I’ve been thinking I really shouldn’t leave the weekend to start on such a sour, ranty note as the previous entry (even though I don’t regret one word of it!), so here, enjoy this image of the lovely Rita Hayworth:
As crotchety old men have been saying for eons, they don’t make ’em like this anymore!
I hate to get all inflammatory on such a pleasant Friday afternoon, but I think this is probably worth it. A buddy of mine sent me this chart a few days ago, and I’ve since seen it on a number of blogs. It’s a real doozy. Study it. Ponder it. Think about everything our nation has done to itself and others in the last decade, and then consider the concept of proportionality:
When it comes to spiritual matters, I’m what you might call a devout agnostic. I have no use for religion in my own life, but I don’t question the meaning and comfort it provides to a lot of other folks. I don’t know if there’s a god. I can easily imagine the universe coming into being all on its own. But that doesn’t mean that it did, which is a question I personally find unanswerable. And as for the question of whether human beings have an immortal soul and/or something to look forward to at the conclusion of this life, again, I’ve got nothing. Seems to me that it’s entirely plausible the thing we call “consciousness” is merely a function of the biochemical processes in our brains, and once those processes cease once and for all, everything that we are flickers away like a program derezzing in the movie Tron. But then it’s equally plausible to me that there is something more, since science assures us that matter and energy are interchangeable, nothing is ever really destroyed, and there are dimensions of existence we cannot perceive. I have a healthy enough ego that I certainly hope there’s an afterlife. As to what form it may take, who knows? I like to imagine we’ll be reunited with people who mattered to us, and maybe have a chance to put right the things we screwed up. I once suggested to a grieving friend that perhaps the best kind of afterlife would be nothing more than a re-creation of the time and place where we were most happy, a kind of substantiated, infinitely looping memory. But again, who knows? My personal philosophy about these things is probably best summed up by something Mr. Spock once said, “There are always possibilities.”
Speaking of Star Trek movies, hardcore fans may recall there was a scene planned for the seventh one, Generations, in which Captain Kirk tries to relieve the boredom of his retirement years by indulging in the 23rd Century’s version of extreme sports, “orbital skydiving.” That is, he jumps out of an orbiting spacecraft and free-falls back into the atmosphere until he’s low enough to open a parachute. The scene didn’t make it into the finished film, although it appears in the novelization and comic-book adaptation; a rough version of it is available on YouTube, if you’re curious. Or masochistic. Personally, I’m glad it got cut. Not that Generations was a very good film anyway, but having that scene right in the opening moments would’ve been a disaster. The later Trek films already suffered from an excess of silliness, and this particular idea was so painfully ridiculous that audiences would’ve been in full-on MST3K mode before the credits even started rolling. Even within a framework that allows teleportation and giant starships that literally bend the fabric of spacetime, skydiving from outer space is over-the-top implausible.
Or so I’ve always thought.
In one of those really weird welcome-to-the-future moments, I’ve learned that two competing daredevils aim sometime this fall to do something very similar to what I thought even James T. Kirk could not believably do: skydive from the very edge of space back to Earth. One of them is an Austrian named Felix Baumgartner, who is fully sponsored by Red Bull and widely believed to have the best chance of succeeding; the other is a Frenchman called Michel Fournier, who is funding his own adventure and has been trying to accomplish this feat since the 1980s. Both men have similar plans: to ascend to 120,000 feet in a gigantic balloon, clad in a pressure suit, and then leap out and plummet back down to 3,000 feet before deploying a specially designed parachute. The total jump will last about 10 minutes. And here’s the really wild part: the jumpers expect to exceed 700 mph during their fall. That’s the speed of sound, if you don’t know this aeronautical stuff. No one knows what might happen to a human body breaking the sound barrier without an airplane or spacecraft around them. Possibly nothing… or it’s equally possible these guys could turn themselves into strawberry jam. Either way… a supersonic human is pretty mind-boggling.
No date has been announced for either attempt. I’ll be following this story, though…
Here’s something extremely nerdy to ponder while you enjoy whatever snack you’re having for elevenses, a video compilation of “going to warp” scenes from all the pre-J.J. Abrams Star Trek movies, from 1979’s Star Trek: The Motion Picture to Star Trek: Nemesis in 2002. (I saw a similar montage a couple days ago that included the 2009 reboot flick, but it seems to have vanished. My guess is some copyright nazi got wind of it. Clips from all those old movies? No problem. But don’t go posting so much as five seconds of our shiny new Star Trek, you damn Internet bootlegging fanboys!)
Anyhow, it’s interesting to me that the effect actually became less spectacular over time. You’d think the opposite would be the case as visual effects technology advanced and this stuff (presumably) became easier to create. Of course, the Trek movies did see their budgets whittled away over time, so that may have been a factor. In any event, I give you… Warp Speed!
Since all Trekkies have a genetic imperative to offer unsolicited opinions on meaningless stuff, I’d like to announce for the record that my favorite warp effects are the “disco-tunnel” from The Motion Picture and the Wrath of Kahn “rainbow streak.” The TMP effect is the most spectacular of all of them, the most cinematic. The sound effects and the slightly drawn-out timing impart a sense of drama, as if massive energies are being harnessed and something truly extraordinary is about to happen. And of course, if you consider the historical context of this being the first time we’d seen the Enterprise on the big screen, and the desire (at that time) to make a Star Trek that really was something more than just a two-hour television segment, that’s exactly what the jump to warp speed was supposed to be.
