Edith Keeler Must Die

Don't copy-paste legends

I saw the midnight premiere of Star Trek: Into Darkness early Thursday morning. The initial 2009 reboot of the franchise was an intriguing blend of classic Star Trek motifs through a 21st Century sensibility, so I thought I'd enjoy this continuation of the new films even more than the kickoff  movie.

 As I soon discovered, that idea was a colossal miscalculation.

Yes, it's obvious that the franchise needs to be geared toward a mass audience, and a market of Star Trek aficionados simply can't pay enough in ticket purchases to offset the costs incurred by Paramount every time the studio mounts one of these productions. The movies, therefore, have to follow a strict diet of predictable action, adventure, pretty people, and explodey stuff in order to maintain ticket sales and repeat business.

This is a mandatory, yet completely unessential, three-second scene that fulfilled
Paramount's requirements for "a sexy new Star Trek."

   Yet, there still has to be something of the heart of Star Trek-type stories to consider these films part of the Star Trek universe. Director J.J. Abrams doesn't seem to agree with this idea, as evidenced by the plot of the latest adventure of Captain Kirk & company.

Abrams famously stated he was never a Star Trek fan growing up, and really never watched much of the series until he was hired to direct the first reboot film. It's almost a matter of pride to him that he had no love for Trek as a child, and this lack of affection seems to percolate through the latest film.

Note: before I continue any further, I want to assure you that I do not want to spoil any plot elements for people who haven't seen the movie, so I'm going to talk in general terms about the problems in this film. My criticisms will probably make more sense after you've seen the movie, but I think it's important to view the film without having any plot surprises ruined for you.

The attitude of the script seems to be that it was written by someone who screened several key episodes of Star Trek and watched a few of the films, but had no idea about the personalities of the characters mentioned in the shows. It's as if they had watched "City on the Edge of Forever," and then decided to rewrite Edith Keeler as a Romulan spy. Sure, everyone in the film is saying  the same catchphrases that resonate from earlier episodes and films, but the screenwriter Damon Lindelof doesn't seem to understand why the characters say the things they do. The ignorance of the why part turns the phrases into gibberish, or worse, unintended comedy.

The Squire of Gothos? Cadet Finnegan? Sure, pick a TOS villain and cast Cumberbatch in the role.

You don't have to be a Trekkie to know the basic rules of Star Trek: Kirk makes bold decisions, Spock's favorite word is "logic," guys in red shirts don't live long. But the characters and their interactions were more complex than superficial features. Even the guest stars on the old TV show had backstories that explained their reasons for doing things: Commodore Decker was driven by guilt over the loss of his crew to attack the Planet Killer in a shuttlecraft; Khan Noonian Singh was the pride-drunk leader of a remnant of 20th Century supermen whose weakness was his arrogance; Commander Balok was a master of deception because his diminutive  race had previous run-ins with aggressive species. The aliens and opponents the crew of the Enterprise faced each week had motives and desires that made sense in the context of the plot of every show. 

May the Force be with you, Frodo. Epic misunderstanding of a franchise.

Star Trek Into Darkness? Not so much. The biggest failure of the film is the outright looting of previous Star Trek characters and situations in order to evoke audience nostalgia for those original TV and film moments. We're given a bad guy named John Harrison (Benedict Cumberbatch) who turns out to be a character from the TV show - - except this character doesn't act anything like the original character. When dialog from the original character's appearance is repeated in this film, then, it doesn't quite make sense with what we see on screen. Imagine, for example, having a Klingon suddenly appear on screen without introduction and shout "HARCOURT FENTON MUDD!" at Mr. Spock - - - it's almost at that level of incoherence.

The motivations of the villains are breathtakingly shallow. They are bad guys simply because the script needed bad guys at certain points in the film. New locations crop up only because the Enterprise crew required a new place for fight scenes scheduled at regular intervals in the movie, and the previous venues had been destroyed during earlier fights. Ships are destroyed, crash, and somehow fly again because they're needed for the next battle scene. In one particularly absurd moment, a starship, already blown up by six dozen photon torpedoes, reappears for another barrage of phaser fire.

Don't worry, it's only a scratch.

The biggest problem (and I'm going to be as vague as I can so as not to spoil anything) is the lack of loss in this film. Yes, there are deaths of characters, but the solutions to otherwise fatal situations are telegraphed so early and often in this film that the audience doesn't care when people fall off the roofs of speeding cars, or get shot, or have their ships blown up around them. There is no peril that can't be erased, and without the high stakes of life or death, character mortality is no more of a concern than losing a turn during a Super Mario Bros game.

