Monthly Archives: May 2012

May242012

Book Recommendation: Lost in Shangri-La

Looking for something good to read over the long holiday weekend? Well, how about a story that begins like this:

The time is 1945, only months before the atomic bombing of Japan brings about the end of World War II. On the remote South Pacific island of Dutch New Guinea, Allied cargo pilots flying over the island’s largely unexplored interior spot a previously unmapped valley high in the rugged mountains that appears to be cut off from the outside world. Seen from the air, it is lush, beautiful… and obviously inhabited. The press dubs this valley “Shangri-La” after the exotic setting of a popular, decade-old novel called Lost Horizon, and soon bored and curious personnel stationed at the remote base on New Guinea’s coast are taking sightseeing flights over this valley and logging them as “navigation training.”

On May 13, 1945, twenty-four men and women board a C-47 transport plane with the ill-considered name Gremlin Special for their own “navigation training.” But something goes disastrously wrong during the flight, and the plane crashes in the steep mountains surrounding Shangri-La, with only three survivors, two men and a woman. Injured, completely unprepared, and mourning the deaths of their friends, comrades, and, in the case of one of the men, a twin brother, the trio now faces a hike through dense jungle to reach the only place where they can hope for rescue: the mysterious valley below, which they know is populated by stone-age headhunters who have never seen a white person.

And this is only the beginning.

Did I mention that it’s a true story?

Mitchell Zuckoff’s nonfiction book Lost in Shangri-La recovers one of the most fascinating tales of World War II from obscurity — the media of the time did report on the amazing rescue of the Gremlin Special survivors, but the story got shoved off the front pages by Hiroshima, and it was virtually forgotten until Zuckoff ran across a mention of it while researching something completely unrelated — and tells it with the breathless pacing of a pulp-adventure novel. In fact, the story sounds tailor-made for the movies, with an incredible cast of strong-willed, eccentric, and heroic characters; a rescue scheme so crazy, it’s amazing that it worked; and a bittersweet undercurrent of the inevitable changes wrought by one of the last true “first contacts” between modern Westerners and an aboriginal culture.

This is really an incredible book about an incredible story, and it tends to linger with you — I actually finished it over a month ago, and I’m still thinking about it. It’s so many things: an adventure tale with all the elements you’d expect from an Edgar Rice Burroughs novel, a tale of survival and the indomitable human spirit, and an interesting bit of World War II lore, with a dusting of ethnography and biography. It’s been a long time since I read anything so thoroughly captivating. I can’t recommend it highly enough.

Check out Zuckoff’s official site for more information, including photographs and even vintage film footage!

May242012

Clever Ad Makes Me Smile

Up until two days ago, I’d never heard of “Jeremiah Weed,” even though it’s supposedly the alcoholic beverage of choice for U.S. fighter pilots, at least according to the company’s official Facebook page. (You’d think something like that would’ve impinged on my Trivia Detection Net at some point. I strongly suspect this claim is nothing more than the feverish imagining of some copywriter somewhere who was going for the same macho/funny vibe behind Dos Equis’ “Most Interesting Man in the World” campaign.) Anyway, this Jeremiah Weed stuff is, again referring to that Facebook page, “a 100-proof bourbon liqueur distilled in Kentucky” that is “relatively strong and somewhat sweet.” It’s an ingredient in a number of products marketed by the company, including:

Jeremiah Weed Bourbon Liqueur
Jeremiah Weed Blended Bourbon
Jeremiah Weed Sweet Tea Flavored Vodka
Lightning Lemonade® Premium Malt Beverage
Roadhouse Tea™ Premium Malt Beverage
Spiked Cola™ Premium Malt Beverage

Honestly, those all sound pretty horrible to me. I’m not a bourbon drinker and I’m not a fan of overly sweet booze (when I do drink, which admittedly isn’t often these days, I usually prefer Irish whiskey on the rocks, nice and simple and not likely to leave me with a splitting headache the next day, which syrupy mixed drinks and sugary liqueurs always seem to do). However, I’d be willing to sample any of these beverages if it was personally handed to me by a member of That L’il Old Band from Texas:

I always wonder when I see ads like this if the reactions are genuine, i.e., are these really just random good ol’ boys dropping into the local Kwik-E-Mart with no idea ZZ Top was behind that wall, or was it all scripted and acted? Either way, it’s a fun ad. I love those guys… the hot rod, the beards, the dancing girls. Yeah, that’s rock and roll, and that’s what I’m all about, baby. Still not sure about that Weed stuff, though.

