Monthly Archives: December 2010

Dec092010

A Dirk Gently TV Series? Really?

I think most of my Loyal Readers are probably familiar with The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy — that sublimely silly sci-fi spoof by Douglas Adams — in one or another of its many varied forms. (It has been a radio show, a low-budget BBC television series, a big-budget Hollywood feature film, and, of course, a bestselling novel.) But I’d be very surprised if many of you know Adams’ other major literary works, a novel called Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency and its sequel, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul. I’ll be honest… I don’t remember them all that well myself. In fact, I’m not certain I ever got around to reading Tea-Time, and the only thing that has stayed with me about the first one is a joke at the expense of my hometown… something about an electric monk who has recently started malfunctioning and is therefore believing in things they’d have a hard time accepting in Salt Lake City.

Well, I thought that was terribly witty when I was in my teens.

Anyhow, somebody remembers the Dirk Gently books, because I’ve just learned via Boing Boing that the BBC has done a TV adaptation of them. Here’s a brief and not-terribly-informative trailer for it:

Might be something worth seeking out. If you like this sort of thing. Which I do. No word on when or if it’s coming to American TV, though…

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Dec092010

Another Step Toward the Future

Big news from the Final Frontier: SpaceX, the spaceflight company started by Paypal and Tesla Motors founder Elon Musk, has become the first to successfully launch, orbit, and recover a spacecraft that was designed, built, and operated entirely by a commercial entity, rather than a government agency. You can read the details here, but in brief, SpaceX’s capsule-style Dragon spacecraft was launched yesterday morning aboard one of the company’s own Falcon 9 boosters (which you may recall were successfully tested earlier this year); the Dragon circled the earth twice at an altitude of 186 miles, then returned beneath three big parachutes for a soft splashdown in the Pacific, just like the old Apollo moon ships. The flight was flawless, and the Dragon even came down within a mile of the waiting recovery ship.

With the future of NASA’s Ares booster and Orion space capsule uncertain and the final flights of the Space Shuttle Program fast approaching, the Falcon/Dragon system now looks to be our nation’s best bet at maintaining our spaceflight independence, rather than having to bum rides off the Russians. The next step will be bringing the Dragon to within sight of the International Space Station, followed by a third test flight in which it will actually dock with the ISS. SpaceX, feeling its oats a bit, has proposed combining those two flights and just going straight to the station, but hasn’t yet received permission to do that. And then, assuming all these tests go as well as yesterday’s, SpaceX will win a $1.6 billion contract for 12 flights to the ISS. The Dragon will be carrying only supplies on these missions, no humans — passengers are going Russian once the Shuttle retires — but the craft was designed to be configurable for passengers, so maybe once it’s proved itself… well, we’ll see.

I’d like to believe that Americans will remain at the forefront of manned spaceflight, or at least involved in it, but there doesn’t seem to be much public interest in it anymore, and with the politicians now obsessing over the national debt (while stubbornly turning a blind eye to the single largest item in the budget, our insanely huge military budget), I can’t help but feel pessimistic. Maybe outsourcing the logistics of spaceflight to private companies will help. Maybe it won’t. As I said, we’ll see.

As long as I’m blathering about space stuff, and on a somewhat happier note to wrap up the entry, NPR blogger Robert Krulwich was pondering the subject of scale the other day, and he used for example the fact that the Apollo astronauts really explored very, very little of the moon’s surface, in spite of the perceived significance of their missions. He used some interesting maps to illustrate his point, showing Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin’s tracks superimposed over a football field and a baseball diamond. Interesting stuff… but things got really interesting when he received a message from none other than Armstrong himself, explaining why he and Buzz didn’t venture very far from the Eagle… and suggesting he, Armstrong, would’ve liked to go much farther. Armstrong, if you don’t know, is the most reclusive of all the Apollo astronauts. He rarely makes public appearances, and unlike so many of his colleagues, he hasn’t written a book about his experiences, so having him send an email response to a blog entry is a pretty big deal. Go check it out!