I could continue with nitpicking the howling continuity errors, the usurption of the laws of physics, and the over-reliance of jam-packing every single scene with floating debris and shuddering camera angles, but those points don't begin to match the immensity of the ineptness of the script. This is a Star Trek film, mostly in the sense that Paramount owns the intellectual property and that the character names are the same as those used in the original Roddenberry series. It is not a Star Trek film, though, in any aspect where it's supposed to match the quality of the original series' story-telling, or show respect for the characters and their motivations. It's an auto-tuned version of Star Trek, replete with mandatory set pieces to please the ticket-buying audiences of the world. I'm not saying it wasn't a fun movie - - it's just not really about Star Trek anymore. If Edith Keeler must die, the reason shouldn't be so that there's a satisfying explosion at the end of the film.

Let's cram some more merchandise onboard, shall we?

Don't Crush that Dwarf

When I was a kid, comedy albums were all the rage. George Carlin, Richard Pryor, Steve Martin - - all the top  stand-up comedians put out platinum-level blockbuster records that millions of teenagers bought at Sam Goody's and Tower Records stores.

Improv and stand-up routines are clever and entertaining forms of comedy. I've been to comedy clubs and laughed at really witty, observational humor. The folks who can practice these crafts are great at what they do, and I don't think I'd be able to compete in their arena. Stand-up doesn't lend itself well to repeated listening, though. Once you've heard a routine, I don't think it's possible to recapture the same enjoyment level as when you first heard the jokes.

This is not true of my favorite form of comedy album: the scripted "radio show" style, or the immersive worlds pioneered by The Firesign Theater. The four actors of  Firesign (Phil Proctor, Peter Bergman, Phil Austin, and David Ossman) created entire audio cities set in the past and future, where familiar characters bounded on stage, only to rebound again in later albums. The audio canvases deployed by The Firesign Theater were as seemingly real as watching "Lost" or "Star Trek," with buried background sounds noticed only on third or tenth replayings. The characters remain popular with many folks of my age and temperament: who doesn't cackle along with Rocky Rococo, as he taunts Nick Danger, Third Eye? Doesn't everyone follow the word "brough-ha-ha" with "ha ha ha?"

Although Firesign Theater (minus the late Peter Bergman, who passed away earlier this year) continues to produce new shows and recordings, I've missed the days of great radio show-style comedies. Garrison Keillor is a good storyteller, but his shows are mostly monologues, and miss a certain depth present in Firesign Theater tales.

Last month, I discovered a podcast show that I can't believe has evaded my notice for many years: The Thrilling Adventure Hour, hosted by Nerdist.com and written by the team of Ben Acker and Ben Blacker. TAH is a cornucopia of well-written comedy sketches framed in the style of an old-time radio show. The cast is an amazing collection of current TV actors and pop culture icons, including such greats as Linda Cardinelli from Freaks & Geeks and Firefly's Nathan Fillion.

Although it's billed as an "Adventure Hour," the stage show is broken into half-hour "episodes" of varied storylines. Each episode tracks with longer story arcs for their groups of characters. They're all comedies, but in different genres. Here's a quick list of some of them:

Captain Laserbeam: A superhero show featuring the title character (voiced by John DiMaggio, Bender of Futurama fame), the protector of Apex City. With his enthusiastic gang of young Adventurekateers, Captain Laserbeam turns "wrong into right."

Amelia Earhart, Fearless Flyer: Whatever happened to Amelia Earhart? In 1938, she faked her disappearance at sea to serve the American Victory Commission as their one-woman, top secret Air Force. Autumn Reeser, who plays the plucky female submarine scientist Kylie on ABC's The Last Resort is the voice of Amelia.

The Cross-Time Adventures of Colonel Tick-Tock: Want a steampunk-era comedy? Sit back and enjoy the adventures of Colonel Tick-Tock, the chief of Her Royal Majesty Queen Victoria's Chrono Patrol. The Colonel makes sure History happens in the correct order. Craig Cackowski (Officer Cackowski on NBC's Community) is the title character.

Beyond Belief: A little bit of Topper, a whole lot of Nick & Nora Adams from The Thin Man series, it's the story of upper-crust couple Frank and Sadie Doyle, two love-besotted, and generally pickled ghostbusters living in a tony apartment atop the Plaza Hotel in Manhattan. The opening lines: "Who cares what Evil lurks in the hearts of men? Unless Evil is carrying the martini tray, darling!" sets the mood for cocktails and ghosts to follow.

Sparks Nevada, Marshall on Mars: The centerpiece of the entire TAH franchise, Sparks Nevada, Marshall on Mars is a cross between Firefly, Gunsmoke, The Lone Ranger, and How I Met Your Mother. As he repeatedly points out during every episode, Marshall Nevada (voiced by comedian Marc Evan Jackson) is from Earth, but he "rights the outlaw wrongs on Mars." His faithful (and blue) Martian companion is the onus-obsessed Croach the Tracker (voiced by Drunk History's Mark Gagliardi), a being who doesn't understand human emotions and is quite reluctant to let anyone see his feet. Croach's tribe was saved by Sparks Nevada,  and therefore he must remain a faithful companion for the Marshall in order for Croach to repay his tribe's onus.