The Kahn effect (seen at 0:17 and 0:22, if you don’t recognize them all on sight) wasn’t as spectacular or as “big” — I suspect it was cheaper to produce — but it was impressive in its own right, and probably better for story-telling purposes, since it could be placed in context with other objects and backgrounds. (I can’t quite imagine the TMP tunnel effect against the Mutara Nebula, the backdrop in the second Kahn clip; it seems as if it would only work if the Enterprise were alone in the frame.) Some variant of the rainbow streak would, of course, appear in all the rest of the movies derived from the original series, but for my money it was never as nicely done as in its first appearance.
As for the effect seen in the Next Generation movies, I was never a fan of the “rubberband” effect introduced in the Next Gen TV series, i.e., the way the ship seems to stretch out, then snap forward into the starburst/sonic boom thing. It always looked cheap and silly to me, and the big-screen version didn’t improve upon it…
For any Loyal Readers who’ve been waiting to hear how my buddy Jack did at Lotoja over the weekend, I’m sorry to announce that he had a rough time this year, battling a sinus infection that seriously impacted his performance. He finished the race in 14 hours and 12 minutes, his slowest performance out of the three years he’s ridden in this event. Still, he did finish, which is not an accomplishment to sneer at. I doubt I could get through the thing, even if I had an entire week in which to do it…
I should’ve mentioned this at least a week ago, but I’d still like to pass along the news that my buddy Jack will be riding tomorrow in the Lotoja Classic bicycling race, a 206-mile endurance course that runs up and down three mountain passes between Logan, Utah, and Jackson Hole, Wyoming. This is Jack’s third Lotoja, and once again he’s riding in support of cancer research at the University of Utah’s Hunstman Cancer Institute. He’s already made this year’s donation goal, but if anyone out there is feeling generous, I’m sure he’d be thrilled to have a little more added to the kitty. Click here to contribute.
I’ll be away from my computer for most of the day tomorrow, but I’ll post Jack’s results as soon as I can… Jack, if by some chance you’re reading this on one of your fancy wireless toys, may the wind be at your back, my friend!
I’ve seen this meme floating around Facebook the past couple days and was thinking I’d give it a whirl anyhow, but this morning I got tagged by a friend, so no more procrastinating for me.
The idea is to come up with “15 albums you’ve heard that will always stick with you,” whatever that means. (I interpret it to mean the ones you’ve played so many times you’ve got them memorized, or they represent some kind of emotional milestone for you, or you have a specific memory or anecdote associated with them.) You’re supposed to list the first 15 titles you come up with in a maximum of 15 minutes. Like most people, I imagine, I thought of way more than just 15 titles in far less than the allotted time. I’m listing them all below the fold, along with the usual commentary.
For any Loyal Readers who may also be Facebook friends, please note that I’ve tinkered with the list a bit since I posted it over there, and my commentaries are much more detailed here. If that affects your interest levels in any way…
Okay, pop culture, I get it. You have finally beaten me. Your insatiable entertainment juggernaut held me in its warm embrace for a brief, glorious moment of my youth, but then predictably, inevitably, churned onward toward newer and flashier things, leaving me stranded on the side of a one-way road that’s rapidly diminishing into the rear-view. So I guess it’s time for me to surrender to the obvious and admit that my day is past, my sensibilities are out of touch, and I am no longer even remotely cool.
At least that’s how I felt about ten minutes into the movie Scott Pilgrim vs. the World.
First, though, a bit of backstory to explain how I came to be watching a film that hadn’t previously drawn so much as one iota of my interest…
Just lately, I’ve been working my way through Season One of the old TV series Vega$ on DVD. If you don’t remember it, Vega$ — not to be confused with the more recent James Caan series Las Vegas — was an early entry in the private-detective genre that dominated prime time during much of the 1980s, running for three seasons from 1978 to ’81. The show was created by Michael Mann, who would later become the driving force behind Miami Vice, and his pilot script suggested Vega$ could have been a stylish series with enough grit to allow some serious storytelling and character development, but without getting too heavy. Unfortunately, Mann’s influence was quickly swamped by executive producer Aaron Spelling’s trademark glitz, superficiality, and penchant for the ridiculous. For example, a typical episode from the first season involved an unscrupulous land developer trying to scare a retired madame off her property by — get this — sending a gorilla to threaten her. Or more precisely, a guy in a ratty-looking gorilla suit, like the ones Hawkeye and Trapper wore when they wanted to annoy Frank Burns. Yeah, it’s a pretty bad show, even by the admittedly looser standards of the time.
(In case you’re wondering, I was never a fan, not even back in the day; in fact, I don’t recall ever watching it at all. The only reason it even pinged my radar is because the lead character drove a red 1957 Ford Thunderbird like my dad’s. I picked up the DVDs out of curiosity, and to get a look at that car, and now I’m watching with the same sick “I cannot look away” fascination I feel when I see some white-trash loser getting busted for huffing paint on COPS.)
Believe it or not, though, my purpose here really isn’t to rip on Vega$ for simply being what it was, namely a product of the Spelling cheese factory. After all, it ran in the time slot following Charlie’s Angels, so what else could it have been but a big old pile of Kraft singles? No, what I’m interested in discussing is how eerily similar Vega$ was to another detective series, a much more respected and beloved series, a series that was starting production right around the time Vega$ was winding down: Magnum, PI. The two shows are so similar, in fact, that I think you can make a pretty good argument that Magnum, better though it might have been, was something of a Vega$ rip-off. Consider the following:
