Category: Culture

My Favorite Alarm Clock

Stll_alarm_clock_snoozeI recently bought the DVDs for the first season of My Favorite Martian, a 1960s sitcom that I have never seen but often heard about.

Just watched the opening sequence of the first episode and was laughing out loud in moments.

The first shot of the first scene of the first episode is of an alarm clock, which procedes to ring.

The single guy sleeping in the bed next to it (a very young Bill Bixby) shuts it off.

Then second alarm clock rings. To shut it off, he must get out of bed and walk over to a birdcage, which contains the sounding clock. He opens up the birdcage and shuts off the alarm.

He’s still so sleepy, though, that he is about to lay down in bed again when a third alarm clock sounds. To shut this one off he must leave his bedroom and go into the next room.

He seems invigorated by the trek, rubs his hair with his hands, and marches back into the bedroom to get dressed.

But sleepiness again overcomes him and he hits the bed.

Great visual comedy! And not a word of dialog in it!

Had to laugh because, not presently having a wife to poke me out of bed (unfortunately!), I happen to have three alarms set to wake me up in the morning. My cell phone goes off first. Then, fifteen minutes later, it goes off again. Then, almost immediately, my regular alarm clock sounds.

Guess human nature is now what it was in the 1960s.

Will let you know how the series turns out.

Dracula's Father

The Year without a Summer caused Mary Shelly and her literary friends to hole up indoors during their Swiss vacation. To pass the time, they took drugs (laudanum) and told stories. Later, they published them. Shelly’s Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus.

Frankenstein’s monster wasn’t the only classic horror monster that came into being at that gathering. In fact, a character that, for literary purposes, is Dracula’s father got invented.

The character’s name was Lord Ruthven, and he was modelled off the notorious British aristocrat, Lord Byron. (Remember Byron. Remember Byron.)

An employee of Byron’s, John Polidori, wrote the story titled, The Vampyre and modelled the character after his master, while the two were on a trip in Europe (just like two characters in the story) and were stopped at the Swiss literary gathering by the Year without a Summer. (Strange how it all connects, ain’t it?)

The reason Lord Ruthven can be described as Dracula’s father is that, while there had been vampires before, both in the legends of Europe and other places, they were pictured as brutish, repulsive monsters, not the suave, debonaire romantic types that have dominated vampire fiction since.

So it’s interesting . . . the Year without a Summer ended up getting both Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff the jobs that made them famous, 120 years later.

READ ABOUT VAMPIRES.

READ ABOUT THE VAMPYRE.

READ THE VAMPYRE.

Dracula’s Father

The Year without a Summer caused Mary Shelly and her literary friends to hole up indoors during their Swiss vacation. To pass the time, they took drugs (laudanum) and told stories. Later, they published them. Shelly’s Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus.

Frankenstein’s monster wasn’t the only classic horror monster that came into being at that gathering. In fact, a character that, for literary purposes, is Dracula’s father got invented.

The character’s name was Lord Ruthven, and he was modelled off the notorious British aristocrat, Lord Byron. (Remember Byron. Remember Byron.)

An employee of Byron’s, John Polidori, wrote the story titled, The Vampyre and modelled the character after his master, while the two were on a trip in Europe (just like two characters in the story) and were stopped at the Swiss literary gathering by the Year without a Summer. (Strange how it all connects, ain’t it?)

The reason Lord Ruthven can be described as Dracula’s father is that, while there had been vampires before, both in the legends of Europe and other places, they were pictured as brutish, repulsive monsters, not the suave, debonaire romantic types that have dominated vampire fiction since.

So it’s interesting . . . the Year without a Summer ended up getting both Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff the jobs that made them famous, 120 years later.

READ ABOUT VAMPIRES.

READ ABOUT THE VAMPYRE.

READ THE VAMPYRE.

Footfall

FootfallWatching the news tonight with the continuing coverage of the quakewave disaster brought me fresh impetus to pray.

It also brought to mind something that had occurred to me a few days ago.

The dynamic duo of Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle have an excellent sci-fi novel in which they try to do a more realistic take at what an alien invasion of Earth might involve and how we might be able to realistically defend ourselves–against aliens who at first seem completely invincible.

(The idea of being able to contribute something new and different to this well-worked-over theme was a precondition of Niven being willing to participate in the project.)

The cover has a nice blurb from Tom Clancy plugging it: "Nobody does it better then Niven and Pournelle. I loved it!"

I did, too.

Good book.

Very respectful of religion (Pournelle is Catholic). Interesting tidbit (and minor spoiler): The secret American project to deal with the alien mothership is called Project Archangel and involves developing a weapon known as Michael.

Why Project Archangel? Why Michael?

Because they’re hoping that Michael will drive the alien Satan from our heavens.

But here’s the connection that put me in mind of this novel (again, a deliberately vague spoiler): At one point the aliens deploy a weapon called The Foot that does something HORRIBLY reminiscent of what just happened to Indonesia and the surrounding area, only much, MUCH worse.

