They Blinded Me With Science

The latest issue of Popular Science (Feb 2007) came in the mail today (the issue pictured is actually last month's, but I thought I'd remind you what the magazine looks like, since a lot of folks haven't seen an issue in years), and as usual it was a "put everything else down and read it first" magazine.

I've always enjoyed Popular Science; when I was a kid, I would get to school early so that I could stop by the library and read the latest issue. I always thought it was incredible that the school would actually spend money to subscribe to lots of magazines like this that I would have subscribed to if I could afford it--but thanks to their willingness to pay for them, I didn't have to!

The newest issue has a great section called "Cop Tech--Inside the Police R&D Lab" that offers a look at the cutting-edge technology that might enable police to carry out their jobs more safely and effectively. GPS devices that can be fired from police cars so that they attach themselves to fleeing cars; video "grenades" that offer 360° views of the immediate vicinity; highly focused pain beams that do no permanent harm; these are the sorts of SF devices that are long overdue for police enforcement. The idea behind most of these devices is more effective apprehension and prevention with less deadly force; I don't see how anyone can argue with that.

My favorite part of each issue, though, is "How 2.0," offering tips on how one might implement various tech-geek concepts at home. A lot of it is beyond my level of expertise, but not all--and even when it is, it's fun to daydream.

If you haven't checked out PopSci in a while, pick it up the next time you're at the magazine rack; it's a great read!

Curse of the Cat People

It's official. I've become one of those "cat people" you hear about. And the picture to the left of this paragraph is absolute, incontrovertible proof of that fact.

I've been shopping around for a good 7.1 A/V receiver; I finally narrowed it down to a Sony, a Denon, and a Pioneer Elite unit. Each of them is fairly large--one is about 35 pounds, the other two are about 30 pounds each, and all three are about 7" high x 17" wide by 17"/18" deep.

I have just enough space in my A/V rack for the unit.

Problem is, Anna likes to sleep right where you see her curled up in that photo... and if I put the receiver there, she won't be able to get into her favorite early-evening sleeping space.

So it looks like I'm going to forego the amplifier and get by with my current, more limited, sound system unless/until Anna decides she'd rather sleep somewhere else.

Yep... one of those cat people...

Peake Performance

Charles recently forwarded me this link to the Mervyn Peake website hosted by Peake's son, Sebastian. I dropped by to check it out, and came away more impressed than ever with the eclectic talents of Peake, a writer whose work initially confounded me. My first shot at Gormenghast left me wondering exactly what Peake was attempting; I could tell that the effort was ambitious and distinctive, but I had become so accustomed to more traditional linear fantasy storytelling that I had trouble warming up to Peake's more complex, mazelike structure. Once I got into the book, though, I was entranced; In some ways, he constructs an engaging vision of medieval quasi-reality that perfectly complements more traditional period pieces like Perceval and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Peake, though, uses words as M.C. Escher uses images, to create a puzzling and paradoxical narrative that just fascinated me the first time I read it, and still fascinates me to this day.

The edition of Gormenghast pictured above is the edition that I actually read way back there more than a third of a century ago. It's the cover of the Ballantine edition; it became a part of my collection because I was a Ballantine Adult Fantasy completist (this series, collecting classics of fantasy that would appeal to adult readers before the phrase "adult fantasy" conjured up images from a Penthouse letters column) and one edition of these books carried that circle-with-a-unicorn-head symbol that Ian & Betty Ballantine used as the BAF symbol. Being always the completist, I picked up those editions with no intention of reading them; during a time when nothing else particularly appealed to me, though, I picked up the first book, gave it a try, and put it down. I never put it out of mind, though, and was drawn back to it later on, whereupon I discovered its appeal.

I never cared for any of the performances of Peake's work that have been done in film, because so much of what makes Peake work for me is his prose, not his plotting. Like Lovecraft, his work has never translated fully well to film as far as I'm concerned. But oh, what wonderful books they are!...

The website also made me aware of Peake's skills as a visual artist; I was largely unaware he was so versatile and adept at painting and drawing, but want to see more of his illlustrative work.

Valerie Should Despair...

Just watched another execrable episode of Masters of Horror, the series that most definitely does not live up to its name. This episode, "Valerie on the Stairs," is misdirected by Mick Garris, based on an original story by Clive Barker (which, I have to presume, he threw away here because he realized that it was too bad to actually put into print).