The Marshall's friends are many: The Red Plains Rider, an Earth girl raised by Martians, who has a wandering crush on both Croach and Nevada; a saloonkeeper (voiced by Josh Malina of The West Wing) whose only goal is life is to have "no trouble" in his saloon; a rancher/deputy named Cactoid Jim (voiced by Nathan Fillion) whose legendary exploits are immortalized in song as they're occurring. There's also a building that's fallen in love with Croach, but it's a bit difficult to explain all the details about that romance in a few paragraphs.

The shows are miles deep in references, callbacks, and subtleties. Even the routines of each series play out differently each show. For example, Captain Laserbeam usually asks his Adventurekateers whether or not a previous villain has returned: "Is the Ancient Magician... up to his old tricks? Is Kid Kidnapper kidnapping kids for his devilish playgroup?" The gags are obvious, but their cleverness is refreshing.

Best thing about the show is that the podcasts are freely downloadable. There's almost 50 hours of episodes online, and they are consistently hilarious. Check them out at The Nerdist.com's podcast home page.

Not Because They are Easy, but Because They are Hard

Nuno Bettencourt was the lyricist and frontman for the 80's rock band, Extreme. He wrote lots of glam metal rock ballads, but achieved his greatest success with an acoustic pop song.

Bettencourt felt that the phrase "I love you" was becoming meaningless. In a 1991 interview with the Albany Herald, he said, "People use it so easily and so lightly that they think you can say that and fix everything, or you can say that and everything's OK. Sometimes you have to do more and you have to show it – there's other ways to say 'I love you.'"  The result was the hit song More Than Words.

True, words can be meaningless if not backed up with actions, but sometimes words spark and inspire enormous actions.

Today marks the 50th anniversary of a speech that defined and explained the reasons why America decided to go to the Moon. President John F. Kennedy, speaking to a class of future engineers and scientists at Rice University, stood at a podium in the middle of a football stadium on a hot September morning and summarized the history and mission of American explorers. The scope was huge, covering 50,000 years in the first two minutes of the speech, then continuing through the period from the establishment of the Plymouth Bay Colony by William Bradford, and extending to the investigations of the Moon and the planets beyond which continues a half-century later.

Historians can point to a handful of Presidential addresses that encapsulate a moment in time clearly and succinctly. Abraham Lincoln, penning thoughts about the dedication of a national cemetery, summarized the reasons for the Civil War and its higher purposes in the 262 words that form the Gettysburg Address. Franklin Roosevelt, responding to a surprise attack by an enemy on the other side of the planet, formulated a speech that marked the Pearl Harbor assault as a "day of infamy" forever.

The Rice University speech by President Kennedy is undoubtedly on a par with these other historic addresses. JFK spoke not only to the Rice students, but to America and the world:

William Bradford, speaking in 1630 of the founding of the Plymouth Bay Colony, said that all great and honorable actions are accompanied with great difficulties, and both must be enterprised and overcome with answerable courage.

The simple idea here is that going to the Moon is nothing new - - Americans have worked on tough projects before, and will do so in the future. Tying the Space Age to the founding of the country explained this new reach to the unknown as a familiar habit for the nation.

 If this capsule history of our progress teaches us anything, it is that man, in his quest for knowledge and progress, is determined and cannot be deterred. The exploration of space will go ahead, whether we join in it or not, and it is one of the great adventures of all time, and no nation which expects to be the leader of other nations can expect to stay behind in the race for space.

Those who came before us made certain that this country rode the first waves of the industrial revolutions, the first waves of modern invention, and the first wave of nuclear power, and this generation does not intend to founder in the backwash of the coming age of space.

 Remember, at the time of this speech, the Soviet Union was far ahead of America in manned spaceflight. They had spent more than several days in space - our three manned orbital flights totaled less than 12 hours. The sense of behind-ness rankled the nation.

We mean to be a part of it--we mean to lead it. For the eyes of the world now look into space, to the moon and to the planets beyond, and we have vowed that we shall not see it governed by a hostile flag of conquest, but by a banner of freedom and peace. We have vowed that we shall not see space filled with weapons of mass destruction, but with instruments of knowledge and understanding.

Kennedy continued the comparison between our conflict with the Soviets on Earth, and the new, unconquered frontier of space:

There is no strife, no prejudice, no national conflict in outer space as yet. Its hazards are hostile to us all. Its conquest deserves the best of all mankind, and its opportunity for peaceful cooperation that may  never come again.

The President then put out the Big Questions of the thesis:

But why, some say, the moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask why climb the highest mountain? Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic?

