LZ-129 The Flames Are Shooting 500 Feet Into the Air May 6, 2012
Posted by bobv451 in death, history, sense of wonder, zeppelin.add a comment
Victories seem more difficult to celebrate in the USA than disasters. Today in 1937 the Hindenburg caught fire and burned, with the loss of 36 lives, including one ground crewman. One reason this is so spectacular goes to how difficult it was to film news events then. Having the necessary equipment on hand required some time to set up the camera and an experienced camera operator. It wasn’t until 1978 that videocameras became common enough that another actual air disaster (this one killing 144) was captured on film/tape.
Now, of course, try to find someone who doesn’t have a smartphone with video capabilities to record air atrocities.
As you know, I am a fan of dirigibles and have been aloft in both a blimp and a zeppelin. On occasion I check out stories of flying. A marvelous fictional account is Max Allan Collins’ The Hindenburg Murders, complete with schematics.
In the movies there is always the Michael York/Elke Sommer thriller Zeppelin and Hindenburg, starring one of my favorite actors, Geogre C. Scott.
I never saw the made for TV movie with the hyperbolic title Hindenburg:Titanic of the Skies and might count myself lucky for having missed it.
Want more about the Hindenburg? Here’s a nice place to read up.
I leave you with some of the most stirring unscripted news commentary of the past century.
Looking Into the Future From the Past April 21, 2012
Posted by bobv451 in conventions, history, inventions, nostalgia, science, space.add a comment
It’s hard for me to believe the Seattle World’s Fair opened on this day in 1962. My dad was a big fan of such fairs, for some reason, and one of the few family vacations that didn’t also touch on visiting relatives got us moving northward from El Paso.
For my part, I was in hog heaven. LBJ opened the NASA exhibit but who cared about petty politicians? Wernher von Braun was there, too. A real superstar in my eyes, but we couldn’t get in to see the talks. Doubt my dad would have been all that interested, since he didn’t share my enthusiasm for things outer spacial.
According to this article, JFK wasn’t at the closing ceremony because of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Who knew?
The article also goes on at great length about how the fair theme was overpopulation and how we were going to nuke ourselves into oblivion. I don’t remember a bit of that, though considering that JFK was trying to keep the Russkies from doing that very thing, perhaps I should have paid more attention.
I remember the weird vending machines that kicked out hamburgers in cellophane wrappers (gee, just like the ones I buy at Costco, only they come in big boxes and not from vending machines). Never a big one of trinkets, I still got a glass sculpture of the Space Needle. Alas, I have no idea where the 6″ glass structure is. Too many moves since then doomed it, I fear.
This is the first time I ever saw color TV. KOMO had a live broadcast, their afternoon guy and a basset hound. Comparing the TV picture with the real thing was a revelation. The basset hound really wasn’t purple. That was a little disappointing. Riding the monorail was fun but not the transportation system of the future they made it out to be. Last time I was in Seattle was 1989 and rode the monorail for old time’s sake. Wasn’t the future of transportation then, either.
I remember the cube buildings and, of course, the Space Needle. In ’62 didn’t eat there because of the cost, though we did ride to the observation deck and look around. In ’89 did eat there and the view was great and the food mediocre (unlike the Calgary Tower where both view and food were superb). And nowhere was there a hint of Jessica Alba sitting on the outside.
The AT&T/Bell Labs display. I got shunted aside when I was chosen to show how much faster touchtone phone dialing was compared to rotary. And yes, I was the perfect choice and was *much* faster on the buttons. But the guy pushing this innovation didn’t appreciate my comment that the central switching system still took the same length of time to put the call through since it was mechanical, especially since he shoved a microphone in my face when he asked what I thought and hundreds of people heard.
An excursion around town to the Archway Bookstore was a revelation. El Paso didn’t have bookstores, per se. Newsstands and department stores, but an entire store of nothing but books? In the basement of the Archway was about every Ace Double ever. Or so I thought. I must have spent close to $3 on books! (A princely sum for me then) Apparently this store is long gone.
The fairgrounds is undoubtedly far different from 1989 and vastly so from 1962, but memory of seeing von Braun, the bold architecture (which style burned itself by 1970) and the idea of the future all appealed. (Another World’s Fair I went to, this one in New Orleans, had the most depressing exhibits of massive water valves and pictures of hydro plants ever–their theme was “water.” That trip was fun for reasons other than the fair.)