May232012

Geek Misreads Headline!

When I opened my browser this morning, this was the first item in my news feed:

Doctor Who Helped Find Bin Laden Given Jail Term, Official Says

Is it just me, or did you also interpret the first two words as a proper noun on the first read through? In other words, did you at first think the headline meant the U.S. government had some assistance in its search for Bin Laden from this guy:

Well, why the hell not? He’s always mucking about in British government stuff, so why not U.S. affairs as well? The Doctor somehow involved in the search for bin Laden… who of course must have been more than he seemed to attract the attention of a Time Lord… Sounds like a good start for some fanfic… if I were into that sort of thing…

May222012

Of Course the Launch Went Well…

…Scotty was on board!

Following up on this morning’s successful Falcon-9/Dragon launch, I’ve learned that ashes of the late actor James Doohan, who of course played the irascible Chief Engineer Montgomery Scott on the original Star Trek and who died in 2005, were along for the ride. Remains of 300 people, including Doohan and Mercury-era astronaut Gordon Cooper, were carried aloft on the Falcon rocket’s second stage; while this payload was not technically part of the Dragon capsule, I like to think Starfleet’s Miracle Worker at least imparted a little good luck to the fledgling spacecraft.

Also, if you don’t quite understand what the fuss over this one little launch is all about, allow me to direct your attention to a nice piece by space reporter MIles O’Brien,* who spells it out the significance of today’s events quite handily:

Supporters of [NASA’s Commercial Orbital Transportation Services program] say it is tantamount to subsidizing nascent airlines in the barnstorming days by giving them contracts to fly the mail. The government didn’t tell Henry Ford how to build his Tri-Motor, but the mail those planes carried was an effective taxpayer tool to encourage a whole new industry – eventually making it possible for millions of people to board planes with as much fanfare as if they were buses – and then moan if they are five minutes late pushing back from the gate.

It would be nice if space travel could be that routine some day. And the Shuttle, a vehicle that I love and miss, was never going to get us there.

That’s pretty much my attitude as well. As hard as I’m grieving for my shuttles and wish they could still be flying in some capacity, they hard reality is that they didn’t bring us the future we imagined. SpaceX and the Dragon might not either, but it’s a step in the right direction.

* I always smile when I run across an article by Miles O’Brien. He’s an excellent reporter who has a real flair for boiling technical information down to where laypeople can understand it, and he genuinely seems to love the aviation and space-related subjects he specializes in. He also happens to share his name with a fictional character from the Star Trek universe, Chief Miles O’Brien, played by Colm Meaney, who was a Scotty-type engineer who could fix anything on both The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine. It’s not quite irony… but it is an amusing coincidence.

May222012

The Dragon Is Soaring

Following what a NASA press release called a “flawless countdown,” the SpaceX Falcon-9 booster rocket lifted off from Cape Canaveral this morning at 3:44 eastern time. The Dragon spacecraft successfully separated from the booster minutes later; its solar arrays are now deployed and all systems look good as the vehicle chases the International Space Station around the Earth for a rendezvous three days from now. There are still plenty of tests for the Dragon to pass, including of course the climatic docking operation, but so far SpaceX seems to be on track for making a historical first… and perhaps the start of a whole new era in human spaceflight. Exciting stuff.

I did not get up in the wee hours to watch the launch live, but of course that’s no longer necessary in the Internet age: a full hour of coverage is available on YouTube, if you’d like to check it out. (If you just want to see the highlights, you can find the lift-off at 44:43, the spacecraft separation at 54:10, and the deployment of the solar array at 56:20.) I find the audio associated with this clip really amusing… the control voices you hear are SpaceX employees, not NASA people, so there’s a different flavor than what I usually associate with space launches. Everyone sounds so bloody young, for one thing, especially one female voice (I’m not sure who is performing what role). And then there’s the enthusiasm… spontaneous applause breaks out at the moment of lift-off, and again when the Dragon separates from the booster. The announcer has a shake in his voice when he declares at about 55:10 that Dragon is now in free flight orbiting the earth, and the eruption of noise when the solar array opens sounds like a sporting event. It’s endearing, and it’s contagious. These people know they’ve accomplished something very, very big today.

