Monthly Archives: June 2009

Jun252009

A Quick PSA

Just a note for any local readers who may be looking for something interesting to do this weekend: a pair of World War II-era bomber planes are going to be in the area, on display and open to the public for tours. It’s the same pair I’ve written about before, the B-24 and B-17 that are owned and operated by The Collings Foundation out of Stow, Massachusetts. As an added bonus this year, they’ve brought along a “little friend” — a P-51 fighter, just like the ones that used to escort the bombers on their missions over Europe 65 years ago.

Even if you’re not into airplanes per se, I urge you to take advantage of this rare opportunity to see three functioning pieces of an increasingly distant moment in history. Take your children, if you’ve got them, and help them understand that history isn’t just a list of dates in some dry-as-dust textbook, that it’s composed of real events that happened to real, breathing people. Nothing makes that point more strongly, in my opinion, than something like an ancient airplane that still flies and smells of oil and exhaust and hot metal, something that still lives. When you’re around objects like that, it’s easier to imagine what our grandparents — or great-grandparents, I suppose, for the kids today — experienced and felt and accomplished. You can sense the past in ways you just don’t get from a book or a sterile specimen sitting behind velvet ropes in a museum somewhere. I find it exhilarating, myself.

Speaking of exhilarating, if you can afford it, you really must look into booking a flight experience. My dad and I went for a ride in the B-24 a few years ago, and it was one of the flat-out coolest things we’ve ever done. I can’t gush enough about it. It was also a great bonding moment for a couple of grown men who often can’t find anything to talk about, if that gives you any ideas.

But if the flight experience is beyond your means, at least go for the walkthrough tour. The Wings of Freedom tour will be stopping at the Heber City airport tomorrow through Sunday, and then will appear at Provo’s municipal airport on Monday and Tuesday. I understand the walkthroughs will be offered from 1000 to 1700 hours (that’s 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., for you civilian types). In the meantime, you can click that photo up there at the top and be treated to a ridiculously huge view that’s almost — but not quite — as good as seeing the real thing…

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Jun252009

In Memoriam: Sam Weller

It’s been a busy, busy week here in the Proofreader’s Cave, and I haven’t had the time to even think about blogging, let alone actually do any (very frustrating, especially with today’s pair of celebrity deaths — one expected, the other shockingly not — practically screaming for my attention). But I would like to briefly note the passing on Tuesday of one of Salt Lake’s leading citizens, Sam Weller, whose eponymous Sam Weller’s Zion Bookstore has long been the literary epicenter of the city. Sam didn’t actually found the store, but he did change its name when he took it over from his father in 1946. In a painfully ironic twist, he was forced to retire 12 years ago — leaving the store in the capable hands of his own son, Tony — after losing his eyesight. That’s always struck me as an impossibly sad fate for a bookseller, and just a little too uncomfortably close to that old Twilight Zone episode that starred Burgess Meredith. You remember, the one called “Time Enough at Last,” the one where the bookworm survives a nuclear war and looks forward to finally catching up on his reading now that there’s no one around to bug him, but then he drops his spectacles and they shatter, leaving him blind as a bat. Ugh…
Anyhow, you can read more about Sam’s life and his store here. He was 88 years old. I have more to say about my own experiences with Sam Weller’s Zion Books, but it’ll have to wait. Like Burgess Meredith pre-apocalypto, I simply haven’t the time right now…

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Jun252009

Quote of the Week

Courtesy of Lileks:

People! It takes all kinds to make a world. I just wish sometimes they’d go off and make one of their own.

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Jun202009

Barsoom Update

Speaking of Pixar, you may recall my enthusiasm a while back at the news that Pixar — the one movie studio these days that’s consistently turning out genuine movies, as opposed to unsatisfying exercises in spectacle and marketing — is developing a trilogy based on the pulp-tastic “Martian tales” of Edgar Rice Burroughs. Well, I’ve been accumulating little tidbits of news about the project for the past several months, and it’s time to perform an infodump for any of my readers who may be interested. The last item should be particularly exciting for my fellow Utahns, if that’s any incentive to click through…

Continue Reading…

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Jun192009

Further Evidence of the Utter Awesomeness of Pixar

It’s a sentimental story to be sure, almost too cinematic to be believed. But sometimes life really is like a movie, and in the immortal words of Kermit the Frog, sometimes we do get to write our own ending.

In this case, the protagonist is a ten-year-old girl named Colby who was dying of a rare and vicious form of cancer. The ending she wanted was simple enough: she wanted to live long enough to see the new Pixar movie Up. But by the time the movie opened, she was too ill to go out to the theater. So a family friend started cold-calling Pixar and Disney, hoping she could somehow make the little girl’s wish happen before it was too late. She finally managed to reach an actual human at Pixar and explain her situation. And the very next day, a Pixar employee was knocking at Colby’s front door with a DVD of Up — it’s still running in theaters, remember — and a sack of related swag.

It was Colby’s last day on Earth; she died seven hours after the movie ended. As fate would have it, she couldn’t even open her eyes to actually see what was on the screen. But she could hear it, and her mom described the images to her.
I hope it made her happy. I can think of worse ways to spend your final day.