The Unseen World Around Us April 12, 2012
Posted by bobv451 in dinosaurs, geocaching, history, ideas, New Mexico, outlaws, science, science fiction, sense of wonder, space, UFOs, writing.1 comment so far
As you probably know by now, I am fascinated with the idea we go through life and see only a tiny fraction of it. This drew me to geocaching where most people go right by a cache and never know. This is a simple thing. The world–nature–is vastly more intriguing with its diversity and how new things pop up all the time, things we simply have not been attentive enough to see before.
In NM there are cemeteries all over the place, but who is buried int hem? Some terrible outlaw who never achieved the status of Billy the Kid or Blackjack Ketchum? Or just plain folks, putting in their time, working sunrise to sunset and then…dying. Unnoticed, or perhaps noticed only for a very short while by a very few people?
New discoveries in NM caverns possibly give us more powerful antibiotics. Who woulda thunk it? Back in 1986 the Lechuguilla Cave was discovered. It’s the 7th longest cave in the world and the deepest in the continental US. And antibiotic resistant bacteria have been found in it.
Which brings up the point, what antibiotics? Turns out these may be brand new ones. What else may be found here? It is near Roswell. Could those crafty UFOnauts be hiding down there, knowing it is the deepest point they could reach without digging? Are those antibiotics potentially from Out There, brought to Earth by the 1947 saucer crash? Or perhaps your ideas run more to thriller. If there is a bacterium, can it be used as a terror weapon? Only the antibiotic from the cave can save us?
More than 1200 new species of plants and animals have been found in the Amazon since 2000. What might James Cameron find diving into the Marianas Trench? That’s a long way down and hitherto unexplored.
Panspermia might be a way of repopulating lost species on earth. Comets and asteroid impacts can blast away huge chunks of earth (imagine finding those dinosaurs from ’40s and ’50s pulp stories on other planets!) And then return it.
So much of nature out there, unseen.
Frack and Frelk April 5, 2012
Posted by bobv451 in history, science, science fiction, westerns, writing.add a comment
A student asked a few weeks back about using slang in his fiction. As with everything dealing with writing, the answer is yes and no. For westerns, the slang is pretty well detailed in writing of the era. Diaries are a good source for common usage (though uncommon in the sense that not many people then could read or write). But the usage is established, so only embellishments need to be made to lend an air of authenticity.
Noir detective stories set in the ’30s and ’40s fall into this category, too. It’s there in contemporaneous writing. Hunt for it. The idea isn’t to use slang exclusively but rather to give the flavor of the era. We are, after all, writing for a modern audience.
The harder question to answer deals with slang in sf. Science fiction futures ought to sound different–but should they? Tossing in tech stuff can be deadly. Who would believe a story where transistor radios were cutting edge tech? Slang changes rapidly and can make edgy, hip stuff sound outdated before it sees print. I never knew anyone who used the words groovy or grok in dialog, but grok especially is worth examining.
SF can create slang–a little bit like a spice–and it ought to be used consistently. Using current slang is likely to be a nonstarter, but a few good words tossed in can seem ordinary if your characters just use them and don’t make a big point out of it, as if saying “see? This is what we’ll all be saying in the future.” I’m fond of a couple words I coined. Foptic=fiber optic and gengineering=genetic engineering (and in a similar use genhanced=genetically enhanced).
Grok is a similar term. It defines the culture internally in Stranger in a Strange Land, is catchy and used often enough to be well understood and accepted by the reader. Curse words tend to be a little more slippery. Samuel R. Delaney invented frelk in Dahlgren for a specific sexual perversion, but it came out nicely as a swear word. Frack showed up in Battlestar Galactica, but has been superceded by reality. Ask the man in the street about fracking and you’re more likely to get a jeremiad about natural gas than Cylons.
Keep it natural, keep it simple and never forget your audience lives in the frelking 21st Century.
Look to the (New Mexico) Skies! February 24, 2012
Posted by bobv451 in awards, business, history, New Mexico, space, writing.add a comment
Last night I trundled on down to the NM Museum of Natural History to attend a talk on 100 years of space flight in New Mexico by author Loretta Hall.
She won a NM Book Award for her history of space exploration since 1930 and gave an entertaining presentation ranging from Robert Goddard to 2025 or so, when Virgin Galactic figures to break even on its space tourism.