On the trip into Houston - - realizing his audience -- Kennedy penciled in an additional Big Question:

Why does Rice play Texas?

And then he answered those questions with an epic response that will probably be quoted as long as Americans travel into space:

We choose to go to the Moon.
We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.
Because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, Because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too. 

 Bettencourt was right that actions are more important than words. But I think, sometimes, the words matter, too.

JFK's podium copy of the Rice Speech, @ the JFK Library

2,503 days after the speech.

The Department of Worms

Back before the magnificent Internet, we had two methods of finding out something we didn't know: we either went to a public library to look things up, or we telephoned people who might have the right answer. I believe the TV show Ca$h Cab defines these methods as the "Street Shout-Out" and the "Phone a Friend" options.

Springtime in the Eastern US is traditionally a rainy season, so many science questions about rain and biology arise during this time of year. A question my son brought up on a rainy spring morning highlighted an overlooked science topic: why, he asked, were there so many soggy, dead earthworms on our asphalt driveway, but none on our lawn?

At the time, we lived in Northern Virginia, not too far from one of the greatest repositories of science knowledge in the pre-Internet world: The Smithsonian's Natural History Museum. Experts from every branch of science were a mere phone call away.

I called the Natural History Museum and asked to speak to someone about earthworms. "One moment," said the Smithsonian operator. She transferred the call.

"Invertebrates," said a new voice on the line.

"I'd like to ask a question about earthworms..." I began.

"Just a second, let me transfer you," he replied. Another couple of clicks later, and a new voice answered the phone.

"Worms," said a tired-sounding fellow at the Smithsonian.

"I was going to ask a question about earthworms," I said, "but I have to ask: how did you wind up with a career where you get to answer the phone with the word 'Worms?' "

"I studied," he replied.

The head of the Department of Worms then explained all about why there were dead earthworms on my driveway. He said that worms mostly live underground and breathe through their skin. When it rained, the worms would work their way to the surface and get on top of the grass to avoid drowning. Worms that wound up on the asphalt couldn't climb up on any grass, and, even though it doesn't look like that much water, most driveways have a layer of water on them during rain storms that's about one worm's depth. And that's all the water you need to drown a worm.

I do enjoy the ease of Google-ing information nowadays, but I miss the chance to talk about careers -- and worms -- with researchers on the telephone.

Take Two

Thirty years ago, I was a Radio-TV-Film student at the University of Texas. I thought I was going to be involved in the film industry, and I studied editing, lighting, and cinematography.

Life intervened, and my career took a different path. While I watched the industry from afar, I saw the techniques I learned in college become obsolete or outdated.

Three decades later, I have an opportunity (through the good graces of the Rhode Island School of Design) to catch up on some of the widgetry that's replaced the old kinescopes and editing benches of my undergraduate days. I'm taking a course in Adobe After Effects techniques that seems to marry what I used to know with what I don't know now.

My first homework assignment for After Effects was an open-ended project: I could choose any opening credits sequence from a film or television show, and "re-imagine" the sequence in whatever way I'd like. The only restriction was that I needed to use three of the After Effects techniques I had learned in class dealing with opacity, scale, and position of image layers.

I chose to remake the title sequence of what is undoubtedly my favorite film: director William Wyler's 1946 classic, The Best Years of Our Lives. Although the movie was beautifully filmed by cinematographer Gregg Toland, the opening credits were dull, static title cards dissolving into each other.

The Best Years of Our Lives was a story about soldiers, sailors, and airmen returning to civilian life after their struggle for survival through World War II. Audiences of 1946 knew that struggle intimately in their own lives, so there was no need at the time to portray that struggle on screen. Seventy years have put a lot of distance between us and that incredible time, so I thought I would try to show a few moments of that global battle as the credits appeared. Here's my attempt at condensing years of history into a minute and seventeen seconds:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BmTYspHZha4


(Apparently Youtube isn't going to let me upload this video correctly, so you'll just have to click the link. Sorry!)

Live in the World of Tomorrow...Today!

Norman W. Edmund passed away last Tuesday at the age of 93. Any American boy who grew up in the 1950's and 60's knows the company he founded: Edmund Scientific. His business made home science projects affordable and accessible across the country.

Norman W. Edmund

 Mr. Edmund knew how to connect with the inner scientist in boys everywhere. Rather than playing off the current fad of painting science as something for geeky "outsiders," Norman Edmund portrayed his customers as a group of industry "insiders" who suddenly had access to high-quality science gear at affordable prices. His catalogs, hawked regularly in magazines such as Boys Life, were punctuated with bullet lists of applications for each of his military surplus equipment. What young scientist wouldn't want a Audio Phase Discriminator with resolution down to 200 cycles? And for only $15 plus shipping - - why not order one and find out how to use it when it arrived?