The article I linked above is worth reading in its entirety, by the way. If you can get through it without tearing up, you’re not human.

Hat tip to Jaquandor for bringing this to my attention…

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Jun182009

There Are Times When I Really Wish I Lived in LA…

Yeah, sure, the City of Angels suffers from atrocious traffic, smoggy air, and a surplus of shallow, pretty people — and this is different from Salt Lake how? — but for a TV and movie lover like myself, the place also offers endless amusements that my home town simply can’t compete with. Like, for instance, a classic movie theater running a triple-feature of 1970s-vintage Battlestar Galactica movies this Saturday.

Darth Mojo has the details, but, in a nutshell, Universal Studios once tried to recoup some of the costs of the original Galactica by releasing several theatrical movies that were composed of edited episodes from the series and its bastard stepchild, Galactica 1980 (I shudder just typing those words…). According to Mojo, this will be the first time all three of these movies have been shown on the big screen in this country. Damn, how I’d like to be there! If nothing else, it’d just be cool to see in person that awesome Cylon graphic on the gorgeous old marquee shown above.

The theater that’s hosting this triple-threat, American Cinematheque’s Aero in Santa Monica, apparently shows mostly classic films; browsing over its current schedule, I think I’d probably be spending a lot of time there if I lived in the area…

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Jun162009

Is It a Sign?

If you don’t happen to recognize him, that golden dude up there at the top of this entry is the Angel Moroni, an important figure in the LDS faith. Most Mormon temples are crowned by a Moroni statue; in these parts, where we have four temples in the Salt Lake Valley and two more in the adjoining valleys to the immediate north and south, they’re a pretty unremarkable sight. But every once in a while, something snaps you out of your comfortable complacency and forces you to notice things that have long since faded into the background. Such as the meteorological consequences of placing a ten-foot-high statue covered in highly conductive metal on the highest point of a building that towers above its neighbors.

In other words, lightning struck this Moroni statue during one of the truly spectacular thunderstorms we had over the weekend. You can see that the electrical blast blackened his trumpet, arm, and face. It looks like it also zapped the sphere he’s standing upon, or possibly the current emerged from the statue at this point as it was seeking ground. In other photos of the damage, I’ve seen a lightning rod protruding from the statue’s head, so this bolt must’ve either missed the rod or else was so big that the rod made no difference. It must’ve been an incredible sight, if you’d happened to be looking in the right direction at the moment of impact.

This particular Moroni stands atop the Oquirrh Mountain Temple west of my house, a temple so brand-new that it hasn’t even been dedicated yet. I wonder if the interior now smells, in addition to fresh paint and new carpeting, of ozone and slag?

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Jun122009

The Love and Hate Meme

It’s a bleary-eyed Friday morning here in the Proofreader’s Cave, deep in the bowels of one of the glorious metropolitan skyscrapers in fabulous downtown Salt Lake. One of my fellow proofers has been on vacation this week, so I’ve been doing the work of two, and naturally this has also coincided with a surge in output from our shared primary account. All of which means that I’ve been working my tail off, I’m fried, and I’d like nothing more right now than a window seat at the Buena Vista, a steady flow of Irish coffees, and absolutely no place to be and nothing to do for the next ten hours or so.

I’ve kept myself sane during the week by working on the following a little bit at a time, whenever I needed to tear my eyes away from the Chicago Manual of Style. Which has been more and more frequently as I’ve neared this morning. I have a feeling the rest of today is going to be an uphill slog. In any event, credit for this one goes to SamuraiFrog, who, in a display of great wisdom, chose to combine two separate but similar memes that’ve been making the rounds lately into one big one. Henceforth, my crotchety opinions on a great many things…

Continue Reading…

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Jun072009

If You’ll Indulge Me with One More Post…

…about David Carradine, I’d like to share a photo I ran across while I was searching for an image to include with the “In Memoriam” entry. It didn’t suit my purposes for that — I wanted something specific to Kung Fu, not just a portrait — but I nevertheless thought this was a cool picture:

David Carradine

Incidentally, is it just me, or did Carradine have a striking resemblance to John Carpenter, the director of so many iconic B-movies of the ’70s and ’80s?

John Carpenter

What do you think, long-lost brothers? Or is it just the “weather-beaten old guy with long gray hair and a cigarette” effect?

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Jun072009

TV Title Sequences: Kung Fu

In honor of the late David Carradine:

Sorry for the poor quality of this clip; it’s the only one I could find. Still, even with the warbly audio and washed-out picture, it gives a good idea of what Kung Fu was like for those who aren’t familiar with it. If this piques your interest at all, the show is available on DVD (but not Hulu, oddly enough).

As always when I watch these old intros, I’m amazed how long this is. Back in the day, a television series went to huge lengths to explain its premise for newcomers, and to set the mood for what was to come. Now, I guess the assumption is that you already know what you’re about to watch, and anyway we need to scrounge every spare second for actual storytelling so we can cram in another commercial or three. Seriously, if you compare the average runtime of an hour-long TV drama from 1975 to a modern show, we’ve lost nearly ten minutes to advertising.

Yet another piece of evidence that, in a lot of ways, the 1970s and ’80s were a much better time…

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