This abysmal tale focuses on a writer who moves into a rent-free sort of writer's commune known as the Heiberger House. Supposedly, this is a halfway house for unpublished writers who are on their way to being published.

Last time I looked, Clive Barker had managed to write a story or two... so why in the world did he construct this garbage story that presents the ideas that writers are all psychotics who have to work away from society, isolated from all but their art. This was a literary cliché long before Tennyson's "Lady of Shallot," but at least Tennyson gave the concept a bittersweet melancholy. Barker transforms the isolated environment into a charnel-house (I presume as a metaphor for his butchery of the concepts of storytelling), totally abandoning his own premise in the process). This is supposed to be a home for unpublished writers, but it turns out that several of the people who live here have been published after all...

What still baffles me, though, is why a perfectly talented man like Barker wants to perpetuate the myth that writers are socially inept, emotionally stunted, intellectually warped, psychologically disturbed people who cannot create while interacting with society. It's an inaccurate, stereotyped, outdated gimmick that makes the story seem even dopier than it might have been otherwise. (I also want to know why Barker assumes that a laptop computer will lose what has been typed into it when there's a power failure... that's precisely why I use a laptop, because it has a built-in power supply that works through intermittent power failures!)

As for Mick Garris... well, this is a man who couldn't make a true horror film even if someone gave him an unlimited budget. He has no idea how to frighten, only how to startle; he mistakes gore for fear, dealing out far too much of the former and none of the latter.

Remember when the relaunched Outer Limits came on, and those of us who remembered the original wondered why the new series just couldn't get it right? Well, Masters of Horror makes the relaunched Outer Limits seem like the product of literary and cinematic geniuses; episode after episode, it seems to be a contest to see who can be more embarrassed by the wretched quality of the series, the directors or the writers. I think it's a tie... they're both losing...

The "Taking Up Space" Museum: Thunderball--The Game

One overlooked early Silver-Age comics gem from DC's science fiction line was "Space Museum," an every-third-issue series of stories that ran in Strange Adventures from the late 1950's until the early-mid 60's. Gardner Fox's concept for the series was brilliant in its simplicity: in every tale, a father took his son to the Space Museum, where the son zeroed in on some artifact on display; the father then told the fascinating story behind the object, demonstrating that there's always a story behind the most seemingly innocuous items...

Inspired by Gar Fox, I now kick off my irregular line of tales: The "Taking Up Space" Museum. In each entry, I'll pick some item around my house, and explain why it's here. (Since I'm a pack-rat with 53 years of experience, this could be a looong series...)

Today's item: The Milton Bradley Thunderball game, released in 1965. Thunderball is the James Bond film for me, because it's the first Bond film that I saw in theaters in its initial release. I was familiar with James Bond and the premise of the films, of course, but I had missed Dr. No and From Russia With Love in their initial release, and my parents were a little unsure about Goldfinger, what with a naked gold woman and a character named Pussy Galore. By the time Thunderball was released, though, I was an avid James Bond fan who had never seen a single film, although I knew the storylines and had seen all the crucial moments via trading cards and magazines.

I went to see Thunderball at the DeSoto Theater on Broad Street in Rome, a well-maintained classic-architecture theater complete with a balcony, velvet-covered seats, a full stage for live performances (I saw Bob Brandy and Officer Don there--and while that own't mean anything to anyone who didn't watch Chattanooga and Atlanta television in the early 1960s, it was a big deal for me!), and a sense of opulence that benefited from the low luminescence of theater lighting. I was entranced; the film had excitement, humor, gadgetry, adventure, drama--everything an eleven-almost-twelve-year-old could ask for in a film.

And then, less than a week after seeing the film, I was in Murphy's 5 & 10 Cent Store (where very few things were either five or ten cents by that time) when I saw the Thunderball game. I knew that I had to have it; all the money I had set aside for comic books was rebudgeted for the game, and within two weeks it was mine.

And for months after that, it became almost a ritual for Gary Steele, Phil Patterson, John Ball, and me (rarely as a group, usually in pairs) to play the game almost every day, while the Thunderball soundtrack played in the background. We memorized every possible permutation of gameplay, virtually wearing the game out in the process.

To this day, when I hear a bit of music from Thunderball, I am taken back to my room on 3 Marchmont Drive, where we would spend hours huddled over the gameboard spread out on my floor. And when I see the game, I remember the melodrama of John Barry's score, the excitement of the film, and the many hours of pleasure we derived from this simple boxed game. I suspect that we probably played the game for many more hours than Milton Bradley staffers spent designing it, in fact...