And if you saved up enough money: LASERS!

My first purchase from Mr. Edmund's catalog was a set of six prisms. The glass was Army surplus, originally used as part of a lens set for an armored personnel carrier's periscope, and was virtually impervious to cracking - - even if dropped on a sidewalk. With the simple prisms, I learned how to recreate Isaac Newton's studies of light diffraction and wavelengths. I found out how to aim the prisms to cast rainbows on my bedroom walls, and how to stack prisms to restore the rainbows back to plain white light. All this science for about $3 including shipping.

I didn't buy the most common Edmund product, but many of my friends did: the official surplus military weather balloon with auxiliary helium tank. Many balloons (with an attached Spy Camera with Delayed Shutter Timer) were lost in the New Jersey stratosphere, all in the hope of returning pictures of a near-space panorama. Somewhere in the Raritan River basin, there must be dozens of rusting cameras full of moldy Ektachrome film reels, the remains of many failed junior meteorology experiments.

It's a Professional weather balloon!

Einstein, Salk, von Braun, and Sagan inspired many people my age to become scientists, but the case could be made that Norman W. Edmund inspired more future scientists than all those other men combined.

When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer...

Captain Girlfriend and I went to a nearby library today for a lecture about Apollo 11. The fellow giving the lecture was a retired engineer who worked at MIT's Instrumentation Lab. He helped design the alignment telescope used in the Lunar Module.

Here's a picture of what the alignment telescope looked like inside the LM:

 

That camera looking thing behind the yellow guard rail was the Alignment Optical Telescope. It was a critical piece of hardware used to figure out where the Lunar Module was in relation to the Earth and the Moon. By pointing the telescope at two bright stars, the guidance computer could figure out where the ship was located in space. Quite an amazing bit of machinery that's often forgotten when looking at all the marvelous Apollo equipment developed during the same project.

The telescope and associated software cost $15 million for each unit delivered. The speaker told about how, when he was freshly hired at MIT, he was sent to give a demonstration of the new telescope to NASA. His sample telescope was placed on a table near a lectern, and several other engineers from other companies were also given space on the table to present their hardware projects. One of the other engineers got up to explain his system, and bumped into the table. The telescope began rollling... and rolling... and the speaker was sitting TWO ROWS away from catching the thing. Fortunately, nothing wound up broken, and the MIT folks didn't fire him for not wrapping himself around the scope 24/7.

The Q&A session was disappointing. I like going to popular science lectures to hear what average people want to know about, but it's usually quite depressing to think that most people believe the job of NASA is to redirect asteroids that are going to hit the Earth like a Michael Bay movie. The questions were about asteroid redirection, why America is "no longer in space anymore" and whether America would establish a permanent base on an asteroid. It's difficult to have a dialogue about the state of American manned space exploration when so few people actually follow what's in development at NASA. 

An interesting question from a 15-year-old boy in the audience made me realize how little of the Apollo era has translated to the current generation. The young man could not understand how the Apollo parachutes could have survived reentry. I've never noticed this before, but the landing sequence for Apollo really isn't described in much detail in movies about the missions. The engineer did his best to detail the Interface and Entry process in Apollo, but I'm not sure if the boy completely understood. 

After the Q&A, the small crowd broke up into little groups getting ready to leave for home. One family asked me a few questions, as they had heard some of the questions I had asked the engineer. I explained that there were many manufacturers working with NASA on manned spacecraft, and reading sites such as spaceflightnow.com was a great way to find out what's new. Their son (also about 14 or 15) didn't ask questions but seemed very interested in the topic. I can only hope that his curiosity would turn into the passion so many folks my age still have. 

All in all, a fascinating day.

The Softer Side of Sears

I know people who pride themselves on the fact they do not own a TV set, or watch TV, or are unaware of anything going on in the world of popular culture.

I am not one of those people. Popular culture is my daily bath water, and TV is the faucet. Not only do I enjoy television, but I revel in the cultural benchmarks of television commercials -- especially ads with catchy jingles and motifs.

Of all retail outlets in the United States, no other company has wrapped itself up more in commercial promotion than Sears. For over a century, Sears and its marketing department set the retail consumer tastes of the nation, selling items as disparate as blue jeans and do-it-yourself house kits. During its heyday, Sears was the Amazon.com of its time, and retained that status through most of the 20th Century.

Sears television marketing has faded since it was purchased by K Mart Corporation, but the decades preceding the merger presented a fantastic array of 30 and 60-second entertainment lozenges. They're short time capsules of  what the folks at one of America's largest retailers thought we'd be persuaded to buy.

The earliest Sears commercials I can remember were for Sears Toughskin jeans. Although I was a Wrangler kid, I knew quite a few guys my age in the 60's who wore the outrageous pumpkin-colored polyster jeans made from the same material that formed the surface of trampolines.

