never bothered to learn Atari BASIC, and that mysterious activity known as hacking held no appeal for me. I didn't have any idea what you could do with a computer, really, beyond writing lousy adolescent fiction. It wasn't much more than a sophisticated toy, so far as I could see. (That attitude probably wasn't helped by the fact that you used an ordinary television for a monitor; if you got bored with whatever you were working on, you could just change the channel and watch Gilligan's Island or whatever. Which I guess isn't much different from hopping online and seeing what's shaking at Boing Boing, when you think about it...) I was savvy enough to recognize that the Atari Writer word processing program was far more convenient than the old portable typewriter I'd been using in my pre-computer days. I saved reams of paper by editing and perfecting -- well, rewriting, anyway -- my work before printing it out. But if someone had told me then that our entire economy and a pretty sizable chunk of our culture would one day revolve around these toys... well, people did try to tell me all this was coming and I didn't believe them. I thought computers would never amount to much more than fancy typewriters. Some would-be science-fiction writer I was, eh?

Normally, these Internet quizzes come about as close to describing "the real me" as my newspaper horoscope, i.e., they're so ridiculously generalized that they could be about anybody, or they're so far out in left field that they're most assuredly not like me at all. But every once in a while...

What Your Pizza Reveals

People may tell you that you have a small appetite... but you aren't under eating. You just aren't a pig. You aren't particularly picky about pizza. It's so good... how could you be? You fit in best in the Western part of the US. You like food that's traditional and well crafted. You aren't impressed with "gourmet" foods. You are dependable, loyal, and conservative with your choices. You are a flavorful and bold person. You should consider traveling to Spain. The stereotype that best fits you is geek. You're the type most likely to order pizza to avoid leaving your computer.

What do you think? Close?

Just for kicks, here's another one:

You may recall me mentioning a while back that Pixar is adapting Edgar Rice Burroughs' fabulous pulp novels about John Carter of Mars into a mixed live-action/CGI film trilogy. Well, I've just learned they're not the first animators to take a crack at ERB's manly Virginia gentleman who becomes the warlord of an alien world. Another attempt was made to translate Carter to film way back in the 1930s by Bob Clampett, an alumnus of Warner Brothers' famous Termite Terrace and the director of many well-known Looney Tunes shorts (including one of my favorites, Falling Hare, in which Bugs Bunny battles a gremlin).

According to this guy, the attempt never amounted to much, because Clampett and ERB had a different creative vision than the movie studios -- unthinkable, I know! -- but Clampett got as far as making some test footage, which I now present as a Fascinating Historical Curiosity:

I don't know about you, but I think that stuff looks really cool, very much in the vein of the extremely nifty Superman shorts produced by Max Fleischer in the '40s. The running thoat -- the eight-legged animal -- is especially impressive. Sigh. Yet another item for the "If Only" file...

(Hat tip to Chris Roberson for posting the video first.)

For the record, I answered "yes" to items 1 and 3 only. And I can rationalize that I noticed the missing apostrophe because I'm a proofreader, right? Right?

(I suppose I shouldn't mention that, while I don't have a bat'leth, I do own a replica of Duncan MacLeod's katana. No, I really shouldn't mention that at all...)

Source via.

In an effort to cleanse my eyes of the filthy residue left over from Highlander: The Suck, er, The Source, I've begun re-watching my DVDs of Highlander: The Series. And considering that I haven't done a TV Title Sequence entry in a while, well, you can probably guess where I'm going with this one...

It's not uncommon for title sequences to evolve as the show goes along: the theme music changes, background visuals get updated with more recent footage, cast members come and go. But I can't think of any other series that had as many distinct variants of their openings as Highlander. There were at least four major ones, and probably several minor ones as well if you obsessively cataloged every little tweak that was made over the show's six-season run. The problem was the same one I always run into whenever I try to write or talk about the show, which is the need to somehow convey a lot of pretty far-out backstory for first-time viewers who don't know a Quickening from a Kwik-E-Mart. The premise and formula of Highlander isn't really that complicated once you've watched a couple of episodes, but I still remember how baffling it was to be thrown into the first movie with no prior knowledge of what the hell was going on, and the showrunners were surely aware of that newbie reaction.

Here's their first attempt to spell it all out:

The short version: The fifth Highlander feature film, recently released directly to DVD, wasn't as bad as I expected.

It was worse.

Much, much, much worse.

It was worse than either Star Trek V or Highlander 2, long the benchmarks for movie sequel suckage.

It was so bad it left The Girlfriend curled into a fetal ball, whimpering inconsolably.

It was so abysmally, eye-gougingly, soul-grindingly bad, in fact, that this fanboy is now finished with the whole god-forsaken franchise, at least as far as new Highlander product goes. I'm not quite incensed enough to disavow the original movie and the TV series, both of which I still enjoy, but in the highly unlikely event any further Highlander movies get made, I won't be wasting any more of my precious, limited, mortal lifespan on them. Because when it comes right down to it, I'm just not that masochistic.

The long version follows, if you're interested in reading any more of my rantings on this subject, but I think the important point has been made...