Not in a Hallmark mood this year…

Via Atrios…  According to this actuarial life table, having reached the age of fifty-four, and being male, I can reasonably expect to live through another 24.77 valentine’s days. 

Oh look…here comes another one…

As I’ve said before, I will vote for whoever the democratic candidate is this coming November.  But I’m still pretty much agnostic about the two leading contenders.  I don’t think either one of them will be great on gay equality.  But I’m actually starting to warm a bit to Obama, in spite of Donnie McClurkin, and here’s why…

I drove for two hours yesterday to Bangor with my sister and daughter to see Barack speak in Maine. I figured it would be interesting to see a candidate speak, when Maine is typically forgotten. We made the mistake of getting there about an hour before the doors opened to the Bangor Auditorium, as the population of the city had increased by a third for his speech. We waited in the longest line I had ever seen in my life for almost two hours. We met some wonderful people, many younger and surprisingly many quite a bit older.

After all of that waiting, we were only a few hundred feet from the auditorium when we were told that the main room had filled to capacity as well as the overflow room. Just when we were ready to turn back, we were told that Barack would speak to us outside, and would do so FIRST.

So imagine a scene like the stump speeches only read about in books, people jostling on snowbanks, climbing fences, trees, even each other in the calm cold that was Maine yesterday to hear and see Barack, for only a few minutes. And did he deliver…

Now, that’s a class act.  But also, he’s taking no votes for granted.  He’s making sure that everyone who comes to hear him, gets to hear him.  That’s good.  If the democrats are going to win back the white house, they’re going to need a fighter.  A grass roots, carry the fight right to the streets fighter.

That letter to Salon.Com ends with this…

Hillary speaks of worries about Barack being a likable guy, same as George Bush. She’s right, and also dead wrong. Likable they both can be, yes. But George Bush is the man who drinks you under the table, then drives you all home and thusly off a cliff.

Er…not quite.  Bush is the guy who will drink you under the table, then walk out leaving you stuck with the tab, then expect you to call him up the next day and thank him for having drinks with you.  And if he doesn’t get that phone call you’ll be on his shit list forever.

So after I returned that flimsy Edsal Steel shelving, I drove to Costco, filled up Traveler’s tank on their wholesale gas, and then bought my next, and probably my last restaurant size roll of plastic wrap.  I’ve no idea now how much the old one cost, but it was made by Reynolds and the box says it was two-thousand square feet.  Since it was a foot wide, figure that’s two-thousand feet long.  The new one is Costco’s house brand, Kirkland, cost about ten bucks and it’s also a foot wide and three-thousand square feet.

Heh…my packrat gene is screaming at me to keep the old box for posterity.  But it’s worn and tattered with age and probably not good for storing anything else now, and I don’t want to end up as one of those solitary old men with a house so full of random junk it’s got pathways you have to navigate between the piles.  I hate clutter, and that probably keeps the packrat urge in check.  Somewhat.  And I know which side of the family I got it from.  When I was going through mom’s things after she passed away, I got into the cabinet under the kitchen sink and swear to god I think she never threw out any little glass bottle or plastic tub she ever bought.  I knew what to expect of course when I opened those doors.  I grew up with it.  And you know her fridge was just packed full of leftovers, in little glass bottles and plastic tubs.  But she grew up during the great depression, so it probably all seemed very practical to her.  One thing I swore when I moved into my own place was that I would never eat leftovers again. 

I’ve tried over the years to limit my packrat gene to hardware.  And books.  I’ve got tons of books here and I’ve read nearly all of them.  I probably don’t have to visit a hardware store ever again in my life for nuts and bolts and washers and screws.

My twenties were a period of time where I wandered from one low paying job to another, while I was trying to make a living as a freelance photographer.  I did a lot of warehouse work in those days, and various Manpower temp jobs.  In the process I think I’ve put up more generic utility steel shelving in my life then Carter has pills (as my mom used to say).  I’ve put up a fair amount of wood shelving too, including the Ikea particle board and veneer bookshelves scattered all over Casa del Garrett.  Which is all to say that, dazed and confused though I am about a lot of things, I pretty much know how to put together shelving. 