Much of the talk was familiar, especially the pictures of early launches from White Sands. She touched on how Randall Lovelace was charged with testing the Mercury astronauts (and that the movie The Right Stuff was pretty accurate). What I had never heard before was Lovelace’s crazy notion that women ought to be in the program, too. One pilot named Jerrie Cobb tested out to within 2% of the top men. Five other women also qualified. So it ought to have been the Mercury 13, not the Mercury 7–except NASA wouldn’t accept women. The kicker was that the women weren’t jet test pilots.
One of the un-Mercury 6 has a ticket on Virgin Galactic. I hope she makes it (another interesting factoid–90% of everyone from 21-80 yrs old can qualify to be a space tourist. Think I could raise $200k on Kickstarter for a ticket? Loan me $200k till my (rocket)ship comes in?).
The entire space tourist trip will last about 2.5 hrs, with 90 minutes being a slow spiral upward to 50,000 ft to get above the turbulence. Another 6 minutes to apogee, perhaps 10 minutes of floating about and sightseeing, then descent a la space shuttle (ie, unpowered, like a falling brick) Hall said that maximum g-force would be 6g, which seems wildly high to me since the shuttle launch only had a max of around 3g. Instantaneous g-loading? A football player takes 80g instantaneous–repeatedly. So maybe 6 isn’t outrageous for a sudden stop?
NM has a great history from Goddard’s liquid fuel inventions to probably satellite launches from White Sands/Spaceport America in a few years. Ad astra!
http://space.about.com/od/astronautbiographies/a/jerriecobb.htm
R46.1, That’s My Code February 22, 2012
Posted by bobv451 in gummint, history.add a comment
Lunch with a variety of folks always gives me the “You gotta be kidding” when they come up with things so strange not even a lawyer could imagine it. One of the top doctors in town made the claim that under new federal bureaucracy there are 140,000 possible claims that can be made for insurance compensation.
I didn’t think there were 140,000 ways to injure yourself, but the one he was sure would be used frequently was “Code V91 07XA burn due to water-skis on fire.” Except he was unsure which of the *3* code variants might be most useful. Three? You have to wonder about spontaneous combustion codes and even what the codes might be for alien abduction and subsequent anal damage.
How many bureaucrats does it take to screw in a light bulb? Oh, wait, we can’t own 100 watters any more. Never mind.
One of those story ideas that never seemed the least bit plausible (and certainly qualifies as uber sf) was Frank Herbert’s Bureau of Sabotage stories-–the Bureau of Sabotage was required to keep things from working too well. And of course there is Clarke’s Against the Fall of Night/City and the Stars where a wild card is introduced every few generations to keep decay from setting in. That is almost reasonable since it assumes things are tending to entropy rather than working perfectly and entropy must be introduced.
And one of those stories that might well be our future is Keith Laumer’s “In the Queue.” We spend our time waiting, filling out forms and then…
Otherwise, today was a fine day. Went geocaching and found a cache in an alligator/dragon’s belly. Seems appropriate, from the belly of the beast.
BTW, the code in the title is for “bizarre personal appearance.”
Today, 1962 February 20, 2012
Posted by bobv451 in history, science, space.1 comment so far
Fifty years ago, America sneaked into space. John Glenn actually orbited the Earth. Hard to believe space tourism will duplicate what the prior two Americans did, at least as far as “going into space” altitudes. (I am discounting Ham’s flight, too. Ham is buried at the west end of the parking lot at the Alamogordo Space Museum. At least he didn’t die in orbit as did Laika back in ’57) We are lucky to still have an original Mercury astronaut around. The first man in orbit died in a Mig15 crash back in ’68, while we elected ours to the Senate to insure his mummification.
One of the major head scatchers of the 20th Century has to be the sudden decline of our space program. We reached the Moon, that was it (I can blame Nixon but Vietnam was also a big part of it). I find it hard to believe vision is missing, but it seems to be so. If I remember the story, one of the dogs the Russians sent into space was recovered, had pups and one was given to JFK. Wonder if there are offspring? And why does Eric Frank Russell’s story “Into Your Tent I’ll Creep” come to mind?
Congratulations to all who have gone into space. May another, albeit far future, generation join you in this achievement.
A Simple Change In History February 15, 2012
Posted by bobv451 in death, history, ideas, science.6 comments
It’s great to have friends who come up with nifty ideas. Scott & Pat have actually done research on this and it sounds plausible. Pat goes to garage sales and managed to get a lead crystal decanter worth several hundred bucks for only a few, but should she use it since it is lead crystal (from the turn of the last century)?