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Dec062010

The Triumph of Intellect and Romance over Brute Force and Cynicism

Starting off the week with a dim, gray, and rainy Monday. I think we need a happy video to liven things up, don’t you?

Today’s selection will probably not make a lot of sense to some of my Loyal Readers, but for all you folks who are about to be baffled, trust me: this is very cool and funny. This is what’s known in the TV business as a “cold open,” a brief segment of a show that precedes the opening credits. This is actually a pretty common device, especially among hour-long dramas and talk shows. CSI, for example, always does a cold open consisting of the discovery of the dead body of the week, followed by the bad pun of the week, and then a smash cut to The Who singing the theme song.

In this case, we’re looking at a cold open from a recent episode of The Late, Late Show with Craig Ferguson — the best late-night talk show currently running, in my humble opinion; Leno, Letterman, and Conan, meh — for which a friend of mine was lucky enough to be in the live studio audience. Which means I heard about this opening a couple weeks in advance. For some reason, though, the bit was cut when the show actually aired. (I’m guessing some network suit thought it was too obscure and viewers wouldn’t get it, but I don’t actually know.) But the 21st Century being what it is, the clip naturally leaked onto the InterWebs last week, and now here it is for everyone’s pleasure and edification:

Ferguson is riffing on Doctor Who, of course, the classic British science-fiction series that ran from 1963 to 1989 and was recently revived (in a somewhat more grown-up version) to much acclaim. While it’s all presented in a very silly fashion, Ferguson pretty handily summarizes all the major ideas of the show here. And in case you’re wondering, the nervous-looking young man who shows up right at the end of the routine is Matt Smith, the latest (and youngest) actor to play the iconic character.

Speaking of Matt Smith, I’ve been meaning to mention that he and the rest of the Who cast have recently been right here in my humble little home state of Utah, filming an episode of the show in Monument Valley, that starkly beautiful landscape made famous in countless Westerns and TV commercials. This marks the first time Doctor Who has filmed in the United States, and even though I’m more of a casual fan than truly rabid about this show, I am absolutely delighted that they came here, to my own backyard, in order to mark the occasion. I have no idea if Monument Valley will be standing in for some alien planet — remember, Pixar’s Princess of Mars project has been shooting in the same general area — or if it will be properly identified for what it is. Considering the Doctor is a time-traveler, I have a hunch it’ll probably be an Old West setting in the classic Hollywood style (paging John Ford!). But nevertheless, it’ll be fun to see a piece of home on a show that is so uniquely British.

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Dec012010

A Poem I Wish I’d Written

A few days ago, I received a much-appreciated email from my friend Karen, who’d read my annual holiday mope and wanted to let me know my dark feelings weren’t all that unusual. She also wanted to forward something she thought I’d like, a poem she’d seen that “seemed very much like something [I could] have written.” I smirked at the idea, remembering that my last experiment with this particular literary form was back in 1990, just after I’d broken up with this one particular girl and was convinced there would never be another, and my fate was to be unceasing heartbreak and loneliness and hair-metal ballads about the same. (Hey, I was only 20, and not an especially mature 20-year-old at that). Let us simply say the results of my poetic efforts weren’t exactly, um, good, and then we’ll politely turn away from the sobbing idiot in the corner…
But hey, I didn’t want to look a gift horse in the mouth, as the cliche goes — you see why I wasn’t much of a poet? — so I followed Karen’s link and, well, darned if it does sound like something I could’ve written, if only I had any talent at all for writing poetry. In a strange example of synchronicity, it even evokes my memories of the last year I was driven by hurt to scratch out a few talentless lines of free verse, as if the man I am now were looking back across a couple decades and finally able to say what he wasn’t able to say then, in the way he wanted to say it but couldn’t.
Or something like that. Maybe I just like the imagery of old T-birds and open roads and Cecil B. DeMille. The poem is below the fold, should you wish to read it for yourself…

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