Casa del Garrett is full of shelving.  There are bookcases everywhere, both free standing and bolted onto the walls.  I’ve added the occasional shelf to the kitchen cabinets where I thought they were needed.  There’s wall shelving in the basement, where I keep my winter supplies, and little glass shelves where I keep my favorite bottles of sugary cordials by the bar that I’ve modified slightly to suit myself.  This afternoon, I attempted to put up some new steel shelving in the basement, in a corner that I’ve needed to organize for some time now.  I say ‘attempted’, because I ended up buying what must be the worst piece of junk I’ve ever seen in my entire life.  Which kinda impresses me in a way, because as a fifty-four year old American, I’ve seen a lot of junk.

The corner in my basement where the dryer and the sump pump live is an odd one.  I’ve been fussing with it ever since I bought the house, never quite knowing what to do with it.  Eventually it began to accumulate a bunch of other things I didn’t know quite what do with either, mostly tools.  In one spot I kept all my tall yard tools…various rakes, shovels, and such, and the wide utility bristle broom.  These were all kinda piled together in the corner and getting one particular one out of the pile was getting to be a chore.  Next to that was a spot where I’d been stacking up power tools in their plastic carry cases.  Some of them, like the grinder, didn’t have nice carry cases so I left them in the boxes they came in.  On top of the grinder box I had two rubbermaid storage bins full of various things.  One bin holds all my extension cords.  Another some darkroom equipment that I seldom use anymore, mostly relating to the enlarger I don’t have anymore.  Next to that, was the big box my leaf vacuum lives in between seasons.  I had the miter saw stacked on top of it. 

So that was an area of the basement that needed organizing.  What kept me from doing it was that all the dimensions there were odd.  Most ready made shelving comes in 36 or 48 inch widths and I had only one chunk of space of 30 inches and one of 22 to work with.  Additionally, the circuit breaker box and electricity meter is near the middle the wall and the water pipes and shutoff valves to the bathroom on the other end toward the bathroom.  I couldn’t build shelving over either of these, and I couldn’t put anything over the spot in the floor where the sump pump was.  Every time I stopped to think of ways to organize that space, I’d get bogged down trying to resolve all the odd dimensions I had to work with, and I’d just put it off some more because there was always something else to do around the house.  I could have easily built some custom wooden shelving, but I didn’t want wood next to the dryer, which is gas.

What finally got me motivated was sometime during that night last Thursday the bathroom toilet sprung a small leak where the water feed connects to the tank.  A small trail of water then spread from the leak out the bathroom door and toward the sump pump.  Which is good…that’s where leaking water is supposed to go in the basement.  But along the way it seeped into the cardboard boxes where my leaf vacuum and grinder live, which made the bottoms soggy enough that they collapsed under the weight of the bins and the miter saw stacked on top.  I came downstairs yesterday morning to get some things out of the dryer, only to see the miter saw and the Rubbermaid bins tumbled onto the floor, the leaf vacuum box on its side, the grinder’s box sagging to one side, and water seeping out from the bathroom door.

Good morning sleepyhead!   So the first thing on the agenda was finding out where the leak was coming from, and then turning off the water to the bathroom.  It’s…disturbing…how much water can result from just a small drip drip dripping leak over just a few hours.  The previous owner had installed these really nice ball valves on the lines leading into the bathroom in the basement, so shutting off the water to the bathroom wasn’t a problem…I didn’t even bother with the toilet shut off valve.  Those ball valves are nice…at some point I want to replace all the shutoff valves in the house with them.  Once the water was off I moved everything out of the area and mopped it all down.  I spent a few minute checking the miter saw and the grinder for damage.  They looked okay.

I put a bucket under the toilet tank by the water feed and flushed once to empty the tank, then disconnected the water feed and removed the old fill valve and let the remaining water drain out.  I checked the area around the inlet to make sure the tank hadn’t cracked on me, which thankfully it hadn’t. Then I took a quick trip to Home Depot for a new fill valve, and a flexible water line to replace the solid one the previous owner had installed between the toilet shutoff valve and the tank.  The only flexible water lines in Casa del Garrett are the ones I’ve installed since moving in, and that’s basically the second floor toilet.  Eventually I want to replace every final connection to every faucet with flex line too because it makes things easier to work on.

While I was at Home Depot I wandered around the shelving area.  Now I really wanted to get that corner around the dryer and sump pump under control.  Over the years I’d let it become a clutter that I had to wade through whenever I needed something.  Just getting out the big broom usually meant taking several other long yard tools out of the stack first, just to get to it.  While I was looking around Home Depot I saw just the thing: a really neat looking yard tool organizer made by Black and Decker, that looked like it would fit in that area nicely.  It was only twenty bucks. 