I’m really thrilled for them, and also more than a little jealous. I’ll confess, I wish I was part of their team, forging the future we ’70s kids dreamed of…

May202012

Sunday Morning Movie Review: Stay Hungry

With the DVD format now in its final death spiral leading out of the marketplace, I find I’m buying more of them than ever. What’s happening is that retailers and budget stores that specialize in closeout merchandise are dumping old inventory at ridiculously low prices, in some cases lower than it would cost to rent them, assuming there were still any rental stores around. But of course browsing a video store for back-catalog stuff I haven’t seen is no longer an option, and Netflix’s recommendation algorithms just never seem to generate the same level of serendipity I used to experience as I wandered up and down aisles of actual, physical media. So I’ve taken to rolling the dice and buying el-cheapo DVDs at Big Lots sight-unseen on the off chance they may be something I’ll like. I admit I’ve ended up feeling like I wasted my money more than once. But I’ve also gotten lucky with a few titles that turned out to be really good. Or at least really interesting for some reason. Case in point: a 1976 film called Stay Hungry.

Directed by Bob Rafelson, who’s best known for the Jack Nicholson vehicle Five Easy Pieces — that’s the one with the famous scene of Jack dealing with an unpleasant waitress in his own inimitable fashion — Stay Hungry stars an achingly young Jeff Bridges as the only son of a wealthy Southern family who’s trying to find his place in the world following the death of his parents. Having fallen in with a group of real-estate developers who want to build a high-rise office tower, Bridges is given the assignment of acquiring the last hold-out property on the block, a broken-down old gymnasium. But the situation becomes complicated when Bridges finds himself drawn to the eccentric family of characters who inhabit the place, notably a perky receptionist and a charismatic bodybuilder named Joe Santo, who is in training for the upcoming Mr. Universe contest.

Stay Hungry is pretty typical of early-70s mainstream cinema, an uneasy blend of comedy and drama with a loosey-goosey plotline that sometimes feels aggravatingly aimless, as well as a tone that veers from whimsical to discomforting to downright horrifying, before veering into straight-out farce at the story’s climax. To be honest, I wasn’t sure I was even liking the film until it was over — for the record, I’ve since decided that, yes, I did like it — but the one element that kept me going through my uncertainty was the cast. Jeff Bridges wasn’t yet the national treasure he has since become; in certain scenes, he comes off as trying too hard. But in others he was so perfectly naturalistic and utterly inhabiting the character, it’s easy to forget who you’re watching. And of course he’s always been an amiable presence, even in films where he’s played more unsympathetic characters.

The adorable Sally Field made her feature-film debut in Stay Hungry, successfully transitioning away from child-star television roles in Gidget and The Flying Nun, in part by baring her behind in a post-lovemaking scene. But even without that bonus attraction, she turns in a professional, layered performance and it’s very easy to believe Bridges would fall for her hard enough to change his entire life. (Full disclosure: I’ve always had a bit of a thing for Miss Frog.)

The supporting cast includes several familiar faces that are fun to see so much younger than we’re accustomed to, including Scatman Crothers as Bridges’ family butler, a pre-Freddy Krueger Robert Englund, Ed Begley Jr., and Roger C. Mosley, a.k.a. TC the chopper pilot on Magnum P.I.

But the really fascinating presence in this film is the guy playing Joe Santo, a real-life bodybuilder named… Arnold Schwarzenegger. Although Stay Hungry was technically his third film following Hercules in New York and Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye, this was the first time audiences had heard his true voice and his distinctive Austrian accent (he was dubbed in Hercules, and menacingly silent in the Altman film), so his credit in Stay Hungry justifiably reads “Introducing…” Arnie was at the height of his Mr. Universe days here — Joe Santo’s story is a thinly disguised version of his own biography — and his body is simply a wonder to behold, especially in the film’s conclusion when we see him in competition, flexing and posing alongside a man who is his equal in size, but lacks Arnold’s definition and — just as importantly — his showmanship. He truly was astounding. But far more captivating than his physique in this film is the character he played, so completely unlike the familiar wisecracking action-figure persona he adopted later on in the ’80s. Joe Santo is inhumanly focused on his workouts, yes, but other than that he’s… nice. He’s friendly and supportive of his friends and self-effacing and sympathetic. After a lifetime of “I’ll be back”-style quips, it’s downright startling to see Arnold playing just a guy. And even though I doubt he ever would have become a great actor, certainly not someone on the level of his Stay Hungry costar Jeff Bridges, I find myself a little sad that he didn’t play more regular guys in his acting career.