Turns out it might be pretty bad if she did. The lead leaches out of the glass fairly rapidly when the decanter is filled with something mildly acidic. Like wine. Which is what you would likely put in a wine decanter. But how much? Scott found that concentrations would be 50,000 micrograms in a few weeks (and the edge of oops for lead in drink is around 50 micrograms). So you could get quite an overdose…from just one glass of wine from that decanter.
As Scott pointed out, the aristocracy most likely to use such a fine piece of artwork would fill it, possibly close the house for a few months, then return. And drink highly contaminated wine.
Worse, the Romans used lead to “sweeten” sour wine, a practice later vintners followed.
What are the symptoms of lead poisoning? When you think about British aristocracy, well, it’s like a checklist.
High blood pressure
Declines in mental functioning
Pain, numbness or tingling of the extremities
Muscular weakness
Headache
Abdominal pain
Memory loss
Mood disorders
Reduced sperm count, abnormal sperm
Miscarriage or premature birth in pregnant women
In addition, it can cause a condition very similar to gout.
The aristocracy methodically poisoned itself over the years, likely drinking more wine to cure their hangover symptoms which could well have been due to lead poisoning.
If the aristocracy had not been susceptible to lead poisoning, they might still be top dogs. How’s that for an alt history idea?
Eggs-zactly February 2, 2012
Posted by bobv451 in history, hobby.add a comment
One of the things I appreciate and even marvel at are Faberge eggs. I remember seeing the first egg (a white ceramic egg that opened to a hen and hen’s nest inside–all solid gold, of course) at a museum in Ft. Worth. This was part of the Malcolm Forbes collection, which toured a lot. Later I saw another egg that was purported to be the first Faberge egg at the Matilda Geddings Gray travelling collection in New Orleans.
Aside: I also held in my hand a Faberge stone elephant (bleh) and a bell push with the original electric cord still attached. The bell push itself was machined like an egg. My hand shook as I held it–and I could have bought it for $1200. Reputable dealer along Royal Street in New Orleans, lovely artifact of the Czar, would have incited me to put in a bell system to summon my butler. Only thing was, this was 1987 and I didn’t have $1200. But I held that bell push so long the Goth clerk asked for it back, fearing I might stroke out then and there.
Over the years I have seen various eggs from the Forbes collection, but the biggest display was in San Diego in 1990. The Armory allowed eggs never seen outside Russia to tour along with the Forbes collection. The Trans Siberian Railway egg was silver and onyx outside, with odd looking steel working wind-up train inside. Only it wasn’t steel. It was platinum. The Standart egg showed the Russian Imperial yacht in a crystal egg. And and and I could go on.
The Forbes collection was sold to Viktor Vekselberg in ’04 and he is now the world’s largest owner of eggs, including 11 Imperial eggs. Another 9 are in the Kremlin Armory. Thirty more surviving Imperial eggs are scattered elsewhere.
What triggered this blog was Dennis forwarding a notice of the Virginia Museum display. I think they have 5 eggs. When I win the lottery, I might not be able to afford an egg but I would certainly go see such collections. Here is a nice shot of the Imperial Napoleonic Egg.
Is That What I Really Meant? January 11, 2012
Posted by bobv451 in education, history, ideas, science, writing.1 comment so far
My son forwarded a link about a project Bruce McAllister started when he was a high school student in 1963. He wrote 75 authors asking if they intentionally put symbolism into their work
The wide spectrum of authors answering fascinates me. Some were terse like Ayn Rand–but she responded. Others like Ray Bradbury were generous with their time and thoughts (what else would you expect out of a great writer like Ray?) Another revisited the question a year after the initial survey. Interesting to see how long the comments from the sf authors were.
The old saw about “write what you know” is true in the sense that a writer can’t put something into a story if it isn’t already in the brain–or the pieces that are put together to form the story. You are a prisoner of your own experience. Worse, you are in solitary confinement, only getting brief glimpses outside (and then this becomes part of your experience).
I have always said that a writer is responsible for 75% of the story. The reader brings the other 25% and this is entirely beyond the writer’s control. Those that hate a story not only don’t find their 25% engaged, things in the 75% go awry, also. But those that click, those that have their full 25% firing on all rockets, see things the writer possibly never intended–or ever could. A synergy, if you please, makes for the best books.
In a way, finding symbolism is a matter for the academics. I doubt it matters much to writers (unless they are academics and think this is necessary). Delivering a powerful story, an entertaining one, is (or ought to be) what drives a writer.
So what do you see?