Then I spied some shelving that was just the right size: Thirty inches wide and not 36.  So I brought a box of that home too.  It’s this shelving I want to warn you about.

As I said at the beginning of this, I’ve built a lot of steel shelving in my life.  This stuff, made by Edsal, is just plain junk.  When I got the box back home and opened it I saw a collection of cheap steel stampings that, when you fitted them together, simply would not stay together. 

Note that the propaganda on the box says the "Unit holds up to 1,000 pounds!"  Sure sounds like they’re telling you this thing can hold a lot of weight.  And here’s what’s supposed to hold all that weight:

That’s it.  That’s what you get.  A bunch of cheap steel stampings and four 1/8th inch pieces of particle board. There are little tabs on the uprights, and groves on the cross members you’re supposed to fit together and, as the instructions say, lightly tap into place until they lock. 

Except they don’t lock together at all.  The cross members kinda loosely hang over the tabs…

I tried for hours to get the pieces of that thing to stay together long enough that I could fully assemble one section (you’re supposed to bolt two sections of this thing together (!), one on top of the other, to get the advertised height) and they just wouldn’t.  Look closely at that joint.  There are two fatal flaws in the design that I can see.  First, the groves on the cross beams don’t seat all the way down on the tabs.  At least, not with the "tap" that the instruction manual says you give them.  In fact, you can take a hammer to this joint pretty forcefully and the cross beam still won’t seat fully.  But look more closely.  Notice that the end of the cross beam doesn’t fit right up into the corner of that upright.  There’s a small gap there, between the end of the beam and the corner of the upright.  That allows the beam to move slightly along that axis, even after it’s seated as far as you can get it to seat in the tabs.  If it sat snugly in the corner it might not be so bad, because it couldn’t move then.  But I still wouldn’t want to load this thing with a thousand pounds of anything.

Some steel shelving uses x bracing you attach to the back of the shelves to add rigidity.   As near as I can tell, Edsal expects the particle board shelves you lay over the beams to provide enough rigidity to the unit that the beams won’t wiggle out of their tabs.  But they don’t.  The entire unit can still flex and twist enough that sooner or later one of the beams wiggles free and then the entire thing collapses.

I never got it put together.  After a while I started trying to out think the poor design of the thing, and that led me to determine that I’d have to drill holes in it so I could bolt the damn thing together, and then add some additional bracing in the back of it or else I could never trust it to hold anything.  I was seriously considering doing that, but I eventually realized I was letting my pride get the better of me.  I didn’t want to admit I’d just been taken for a sucker.  I’m not normally that trusting of what I see on the box.  But I never expected in my wildest dreams to open a box of basic utility room steel shelving that was this utterly pathetic.

For kicks and grins, I did a google search on Edsal steel shelving, and came across these customer reviews over at Amazon of the 36 inch wide model…

Awful

Complete junk – The other 3 reviews describe the issues perfectly. I had to use duct tape to hold the pieces together.

… 

Junk!

This product has got to be one of the most poorly designed that I have ever tried to assemble. While boltless design may sound appealing, the slide-in tabs are not built to fit the piece that must be locked into it. Therefore, one is required to wedge, bang, or pry open the tabs so that they may be large enough, but once you get the pieces to fit together, the opening is far too large for it to stay secure. So then you try to bang it closed. Very sketchy. The whole piece wobbles, falls apart at random moments throughout the assembly process, and the cardboard shelves are flimsy, full of splinters, and cheap. The whole experience was frustrating, right down to trying to fit all the pieces back into the box so that I can return it.

…..

Worst EVER

These shelves won’t even support their own weight. I’d hate to see what might happens if a person actually tried to store something on them. I have fairly extensive experience with this type of inexpensive metal utility shelving and these are BY FAR the worst Ive ever tried. No matter how well you seat the boltless "fasteners", the unit sways and twists uncontrollably. A close reading of the instructions reveals that the shelves must be attached to the wall to work (this despite the clear picture of a free-standing unit on the box). Additionally, the 1/4 inch(!) particleboard shelves are weak like cardboard (but heavier), and do nothing to support the structure of the frame. The last straw is the complete lack of a crossbrace which might work to keep the thing square. What a total waste of time and energy. On the plus side, disassembly is a breeze since it falls apart on its own. :D

…

Four big NO votes on American Inventor..!

