My Minimal Blog Presence

Blue Christmas

2007-12-20T22:03:00.000-05:00

A Star Trek Conspiracy?

2006-06-30T18:46:00.000-04:00

This has been bugging me for a long time. Am I the only person to ever notice this? The original Star Trek episode "Assignment: Earth" has a strange double coincidence with real-life events. Spock mentions that the same day the US is launching an orbital nuclear warhead platform there will also be an important assassination. The missile shown in the episode is actually stock footage of the launch of Apollo 4, the first unmanned test of a Saturn V. Less than a week after the episode's first airing Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated the same day as the launch of Apollo 6, the second unmanned test of a Saturn V. Spock's other "prediction" of a government coup in Asia did not happen that day.

I discovered this around ten years ago when researching the source of the famous inter-stage separation footage from Saturn V flights. Its appearance in this Star Trek episode nails Apollo 4 as one of the sources, since it was the only Saturn V flight to predate this.

Others have noticed the King assassination coincidence, but as far as I know my observation has been unpublished (other than in my own e-mails to friends). Until now.

And I'm adding it to Wikipedia. Then it will turn up everywhere....

Whither Eastern Daylight Time?

2006-06-06T02:24:00.000-04:00

I've been pretty lackadaisical posting here lately, but I just had to get this one out.

Twice today I have seen the current time referred to explicitly as "Eastern Standard Time." One was Google Calendar's invitations, and the other was a Hoops & Yoyo e-card celebrating the impending start of summer on June 21st (and they even said 8:23 pm rather than the correct 8:26 am!).

What is going on? Have people forgotten the distinction between EST and EDT? Do people think that the timezone is "Eastern Standard" rather than "Eastern?"

This must be nipped in the bud, most vociferously!

If It Walks Like a Dictator and Talks Like a Dictator....

2006-01-04T16:10:00.000-05:00

Jonathan Schell in The Nation writes:

There is a name for a system of government that wages aggressive war, deceives its citizens, violates their rights, abuses power and breaks the law, rejects judicial and legislative checks on itself, claims power without limit, tortures prisoners and acts in secret. It is dictatorship.

Who Are James Horner and Michael Hoppe Ripping Off?

2005-11-22T16:49:00.000-05:00

I heard this on XM Radio's "Fine Tuning" the other day, and I thought, neat, they're playing a track from the "Apollo 13" soundtrack. But it wasn't. Is it a rip-off of Aaron Copland ripping off some folk melody?

Marta Bohn-Meyer

2005-09-28T19:40:00.000-04:00

The NASA channel keeps showing video of Dryden Flight Research Center chief engineer Marta Bohn-Meyer that really gets at me. First I should say that she died in the crash of an aerobatic plane in Oklahoma. Part of the video they're showing looks like outtakes from training videos she may have made, and it's made especially creepy/compelling that in some of the clips she is talking, but there is no audio. A couple of the clips like this have her standing and even lying on top of an SR-71. We also see her go through the ritual of wearing a necktie under her partial-pressure suit and then having it cut with scissors after she completes what is presumably her first flight in an SR-71. Somehow it reminds me of Kirk seeing the clip of Deela at the end of "Blink of an Eye," or James Caan's character deleting the multi-screen video of his wife in "Rollerball."

All Hail Nils Olav

2005-08-23T01:05:00.000-04:00

I caught this on the "Moment of Zen" on "The Daily Show," and had to look it up to figure out why there was a penguin in Edinburgh, Scotland named Nils Olav who holds the rank of Colonel in the Royal Norwegian Guard. There's a definite penguin vibe going on: the most recent previously-unseen-by-me episode of "Wonderfalls" I saw on Logo was "Wound-Up Penguin," and we all know about "The March of the Penguins." I saw that at the last-ever screening of anything at the old Carolina Theatre in Chapel Hill. *sniff*

J. Peterman

2005-08-18T16:39:00.000-04:00

Wait a minute--I thought the J. Peterman catalog was a creation of "Seinfeld," a take-off on the old Banana Republic catalogs (before they became an arm of The Gap). Now I hear that John O'Hurley, "J. Peterman" of "Seinfeld," has brought the J. Peterman company out of bankruptcy with the help of, uh, Mr. Peterman himself. Life imitates art imitates life yada yada yada.

I Think I Know Where They're Hiding the Alien Spacecraft

2005-08-17T11:15:00.000-04:00

Now that we can look at satellite imagery of Area 51 in Nevada, it appears there's just one place left to hide the evidence of aliens.

Interesting, isn't it? I hadn't realized there was censorship of Google Maps or M$ Virtual Earth until I read about this. Of course, for the higher-magnification images of Area 51 they just put up a screen that says they don't have those images (and M$ just grays it out).

Just don't tell them where I got this.

Download it while you still can!

2001, We Hardly Knew Ye

2005-08-15T15:20:00.000-04:00

From the WSJ Real Time blog entry, Requiem for the Future:

A common theme of those dog-eared, much-loved paperbacks was that the Earth of the future was the dull place, a decadent dead end reserved for the poor, the defective and the luckless. In fact, we remember flipping ahead irritably to see when the characters' dull visits to Earth would end and they'd get back on the spaceships where they belonged. It never occurred to us that the parts we wanted to skip would be the only parts we'd get to live.

*sniff*

I Can Put My Swiss Army Knife Back On My Key Ring?

2005-08-13T11:54:00.000-04:00

Airline Security Changes Planned:

The staff's first set of recommendations, detailed in an Aug. 5 document, includes proposals to lift the ban on various carry-on items such as scissors, razor blades and knives less than five inches long. It also proposes that passengers no longer routinely be required to remove their shoes at security checkpoints.

[...]

If approved, only passengers who set off walk-through metal detectors or are flagged by a computer screening system will have to remove their shoes at security checkpoints.

[...]

Some security analysts praised the agency's proposal, saying that security screeners spend too much time trying to find nail scissors and not enough time focused on today's biggest threat: a suicide bomber boarding an airplane.

[...]

K. Jack Riley, a homeland security expert at Rand Corp., said hardened cockpit doors, air marshals and stronger public vigilance will prevent another 9/11-style hijacking. "Frankly, the preeminent security challenge at this point is keeping explosives off the airplane," Riley said. The TSA's ideas, he said, "recognize the reality that we know that air transportation security has changed post-9/11. Most of these rules don't contribute to security."

Wow, someone finally admits that most of TSA's screening procedures don't contribute to security. Now if only all the other public venues that have put security goons in place will follow the lead. Nah--probably not. It's going to be hard to roll back the security-industrial complex in our nice little police state (a phrase a friend once used to describe Singapore). :-(

OBEY

Pan Am is Back!

2005-08-12T18:04:00.000-04:00

Okay, this is just sooooo wrong.

Kubrick 1949 Photos of Chicago

2005-08-12T17:58:00.000-04:00

I thought this was just so cool that the Chicago Tribune dug up some photos of the Windy City which Stanley Kubrick took in 1949 for Look magazine. The accompanying article should be checked out, too.

Hackers Can Turn Your Home Computer Into A BOMB

2005-08-12T17:46:00.000-04:00

...& blow your family to smithereens!