Polyester pants, for exercising in the hot summer sunshine. And people bought this idea!

As the 60s and 70s gave way to the 80's, the focus of Sears marketing moved away from selling moms on the idea of kids' rip-proof clothing and tried to capture more male shoppers. The theme was "There's More for your Life - - at Sears." Here's a mid-80's commercial trying to show that hanging out at the mall on a Saturday while your muffler was getting replaced was a GUY thing:

The problem was that this "guy thing" ad campaign was a bit *too* successful. Women associated Sears with Craftsman tools and sweaty Sears technicians changing tires. In 1993, Sears rolled out a completely new campaign - - a campaign that would span the rest of the 1990s: "The Softer Side of Sears."

Depending on the source, everyone from Jim Brickman to Jake Holmes composed ditties touting the great variety and quantity of high-fashion women's wear at Sears. The commercials were packed with runway models playing with little kids and twirling around in prom dresses while the catchy C-F-G-C melody played over the stylish scenes. The jingle lyrics played on words that normally described the traditional hardware/appliance inventory of Sears: "electric pumps" now referred to bright red high-heeled shoes, and "plungers" could also describe some women's formal wear.

These folks didn't look like typical Sears customers. They were fashionable, carefree, and seemingly a lot more well-off than folks you'd bump into buying a gallon of Weatherbeater paint.

The campaign also tried to key in on loyalty between customers and the retail chain. Sears was a familiar name across the entire country, and the familiarity of what Sears had always provided in reliable merchandise was also underlined in these ads. Here's an institutional ad that sells more than just the products, but the Sears brand ID itself:

By 1999, Sears discovered that this campaign also over-successful. Women headed to Sears for high-fashion clothes, only to find that the selection of cotton housecoats and ill-fitting stretch pants never really changed. Unlike the marketing department's plans for fashion domination, Sears's wholesale buyers never upped their game by loading the shelves with a better line of clothes. Sales declined for the final three years of the 20th Century, so Sears moved on to a bunch of new ad campaigns, none of which were directed at getting people to believe that buying clothes at Sears was a great fashion choice.

Sears / K Mart has a muddled marketing message nowadays. I'm not sure I remember the last time I saw a memorable Sears ad. It's a shame, because the tradition of smart, fun commercials had a long history at Sears.

The 1% TV Dads

For the past week or so I've been working on an article for TVDads.com about wealth and poverty among the single dads on television. I've been meaning to tackle this topic for quite a few years, but I've decided that the era of Occupy Everything may make this the perfect moment.

I don't want to spill too much about the content, but one of the topics is about where individual TV Single Dads land on the wealth-o-meter for their locales. It's surprisingly difficult to measure some of these television dads in an appropriate manner. Yes, Bruce Wayne is rich and Fred G. Sanford is poor - - but what about Papa Smurf? Is the blue guy rich, poor, or average? Should he be compared to other Smurfs, or Gargamel? What about Man-at-Arms on "He-Man and the Masters of the Universe?" He's a civil servant on the planet Eternia, but how well-off is he compared to others on that planet?

All these calculations are beginning to be quite a struggle, but I hope to have the article finished by the end of the week. Expect an update soon.

Unfinished Business

For the past few years, I've been trying to get more things done in my life by writing out a yearly "To-Do" list in my journal (if you don't have a bound journal, get one - - it worked for Pepys and it works for me, too). The downside of the To-Do list is that, at the end of each year, I have a thorough and accurate record of the things I didn't accomplish.


Top of the Unfinished pile is my Sekrit Space History book. I'm barely 40 pages into an expected 290-page book, and its completion keeps getting moved down the priority list. If I don't finish this epic by the end of 2012, I'm going to miss a lot of 50th anniversary events that tie into the narrative. So that's a key item to focus on for the coming year.

Second missed goal was my emptying of the End of Raiders of the Lost Ark basement. I've dumped a half-dozen crates into trash bags and shredders, but the stack o' stuff still clogging my cellar needs to go. It's at the point now where I don't like going downstairs because I'm reminded about how much stuff needs to be sorted, sold, donated, or trashed. However, 2012 is now my fire sale date for ditching the detritus.

TVDads.com was supposed to be on the Drupal content management system by now, but I've been working so much on paying gigs that my web equivalent of the cobbler's children is still without shoes. Perhaps I can tackle this after my current client gig is up, but before the 2012 Fall Season announcements arrive.

Of low priority but long overdue, my never-ending critique website of Ross Hunter's Airport movie remains stalled at 0:15:00. As with the TVDads upgrade, too many events took priority above its completion. I think I can solve this by devoting a solid weekend to typing and frame-grabbing. The big decision, of course, is to figure the right weekend.

Other than those goals and a few minor missed opportunities, 2011 has been a smashing success. I received my Master's degree, my daughter graduated with honors at the University of Rhode Island, my son ejected from his frustrating job to go to work at a place where they respect, love, and (most importantly) PAY him for his talents and labor. My girlfriend has also left her frustrating job and moved closer to completing her own degree.  Our family ends the year generally happy and definitely healthy.

I'm thankful most of all for having so many friends in my life. When days are filled with work and study, it's easy to become isolated from the rest of the world. Fortunately, the people I know and love and who know and love me keep me connected and share their lives with me every day. If the question is "what are you most grateful for in 2011?" the answer, of course, is you.

Have a great 2012. See you there!

Not a Teacher

On the list of the many jobs I'm incapable of doing, right after "Opera Singer" comes "Teacher." I'm an awful teacher - - I can't figure out how to assemble tests, I wander far from whatever syllabus is planned for the day, and I am miserable at grading papers.

If I were a teacher, though, I'd want to teach the geography of the Moon. Wait - let's not use "geography" as the proper word, because "geo" means "Earth." So, what I'd like to teach is the *MAP* of the Moon. Back in the dinosaur days when kids my age were studying everything they could about Project Apollo, Moon maps were everywhere: on the backs of cereal boxes, on placemats at Howard Johnson's Restaurants, in schoolbooks, and on TV. Everyone with a lick of interest in current events knew where the big craters were, and where Apollo XI landed.

All that's gone now. I was on the front lawn of my house last night, taking pictures of the Moon through my new Celestron telescope, and it struck me that I may be the only person for miles around who could name locations on the Moon. That thought made me really sad.

So, I've decided that I'm going to write three blog posts about the basics of the Moon: why it has phases, what the principal features are that we can see from Earth, and where and why the astronauts landed where they did.

I don't know if project will be interesting or not for my readers, but I feel like I must write about the topic to appease the part of me that wishes I could be a teacher.

Stay tuned.

Guaranteed Cloudy Skies

It's a dead certainty this week will be the rainiest and cloudiest on record in Massachusetts, because I've finally pulled the trigger and ordered my Celestron telescope.

This will be the third telescope I've owned. My folks bought me my first telescope, a refractor made by the Monolux Corporation, when I was 11 years old. The Monolux telescope had wobbly wooden legs that were screwed together with an endless series of hardware store replacement wingnuts as the original equipment stripped, cracked, or simply fell off during road trips. My dad took the telescope fork to work several times, re-welding the cracked mounting bracket with a heli-arc plasma torch. It was a flimsy instrument but I learned a lot about astronomy just by working within its limitations. Through the Monolux's eyepiece, I first saw the Galilean moons of Jupiter, the Comet Kohoutek, the Great Nebula in Orion, and the mountains of the Moon. I learned that increased magnification sometimes just meant increased blurriness, and I also found out how fast a planet moved across the sky just from the simple act of the Earth's rotation.

My second scope was an abortive attempt to discover the world of Newtonian telescopes - - although I made a horrible choice by getting an example model at Sears. As far as I could tell, the mirror at the base of the Newtonian scope was made from the underside of a soup can. I couldn't resolve the crater Copernicus while looking through the viewpiece as a first light experiment. Brought the Newtonian back to Sears the next day, and didn't bother looking for a new scope for decades.

Wednesday, my new Celestron Schmidt-Cassegrain 8" scope is due to arrive from Amazon. Unlike either of my previous telescopes, this one has a tracking motor so that I don't have to keep dragging the eyepiece along the ecliptic as the night progresses. The tracking motor is attached to a handheld computer that can move the scope to any of 40,000 celestial objects. This is (pardon the expression) light-years beyond any of my previous astronomy outings. I feel like I've finally moved  to a "grown-up" telescope.

I'm not sure what object I'm going to look at for a First Light subject - - ideas are welcome. First Light for my Monolux was Copernicus Crater on the Moon -- that landmark became a regular destination for setting up my telescope most Moon-filled evenings. Since there's no Moon this week, though, I'll probably go with Galileo's choice and focus on Jupiter. It's been a friendly planet to astronomers for 600 years now, and I feel very much at home when I see the place through a lens. Uranus is another possibility, because it's a planet you can only really see in a telescope, and an initial viewing may give me a feel for how good this new scope is.

All this, of course, is dependent on the weather, so I may not have a First Light report until the end of November.

Old Space Books

It's an obsession: I read every bad space book from the 60's I can find. Church bazaars, library sales, used book stores - - all are rich hunting grounds for some of the worst science writing ever glued between book covers. Based on the sheer mass of these awfully written "true-life" space novels, the 60's seemed to have an exemption for publishing houses who wanted to print books without the typical expectations of plot, characters, or storyline.