"Close, but no cigar" describes this attempt at a "boltless" shelving unit. It’s nice not to have to worry that there’ll be enough nuts, bolts and washers in some plastic baggie, but the reality of it is an extremely frustrating experience.

The tabs are poorly designed- both tabs on an end of the horizontal supports are exactly the same length. This means that BOTH tabs have to be started perfectly AT THE SAME TIME, to make them slide in. If one tab was slightly shorter, you could start one, then the other.

If the tabs are bent AT ALL, they won’t line up properly and either won’t slide into the slots, or will poke out to the outside instead of properly sliding all the way through the slot. Either way, it means taking the joint apart and bending the tabs until they slide in.

The problem with that is that there is NO positive locking of the tabs once they finally DO get through the slots. This means the end you struggled with for 10 minutes may pop out while you’re trying to deal with the other end. Trying to remove one end to re-align the tabs is likely to disloge BOTH ends, making you start completely over. The weight of the shelves and the items on the shelves will hold the tabs and slots together once you get that far, but during assembly it’s a recipe for extreme frustration.

There’s more wrong with the desigh, but you get the idea… I never wished so much for a plastic baggie full of nuts and bolts.

So I’m not the only one who is a tad displeased with the product.  This crap should have never made it out of the drawing room.  Somebody in management should have laughed in the face of the "engineer" who brought them this thing.  You’re joking…right?  Hahahaha…good one…  Now get back to work…

I’m taking the shelves back to Home Depot in a little while.  I’ll let you know what happens there.  Basically, I’ll settle for a store credit.  But I’m going to strongly urge them to get word back up the chain of command there, that this stuff is dangerous.  Somebody manages to actually get this shelving together and actually tries to load it up with a thousand pounds and they’re going to get hurt.

[Update…]  Home Depot cheerfully accepted my return, no hassle…

Me:  Hi…I bought this here yesterday…

She: Yeah…I think I sold it to you. 

Me:  Right…yeah…you were working the register…

She:  (cheerfully) So what’s the problem hon…?

You gotta love Baltimore folks.  I explained the issues I had with the shelving and she took the merchandise back, scanned in my receipt and issued me a credit.  So that’s that.  Hopefully word percolates up the ranks that this stuff isn’t worth selling.  Somebody gets hurt when one of these collapses under weight and you just know the lawsuits will go flying…

Via Cute Overload.  If you’ve ever attracted chickadees to your feeders, you know how they are…

Chickadees man…they’re like that.  I get scolded in the winter months when I go outside and there isn’t anything in the feeders.  And then I get sassed on the way back inside after I’ve filled them up again.  But they’re lots of fun to watch. 

Attract them with sunflower seeds, and a feeder that they can hang off of, but larger birds can’t.  You’ll hear them before you see them, their distinctive deedeedee call coming from here and there in a nearby tree.  If you watch carefully you’ll see them flit from one branch to another, getting closer and closer to the feeder.  Then they’ll dart in like little arrows, grab a seed and fly back to a nearby branch.  They put the seed between their feet and whack it a few times with their beak and then pry out the innards.  Then it’s back to the feeder for another one.

So some guy is tinkering with magnetic motor design, when suddenly his magnets go flying everywhere around his workshop.  He thereupon concludes that he’s invented a perpetual motion machine.

First…let’s review: The three laws of thermodynamics are:

1. The total energy of a closed system neither increases nor decreases.
2. The entropy of that system always increases.
3. The temperature of that system cannot ever reach absolute zero, because entropy cannot decrease.

That last one is a little tricky, but visualize it as, the heat has to go somewhere and it can’t go from a colder body to a hotter body.

Anyway…  No:

‘Holy crap, this is really scary,’ inventor says of strange phenomenon

It all began back in 1985, when Thane Heins, having studied electronics at Heritage College in Gatineau, Quebec, started thinking about how magnets could be used to improve power generators.

…

Heins tinkered away, making what seemed like good progress, until one day in early 2006 he stumbled on to something strange. As part of a test, he had connected the driveshaft of an electric motor to a steel rotor with small round magnets lining its outer edges. The idea was that as the rotor spun, the magnets would pass by a wire coil placed just in front of them to generate electrical energy – in other words, it would operate like a simple generator.

The voltage was there, but to get current he had to attach an electrical load to the coil – like a light bulb – or simply overload it, which would cause it to slow down and eventually stop. Heins did the latter, but instead of stopping, the rotor started to rapidly accelerate.