Just remember, you heard about it here first (or maybe not).

Star Trek Plagiarism

2005-08-12T17:40:00.000-04:00

A relative recently visited Egypt and brought back a photo of a mosque in Cairo.

Wow, looks like that fort from "The Cage"/"The Menagerie" episode (aka "That Captain Pike Episode") of the original Star Trek, doesn't it?

BTW, that is a really poor-quality still on the Star Trek site. Almost like they intentionally made it bad (plus they mirror-flipped it!) to keep you from making it your monitor wallpaper or whatever....

Gravity

2005-08-12T17:15:00.000-04:00

Way back in the 1980's I recall gravity experiments being conducted at one of the 2000' tall TV towers in Auburn, NC (just off US 70 near Garner), but I never heard what the results were. Previous Internet searches yielded nothing. But reading a recent Economist magazine article about controversies regarding theories surrounding possible flaws in gravitational theory prompted me to conduct a search again, and this time I found it!

Apparently the experiments showed a disparity in the gravitational constant measured over a distance of 600m:

We have performed an experimental test of Newton's inverse-square law of gravitation. The test compared accurately measured gravity values along the 600 m WTVD tower near Raleigh, North Carolina, with upward, continued gravity estimates calculated from ground measurements. We found a significant departure from the inverse-square law, asymptotically approaching -547 ± 36 microGal at the top of the tower . If this departure is derived from a scalar Yukawa potential, the coupling parameter is alpha = 0.023, the range is lambda = 280 m, and the Newtonian Gravitational Constant is G = (6.52 ± 0.01) x 10 11 m3 kg-1 s-2. We do not yet have adequate resolution to discriminate this scalar model from a scalarvector model. (Eckhardt, D.H., et al; "Experimental Evidence for a Violation of Newton's Inverse-Square Law of Gravitation," Eos, 69:1046, 1988.)

But the experimental results were later revised by others who found that the effect of the surrounding ground had not been adequately compensated for, and the findings were discredited:

(8) Eckhardt, et al. (1988); [Ref. 20] This was the original WTVD tower experiment in North Carolina which saw evidence for an attractive ("sixth") force. The analysis of terrain bias by Bartlett and Tew [14] suggested that Eckhardt, et al., may have undersampled the local gravity field in low-lying regions surrounding their tower. When the tower results were corrected for this effect, the predicted and observed gravitational accelerations on the tower agreed to within errors. A subsequent experiment by these authors on the WABG tower in Mississippi [21] found agreement with Newtonian gravity, as did experiments on the Erie tower in Colorado [22] and the BREN tower in Nevada [23].

Saul Bass: Master of Credits

2005-08-12T16:35:00.000-04:00

A nice website analysis of the genius artistry of the legendary Saul Bass.

An Email Signature I Enjoyed

2005-08-12T16:13:00.000-04:00

A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text.

Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?

A: Top-posting.

Q: What is the most annoying thing on usenet and in e-mail?

Email Snooping Bosses Face Charges

2005-08-12T16:00:00.000-04:00

First Australia's New South Wales--next, California?

I see the ads for employee-snooping software in magazines, and it makes me ill. People would never have put up with this for phone calls, but somehow people have a higher comfort level with being spied on at work while on the Internet. I know there are companies that have clearly-stated policies that no personal use of computer equipment is allowed at all, but when everyone violates it by getting e-mails from relatives, looking up the plane reservations for their upcoming vacation, etc., it makes no sense. When everyone is breaking a law or rule, then whenever it is enforced it is selective, and that only leads to abuses.

Souscrivez aux Bons d'Armement

2005-08-12T15:54:00.000-04:00

I caught one of these posters in the background of a clip on a Millitary Channel documentary--there was another one with larger planes flying at an angle, but I can't find it on the web. Quite striking--I've not been exposed to many French WWII propaganda posters.... I'm just a sucker for cool poster design.

Man Tangles With Raleigh Over Bike Ornament

2005-08-12T15:37:00.000-04:00

The inspectors in Raleigh are getting pretty out of control. This is an outrage. Just to restate what the article says:

Woodworth doesn't live within the city limits, and his Wake County property has no-trespassing signs posted.

But even though he receives no city water or sewer service, no fire or police protection, no snow removal or road maintenance, Woodworth does fall under some city code enforcement.

I should tell my Dad (who lives just outside the city) that he should sic the Raleigh inspectors on his neighbor, who has lately built up a lot of junk in his backyard....

Project Greenlight

2005-08-12T13:28:00.000-04:00

It's been a while since the latest "Project Greenlight" series aired on Bravo back in the spring, but I had been meaning to post about my enthusiasm for it.

I'm embarrassed to admit this, but I don't think I was fully aware of PGL until the second season, which I haven't seen. I think Bravo repeated it (though the first time it was on Bravo) in a marathon one Sunday before this one started, and now I wish I'd managed to record it all. I guess you can rent the DVDs or whatever....

I guess what I'm saying is--I was a new viewer! And I found it compelling, but I guess maybe too many people are burned out on the plethora of reality TV, since the ratings suffered and it looks like this was likely the last PGL.

It may have been anti-Affleck/Damon sentiment. Back when the series was on in the spring, I caught up with a reality-TV fan friend who I hadn't talked to much since December. I mentioned "Project Greenlight" to her, and she said it sounded interesting, but then she remembered--"Oh, that's that Ben Affleck/Matt Damon show, isn't it? I don't want to watch that--I don't want to watch anything they're in, I'm so sick of them!" I had no idea the vox populi was so against them.... I'm not a big fan of Damon or Affleck (in fact I'm generally an anti-Affleck person, have been since around "Bounce"), but I think they come off very well in this--I love how Affleck seems to have a "Push, Nevada" poster or script book lurking behind him.

What really sucked me in was discovering that director contest winner John Gulager is the son of actor Clu Gulager, and the contrast between his low-key talent and the way the show is trying to play him up as a loser (looks like he drives the car his dad had while on "The Virginian"), and meanwhile the screenwriters are nobodies who didn't write the best script but they are drinking in the experience with agents and lawyers and schmoozing. Throw Dimension co-president Andrew Rona in as the designated prick, and one has to wonder whether the goal of this show is as stated or whether they had psychologists consulting to select the right mix of personalities to produce compelling reality TV....

I thought things were bad when Bravo suddenly switched the time on the show, then cut back a bit on repeat showings, but they continued to seemingly promote the hell out of it (unlike Fox, which will promote the hell out of a show and then pretend it doesn't exist after two weeks).

I have to admit that I looked forward to watching each week's episode more than anything else on TV. I loved how they set up one episode to make you think that Gulager was going to be despondent over clashing on the set, but yet he seemed to take that in stride--what devastated him was looking at a rough edit of the first week's footage and realizing that he was not at all happy with what he was getting.

His problems with the DP remind me of the story of Stanley Kubrick on "The Killing," where he had several conflicts with DP Lucien Ballard, who kept trying to do more conventional setups and insisting that Kubrick wanted to use a too-wide lens etc. Finally Kubrick told him to use the lens and setup Kubrick told him to or leave, and that was the end of that....

Now I'm trying to picture a young Stanley Kubrick as a Project Greenlight contest winner....

