The pictures accompanying this article are indeed beautiful (we had some wild storms yesterday), but Fort Smith is so far from “affluent” that the distance can be measured in light years.
Just sayin’.… Read more
I don’t do the link thing too often, but this site is absolutely brilliant if you’re a fan of 2001: a space odyssey (which, speaking as someone who’s got a working HAL 9000 prop hanging on the well next to him, I suppose I must be). Go visit The HAL Project now – I’m gonna have to try that sweet screen saver on the monitor that just happens to be sitting next to my HAL. 😀… Read more
12 years ago today, my two best kitty buddies were born. I adopted Othello when he was about 6 weeks old the following month, along with a white cat named Iago who was 5 weeks old. Sadly, Iago is with us in spirit only these days, but Othello’s still a purr-fect gentleman today, having gone through five moves (totaling about 2,000 miles), and here lately, the ultimate indignity, being a mentor and punching bag for his new “little sister.” He’s survived tornadoes, exploding buildings, and a dog moving into the house. He’s a cat of action. He can also sleep just about anywhere – so he’s also a cat of inaction!
Happy birthday, Othello! You’re the best little black cat ever.… Read more
I came up with a new personal catchphrase tonight at work while training someone on a piece of equipment:
“If it does anything weird, let me know. I can probably do something weirder.”
I think I’m going to have T-shirts made up. 😆… Read more
I haven’t done one of my “famous film spaceship” things in a while, so here’s one that I’ve had the pictures sitting around for for ages and just haven’t gotten around to organizing and writing.
Though it seems like the buzz about a J.J. Abrams-produced Star Trek movie is going to put off the inevitable retrospectives of the later movies in the series, I still have to stick with my assessment that, at some point in the future, 1994’s Star Trek: Generations is going to be looked upon as the conceptual jewel in the crown of the TNG movies. It seems like it’s really the only one of the four TNG films to even attempt the exploration of a science fiction idea (in this case the Nexus), even if its treatment of that concept suddenly takes a weird right turn in the last 20 minutes that’s never fully explained (the whole bit with Picard and Kirk apparently simply choosing to leave the Nexus and go back just a li’l bit in time). Malcolm McDowell is certainly the TNG movie villain with the most staying power (but I’m biased, as he’s a favorite actor of mine), and Generations also edges out Nemesis (for killing off Data) and First Contact (for re-inventing the Borg) for having the most lasting impact on Trek fiction as a whole (for killing off Kirk). (I also think a reassessment of the movie’s music is long overdue – as much as I love Jerry Goldsmith’s work, it all started to sound similar toward the end of his Trek tenure, and Generations represents, hands-down, some of the best music Dennis McCarthy ever put in front of an orchestra.)
But Generations is also fascinating for what it shows us. Without revamping the exterior of the Enterprise-D for her final voyage, it presents us with significant changes to the well-worn interior sets. What do all these new additions do, and why? Read on, true believers.
… Read more
Hooray! My car has survived 130,000 miles with me behind the wheel. (This is a picture from last December, so don’t freak out, we don’t have snow on the ground in early July.) The car is ten years old, and in a couple of weeks I will have had it for nine of those years. It got me to Green Bay, and brought me back, and it’s still hanging in there despite huge sheets of white paint that have detached from the body and flown off. I have a feeling it probably isn’t going to hang in there much longer – there are some serious engine problems cropping up that it just isn’t going to be worth it to fix. I could probably get more out of the car in salvage than I could get in trade for another car (and in any case, my wife has a “spare” car since she got her SUV last summer, so there’s another set of wheels waiting in the wings). But y’know, this little car is one of a kind. Okay, granted, it’s not hard to see a ’96/’97/’98 Corsica on the streets (they’re still incredibly common). But this car is like my trusty steed. I’ll truly be sad when the day comes to put her out to pasture.… Read more
OK, so…no liftoff just yet. We’ll give it another go this afternoon. Still, my previous comments stand.
And now, for your amusement and delight, a new video feature here in Scribblings. I was recently going through my DVDs of footage recorded at CGE 2003, and run across quite a lengthy romp through Star Trek: The Experience at the Las Vegas Hilton. Not only is it a neat place, but when Mark Holtz and I went there on the Friday night that I arrived in Lost Wages, it was a ghost town – we virtually had the place to ourselves. We also arrived right after the next-to-last group of guests for the evening had just begun the “ride” part of the attraction, so there was plenty of time to grab video and photos of all that Trekkie goodness (including the outlandish prices in the gift store!). It’s spliced into three self-loading flash video segments here – meaning that as each ~4.5 meg segment ends, it autoloads the next segment seamlessly.
Enjoy. And don’t forget to watch that whole real space saga unfolding this afternoon.… Read more
It’s about 42 minutes to liftoff as I type this; I’d be lying to you and kidding myself if I didn’t fess up to saying a prayer that we’re about to see yet another shuttle mission go off without any life-threatening hitches. Not that the media reports of internal NASA strife over go/no-go votes suddenly have me thinking that this mission is unusually dangerous. Because, y’know, it’s never really safe. And it never has been. It wasn’t safe last year. And it wasn’t safe in 2003. And it wasn’t safe in 1986. Or 1967. And that’s why I have no problem still labeling astronauts as “heroes.” Because they still have the right stuff that it takes to strap themselves into that thing and go up there, even though it’s still not safe.
Don’t get me wrong, the questions are valid about the costs and benefits of the space program, about the safety of spending a quarter of a century flying a small fleet of spacecraft that was designed and signed off on during the Nixon administration, and about why it took so long for the “sudden” realization to set in that we need a new space vehicle. But when it’s this close to liftoff, I like to set those thoughts aside and send my best wishes to those folks who are in the shuttle. You know, my heroes.… Read more
So…an interesting series of coincidences involving Doctor Who, both on our screens and in our ears, has me putting two and two together. Follow along if you like. … 