Not *quite* the Enterprise…

 art, awesomeness, history, science fiction  No Responses »
Nov 202019
 

As I continue the long process of unpacking, I’ve come across a whole lot of stuff that I forgot I had, stuff that I just shoveled into boxes before I left Utah. There are a *lot* of things that, now that I paid a painful sum of money to have shipped, I’ll have to get rid of. Hopefully via selling. A mountain of paperbacks that it turns out I don’t have the space for. A fat box of DVDs that I’ll never watch again. That sort of thing.

There are also things that I have no intention of letting go, including a small stash of vintage sci-fi. Included in that is a very small number of “Science Fiction Plus” magazines. One of them, the October 1953 issue, has cover art by Frank R. Paul. Paul was one of the more important sci-fi artists of all time, with illustrations gracing the covers of many pulps in the 1920’s and 1930’s. By the 1950’s the times had pretty much  passed him and his art style by, but he was still at work.

The cover below shows a  somewhat more graceful spaceship than he typically created. It honestly looks like the midway point between the movie-era Starship Enterprise morphing into the Protector from Galaxy Quest. Angle those pylons up some and greatly increase the diameter of the “bridge module,” and you have something *damned* close to the Enterprise.

As I come across stuff of interest during the unpacking, cleaning (you wouldn’t believe just how dusty things got after 15 years in the Utah desert, even things that had been reasonably effectively sealed) and dealing-with stages, I’ll scan and post.

 Posted by at 6:35 pm

Helmets for infants

 AARRRGH, history, Hmm..., science  No Responses »
Nov 182019
 

Sure, the idea of putting a helmet on an infant makes sense from time to time. But what do you make the helmet out of? Genius idea! Whack the noggins off other, larger and less popular kids, chop up their skulls, scoop out their brains and plop the skullcaps (with flesh still attached) onto the heads of the infants that you actually do like. Because, sure, that’s not at all morbid and creepifyin’.

2 Infants Were Buried Wearing Helmets Made from Kids’ Skulls. And Archaeologists Are Puzzled.

Normally I would suggest that this is a horrifying idea. But since this was found in Ecuador, it’s therefore a beautiful example of diverse cultures. Stunning and brave and all that.

 Posted by at 11:50 am

Ponderable: the world ends in 5 years.

 blather  No Responses »
Nov 162019
 

“The End Of The World” is a vague concept. It can cover anything from society slipping into a dark age to global thermonuclear war to the sun exploding and a sudden universal vacuum collapse. Consequently your (“you” can be either a random individual or a major national government) response to a foreseeable End will vary considerably. When it comes to Hollywood, most Ends are preventable (send a team of badasses to fight the aliens or blow up the comet) or avoidable or just survivable. But for this thought exercise, assume a End is on the horizon that can NOT be avoided or survived. Options include:

1) The Sun’s gonna splode. Nowhere in the solar system to escape to.

2) Incoming neutron star or multi-solar-mass black hole will pass inside of one AU from the sun, tossing every planet, moon and asteroid out into the dark, while passing close enough to Earth to tidally disrupt it

3) Message in the cosmic background radiation is decoded giving a hard cutoff date for this particular simulation.

4) Whatever. In five years, humanity is extinct and there’s no avoiding it. No heroics or glorious programs will help.

So, let’s say The End has been detected, checked and confirmed. The experts have run the numbers every which way and there’s no getting around the fact that we’re boned. In fiction, the default position of a government that is aware of this sort of thing is that they will do what they can to keep the facts as quiet as possible as long as possible, to keep people from panicking and to keep the economy humming along. But in the latter case, the necessity of that is to allow The Messiah Project, whatever it is, to be funded and built. If society collapses, then the government can’t build the Mars colony ship or the underground bunkers or the planetary deflector shield or whatever. But in this case, everyone with sufficient clearance to know about The End knows that no Messiah Project will amount to a hill of beans. So in this case, what is your advice to the President? Keep the secret so that the public can go on for a little while longer in ignorance and relative peace, or spill the beans and let people know the truth? Does it matter if society goes down tomorrow if it’s going to be wiped out in five years anyway?

From the other end: you’re a regular schmoe, and the government announces that in five years, The End. The Russians concur, the Chinese, the Brits, the Canucks… every government has their experts check the data and they all conclude that five years and then that’s it. What do you  do? Go to work tomorrow or decide to retire (knowing that if too many people choose Option B, then the economy collapses overnight)? Go Purge and Festival? Or eat a bullet?

 

 Posted by at 6:53 pm

“Cultural touchstone:” A long-delayed rant

 AARRRGH, blather, Crazy, dumbassery, Forward!, Gah., history, Hmm..., politics, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Nov 152019
 

I meant to bitch about this months ago, but… well, I didn’t. Such is life.

Two events hit their fiftieth anniversaries in 2019: the Apollo 11 moon landing and the Woodstock music festival. While Apollo 11 certainly got a fair deal of press, it was nothing compared to the slobbering retrospectives that greeted the anniversary of Woodstock. I actively avoided the numerous documentaries and such about Woodstock that polluted the airwaves, but it was impossible to avoid all the constantly yammerings about it. And something that seemed to be repeated a lot were three words:  Touchstone and Generation/Cultural. Examples:

The Woodstock generation reflects on the legacy of a cultural touchstone

Woodstock: Three Days That Defined a Generation

Celebrate the 50th anniversary of the concert that became a touchstone for a generation.

Woodstock at 50

Re-examining a generation’s touchstone.

Celebrating Woodstock at 50

Woodstock was more than just a music festival, it was a cultural touchstone that has echoed far beyond its own generation.

And so on.

A Google search on those terms return 230,000 hits. A similar search with “Woodstock” replaced with “Apollo 11” returned 59,000 hits, but many of these seem to refer to a “touchstone” in the context of an actual rock that you can physically touch.

This, I believe, is part of the reason why society is such a mess. Instead of the greatest achievement in the history of mankind, that of landing men on the moon, what the Boomer generation seems to consider their “cultural touchstone” was a bunch of losers rolling in filth, filling their bodies with mind-scrambling chemicals and listening to pretentious crapular music that has gratefully largely faded from history.

I’ve often heard of people of roughly the right age claiming to have been at Woodstock when they actually weren’t. This to me makes no sense. Sure, I understand the urge to lie about things in order to make yourself look better… for example I have scars that might seem impressive had they had better origin stories (I once used “I got these when I was a Ranger in the Marines fighting Nazis in Viet Nam,” but oddly I wasn’t immediately believed). But given the option of claiming to have been at Woodstock or having been involved with the Apollo missions… goddamn, who the frak would actually pick the muddy field? Hell, I’d proudly claim to have been the night janitor in the VAB rather than having been some filthy hippie.

Gah. While it’s popular among everyone downstream of the Baby Boomers to blame them for everything, their generation is composed of stock-standard baseline humans. What corrupted them corrupts everyone. But there seems to have been something special that made the lowest elements of their generation rise to prominence  to give us damaged entertainment/news industries and politicians who support things that prior generations knew to be vile, and the fact that Woodstock rather than Apollo 11 is their “cultural touchstone” is a prime symptom. Of course no subsequent generation has really improved on that, and that does not speak well of the last half century’s worth of Westerners. Nor for the future.

 Posted by at 2:40 am
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