Anyway, my final thoughts on the show are:

The two coolest people in the whole thing were Clu Gulager and editor Kirk Morri.

Test screenings are evil.

I can't wait to see the movie....

I wish the Hallmark Channel would show some Clu Gulager episodes of "The Virginian." Part of my fascination with him stems from my never actually seeing him on that show while also having a hand-me-down View-Master reel as a kid that featured one shot of him, James Drury, and Doug McClure on the set of the show (along with shots of PT boat models from "McHale's Navy" etc. in some kind of behind-the-scenes in Hollywood reel). I thought Clu Gulager was one of the weirdest names I'd ever seen while also being perfect for a western star.

I was thinking Project Greenlight might revive Clu's career a bit. Who else is more impressive on the show? I can picture him in a David Lynch film. Hey, I forgot that he was in "The Hidden"! Love the quotes in his IMDB bio....

One interesting aspect of the first episode was the brief clips of the unfinished family-produced films John Gulager had worked on previously. I was searching around for more info on them when I came across this LA Weekly article from several years ago which I originally found posted on the Bravo message boards. Fascinating.

And there was a Goldenfiddle.com article on John Gulager following-up the post-series status of "Feast."

Hey, it took me around an hour to compose this little missive. Is this why I'm so delinquent about updating my blog? *sigh*

The Conet Project

2005-07-05T16:27:00.000-04:00

I was amazed that the "Numbers" episode of Lost referred to a real phenomenon that used to fascinate me when I got a shortwave radio in the 1980's--the secret numbers shortwave broadcasts. Back then no one was sure what they were, though the speculation was that it had something to do with spies, of course, but that sounded a little wacky. I hadn't thought about them in quite a while, but not long before I saw that episode, I had stumbled across this Washington Post article while searching for info on the Pentagon's Supernet. You can download (legally) the entire album the guy in the article made. As the article mentions, he sued the group Wilco for sampling it on their biggest album, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, and it was also used as background sounds in the deserted New York City scenes in "Vanilla Sky." If you want a sample, you may be as intrigued as I was by how eerily creepy this recording sounds....

It seemed like quite a bit of synchronicity that this came up in Lost....

For the Compleat Jedi

2005-07-05T16:18:00.000-04:00

Okay, so you've got that JL421 Badonkadonk Land Cruiser/Tank--what's next?

Why, your very own X-Wing....

What Makes Airplanes Fly?

2005-05-24T17:14:00.000-04:00

I came across an article in the current issue of Air & Space magazine (it's not online, darn) about an airfoil that Einstein designed in 1912. It was tested by an airplane company and turned out to be a flop, ultimately being unflyable and later testing 97th in a test of 99 wing designs. Why? Apparently Einstein designed it entirely in regard to Bernoulli's law, that the air flowing over the top of the wing has a further distance to travel and thus creates a pressure differential in the airflow above and below the wing, resulting in lift.

Sounds good, right?

Well, Einstein was wrong, and the magazine pointed out that this popular explanation of how aircraft wings work is often repeated, even citing a previous instance in Air & Space, but is wrong, and the exact description of what makes wings work is complex and still being debated by aerodynamicists!!!!

Jupiter's Travels

2005-05-24T16:41:00.000-04:00

I didn't catch "Long Way Round" (actor Ewan McGregor and buddy Charley Boorman going from London to NYC via Asia on BMW bikes) on Bravo until they were doing early-morning repeats of it, but then they cut it off after showing just four of six episodes. Typical! A&E pulled a similar bait-and-switch once when they were repeating their Horatio Hornblower movies, prompting me to go out and buy the DVD sets in frustration.

But there is no US DVD of "Long Way Round"! I managed to find a copy of the British version of the series, which includes a seventh episode unshown in the US. In the fifth episode, while in the really nasty wilds of Mongolia the travelers run into Ted Simon, whose book "Jupiter's Travels" inspired McGregor to make the trip in the first place. Apparently he was going around the world again, though this time on a BMW instead of a Triumph.

Southern IMAX Theaters Reject Volcano Film Over Evolution

2005-05-24T16:17:00.000-04:00

Roger Ebert usually doesn't get all hot-and-bothered over such issues, but he just couldn't stand for this, and it galls me as well. I can't find any specific mention of Exploris anywhere, but I know they have not shown the film. I haven't gotten the gumption to e-mail them to ask if they will be showing it. After all, if I get pissed at them, where will I go see IMAX movies?

Discovery of Scuttled Japanese I-401 Supersub

2005-05-24T16:06:00.000-04:00

Part of me didn't believe that those secret super-submarines ever actually existed, despite some History Channel documentaries I've seen. Wow.

He's Not Dead Yet!

2005-05-24T15:53:00.000-04:00

Winston Churchill's parrot is not dead. She is 104 years old. Wow.

Calendar Reform

2005-05-24T15:48:00.000-04:00

The C&T (Common-Civil-Calendar-and-Time) Calendar seems like such a good idea, but the website probably doesn't help the perception among most people that it's just goofy. Dates falling on the same day of the week every year would be very handy and would be a big boost in productivity, though it might drive many calendar makers out of business....

Lemony Snicket

2005-05-24T15:42:00.000-04:00

Here's Lemony Snicket's official bio, "bio" being short for biography, which I'm sure you know is an account of the series of events making up a person's life. And an interview with Mr. Snicket. I was trying to find an interview with Mr. Snicket's closest friend that I recalled, but this isn't it.

Hoops & Yoyo

2005-05-24T15:37:00.000-04:00

Segueing into another cute post: Hallmark seems to be hiding this from people who are loyal store shoppers--it seems to be entirely confined to their website. And there's something of a cult following already.

Befriended Hippo

2005-05-24T15:35:00.000-04:00

Aw....

(Still doing some of that catching up I started a while back....)

Vandenberg Shuttle Launches

2005-05-24T15:30:00.000-04:00

Here's a brief rundown of the ill-fated history of the space shuttle's west-coast polar-orbit launch facility.

A Good Deadwood Quote

2005-05-24T15:23:00.000-04:00

I love this quote from "Deadwood":

"More than providing services to 'em, taking people's money is what makes organizations real...." -- E. B. Farnum, hotel proprietor and mayor of Deadwood, in the episode "No Other Sons or Daughters"

Don't Look at the Man Behind the Curtain!

2005-05-24T11:21:00.000-04:00

My favorite headline juxtaposition of the last week:

Laura Bush: Newsweek not solely to blame for protest deaths
Red Cross: We can confirm the discredited Newsweek report

Of course, a few sources did manage to observe this.

Drive-In Movie Memories

2005-05-17T13:30:00.000-04:00

There was an excellent documentary on my local PBS station last night: "Drive-In Movie Memories." It reminded me of this reminiscence I came across several years ago--who knew there was a whole studio dedicated to making drive-in ads, etc.? And some of those old companies are still in business....

I wish the Starlite Drive-In would get back on its feet again.... *sniff*

Anyway, I have a pretty nostalgic soft spot for drive-in movie theaters--they were something I took for granted as a kid, and yet they were pretty quickly disappearing all around me. One of the first to go was walking distance from my house: the Tower Drive-In in Raleigh. I can barely recall seeing "Mission Mars" there--I wasn't even able to recall the title until I used my hazy memory of the frozen astronauts plot to try to stump Mark Leeper in rec.arts.movies about 15 years ago. The drive-in sat derelict for several years before being plowed under for a shopping center, which excited me because it was going to have a new indoor movie theater.