Simply Having a Wonderful Christmastime

I never did post anything about how Christmas went, did I?

Christmas Eve and Christmas went very well indeed, thank you very much! I seem to have found a few particularly good gifts for family members, and that's always a good thing. For Kim, I prepaid for the installation and monthly service cost for a year's worth of DVR service from Comcast; she had commented on several occasions that she wished her budget allowed for the DVR upgrade, but she wanted to wait to see what 2007 would bring before adding that extra cost. Now she doesn't have to worry about it!

For Dad, there were two gifts that were quite successful: a 24" television with a built-in DVD player and VCR for his bedroom and a 7" digital picture frame loaded with a few hundred family photos to sit beside his chair in the den. I had trepidations about the former gift, but Dad had repeatedly remarked during the past year how much he wished he had a television, with a built-in DVD player and a VCR; his old bedroom TV had a built-in VCR, but with more and more DVDs in his personal library, he wanted the ability to play those as well. Furthermore, his old bedroom television was only a 13"; this is almost four times the total size. So why did I have trepidations? Because as Dad has gotten older, he has become less amenable to learning new remote controls, settings, and controls, and I was afraid that a new television would add new frustrations. Just to be safe, I had downloaded the manual for his television, which meant that I had a diagram of the television controls and of the remote, making it easy for me to trouble-shoot any problems that arose. It turns out that I haven't had to do any troubleshooting at all; he seems to have gotten the hang of it right away.

I'm surprised by how much Dad has enjoyed the digital picture frame. He told me that he spent over an hour watching it the first day I gave it to him, and he's spent a half an hour to an hour a day watching it ever since then (since it has about 300 photos on it currently and it cycles through one every fifteen seconds, he can spend about an hour and fifteen minutes watching it without seeing any duplicates). He said that part of the fun of it is seeing what comes up next, since the order of the photos is totally random; he enjoys remembering when the photos were taken, what was going on at that time, etc.

Susan seemed quite pleased with the assortment of flavored green teas that I got for her; I had tracked down flavors that she didn't even know existed! I also got her a 2007 Linda Nelson Stock Calendar; this is one of her favorite folk artist, and Susan thought she had quit doing calendars as of this coming year (what she didn't know was the artist had simply changed publishers). Otherwise, there were few surprises for her; Susan, like me, tends to acquire a lot her wants as she sees them, knowing that (due to the collectible nature of a lot of these items) they may not be there, so many of the gifts I got her were sort of predictable--a favorite candy, a 365 Cats calendar, and that sort of thing.

No real surprises for Cole, Christy, or Jessica; they come from a generation that wants gift cards rather than gifts, so I gave in and got each of them gift cards from the stores of their choice as their major gifts, with a few little personal gifts to accompany them. I don't enjoy giving gift cards rather than gifts--but I thought about it and decided that gift-giving should focus on what the recipient wants, not what the giver wants, so I did the gift-card thing even though it seems somehow impersonal to me...

Best. Toy. Ever.

No doubt about it--there was no toy that surpassed the wonderful Ideal Man from UNCLE Gun Set. I wanted this so very badly that I probably drove my parents crazy asking for it; once I saw this in its package, complete with shoulder holster, I had to have it.

The pistol is a standard cap pistol, but it was the accessory set that made is so memorable: a rifle stock, a sight, a silencer, a rifle barrel, and a tripod, along with the aforementioned shoulder holster. Heck, the UNCLE gun surpassed any James Bond accessory on the toy racks!

Once I got one of these, I remember actually wearing the shoulder holster to school, my cap gun tucked in there securely and my jacket over that (not a sports coat, of course--just a kid's jacket). Today, that's the sort of thing that would get you expelled... but if my teachers ever noticed it back then, they said nothing at all about it. Just another one of those things that kids did...

Gradually, I lost one piece after another. The tripod went first, then the silencer, then the sight; I had the rifle barrel and the pistol and the stock for a pretty good while, and can't remember exactly when they went MIA. Sure do wish I had them again! There are people who make pretty upscale replicas of the UNCLE gun now, but I guess my emotional attachment is to this cheap plastic toy, not to the upscale stuff...

Another Night Before Christmas...

Anyone who thinks that time flows at a steady, consistent pace couldn't have possibly been an eleven year old on Christmas Eve.

December 24th was a celebratory day at our house; Mom filled our table with a Christmas feast on that day, preparing so much turkey and dressing and potato salad and green beans and sweet potatoes and Waldorf salad and cranberry sauce that a family of four could gorge themselves and still have plenty left over for multiple meals of leftovers. For dessert, there was pineapple upside down cake, smooth and moist and redolent of pineapple and brown sugar; fudge, dark with cocoa and almost crystalline with sugar, that crumbled indulgently at the first bite; caramel frosted cake, a lustrous brown-frosted concoction whose color always reminded me of that distinctive shade of brown found on Fantastic Four #11 and a few other Marvel Comics of the era, a shade that no other comics publisher—and no other Mom—could duplicate; and there was always chocolate cake. Sometimes there would also be pecan pie, but that wasn't an every-year thing. We would usually eat earlier than most of my friends; dinner time was typically 4:30, sometimes pushing as late as 5:00, but hardly ever later than that.

After we could eat no more, we'd all relocate to the living room, lounging around the large console television set-home entertainment system that combined a 25" black and white television with a turntable, AM/FM radio,a and built-in speakers. Dad would claim his large, overstuffed chair; Mom would take the sofa, often stretching out to relax after her culinary labors. Kim and I always took the floor, dragging our pillows into the living room and stretching out as close to the television set as we could get before Mom or Dad made us move back.

About 7:30, Mom put Kim to bed; since Kim was only 3 1/2 years old, that was plenty late enough to leave her ready to sleep. She knew Christmas was an event--after all, the presence of a decorated tree in the living room served as a daily reminder that things were different at this time of year--but she wasn't so attuned to the event that she had trouble sleeping.

Me, I was 11--heck, I was almost a teenager! As far as I was concerned, I could stay up as late as my parents. Of course, they saw things differently; they let me stay awake later than my usual bedtime, but by 9:30 they were hinting that it was time to end the evening. I'd get ready for bed, and by 10:00 pm, I semi-willingly retired to my bedroom, closed the door, and turned out the lights.

And from that time until 5:30 the next morning--the time that I considered the earliest acceptable time to arise, since that was about the time that Dad got up to get ready for work during the week--I bore witness to the fact that time is not a constant. No, the progress of the minutes slowed perceptibly, with each minute running slightly longer than the one before, until it seemed like it the night had gone on forever. I'd finally sneak a look at the clock, and learn that it was only an hour later than the time I'd gone to bed.

In the other end of the house, I could hear my parents doing things; I know now that they were getting out the presents that Santa would bring, and I actually knew even then that Santa came in the form of Mom and Dad, but there was still a part of me that thought that they surely must have had some extra help from that magical fellow in order to get so many presents into our house in so little time. Mom and Dad tried to be quiet, but the house was small, and the distance from the living room to my bedroom was less than 20 feet, with only thin walls and hollow doors in between. I hear the creaks of the floorboards, the rustle of moving objects, the muffled conversations that the televison couldn't quite mask. Then I'd hear the sounds that told me that their activities were ending--the clink of coffee cups as Mom got the dishes ready for breakfast the next morning, the sound of running water as she measured out the right balance of coffee grounds and water so that all she had to do the next morning was plug in the percolator. That was a sound I heard every evening, and it was the sure sign that bedtime had arrived for my parents as well.

The last lights would go out, and I saw not even the slightest glint of light under my doorway. Now everyone was asleep, and that meant that I had to be particularly quiet. My parents' bedroom was directly across the narrow hallway from mine, and the restless creakings of my bed were clearly discernible in their room--I knew that from past experiences, when my parents seemed almost supernaturally attuned to my slightest movements if I got out of bed and tried to tiptoe to the other end of the house in the middle of the night.

So I lay there, awake, looking into the darkness to pick out what details I could in my shadowed room; the only light came through the curtained windows, the indirect glow of a streetlight between our house and the Greshams. And I speculated; what gifts might be under the tree? I wanted a copy of The Beatles on VeeJay Records; Phil Patterson had that album, and we had listened to it incessantly at his house, but I knew I would appreciate it even more if I had my very own copy. And I wanted a Creature of the Black Lagoon model kit; I had many other Aurora monster models, but that intensely-green reptilian horror had eluded me. And of course, there were airplane models on my list; in particular, I wanted a Messerschmidt ME-109, a sleek and deadly WWII fighter that would occupy a place of prominence in the aerial display of other WWII models that hung from my ceiling, suspended by string and thumbtacks.

Hours later... it had to be hours... I looked again. And I saw that it was only 12:45 am.