"The magnets started flying off and hitting the wall, and I had to duck for cover," says Heins, surprised because he was using a weak motor. "It was like, holy crap, this is really scary."

…

Days later, Heins realized what had happened…

Uh, oh…  

…The steel rotor and driveshaft had conducted the magnetic resistance away from the coil and back into the heart of the electric motor. Since such motors work on the principle of converting electrical energy into motion by creating rotating magnetic fields, he figured the Back EMF was boosting those fields, causing acceleration.

But how could this be? It would create a positive feedback loop. As the motor accelerated faster it would create a larger electromagnetic field on the generator coil, causing the motor to go faster, and so on and so on. Heins confirmed his theory by replacing part of the driveshaft with plastic pipe that wouldn’t conduct the magnetic field. There was no acceleration.

"What I can say with full confidence is that our system violates the law of conservation of energy," he says.

Ummm, probably…not.  At a guess, the current he was trying to overload the rotor with shorted back into the motor causing it to spin faster.  The plastic pipe after all, could not conduct electricity either.  But I’ll leave it to the engineers to explain some day, if this guy ever tries to sell his idea to investors.  Look…the fact is that people have been trying to invent perpetual motion machines for millennia and the reason why they never work is because the very fabric of this universe just doesn’t function that way.

There’s another way of expressing the three laws:

1. You can’t win.
2. You can’t break even.
3. You can’t leave the game.

I’ve always found it more then a little amusing, that at the heart of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, there is a perpetual motion machine.  It’s really amazing how often the pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps free-the-marketplace right tries to get its free lunch.

Le Dance Pathetique…as choreographed by Reverend Fred Nile of New South Wales…

Un…

"The church has always reached out to homosexuals…

Deux…

"…and many have been converted, particularly in recent years and have become active members of the church…"

Trois…

"The church is loving to all individuals…

Quatre…

"…and all groups…"

Cinq…

"In the beginning God created Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve."

Le Curtian…Applaus a Voux…

My friends Peterson Toscano and Morgan Jon Fox are helping to organize an event in Memphis, coinciding with yet another Focus On The Family/Exodus “Love (sic) Won Out” conference they’re holding there on On Saturday February 23rd 2008. The events will be held under the banner, Deconstructing the Ex-Gay Myth—A Weekend of Action Art, and will be held from February 22 to the 24th, and will include Peterson, giving a farewell performance of Doin’ Time In The Homo No-Mo Halfway House and the premiere of his new play Transfigurations–Transgressing Gender in the Bible, as well as an exhibit of art by survivors of ex-gay therapy, which promises to be a very moving experience in and of itself. And Morgan’s documentary on the events of the summer of 2005, when a gay teen was dragged into ex-gay therapy against his will, and the world responded with outrage and action, will finally have it’s premiere. This Is What Love In Action Looks Like.

Here’s a short promotional video for the weekend events…

I plan to go, and I urge everyone who can to come to Memphis and participate. The ex-gay movement, funded and operated by right wing theocratic radicals for purely anti-gay political ends has done enormous damage over the years, to many innocent hearts, young and old. In his blog, Peterson writes…

As a Christian and lover of God, I know this to be true–God desires truth in the inmost part. We need each other. We need deep and meaningful relationships and that human touch—emotionally and physically. We need to depend on friends and lovers and loved one and have them depend on us to supply each other with the things only humans can give to each other.

As a Christian I recognize that this is how God set it up. Sure ultimately I know that God supplies all my needs, but just like God supplies my nutritional need through healthy veggies, legumes, fruits and grains, I receive God’s love through other people. God provides me so much of what I need from the emotional and physical intimacy I share with others.

In fact, in regards to these teachings, I see the ex-gay movement as an Ex-Human Movement. In some ways it mirrors what the modern world pushes on us, that we can make it all on our own, except instead of God, the modern world provides us with materialism.

No, we need each other, and when we don’t have our emotional and physical needs met, we mourn, we feel the loss and the pain of detachment, of emotional solitude.

I know that pain of loss and detachment intimately…for a somewhat different reason then the survivors, but nonetheless as part of the experience of gay people in America. It is hard in the best of worlds to find your other half, and make a life together. And in large measure my anger toward those who preach fear and self loathing to gay people, and unforgivably to our families, comes from knowing full well that I might have had a better chance to find my other half in this life, were it not for them. I might have been able to talk to my own parents when I was a teenager, struggling as teenagers do, with first love, and first heartbreak. I might have had a much closer relationship with them then I was allowed to have, because they just didn’t want to know, and the thought of telling them simply terrified me. I had to bottle up so much inside myself back then, and it damaged my relationship with them, and in particular with my mom. We have to bleed…gay children and parents alike…so the haters of humanity can be righteous.