Unfortunately, the Tower Twin was probably the last twin theater built in the Raleigh area, and it was much less than state-of-the-art when it opened in the late '70's and never even had stereo sound. I remember seeing "Capricorn One" there, but I mostly shunned it as an inferior cinema. The shopping center had an addition in the '80's that included a new six-screen theater, the Tower Merchants Six, from the same chain (Cineplex Odeon at the time), but they kept the twin open just around the corner from it, and somehow the movies I wanted to see either didn't play there or were shown in the twin. The twin co-existed with the six-plex until they both closed a few years ago--the twin remains empty while the other theater is now home to a conference center! So is the Tower area a movie theater graveyard?

Trying to look up info on these theaters I found a few sites that attempt to catalog old movie theaters, and I could not believe how much misinformation on local theaters was in every one of them! Opening and closing dates are wrong, theater name changes aren't reflected correctly, and no one has listed Fitzgerald's, the predecessor to the Falls Twin which is where the Raleighwood Cinema Grill is now. Fitzgerald's also had restaurant-style table service in one auditorium, which amazed the Raleighwood manager when I told him about it. Of course, Fitzgerald's didn't last very long: I recall one of the first movies to play there was "Comes a Horseman" in late 1978, and it was already the Falls Twin when "Star Trek: The Motion Picture" opened a year later. Anyway, history is getting mangled pretty fast....

The Lamborghini Marzal

2005-04-23T16:35:00.000-04:00

I finally figured out what that wacky Lamborghini Matchbox car I had as a kid was: the 1967 Lamborghini Marzal, a one-off concept show-car. My Matchbox was brilliant red, and it went like stink 'cause it was one of the new " Superfast" models.

Calling All Campers

2005-04-22T14:48:00.000-04:00

Here's what some folks I went to camp with in fifth and sixth grade have been up to: Wes Westmoreland, Alan Williams, Holden Thorp.

*sigh*

Is the TSA out of control?

2005-04-15T16:37:00.000-04:00

First let me say I don't smoke and I'm not some anti-anti-smoking reactionary, but I really don't understand how banning lighters from US flights increases security, and if it does, then why did it take them more than three years to ban them after previously banning nail clippers? Some over-the-air news stories go so far as to mention that the ban is due to congressional legislation and a reaction to the Richard Reid shoe-bomber incident, but you probably have to read a newspaper to be reminded that Reid used matches, and then you're still reminded that TSA is on its way to banning matches, too.

They might as well ban cotton underwear for all the trouble enforcing a match ban is going to cause them....

Hey, wait a minute--that last article (and several others) mentions that lighters and matches have both been banned from checked luggage for many years. I had no idea--I've brought back a lot of souvenir matchbooks in checked luggage over the years. Safety matches are banned and yet ammunition is okay? I just don't get it....

An Update on O.U.O.S.V.A.V.V

2005-04-14T20:53:00.000-04:00

Has the mystery been solved? I hadn't noticed that news when it came out last year. Can't seem to find any newer news....

John Young and Time Travel

2005-04-14T20:13:00.000-04:00

I was having one of those hazy half-awake dreams this morning before I got up. It involved evidence that the outcome of World War II was determined by time travelers from the future who intervened. All kinds of evidence was being presented to me, like how could Heisenberg have been that stupid, how did a military with jet fighters and medium-range missiles lose, and it all tied in nicely with the appearance of UFOs after the war. Plus there was some connection with NASA astronauts, with John Young and possibly Alan Shepard being involved. John Young came off as some kind of villain, who was somehow involved with a murder/assassination in the future. I think maybe Young actually was from the future or had been replaced by someone from the future, like how else do you explain an astronaut having the career he did? Very very weird. Could I turn it into a novel?

Anyway, I Googled "John Young" and "time travel" and came up with this weird hit.

Censored?

2005-04-14T18:32:00.000-04:00

I just watched "Hare Ribbin'" (1944) on "The Bob Clampett Show," and they followed the cartoon with the announcement that "There are actually two versions of the ending of Hare Ribbin'. The one you just saw is the most widely seen. Maybe one day we can show you the other. But today is not that day." This is accompanied by the presumably different ending, though with the crucial moment covered by a cartoon "CENSORED" screen (which actually looks like it was lifted from the following cartoon, 1938's "Porky & Daffy").

Curious, I did a search and found video of both the different ending and the entire earlier version of the cartoon. What is amazing is that the normal version ends with Bugs Bunny handing a pistol to a dog, who shoots himself in the head, while the original version had Bugs just shoot the dog in the mouth. That's quite the bit of subtle self-censorship. (And by the way, the longer original version just extends a few scenes and makes less explicit how Bugs protects himself in the sandwich.)

J. Lee has an interesting comment on the Golden Age Cartoons forum:

The changed ending to "Hare Ribbin' " is the only one I can think of that was modified during the classic era due to violence, but it's never been made clear if there was an objection from the Hayes Office to the ending, or if the problem was in-house, with Leon and/or J.L. objecting to their top cartoon star blowing another character's brains out right after they started charging theaters extra $$$ to run Bugs Bunny cartoons.

Foo

2005-04-14T00:11:00.000-04:00

Taking a break from the catching up I've been doing here: the Cartoon Network is finally repeating "The Bob Clampett Show" again after a few years' absence. Since last seeing it I've seen every episode of "Toonheads" and have a greater appreciation for Warner Bros. cartoon history. And "'Clampett" is expanding my knowledge. For example, I now know that my favorite version of the "Looney Tunes" theme "The Merry-Go-Round Broke Down" is the first one from 1937. It's killer--I just love the double twang on the WB logo and that hi-hat action.

And I now know that the word foo has a pretty extensive pre-war history and is not, as many people think, a derivative of the bowdlerization of FUBAR to foobar. As the Jargon File says, FUBAR itself may actually be a backronym!

I discovered this when I was shocked to see the word FOO appear a couple of times in the pre-WWII "Porky in Wackyland" (1938). And after doing some searching and discovering its true origins, I then saw it again in "Daffy Doc" (1938).

And I dig the wacky [adult swim] bumper card that comes up after "Clampett" ends: "The Dawn is Your Enemy" accompanied by appropriately creepy music. Interesting that "Clampett" actually airs outside the listed time block for [adult swim]....

Hey, ~Andrea-NT had a deleted journal entry about the "The Dawn is Your Enemy" that I found in Google's cache *sniff*:

Thoughts

Journal Entry: Mon Apr 4, 2005, 5:18 AM

THE DAWN IS YOUR ENEMY
That's one of [adult swim]'s pictures... they show it every weekday at 5:55.
And the creepy music going in the background.

I cannot wait until summer vacation. I miss staying up til 4:00 or 5:00 in the morning...
while watching interesting stuff on the History channel. And then coming up with drawing ideas.

....I dunno.

Modern Ruins

2005-04-12T21:17:00.000-04:00

While looking up the SS United States, I came across this "Modern Ruins" website, and later went back to look at it. Wow.

