Archive for August, 2011

The Short Clam Ride, and the Long

I exercise so I can eat, that is, eat more. So it should come as no surprise that all bike rides must, for me, end at destinations with food. I’d call it the carrot method, but I seldom have anything that healthy. From here in northern Pelham, I can go on two of my favorite food rides with my son, Patrick: The Short Clam and the Long Clam.

via – Culinary Bike Rides of a Sort: The Short Clam, and The Long Clam – Pelham, NY Patch.

Harlan Ellison’s soldiers of the future

Wired magazine’s write-up of two 1964 episodes of The Outer Limits was so intriguing, I had to watch them. At least one is worth the $1.99 to Amazon or whichever is your by-the-episode video purveyor of choice.

Both were written by science fiction great Harlan Ellison. That’s almost always enough for me.

And both installments feature soldiers from the future landing in the present, that is, the present of 1964, and continuing to battle.

In “The Soldier,” one time traveller saves humans from another future warrior. The other episode, “Demon With a Glass Hand,” tells the story of a protagonist from the future who learns, at the end of the episode, he’s a robot in human skin. I Spy’s Robert Culp stars.

Does all this future warrior/robot-looks-human stuff sound anything at all like The Terminator? Ellison, always a fighter for his rights as an author, thought so and went after the The Terminator production team in court. According to Wired, he reached a sealed settlement. But the movie’s credits now offer an “acknowledgement to the works of Harlan Ellison.”

Both episodes are hokie and histrionic and as low tech as any James Cameron feature is high tech. The costumes in “The Soldier” must have been made from cardboard and aluminum foil. But Ellison’s writing, his dark warnings and expansive vision, are there. “Glass Hand” is the better of the two if you’re only spending two bucks.

A nerd’s postscript: Ellison wrote the best episode of the original “Star Trek” TV series, “City on the Edge of Forever,” also a tale of time travel and changing the future.

RFP for Starfleet

This is the best story to run on page one of the New York Times in a year: DARPA, the Defense Department R&D arm, is going to award $500,000 to figure what it would take to send  people to another star. That’s right, government research bucks for interstellar travel, a ship to Alpha Centauri. DARPA won’t be making any follow-up grants and doesn’t want anything back. Just go to work studying for a hundred years—or two—and come up with a starship. You must read the Times piece on the “100-Year Starship Study.” It’s like the NYT has turned into Amazing Stories, or Robert Heinlein meets the Federal Register. Here’s a bit:

The awarding of that grant, on Nov. 11 — 11/11/11 — is planned as the culmination of a yearlong Darpa-NASA effort called the 100-Year Starship Study, which started quietly last winter and will include a three-day public symposium in Orlando, Fla., on Sept. 30 on the whys and wherefores of interstellar travel. The agenda ranges far beyond rocket technology to include such topics as legal, social and economic considerations of interstellar migration, philosophical and religious concerns, where to go and — perhaps most important — how to inspire the public to support this very expensive vision.

This may be the best government money spent out of trillions. And remember, DARPA are the folks that funded the creation of the Internet. Who knows what this money will buy.

My Rip Van Winkle tale

I have for you a tale in the Rip Van Winkle line, though this one is true, and rather than being about one man disappearing for 20 years, it’s about a local town losing its founding Dutch family for 300. I was reminded of it while stopping off in Amsterdam last week following our visits to the Russian baby home where we first met our son Patrick and tours of Moscow, St. Petersburg and Tyumen.

via A Real Life Rip Van Winkle Tale: City Got Peak at Past – Pelham, NY Patch.

Of the wild wild east

I’ll offer a bit of a travelogue on our Russian trip after last week’s more personal journal about our return to the Tyumen Baby Home, where our son Patrick spent the first nine months of his life.

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You know of Moscow and St. Petersburg, have read about them, seen them on TV and in films, perhaps even visited one or both. Chances are you have never heard of Tyumen, though it’s a city of almost 600,000. Chances are I would not either if Patrick had not been born there. Our tour guide proudly boasted the city “is the gateway to Siberia.” As getting “sent to Siberia” is our cliche for being sent somewhere really horrible, I wondered if this was the best promotional copy the Chamber of Commerce could come up with. But the more I heard about the history of the city, the more I saw a parallel to our own.

via Of the Wild Wild East, Siberian Cats and 15 Great Kids – Pelham, NY Patch.