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Sadly, No Alien Overlords

What was that in the western sky on Friday night that stopped traffic and sparked both alarm and curiosity?

As I suspected—since it came from the direction of Vandenburg AFB in southern California—it was just a rocket, unfortunately.

Sadly, no arrival of our more-than-welcome alien overlords.

Damn.

SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket, launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base at 5:27 p.m., was carrying 10 satellites to low-Earth orbit. The satellites will be part of a constellation operated by Iridium Communications. All 10 satellites successfully deployed.

Here’s a short video of the launch shot in Los Angeles. Pretty impressive:

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Building the Death Star

(Maximize in a dark room for full effect.)

Ben and I saw the new film last weekend. I really enjoyed it, although I didn’t get the usual adrenaline rush when the first notes of the theme rang out and the screen crawl started. By the time the end credits rolled, I wanted to see it all again. Ben was not impressed.

As has been written elsewhere, Episode VIII is definitely not your father’s Star Wars. Sacred cows are slaughtered. And as the movie itself drives home, it’s time to let go of the past and move on. I approve of this.

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How…

…as a horny gay geeky teenager in the 1970s, did astronaut and Apollo 17 lunar module pilot Harrison Schmitt manage to fly under my radar? (He was 37 when these pictures were taken.)





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Quote Of The Day

It’s a funny thing coming home. Nothing changes. Everything looks the same, feels the same, even smells the same. You realize what’s changed is you.” ~ Eric Roth

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Ghosts of Christmas Past

Once again this year Ben and I debated whether or not to go to the trouble of putting up the tree. We blew it off completely last year, as neither one of us was particularly in the holiday spirit for a variety of reasons. It’s a little better this year, but based on the absolute lack of cards we’ve received it’s not a sentiment shared by many of our friends. Either that or people just don’t send holiday cards any more; a distinct possibility. (Even we cut our list way down this year.)

What pushed it over the edge for me this year was twofold. We were planning  a last minute holiday potluck and you can’t have a holiday gathering without a tree and I’d also purchased a TARDIS tree topper (which, as you ca see, is way too big for the size of our tree) and really didn’t want it to just languish in its box for another year. Additionally, a friend of ours had given us a string of Weeping Angel lights last year that had never seen the light of day. So Friday evening I bit the bullet and hauled it all out.

While decorating the tree, I kept hearing my Mom’s very disapproving voice playing in my head. Mom was, shall we say…meticulous…in the way she decorated a Christmas tree. (Dad usually handled the lights and Mom did everything else until my sister and I were old enough to take over those duties ourselves, and even then she wielded complete control over the process.) Certain ornaments had to go in certain locations, and the whole procedure of laying on the decorations was very methodical. If she were alive today she’d be aghast that I have large ornaments at the top of the tree and tiny ones at the base.

I think it turned out lovely, in any case. My only regret as an adult (holiday-wise at least) is that about ten years ago I gave my half of the family ornaments back to my sister, thinking at the time that I would never put up another tree. Yeah, now I wish I’d held onto them and I suppose I could ask for them back, but at the same time—with only a few exceptions—I don’t remember exactly which ones were mine and I don’t want to have to deal with the resulting drama from dividing them up again.

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Blast From The Past

Summer 1977: “Star Wars” summer. Seemed like everyone and their brother was attempting to cash in on the phenomenon that was Star Wars, including Burger King.

I bought this set of four posters as they came available at the fast food chain, hoping to one day get them framed. I’d completely forgotten about them until I ran across these images online. As it turns out, forty years later they’re still not framed, languishing in a cardboard shipping tube in the bedroom closet—along with probably a dozen other posters I’d hoped to get framed “someday.”

Considering it costs upward of a hundred dollars to get a simple black frame and mount for art of this size (with a 40% discount coupon!) at Michaels these days, it’s still not going to happen any time soon.

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No, It’s Not Real

Did that landing screen scare you? Good. It should.

Obviously it’s not real. At least not yet. But with yesterday’s decision by the FCC to rescind Net Neutrality rules, it could very well be at some point in the future. But don’t panic…the fight isn’t over yet. Already twenty states’ Attorneys General have filed (or are preparing to file) suit to have this horrific decision overturned and it was just announced that Democratic Senators will also be introducing legislation to roll back the repeal.

In the meantime, you can still contact your congresscritters and demand that the rules (or even BETTER ones) be put back in place. We are not helpless.

The simplest way I’ve found to contact your elected representatives if you don’t like talking on the phone, is to text RESIST to 504-09. It will walk you through identifying your reps and lets you contact them by fax or phone.

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What Might Have Been

From ArsTechnica:

While most Star Wars pieces you’ll see this week are focused on the soon-to-be-revealed adventures of Finn, Rey, Poe, and BB-8, today we’ve got a blast from the past to share with you—sort of. As any self-respecting nerd will tell you, the whole look-and-feel of the Star Wars universe owes a lot to Ralph McQuarrie. In 1975, George Lucas hired the conceptual artist to create the characters and worlds that then only existed on the pages of his scripts. So McQuarrie’s paintbrush created the first images of C-3PO, R2-D2, Darth Vader, stormtroopers, and others, not to mention all those TIE fighters, X-Wings, and Y-Wings.

His paintings and concept art heavily informed Lucas’ filmmaking, and the director reproduced many of McQuarrie’s pieces in Star Wars. But quite a lot changed between the earlier scripts McQuarrie was working from and the film that audiences saw in 1977. Stormtroopers used lightsabers. Luke Skywalker was a girl. And the Millennium Falcon looked very, very different. Now, thanks to the 2017 graduating classes of the DAVE School, we have an idea of what a 1975-era movie—The Star Wars—would have looked like:

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