I'm particularly fascinated by the guy's photos of the World's Fair site in Queens, particularly the US Pavilion as it stood not long before being demolished when the US Open Tennis Center was built in the late '70's. In that condition, it looks like someone could use it for a science fiction movie with some kind of post-apocalyptic 1970s setting.... "Men in Black" did not do it justice! ;-)

SS United States

2005-04-12T20:57:00.000-04:00

The SS United States is now in Philadelphia, and they're talking about refurbishing it for active ocean liner service!

This page says:

SS UNITED STATES. The fastest ocean liner ever built, and the largest passenger liner to be built in the USA - is today in Philadelphia.

With even more power installed than battleships of her day, this red, white and blue crowned super liner was indeed, a wolf in sheep's clothing. If need be, she could be called on to serve the country as a troopship capable of top secret speeds delivering 14,000 troops per voyage, steaming non-stop up to 10,000 miles.

Another page there mentions:

The SS UNITED STATES could make 30.5 knots (35 mph/56kph) at two-thirds power. Even if you rode the Big U on her record-setting maiden voyage - she never ran at more than 2/3rds power.

And yet another page at that site says:

How fast is fast? Imagine a city zooming along the water at the speed of a Jet Ski. This amazing ocean liner could effortlessly cut through the always challenging North Atlantic at 37 miles per hour. And that speed was her normal merchant speed. If pressed, she could easily accelerate to 44 miles per hour or possibly faster. Not only was she fast, she was safe and strong and as some described it, could maneuver like a Chris-Craft.

Some have hinted that the Big U could make nearly 45 knots (that's over 50 mph)! Amazing speed for a vessel with 3,000 souls aboard. Even at 32 knots (her normal service speed) the power to drive this giant liner so is nearly impossible to comprehend.

Some more info here.

I can't seem to find any references to the second smokestack being false, nor to what it would be like on deck at 45 knots crossing the north Atlantic.... But a friend tells me:

The United States was built at Newport News Shipbuilding where my father worked for 35 years beginning in 1958. I believe he told me that the 2nd smokestack was false--just for aesthetics--and that the ship was designed with few or zero "outside decks" as the wind (from the 35 knots) and northern latitudes made being outside very unpleasant.

I'm just reminded that my favorite bathtub toy as a kid was a replica of the United States....

The Cuban PB&J

2005-04-12T16:51:00.000-04:00

I came up with this sandwich; I call it the Cuban PB&J:

a base of peanut butter with Tabasco liberally dolloped on it on one side
a base of mayonnaise with strawberry jelly smeared over it on the other side

Put 'em together and wham-o--it actually tastes pretty good.

If I had a restaurant I wouldn't admit to the mayo but call it aioli or whatever instead....

Esuvee.com

2005-04-12T16:21:00.000-04:00

I saw an ad for this during "The Daily Show," and I thought it was probably one of those joke ads from Toyota. It showed a rodeo, with cowboys trying to ride these monstrous beasts called "Esuvees." I went to the website, and it's not a joke--it's a public safety campaign sponsored by state attorneys general to educate people on how to avoid rollover accidents in SUVs!

The Tweel

2005-04-12T16:18:00.000-04:00

Wild, wacky stuff from Michelin!

Louisburg Man Discovered Alive--In Morgue

2005-04-12T16:03:00.000-04:00

I thought things like this didn't happen anymore....

tiffinbites

2005-04-12T15:38:00.000-04:00

I saw this London-area fast-food chain on one of those Travel Channel shows featuring the too-cute Samantha Brown, and I would love to have the local franchise rights....

Military Tests Hijacking to Safeguard Buildings

2005-04-12T15:23:00.000-04:00

Apologies to the Onion, and, uh, the Washington Post, but in response to "Military Tests Lasers to Warn Off Aircraft" (I know it's now a little old, but...) all I can think of is:

Military Tests Hijacking to Safeguard Buildings

Nearly four years after the September 11th hijackings which resulted in the destruction of the World Trade Center and damage to the Pentagon, the U.S. military said it is testing a system in the Washington area to hijack planes that stray too close to government landmarks.

The plan has prompted confusion among some area pilots who said they were unsure whether they would be able to tell the difference between a terrorist hijacking used by Islamic fundamentalists and one undertaken by the North American Aerospace Defense Command operating in coordination with Homeland Security sky marshals. Transportation Secretary Norman Y. Mineta on Wednesday urged pilots to report hijackings to the Federal Aviation Administration and local law enforcement. A terrorist hijacking can distract a pilot and in rare cases cause the plane to fly into a building.

The US is Third

2005-04-11T19:19:00.000-04:00

Back when the tsunami hit (I know, I'm still catching up) there were a lot of reports mentioning that Indonesia is the fourth most populous country. Of course, we all know China and India are first and second, but who is third? Why, the good old US of A, of course!

Looking at the list I noticed something--there's a big market niche there for a country of 500-600 million or so people. The first to create such a country will totally dominate that market! ;-)

The Olympic Sank a Lightship

2005-04-11T19:01:00.000-04:00

We all know what happened to the Titanic, and some of us know that the sister ship Britannic sank during WWI, but whatever became of the third sister, the Olympic? The Olympic sank a lightship. Those White Star Lines ships are pretty dangerous, huh? That seems almost like sinking a lighthouse....

Air Traffic Control System Command Center

2005-04-11T18:07:00.000-04:00

The FAA has a great website giving you real-time info on airport delays. This can be very handy if, say, Delta, uh, Comair tells you that your late flight from Boston to RDU is delayed and then cancelled due to fog at RDU, and you're noticing that the similar American flight left on-time....

The Champion

2005-03-21T21:57:00.000-05:00

Back last fall I took a trip to the NC Transportation Museum in Salisbury, NC. One of their locomotives on display was an old purple diesel which did not seem all that remarkable to me--not until after returning home and being somewhat psyched by my trip to feed my long-dormant interest in trains, I started watching Trackside on the RFD network. Coincidentally, one of the first shows I saw was a 1997 show on the 75th anniversary of GM's Electro-Motive Division and the open-house they had at their factory in LaGrange, IL. At that time the 501 was owned by a private collector (and former EMD employee) in Wisconsin, who brought the engine down special for the open-house. It is the only extant example of that model out of 17 built, and as NCTM's page says, it is the highest-mileage E-series locomotive in existence! Wow.

I'm back. Again. Maybe.

2005-03-21T19:31:00.000-05:00

Okay, so I haven't posted since just after the election last November. That was all pretty depressing--I went into a funk and just didn't feel like sharing my thoughts. I've also felt frustrated in trying to figure out how to add photos to my blog without using Picasa (I've already got way too many bits of photo software on my PC), and adding other features like trackback to my custom template that dates from the dark ages of Blogger.

*sigh*

Maybe I can get it together again....

New Links

2004-11-11T01:53:00.000-05:00

Okay, I've nixed DVDFile.com, since the powers-that-be there have littered the main page with a bunch of banner ads for a new DVD while failing to make any other updates. My best wishes to Peter Bracke in his future endeavors.