Looking for something to help while away the time, I thought of the AM radio that sat on the desk at the head of the bunkbeds on which I was sleeping. I took the bottom bunk ever since I had found a spider on the top bunk; I have always had a phobic reaction to spiders, so I viewed the top mattress as a protective barrier between me and spidery doom. The desk was built into the end of the bunk bed, and I could reach between the support beams to turn the radio around so that it faced the bed rather than facing the desk chair. I turned the volume way down, then turned the radio on. It lit up as the internal tubes warmed up; a few seconds later, I began to turn the radio up slightly.

And I heard static. Rome's stations cut their power to low levels after sunset; by 12:45, some of the stations were off the air entirely. So I began to tune up the dial, looking for someone else who, like me, was unable to sleep.

It was then that I found a distant signal--it seemed to me like it must have come half a world away--and heard a voice introducing a song. A voice speaking Spanish. I didn't know what he was saying, but it was a voice. I pulled the radio close to me, since the volume was turned down so low that it couldn't have been heard on the other side of my nine foot by eleven foot room, much less across the hallway.

Did he know that it was Christmas now? Was it Christmas now where he was? Why wasn't he playing Christmas songs? These, and many other questions, came to mind, but there was no one to answer. He spoke for a while, then he played songs--some in Spanish, some in English with a country twang. And for that time, I had found a kindred spirit who was just as unable to sleep as I was. He played and talked, I listened...

I must have fallen asleep, because I became aware that there was a sound of water running, and that meant that my parents were awake (or that someone had gotten up to go to the bathroom). I looked at the clock and it was 5:23... seven minutes earlier than my self-appointed deadline for arising from bed and starting the Christmas gift-opening festivities, but 5:23 was close enough...

Have Yourself a Balmy Little Christmas

I don't know how those of you in California do it; I just can't fully embrace the Christmas season when the temperature is hitting 70 in the afternoons. Even worse, it was 61° last night when I went for a midnight walk (okay, it was really 12:30a.m., but close enough). I recall a couple of other Christmases that were hampered by excessively warm weather, but I was young enough then that a tropical heat wave couldn't have lessened my holiday enthusiasm.

I still need to wrap a hefty stack of presents for Kim, Cole, Jessica, Dad, and Christy--but I suspect I won't actually get around to that until this evening, since I've always thought of wrapping as a night-time activity. The warm weather, combined with an incredibly busy week at Dr. No's, has left me all too little time for wrapping during the week.

Christmas Vignette

Every year affords us interesting new memory scraps with which we can assemble a wondrous mental Christmas scrapbook. This year, one event that stands out involved Tommy Sanes.

Who's Tommy? He works the loading dock at FedEx Freight, where we pick up our comic book shipments every week. He's a gregarious, good-natured bear of a man, burly and always smiling, no matter how busy things are. He's a master of the forklift, moving it around with deceptive ease. And Tommy always takes care of us; often he is waiting for us at the loading dock, our skid ready to go, because he knows what time we usually arrive.

This year, as a way of saying thanks, I got Tommy a Christmas card and a gift card for Olive Garden, because I had heard him mention that he really liked eating there. I stuck the gift card in the Christmas card, put it all in an envelope, and had it ready so that I could hand it to him.

As it turned out, this was one of those mornings when Tommy was bringing our books to the loading dock just as we were pulling up. As he brought the forklift down the ramp to put the skid down right next to the van, I handed him the envelope. He grinned and looked a little bit surprised. "I've never gotten a Christmas card from a customer in all the years I've worked here--thanks!" he said. We wished each other a merry Christmas, and he steered his forklift back up the ramp and into the football-field-sized warehouse.

About three minutes later, as we were finishing loading the boxes into the van, the forklift dashed back down the ramp, steered by a grinning Tommy. He stopped a few feet away, got off the forklift, and said, "Aww, man!..." Then he headed over, started to shake my hand, and then changed his mind and gave me an enthusiastic bear hug. "I couldn't believe it!" he said. "No one's ever done anything like that for me in all these years!" I assured him that it was just a small token of our gratitude for all he has done to make our job easier. "I just hope you have a great Christmas," I told him.

"I will now!" he said--and I believe he really meant it. For some reason, this simple gift seemed to have had an impact far greater than its value, and I was very happy for that.

Tommy was still grinning as he drove back in to the warehouse a second time... and I have a sneaking suspicion that grin stayed with him for a while. I hope so.

Merry Christmas, Tommy!