If there is such a thing as Sin, capital ‘S’, in this world, then suffocating the ability to love, and trust in another, must surely be a big one. Our hearts are not blackboards that anyone can scribble their will upon. Our hopes and dreams of love are not their stepping stones to heaven. Please, if you can, come to Memphis and raise a voice for love. Show them what love in action looks like.

More details on the events in Memphis can be found at Beyond Ex-Gay.

In the summer of 1985 I bought a restaurant size roll of plastic wrap from Price Club, the membership wholesaler that would later become Costco.  Some friends of mine who had memberships had taken me there that day, and it was the first time since the last GEM store in Maryland closed that I’d been in a membership wholesale store.  So I knew the drill.  Membership stores were places you could buy things cheaper then regular retailers, and often in bulk. 

But I didn’t have a lot of money back then to spend on a bulk items shopping spree.  Probably, I was close to broke.  Back then I was struggling to make a living as a freelance architectural modelmaker.  But I wanted to make the most of the opportunity so I looked around for something to buy…some day to day household item…for less then I’d normally have to pay.  I figured it had to be something that I used often around the house, but which wouldn’t spoil or go bad if it took me a long time to finish it.  I wandered up and down the isles, looking at various items like detergents and paper towels and such.  Then I spied some restaurant size boxes of plastic wrap and figured one of those would do.  That as I said, was sometime during the summer of 1985.

Anyway…it just now ran out.

That roll of plastic wrap had become something of a running gag between me and my friends over the years.  And…no kidding…I was pulling from it almost daily too for the past twenty-two plus years.  For a while there I thought I might have to put it in my will.

Figure I’ll be approaching my 78th birthday by the time my next box of the stuff runs out…

Via Slashdot.  You saw this coming…right?

"Lest there be anyone left who believes the RIAA’s propaganda that its litigation campaign is intended to benefit the ‘creators’ of the music, Hollywood Reporter reports that the RIAA is asking the Copyright Royalty Board to lower songwriter royalties on song file downloads, from the present rate of 9 cents per song — about 13% of the wholesale price — down to 8% of wholesale. Meanwhile, the big digital music companies, such as Apple, want the royalty rate lowered even more, to something like 4% of wholesale. So any representations by any of these companies that they are concerned for the ‘creators’ of the music must henceforth be taken with a boxcar-load of salt."

Here’s a business model for you: First you squeeze your customers…then you squeeze your creators.  It isn’t piracy that’s destroying the music business…it’s the music business.

It’s a way of life in the bible belt…

The evolution of a sensitive lesson
Educators find ways of handling The Theory. Some skip it. Others hunt for a balance point.

Inverness Middle School science teacher Steve Crandall says he chooses to tell students that science doesn’t have all the answers.

No.  But it has a few…

"I understand politicians like to compromise and that faced with one group who
say two plus two equals four and another group that says two plus two equals
six, will tend to arrive at a position that says two plus two equals five.
Unfortunately, sometimes the answer has to be four…"
-Eugenie Scott, executive director of the National Center for Science Education

Me and some friends, sampling the Virginia vintage over the weekend…

They suggested a trip to some wineries in Northern Virginia last Saturday and I took them up on it.  It’s part of my initiation rites into middle-age yuppydom now that I have the Mercedes.  No, I have not cut my hair.  Are you kidding?  It’s tied in a ponytail which is not visible there.  I ended up taking home two bottles of really nice dessert wine, charmingly labeled "Moonstone".  Then we all drove to Harper’s Ferry and wandered around for a bit. I hadn’t been to Harper’s Ferry since the middle 70s.  Any excuse to drive Traveler somewhere.

It was the time of Sputnik, the middle of the cold war, and the Soviets were ahead of us in the space race. It was the time before Telstar, in a day when most newsrooms had mechanical teletype machines, and if you wanted the news from overseas quickly, you tuned in via shortwave radio. You could still buy artist renditions of the planet Mars, showing its many canals. Saturn only had seven rings back then, Pluto was still a planet, and the best images of our neighboring galaxy, Andromeda, were breathtakingly beautiful, but still a bit fuzzy. There were no black holes, no neutron stars, the term “quasar” had not yet been coined. The best telescope in the world was the amazing 200-inch Hale Telescope on Mount Palomar.