Replacing DVDFile.com is The Digital Bits, which has a pretty good DVD news page, as well as a generally excellent column from film restoration expert Robert A. Harris.

Hollywood Elsewhere, meanwhile, is hanging by a thread.

Website Blues

2004-11-01T02:22:00.000-05:00

Two of my favorite websites are letting me down.

DVDFile.com's news and reviews were my favorite source of DVD news. The news column hasn't been updated since early September, when site editor Peter Bracke took his leave, and new reviews have slowed to a bare trickle since then. The site claimed Bracke would return last month, but it didn't happen.

Hollywood Elsewhere is going through a tough period that I fear is a downward spiral. After a dependable run at Hollywood Video's reel.com (where it had the snappier name Hollywood Confidential), Jeffrey Wells's column moved to Kevin Smith's bad-boy Movie Poopshoot site, where it never quite seemed to fit. It has since become its own site, and while this involved the addition of a myriad of other columns (and it should be noted that no other column at reel.com or Movie Poopshoot ever consistently got my attention) and some new features like the blog-like Wired replacing the neglected The Word sidebar, the main column's publishing has started to lag its usually snappy Wednesday/Friday lunchtime appearance. Plus the once energetic forums seem to have become the object of apathy both by site readers and hosts.

And now I look at those links over there to the right and wonder if I should remove DVDFile.com or Hollywood Elsewhere. I just don't know what to replace them with....

Why Someone I Know Voted For Howard Dean

2004-10-26T20:56:00.000-04:00

The guy does have a knack for bringing up the important issues that many people just want to ignore. An excerpt from last week's "Real Time with Bill Maher" with guest Gov. Howard Dean M.D.:

MAHER: As far as the environment goes, I mean, do you think that an average American is more likely to be killed by terrorism, or by the fact that there's too much mercury and coal in the air? I mean, you're a doctor, this week we found out that... Vioxx, right – Vioxx – can ease the pain and stiffness of arthritis by killing you. [laughter]

Apparently 27,000 people was the figure in the paper, who may have been killed by Vioxx. 3,000 died on September 11th, which is awful, but, I mean—

DEAN: Right.

MAHER: –the whole campaign is about that, and it seems like this barely makes the papers.

DEAN: No. And one of the reasons – and I think a lot of this is part of the media's problem – I'll give you another interesting statistic, which used to drive me crazy during the Vietnam War, we lose as many people every year on the highways to automobile fatalities as were killed in the entire war—

MAHER: Yeah.

DEAN: –in Vietnam. People don't talk about that—

MAHER: Right.

DEAN: –because it's become a commonplace occurrence . The other reason they don't talk about it, it would require congress and big corporations actually spending money to protect people, which they're not very interested in doing.

MAHER: Right. [applause]

The Living Room Candidate

2004-10-26T20:52:00.000-04:00

A very cool compendium of political campaign commercials, from the historical to the present.

Conquest of Space

2004-10-26T20:01:00.000-04:00

I just saw a movie in which a civilian scientist arrives by transport on a wheel-shaped space station orbiting Earth, astronauts watch TV from Earth and watch one-way messages from their loved ones, a spacecraft's mission is prepared in secrecy and its destination changed just before launch, an astronaut is killed while making a repair to a spacecraft antenna and his body must be retrieved, and the crewmember in charge of a space mission goes insane and tries to kill other crew and sabotage the mission...

...and it wasn't 2001: a space odyssey but George Pal's (of "War of the Worlds, " "Destination Moon," and "When Worlds Collide" fame) seldom-seen "Conquest of Space" (1955). Wow.

Art Deco

2004-10-26T19:56:00.000-04:00

Ooh, wish this exhibit would come to the NC Museum of Art....

Raymond Loewy

2004-10-26T19:50:00.000-04:00

When I think of Raymond Loewy, I think of Studebakers, particularly the Avanti.

Then I came across a mention that he designed the timelessly classic Air Force One livery, which then led me to this website.

Okay, wait a minute--the guy also did the BP, Shell, and Exxon logos, Lucky Strike cigarette packs, the Greyhound bus paint scheme, Coca-Cola bottles.... Wow. I feel pretty silly now to think that all he did was design Studebakers.

The Onion's Own Prophecy

2004-10-26T19:47:00.000-04:00

Someone recently forwarded this to me, and I think I remember reading this back when it came out. Little did I realize how true it would be.... :-(

We need an intelligence community dispute referee...

2004-10-05T14:15:00.000-04:00

...and it ain't National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice, at least according to her spokesman.

In light of this, the New York Times opines:

If Ms. Rice did her job and told Mr. Bush how ludicrous the case was for an Iraqi nuclear program, then Mr. Bush terribly misled the public. If not, she should have resigned for allowing her boss to start a war on the basis of bad information and an incompetent analysis.

"Security Moms" a Myth?

2004-10-01T14:14:00.000-04:00

I had not heard (or I had forgotten) that the "NASCAR dads" voting bloc had been discredited, but I had voiced my own suspicion that the "Security Moms" bloc was just a ruse by Republicans to make women think that perhaps they should be a "security mom" and thus vote for Bush....

Washington Post: "Security Mom" Bloc Proves Hard to Find

Update: and now the Post is even going so far as to call "Security Moms" one of the "cleverly named and totally bogus groups of swing voters."

Another update: Ellen Goodman in the Boston Globe calls "Security Moms" an "urban -- or should I say suburban? -- legend."

Broken Arrow in NC

2004-10-01T02:48:00.000-04:00

January 24, 1961 -- Goldsboro, NC:

During a B-52 airborne alert mission structural failure of the right wing resulted in two weapons separating from the aircraft during aircraft breakup at 2,000 - 10,000 feet altitude. One bomb parachute deployed and the weapon received little impact damage. The other bomb fell free and broke apart upon impact. No explosion occurred. Five of the eight crew members survived. A portion of one weapon, containing uranium, could not be recovered despite excavation in the waterlogged farmland to a depth of 50 feet. The Air Force subsequently purchased an easement requiring permission for anyone to dig there. There is no detectable radiation and no hazard in the area.

Relevant somewhat scary quote from a cool ibiblio site about the whole thing:

The state of North Carolina still conducts periodic radiation testing on local ground water.

The Living Room Candidate

2004-10-01T01:43:00.000-04:00

This is a very cool compendium of presidential campaign TV commercials, from the historical to the present.

Gore on Bush

2004-09-23T14:27:00.000-04:00

Al Gore on George W. Bush, from The New Yorker:

"I wasn't surprised by Bush's economic policies, but I was surprised by the foreign policy, and I think he was, too," Gore told me. "The real distinction of this Presidency is that, at its core, he is a very weak man. He projects himself as incredibly strong, but behind closed doors he is incapable of saying no to his biggest financial supporters and his coalition in the Oval Office. He's been shockingly malleable to Cheney and Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz and the whole New American Century bunch. He was rolled in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. He was too weak to resist it.