Last week, The Captain and I visited a great antiquarian bookstore in the tiny town of North Hatfield, Massachusetts. Whately's Antiquarian Book Center has become my new favorite place to burn an afternoon rummaging through old hardcovers and paperbacks.

A major find for me was "Apollo at GO" by Jeff Sutton. Written in 1963, just after Lunar Orbit Rendezvous was settled upon by NASA as the way to land on the Moon, this novel tries its best to be the most exquisitely precise, pedantically literal story about the first three men to visit the Moon.

The book is a classic yawner: the astronauts are all rock-steady test pilots, each the top of his graduating class. The wives are weepy but patriotic and understanding about why their men have to go to the Moon. The flight is described endlessly, with every course correction and sleep cycle explained until it's difficult to tell where the storytelling ends and the cutting-and-pasting from the Apollo Spacecraft Operations Guide begins.

Apollo at GO sold tens of thousands of copies. People actually paid to read this book. Allow me to give you a random selection from the story:

The timer hand moved on. At T minus 6 minutes he issued a brief order. Closing his faceplate and inflating his suit, he spoke into the radio: "Apollo calling Cap. Com..." He repeated the call several times.

"Roger, we read you." The voice, faint but clear, unmistakably was Burke's.

"Beginning attitude correction preparatory to retrothrust," he reported.

"Roger, keep in touch."

"Will do."

183 PAGES of this stuff.  And yet, it still manages to be fascinating, but for reasons entirely unintended by the author.

These books are like mini time capsules: reading them  (while keeping an eye on the copyright date) gives a great chronology about how science writers viewed the technology of the Moon voyage at given points in time. Apollo at GO presupposes that the first manned trip to the Moon on a Saturn V would naturally be the first attempt at a Moon landing. The astronauts, although trained in the operation of the spacecraft,  have no familiarity with each other and somehow never bothered to talk with each other about the spacecraft in which they're flying to the Moon. It's as though they never used simulators or attended construction meetings with the prime contractors. The author apparently  believed that it was a necessary conceit to allow for exposition, but the personal distances placed between crew members seem to be very odd to us in the post-Apollo, post-Shuttle world.

There's also a curious lack of foresight in the book. Although the author knew that Project Gemini would occur before Apollo ever launched, he failed to realize that most of the Apollo astronauts would not be rookies in space. Instead, he writes the characters as though they were newbies, reliving John Glenn's flight while they were in Earth orbit, right down to watching for the lights of Perth on the first pass over Australia.

Another blind spot is the role of the Manned Spaceflight Center in Houston. By 1963, Houston was established as what would be the new home of Mission Control -  a role that it took over during the Gemini IV mission. However, the author still wrote the book as though all mission planning and operations were still controlled from Cape Canaveral. I'm not sure why he missed this, unless he had written portions of the book before the proposed role of  Houston was approved.

I'm not quite done with the book - - it's quite a slog to read more than a dozen pages at a sitting, but I'll post more when I get to the (hopefully dramatic) conclusion.

The K-Mart Effect

I am a rules-based person, and I often try to convert my observations into independently confirmed laws of nature. The rules don't make much sense, but their effects are repeated in the real world enough times to make me feel like some kind of half-baked Isaac Newton.

One of my oldest rules concerns what I call "The K-Mart Effect." The rule gets that name because the effect was first observed in a K-Mart parking lot. Briefly stated, the effect follows a simple rule: "If you park a car in an empty parking lot, the next car will park as close as it can to your car."

Observe this example, noted at the Shirley, Massachusetts Town Hall parking lot just yesterday:

The driver of the first car at left parked far from many parking places that were closer to the town hall. The driver backed into the slot next to the parking lot's Island of Two Trees. Not more than 10 minutes later, a second car arrived, sweeping around the island, and pulling up directly parallel to the first car. There are at least a half-dozen spots closer to the front door of the town hall (out of sight, around the left corner of the building in the background) but it was imperative to the driver of the car at right to sidle up to the passenger side of the first car.

Maybe this was an isolated event for this parking lot, right? Let's repeat the experiment, this time with my Toyota Tacoma truck. I'll park THREE spaces from the town library (just outside the picture to the left).

... and not more than 30 seconds  elapse before a woman in a red sports car zips up so close to my passenger door, it's nearly impossible to get out from that side of my truck. Please note the EMPTY PARKING SPACES to the left (car's right) of the picture. That space is IMMEDIATELY next to the library. It's not a handicapped space, it's not blocked by anything, and it's actually as close as one can park to the library in this parking lot. WHY do people have to park ear-to-ear with cars in an otherwise empty lot?

My theory is that there is some sort of social capillary action that draws people in range of other people. They look for a community to join, and head for the most likely place for interaction. Maybe it's a pack instinct, or some kind of innate security about strength in numbers, or something else buried deep in our collective psyches. Whatever it is, it's annoying as hell.