I was six years old, going on seven, and the stars entranced me. And sitting in front of our black and white TV, one odd little cartoon series utterly captured my imagination. It was called The Space Explorers, and you only saw it in serialized form on the morning kid TV shows. While I was growing up in the Washington D.C. suburbs, I watched every episode of it raptly on the Ranger Hal show, whenever they showed it.

I say it was “odd” because it wasn’t entirely animation as I was used to it back then…or even now. There was instead, traditional animation sandwiched between special effect photography of the most beautiful art deco rocketship I’d ever seen, then or since. And interspersed with that, the most thrilling space art you’d ever want to see, set to a recurring bit of very evocative, very beautiful space music. For years I searched in vain for a copy of that music. To this day I hear it whenever I look up at the stars.

The plot was simple. Commander Perry, space explorer, is flying the first rocketship to Mars, the Polaris I, when suddenly there is a malfunction and the rocketship goes off course. His last radio transmission indicates he is about to crash land on one of Mars’ moons. But before he can say which one, the transmission is abruptly cut off. A rescue mission is quickly organized, and the designer of the rocket, Professor Nordheim is joined by navigator “Smitty” on the sister ship of the one Commander Perry was flying, the Polaris II. Unbeknownst to them, Perry’s young son Jimmy has stowed away on the Polaris II. He’s discovered only after the rocketship takes off.

In the episodes that followed, Jim Perry learned about the planets of the solar system, as they were known at the time. Each episode showcased some aspect of the solar system that Jimmy finds puzzling, and which Professor Nordheim patiently explains to him. The animation was, as I said, interspersed with some of the most breathtaking space art you ever saw, then or now, of the various planets, set among dazzling starry backgrounds. I couldn’t take my eyes away, even though all I had at the time to watch it on was a black and white TV set.

In later years, I thought the creators of the cartoon had been creatively brilliant to mix traditional animation with model photography and that stunning space artwork. What I later discovered was that the cartoon had different visual styles, because it had been sewn together from three different films by William Cayton and Fred Ladd for Radio & Television Packagers, Inc. Fred Ladd would later bring Astro Boy, Kimba the White Lion, and Sailor Moon to the U.S. They did a fantastic job, but the copyright issues of the various individual films that make up The Space Explorers, is probably why we don’t have the DVD today. The traditionally animated cartoon hailed from eastern Europe and was originally less then a half hour long. The model photography came from fragments of a German Kulturfilme produced during WWII, titled Weltraumschiff 1 startet (Spaceship 1 Launches), and the stunning space art of the various planets and stars came from a Czech educational film titled, Universe.

It all seems very dated now…and yet stumbling across clips from it, as I did just a few moments ago (which is why I’m blogging this now), can still evoke that sense of childhood awe in me. One thing I don’t like about space travel in TV and the movies these days, is that they make it all seem so routine, and in the process, make space seem like a small world after all. Nowadays when I want to experience that sense I had when I was a kid, of the vastness of space, I have to retreat to my collection of Hubble pictures…or drive to some lonely spot in the southwestern desert at night, and look up.

Here’s a clip…from a time when the universe was still vast, and a voyage to Mars was still an adventure.

The Space Explorers appreciation site is Here.

[Update…] Here’s a “trailor” for the series, made from various stills and short clips on The Space Explorers appreciation site. Yes…that’s a steering wheel the good professor is using to pilot his spaceship with. Like I said…this was all done in a time before the general public had any real understanding of how space travel would work. When I was a kid, I used to hear folks argue that rockets wouldn’t even work in space, because in a vacuum they’d have nothing to push against. It was a while before Newton’s Third Law sank in generally…

But I was only seven…and the technical details didn’t matter. I’d hardly have understood them anyway. What mattered was how amazing it all seemed…and how vast and beautiful space was…

Via Slashdot…

"I am, in the States, known as a Software Engineer. In Canada we’re not allowed to call ourselves engineers, although the discipline is no less rigorous than any other kind of engineering. But perhaps its for the best, because ‘engineering’ describes only a part of what I do. A software developer must be part writer and poet, part salesperson and public speaker, part artist and designer, and always equal parts logic and empathy."

Yeah.  It’s like that.  But I love it.  It still amazes me that I do the work I do.