"I'm not of the school that questions his intelligence," Gore went on. "There are different kinds of intelligence, and it's arrogant for a person with one kind of intelligence to question someone with another kind. He certainly is a master at some things, and he has a following. He seeks strength in simplicity. But, in today's world, that's often a problem. I don't think that he's weak intellectually. I think that he is incurious. It's astonishing to me that he'd spend an hour with his incoming Secretary of the Treasury and not ask him a single question. But I think his weakness is a moral weakness. I think he is a bully, and, like all bullies, he's a coward when confronted with a force that he's fearful of. His reaction to the extravagant and unbelievably selfish wish list of the wealthy interest groups that put him in the White House is obsequious. The degree of obsequiousness that is involved in saying 'yes, yes, yes, yes, yes' to whatever these people want, no matter the damage and harm done to the nation as a whole—that can come only from genuine moral cowardice. I don't see any other explanation for it, because it's not a question of principle. The only common denominator is each of the groups has a lot of money that they're willing to put in service to his political fortunes and their ferocious and unyielding pursuit of public policies that benefit them at the expense of the nation."

It's a pretty good, but very long, article. There's even a song that goes with it. Pretty catchy, huh? :-)

Invading Iraq Was More Important Than the War on Terror (So What Else Is New?)

2004-09-22T11:25:00.000-04:00

Yesterday this old NBC News article from March was brought to my attention. The Bush administration had three opportunities to kill Abu Musab Zarqawi and destroy his operation in Iraq before the invasion, and they declined each time. Here's a key quote from the article:

Military officials insist their case for attacking Zarqawi's operation was airtight, but the administration feared destroying the terrorist camp in Iraq could undercut its case for war against Saddam.

Why hasn't this gotten more attention?

HAL 9000 for sale on ebay

2004-09-21T15:16:00.000-04:00

Wow, $150,000 is a lot for a 36-year-old supercomputer! Oh, wait, or
is it just three years old?

(That link will quicky grow stale. Here's one that might stick around. Or another.)

Kerry's Attackers

2004-08-23T12:23:00.000-04:00

Thanks to Friday's "The Note" I came across this depressing blog.

Somehow this upsets me more than the "Swiftboat Veterans For Truth": some Limbaugh/Fox News diehard who foams at the mouth when he finds apparent smoking-gun discrepancies in Kerry's damage report from a swiftboat engagement, which for him calls into question Kerry's boat's ability to rescue anyone and whether he was actually ever under attack. Elsewhere this guy says that these questions about Kerry's credibility have no comparison to Bush's service record, apparently because they believe that Bush has never lied about anything he did in the Texas Air National Guard, while Kerry is (apparently) a psychopathic prevaricator.

It only makes me think that in the past 15 years our country has devolved to the point where there are enough extremely polarized people to prevent anyone from governing effectively. If Kerry is elected, we'll have years of stupid pointless investigations to look forward to (ala Whitewater). I don't think the left wing (or, rather, the less extreme right wing) is as hard on Bush, though I suppose some Bush worshippers view the 9/11 Commission as some kind of Ken Starr.

The Kerry attackers are even willing to cede the whole question of Kerry's undeserved medals and self-inflicted wounds in order to bring up the question of his lying about being in Cambodia at Christmas 1968. Okay, maybe Kerry wasn't in Cambodia at that time, as he has dramatically stated on several occasions in the past, but it's going to be hard to prove that he was never in Cambodia, given military record-keeping of the period. Even if he never was, does his lying about being in Cambodia in order to make a point, when he was actually in Viet Nam, at all compare to Bush's service record? I just think these people seriously lack perspective.

And while at dinner Saturday evening I overheard a Mormon enlisted Navy man complaining about how Bush has wasted the lives of a thousand people for nothing....

Perhaps the Most Bizarre Thing I Have Ever Seen

2004-08-17T18:06:00.000-04:00

Spock sings! About hobbits!

Where do people find this stuff? It's from 1967. Wow.

Now if someone could just find the promo video for William Shatner's "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" or "Mr. Tambourine Man"....

Aurora AFX Monza

2004-08-11T10:57:00.000-04:00

Some slot car fanatic named Michael Lohman got his track featured on the "Hometown Horsepower" segment of "Wind Tunnel" on Speed TV, and what grabbed me was that he had up on his wall the box front from an old Aurora AFX Monza (Spyder? not Twin) track set--my all-time favorite Christmas present from when I was a kid. It inspired me to try to look up info on this still-impressive set, but I couldn't find anything. *sigh* Wish I still had it. Wonder whatever happened to it....

Lance-mania!

2004-07-20T16:32:00.000-04:00

I caved. I went out and bought several "Live Strong" wristbands at Foot Locker. Argh.

Yellow Wearing Thin

2004-07-07T03:34:00.000-04:00

After hearing all the reminders about what a great thing the Lance Armstrong Foundation's "Wear Yellow" campaign is, with "Live Strong" wristbands selling for just $1 with all proceeds going to fight cancer as part of a joint campaign with Nike, I decided to check it out. Turns out I can't buy a wristband for $1, but I can buy a ten-pack for $10. Plus $1.50 handling. Plus some indeterminate shipping amount that they won't specify unless I create an account with the LAF store. Why not just be upfront about all this, guys? Sheesh.

Oh, wait, I can buy one from the Nike store, and they assure me that orders of five or less will qualify for reduced shipping (less than the regular $7!), but, again, they won't tell me unless I give them all my info. And there are no brick-and-mortar Nike stores in my state. But I could buy it at a Lady Foot Locker. Or a Kid's Foot Locker. What's wrong with regular Foot Locker?

And the freakin' wristbands are made in China. Probably by orphaned children of political prisoners, slaving away in their own prison awaiting the harvesting of their organs....

If they had just said it's free for a $5 or $10 donation or whatever, it would have been okay. But to crow about how it's only $1, and then make it so hard to actually get one for $1 just irks me.

Lucid Dreaming Redux

2004-07-06T13:45:00.000-04:00

Okay, I give up. Since successfully finding my hands in a dream, I have since had two nightmares involving the severing or mangling of fingers. My subconscious is telling me to back off, and I hear it....

Bush Bungles Reagan Mourning

2004-07-06T13:20:00.000-04:00

Can Bush get anything right? In another demonstration of the lack of foresight in his administration, last Friday Bush abruptly rescinded his order to fly flags at half-staff for 30 days a few days before the end of the official period of mourning for former President Reagan. This was done without explanation, catching many off-guard, and resulted in a holiday weekend in which many flags remained at half-staff, including those seen at such official institutions as the U.S. Post Office and McDonald's.

Lucid Dreaming

2004-06-30T21:40:00.000-04:00

Last night, for the first time ever, as described by Carlos Castenada and in "Waking Life," I was able to look at my hands in a dream. They were misshapen and fake-looking, with tips of some fingers missing, and they were shot through with lots of little holes. Their appearance freaked me out and I started trying to strangle two other people in the dream. This woke me up--into another dream. So the first classically lucid dream I ever had was a dream inside a dream. Weird.

Bobby Baker

2004-06-30T21:18:00.000-04:00

During C-SPAN's coverage of the Reagan funeral they also showed complete archive video from NBC News of Lyndon Johnson's 1973 funeral. The NBC commentators mentioned that one of the mourners present was Bobby Baker, who had been a part of the biggest scandal of Johnson's presidency and had served time in prison. I had never heard of Bobby Baker. Certainly most people today could not name this person as a focus of the biggest scandal of Johnson's presidency. Funny how some scandals stick and others don't.