Anyhow, even with the caveat that this film is somewhat dated and something of a rambling shaggy-dog story, I recommend Stay Hungry purely on the strength of the cast, and especially on the unusual and refreshing performance by a very young Arnold. It turned out to be one of my better Big Lots gambles. If nothing else, it’s worth seeing for the scene in which The Terminator plays fiddle with a bunch of backwoods good old boys:

May192012

The Dragon Remains Grounded

Woke up this morning to the disappointing news that the launch of the Dragon spacecraft was aborted at the last second — literally! — when computers detected pressure higher than the allowable limits inside one of the engines of the Falcon-9 booster. The engines had already fired and the ship was a half-second from lift-off when the shutdown occurred. This sort of thing isn’t uncommon in spaceflight operations — the shuttle Discovery had a similar shutdown on its very first mission, as I recall, and of course SpaceX’s equipment is still very new and likely filled with undiscovered bugs — but I was hoping for a different outcome. I find I really want these guys to succeed. Like I said the other day, I think the company’s story of coming out of nowhere and in only a few short years being on the verge of doing what no other private company has ever done is exciting and inspiring… and of course the sooner they succeed with the unmanned cargo runs, the sooner they can get the Dragon rated for human flight and the sooner the future will resume. At least that’s how I see it.

SpaceX technicians are inspecting the faulty engine now and are supposed to issue a detailed statement about what went wrong later today. The next available launch window that will allow Dragon to catch up to the space station is on Tuesday, May 22nd.

UPDATE: According to the latest tweet from SpaceX, the problem was a faulty valve in Engine #5. (The first of the Falcon-9 rocket’s two stages has nine engines arranged in rows of three, hence the number designation. There’s also a smaller Falcon-1, and a design for a so-far unbuilt Falcon-Heavy, which will triple the engine count for lifting really large stuff.) The engineers will replace that valve tonight, and shoot for another launch attempt at 3:44 AM Eastern time, Tuesday morning.

May182012

The Girl with the Grey Eyes… and a Friday Evening Video

Her name was Christine, or maybe it was Christina with an “a” — I’m afraid I don’t quite remember which — and she had eyes the color of an overcast sky just after the rain has stopped. For all the books I’ve read in which characters have grey eyes, she’s the only real-life example I’ve ever encountered. Curiously, she didn’t like them very much. When I first met her, she was covering them up with cosmetic contacts that turned them a rather ordinary brown. She lost one of those lenses at some point, and for a while she sported a startling, two-toned Jane Seymour look. Eventually she gave up and just let her real color show.

We had a class together our freshman year of college, back in the fall, winter, and spring of 1987-88, an honors philosophy course called Intellectual Traditions of the West. That was a great class, one of the very few I took during five years of undergraduate studies that I still have distinct memories of. It was a bit of a pain, schedule-wise, because it was held from 5 to 7 PM, three nights a week, whereas the rest of my classes were at more traditional times in the morning or early afternoon. I was a commuter student who lived some 25 miles away, so I couldn’t very easily run home during the downtime, or do much of anything else, either, except hang around in the union or at the Marriott Library or on the grass under a tree somewhere, and just wait. Looking back, though, I think the oddball time was a big part of why the class was so memorable. We handful of earnest freshman honors students who were still on campus after the grounds had grown quiet and the shadows long with approaching sunset enjoyed a kind of esprit de corps that I never felt in any other college class. It’s no coincidence, I think, that the most friends I ever had among my U of U classmates were people from that class.

A couple of those were long-established friendships from high school, Keith and Cheryl. Then there were my fellow Trekkies: a guy named Jaren, and his friend Melonie, and the Japanese kid who doodled a new rendering of the starship Enterprise during every two-hour class period. He had a whole notebook full of them. There were a few others who’ve now dimmed in my memory to hazy faces without any distinguishing information attached to them, but I can still sense some residual affection for them, so I know I must’ve enjoyed their company at one time. And then there was Christine. Christina. Whatever.