After the atrocity of unimaginable proportions, when the aliens start to get scared of what we do to them in retaliation (the fate of their race is on the line), you’ll cheer as a defiant human coldly tells the panicking alien leader:

"THIS is the price of The Foot!"

YEAH!

(Now if we could just find some alien butt to kick for what happened in Indonesia.)

GET THE NOVEL

R’lyeh RevealedRE-LOCATED!

I’ve been going back and re-reading some of H.P. Lovecraft’s horror stories–which I haven’t read in years, so long that I’ve forgotten almost everything about them except the shapes and names of some of the monsters in them.

One of the stories I reread is The Call of Cthulhu, which is a lynchpin of Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos.

For those who may not know (and this is forbidden knowledge, remember), Cthulhu is an evil alien entity who is presently asleep in the sunken city of R’lyeh in the Pacific Ocean and who is destined to wake one day and basically kill everybody. Oh, and an evil cult worships him and is trying to wake him up again.

I was intrigued by the fact that The Call of Cthulhu gives the exact latitude and longitude of R’lyeh:

Latitude: S 47° 9 Min.
Longitude: W 123° 43 Min.

So–in an age of MapQuest–plunked the numbers into MapQuest, which promptly spit back the following map, revealing the exact location of the sunken city of R’lyeh where dead Cthulhu lies dreaming.

UPDATE: Down yonder an alert reader pointed out that the original map showed R’lyeh on the wrong side of the international date line. Turns out I had failed to enter a minus sign for the West longitude. Here’s the correct map:

Rlyeh2

BEWARE! HIC SUNT DRACONES!!!

R'lyeh RevealedRE-LOCATED!

I’ve been going back and re-reading some of H.P. Lovecraft’s horror stories–which I haven’t read in years, so long that I’ve forgotten almost everything about them except the shapes and names of some of the monsters in them.

One of the stories I reread is The Call of Cthulhu, which is a lynchpin of Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos.

For those who may not know (and this is forbidden knowledge, remember), Cthulhu is an evil alien entity who is presently asleep in the sunken city of R’lyeh in the Pacific Ocean and who is destined to wake one day and basically kill everybody. Oh, and an evil cult worships him and is trying to wake him up again.

I was intrigued by the fact that The Call of Cthulhu gives the exact latitude and longitude of R’lyeh:

Latitude: S 47° 9 Min.
Longitude: W 123° 43 Min.

So–in an age of MapQuest–plunked the numbers into MapQuest, which promptly spit back the following map, revealing the exact location of the sunken city of R’lyeh where dead Cthulhu lies dreaming.

UPDATE: Down yonder an alert reader pointed out that the original map showed R’lyeh on the wrong side of the international date line. Turns out I had failed to enter a minus sign for the West longitude. Here’s the correct map:

BEWARE! HIC SUNT DRACONES!!!

DVPeaves

What is it with people who make DVDs?

With purchaser expectations of extras and higher picture quality than what one gets on VHS, one would think that DVD manufacturers would take the customer service ethic seriously and make their DVDs as easy to use and non-annoying as possible.

But sometimes they do inexplicably frustrating things, particularly when putting TV shows on DVD.

Here are a few rules all DVD manufacturers should follow:

  1. Print the episode titles on the DVD so that the user doesn’t have to look at the box (which he won’t want to keep if he puts his DVDs in space-saving binders) to find the episode he wants. (Got that, Babylon 5?)
  2. Print the titles large enough that they are legible, so the user doesn’t have to squint. (Understand, Voyager?)
  3. Don’t have a looooong opening sequence that plays before the main menu EVERY TIME the user puts in the DVD and that CAN’T BE SKIPPED THROUGH (Capice, Next Gen?) In fact, make whatever opening you have skippable (Kudos to B5!).
  4. Make sure that there is a chapter break immediately after the opening credits so that the user can skip them and not end up way far into the story. (Why, after releasing seven seasons on DVD, haven’t you figured that out, Stargate SG-1?)
  5. Make sure that pressing PLAY has the function of making an episode . . . well . . . play. Having to hit ENTER to make and episode play when the PLAY key is dead is just stupid. (You savvy me, everybody?)
  6. Minimize the number of clicks that the user has to play the next episode. Don’t get so wrapped up in zoomy graphical menu designs that you force the user to push three or four buttons to navigate to the next episode. (What were you thinking, DS9 ?) or change the combination of buttons that need to be pushed (ditto, Voyager!).
  7. Having a "Play All" option is okay (nice try, B5), but how many users are really going to want to commit to sitting in front of the tube for three hours straight? Do the sensible thing and have NEXT EPISODE/PREVIOUS EPISODE options that immediately start playing the desired episode. (Why hasn’t anybody figured this out?)

And that’s my Andy Rooney moment for the day.