Esta Thé

2004-05-14T19:24:00.000-04:00

What the heck is Esta Thé? They're a big sponsor of the Giro d'Italia, and I can't figure out what they are. Is it some kind of flavored iced tea? At least their 33 cl can confirms my own long-held suspicion about the "33" on Rolling Rock (and that Vietnamese brand) beer bottles. It's just the size.

O.U.O.S.V.A.V.V.

2004-05-14T18:32:00.000-04:00

Recent news of famed Bletchley Park Nazi code-breakers investigating a cryptic inscription at Shugborough Hall in England piqued my interest. I've heard of The Da Vinci Code and its controversy, and then BBC America started re-airing the color episodes of "The Saint," which got me wondering who the heck was that "Saint" guy, anyway, with his namesake connection to the legendary Knights of the Templar. And now this. Seems like some meme virus is infecting the world, causing this convergence.

Anyway, it immediately seemed obvious to me that the D.M. on the inscription had to be the Roman epitaph, "Dis Manibus." And I'm not the only one. So much for that.

There also seems to be some great mystery surrounding the original Les Bergers d'Arcadie painting and Rennes-le-Château. But then most of this can be debunked.

They should try to work this all into the next Indiana Jones movie.

P.S. I just stumbled across the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica while writing this. Cool.

A Week With MLB Extra Innings

2004-04-11T21:41:00.000-04:00

I've been pigging out on baseball this past week thanks to DirecTV's free preview of the ridiculously overpriced MLB Extra Innings baseball package. I've come away with a few impressions.

Except for Joe Buck, the Fox Sports Net announcers are all pretty uniformly bad or mediocre at best. There are all kinds of former players stating the obvious over and over, like telling you what they think the pitcher and catcher are saying in a mound conference, it's never something surprising, and they can never be proven wrong. Give me a break, you Tim McCarver wannabes!

Vin Scully is a national treasure. I haven't heard him call a game since the 1997 World Series on radio, and I miss him dearly. To hear him call Dodgers games on Fox Sports Net (and alone, with no color commentator/analyst!) is a giddy pleasure. It's enough to make me want to subscribe to mlb.tv online so I could go back and hear most of his broadcasts from last year as well as this year.

Michael Kay is pretty darn good doing the Yankees games on YES. I remember him from Yankees radio broadcasts, he of the precise descriptions of teams' uniforms and stadium decor. He's very listenable on TV as well.

So, would I pay $160 to listen to (mostly) bad (mostly) FSN announcers all season? Nope.

A Dandy House in St. Pete

2004-04-07T21:05:00.000-04:00

I was watching the Yankees play the Devil Rays today in the final game of their four-game series which began in Japan, and though the game was played at Tropicana Field, it at times felt like the Tokyo Dome with the parade of Japanese backstop ads, including one for Dandy House, an "Executive Men's Beauty Day Spa." Huh.

A Tribute to Stanley Kubrick

2004-04-02T18:52:00.000-05:00

As a tribute to Stanley Kubrick, I killed otherwise valuable time remaking this blog using Futura fonts.

Valid Points Brought to Light by "The Daily Show"

2004-03-24T01:32:00.000-05:00

National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice appeared on five talk shows to defend against allegations made by former counter-terrorism adviser Richard Clarke, but she refuses to appear before the September 11 commission to answer questions.
Vice President Dick Cheney, appearing by phone on Rush Limbaugh's radio show, attempted to discredit Clarke by claiming that "he wasn't in the loop" on a lot of things. Why was the administration's chief counter-terrorism adviser not in the loop?
Have fun reading about it all here.

I'm Back

2004-03-24T01:12:00.000-05:00

After writing a long treatise back last August on how amazing it was to be blown away by the IMAX version of "The Matrix Reloaded" after having been so disappointed seeing it the first time around non-IMAX, I found my post somehow did not get published and it was also deleted. This threw me into a terrible blog funk that I have been mired in for several months now. I hope to have that remedied. We shall see.

Arroyo Seco Bikeway

2003-08-11T12:14:00.000-04:00

I heard about this on an old episode of OLN's "Bicycle Journal" that I had TiVoed--someone was trying to recreate an old bicycle toll road from Pasadena to Los Angeles. It looks pretty cool, but it doesn't seem that much has been done since 1997 or so.

KGB and Viet Cong both tried to kill John Wayne

2003-08-06T13:23:00.000-04:00

I read about this in Jeffrey Wells's Hollywood Elsewhere column. He thinks it would make a good movie, and I have to agree. Fascinating.

My Minimal Blog Presence

Blue Christmas

A Star Trek Conspiracy?

Whither Eastern Daylight Time?

If It Walks Like a Dictator and Talks Like a Dictator....

Who Are James Horner and Michael Hoppe Ripping Off?

Marta Bohn-Meyer

All Hail Nils Olav

J. Peterman

I Think I Know Where They're Hiding the Alien Spacecraft

2001, We Hardly Knew Ye

I Can Put My Swiss Army Knife Back On My Key Ring?

Pan Am is Back!

Kubrick 1949 Photos of Chicago

Hackers Can Turn Your Home Computer Into A *BOMB*

Star Trek Plagiarism

Gravity

Saul Bass: Master of Credits

An Email Signature I Enjoyed

Email Snooping Bosses Face Charges

Souscrivez aux Bons d'Armement

Man Tangles With Raleigh Over Bike Ornament

Project Greenlight

The Conet Project

For the Compleat Jedi

What Makes Airplanes Fly?

Jupiter's Travels

Southern IMAX Theaters Reject Volcano Film Over Evolution

Discovery of Scuttled Japanese I-401 Supersub

He's Not Dead Yet!

Calendar Reform

Lemony Snicket

Hoops & Yoyo

Befriended Hippo

Vandenberg Shuttle Launches

A Good Deadwood Quote

Don't Look at the Man Behind the Curtain!

Drive-In Movie Memories

The Lamborghini Marzal

Calling All Campers

Is the TSA out of control?

An Update on O.U.O.S.V.A.V.V

John Young and Time Travel

Censored?

Foo

Thoughts

Modern Ruins

SS United States

The Cuban PB&J

Esuvee.com

The Tweel

Louisburg Man Discovered Alive--In Morgue

tiffinbites

Military Tests Hijacking to Safeguard Buildings

The US is Third

The Olympic Sank a Lightship

Air Traffic Control System Command Center

The Champion

I'm back. Again. Maybe.

New Links

Website Blues

Why Someone I Know Voted For Howard Dean

The Living Room Candidate

Conquest of Space

Art Deco

Raymond Loewy

The Onion's Own Prophecy

We need an intelligence community dispute referee...

"Security Moms" a Myth?

Broken Arrow in NC

The Living Room Candidate

Gore on Bush

Invading Iraq Was More Important Than the War on Terror (So What Else Is New?)

HAL 9000 for sale on ebay

Kerry's Attackers

Perhaps the Most Bizarre Thing I Have Ever Seen

Aurora AFX Monza

Lance-mania!

Yellow Wearing Thin

Lucid Dreaming Redux

Hackers Can Turn Your Home Computer Into A BOMB