***Text Missing***

May182012

The Problem with Remakes

But the point is that when a movie remake is launched, the property already possesses a history, a context, a vibe, and a perception by the culture-at-large. The critical task of the remake-r is to interpret those pre-existing characteristics and determine the “why” behind the initial and residual success.

But that “why” isn’t always easy to understand, and it is even more difficult to replicate.

The message … is that you can’t go home again.

— John Kenneth Muir, with whom I tend to agree an uncanny amount of the time

May172012

True Geek Confessions

Michael May of AdventureBlog fame has recently been taking writing assignments from a shadowy online cabal known as the League of Extraordinary Bloggers, and when I saw the current one, I knew I just had to have a piece of that action:

What is something you absolutely hate or love or just don’t get, or maybe it’s something you have never even seen or read. What is your deepest, darkest geek confession?

Like Michael, I’ve elected to go for a straight flush and provide an answer for each proposed category. So, briefly but most likely provocatively:

Something I Hate That Everyone Else Loves: The “reimagined” version of Battlestar Galactica. I’ll admit, I was probably biased against this one from the start because of my affection for the original Galactica, but I gave the new series an honest chance to win me over, I really did. I watched the pilot film and the first half-dozen or so regular production episodes, and… it just didn’t do anything for me. While there were some interesting storylines (the one where the Cylons were harassing the fleet every 30 minutes or whatever was good, as was the one about replenishing the Galactica‘s water supply, an issue the original never touched on), I didn’t like what I saw as unnecessary changes in the show’s basic premise (the Cylons created by humanity instead of an alien race, the Twelve Colonies all existing on a single world instead of 12 separate planets), I didn’t like the shaky-cam cinematography, I didn’t like people from the other side of the galaxy wearing perfectly ordinary 20th-century business suits and having perfectly normal North American/European names… and worst of all, I just didn’t like the characters. Not one of them. I recognize that modern audiences have different expectations of their fictional characters now than they did in the ’70s, but everybody on this show was conflicted, bitchy, morally compromised, untrustworthy, and totally unsympathetic. By the sixth episode, I found I didn’t give a damn if the Cylons did wipe them all out, and that’s not a series I care to keep watching. Sorry.
Something I Love That Everyone Else Hates: As you might imagine from the above, the original Battlestar Galactica. Seems nobody can even mention this one anymore without sneering, or at least applying a qualifier like “guilty pleasure,” but I maintain it was not as bad as people think it was (at least not when you consider the context in which it was made, i.e., late 1970s broadcast television) and I personally far prefer its themes of friendship and family to the complete dysfunction I saw on the remake. I prefer my heroes with some innate nobility and joi di vivre — even in the face of total catastrophe — to unrelenting nihilism. And even though its dialog was notoriously clumsy with weird made-up jargon and its writers ignorant of actual astronomy (they seemed to think the terms “galaxy” and “star system” were interchangeable), the show conveyed a genuine sense of wonder about the universe that frankly no modern sci-fi movie or series seems able to capture anymore, not even the various latter-day Star Treks.
Something I Don’t Get That Everyone Else Seems To: The Christopher Nolan/Christian Bale Batman movies. They’re undeniably well made, but I don’t find them especially thrilling or inspiring or fascinating, or even all that much fun. I’ve only seen Batman Begins and The Dark Knight one time each, and never especially wanted to see them again, nor do I really remember much of what happened in either of them. These films seemed to slide right across the surface of my consciousness without leaving a mark. Part of this is probably due to the fact that I have a very hard time seeing Christian Bale as anything but a pretentious, self-absorbed dick, so I don’t really care what happens to his Bruce Wayne/Batman. And partly, I dislike the unrelentingly downbeat tone of these movies. Like Neo-Galactica, it’s ultimately about unsympathetic characters and nihilism for me… But then I’m already hearing talk about rebooting this series after the third chapter comes out this summer, so there’s always the next version. (Really? A reboot already? You can’t give it a rest for a decade, guys? Sheesh…)
Something I’ve Never Seen That Everyone Else Has: Finally, this one isn’t really a “geek” thing, but it is a pretty major landmark that is constantly referenced, at least by people of a certain age, and I just have to nod my head like I know what they’re talking about because I’ve never seen… Rocky. That’s right, one of the watershed blockbusters of the ’70s and I’ve not seen it, or any of its sequels. Not do I really care. Not a big Stallone fan, you see…