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Mt. Holz Science Fiction Society
Club Notice - 04/10/98 -- Vol. 16, No. 41
MT Chair/Librarian:
Mark Leeper MT 3E-433 732-957-5619 mleeper@lucent.com
HO Chair: John Jetzt MT 2E-530 732-957-5087 jetzt@lucent.com
HO Librarian: Nick Sauer HO 4F-427 732-949-7076 njs@lucent.com
Distinguished Heinlein Apologist:
Rob Mitchell MT 2D-536 732-957-6330 rlmitchell1@lucent.com
Factotum: Evelyn Leeper MT 3E-433 732-957-2070 eleeper@lucent.com
Back issues at http://www.geocities.com/Athens/4824
All material copyright by author unless otherwise noted.
The Science Fiction Association of Bergen County meets on the
second Saturday of every month in Upper Saddle River; call
201-933-2724 for details. The New Jersey Science Fiction Society
meets irregularly; call 201-652-0534 for details, or check
http://www.interactive.net/~kat/njsfs.html. The Denver Area
Science Fiction Association meets 7:30 PM on the third Saturday of
every month at Southwest State Bank, 1380 S. Federal Blvd.
1. URL of the week:
http://www.research.att.com/~reeds/petronius.html. The true story
behind that infamous Petronius Arbiter quote ("We trained
hard....). [-ecl]
===================================================================
2. 4.8 inches = one milligodzilla
===================================================================
3. I have a new way to make money. I rent out my refrigerator to a
local business. I can get a few dollars a week at just the cost of
half of my refrigerator. The problem is that I would like to use
that half, but a buck is a buck. If all this sounds a little nuts
to you, let me explain the company who rents the space is called
Costco/Price Club and they don't actually rent the space, they just
sell things in industrial sizes at a savings. So I fill up the old
fridge with their huge economy sizes--actually intended for the US
Army or some such-- and I am money ahead. But I am also
refrigerator space behind.
What do you do with an industrial size bag of walnuts after you
have opened it and used the walnuts in a recipe? Well, if you
follow the instructions you refrigerate them. You don't want those
precious walnut oils to go rancid and the walnuts to go all soft
and mushy, do you? No, of course not. So the bottom shelf of the
refrigerator has walnuts going rancid and stale a lot slower. But
luckily it will be there only for whatever short length of time it
takes two adults to eat a three-pound bag of shelled walnuts. This
works out to an average of 4.6 years according to the United States
Bureau of Statistics on Trivial Matters. In the meantime we have
jars of walnuts sitting in the bottom of the old fridge and while
they had a crispy crunch when new, they lose just a bit of it each
passing day. We no longer keep the tall containers of spices
there, but I am not sure why. Those are now stored un-
refrigerated. To make way for the jars of nuts. I know it is not
that we finished them. I mean how quickly could we have finished a
half pound of oregano? Or parsley leaves? Or basil? After a
couple of years they were moved elsewhere and only an expert could
have told that the difference in levels from when the containers
were new was not simply due to settling. "Yes, Mr. Leeper, for
shopping at Price Club you now have the Grand Prize, a lifetime
supply of oregano." When I die the unused part goes into my
estate. (I hope my relatives are not reading this.)
Ours is a refrigerator intended for families of up to five or so.
There are only two of us. That means it should be about 40% full,
right? So how come nothing else will fit in and when I open the
door things fall out. (Now I realize that there are lots of people
in the world who would love to suffer from this plight. But look
at it this way, they have a lot of things they can complain about.
For complaint material I have only a few things like Jean-Claude
Van Damme films and my refrigerator. Other people get a lot more
sympathy.)
Why do two people fill the freezer up to the point that when
someone asks us to bring some ice cream to a party and we have to
store it for an hour we have to start planning how to fit it into
the freezer. (Truth!) Well, part of the problem is the four
cartons of different attempts to make something that tastes nearly
as good as ice cream but is actually a lot healthier. Feugh! But
the real reason is that we have shelves in the already too small
freezer taken up with cans of orange juice concentrate so big we
cannot make the orange juice in the blender without diluting it
when we are done. We put in a full can and fill the blender with
water and what we get is a sort of fresh orange juice syrup. You
add water and stir to get fresh orange juice. Then the top shelf
of the freezer is filled with batteries. You can't even eat them.
At least I would not recommend it. Somewhere we heard that
batteries keep better in the freezer. The problem is when I pop
them into my Walkman it makes the Walkman cold.
I think the next time around I am going to get only a half-sized
refrigerator, buy in the local grocery, and apply the savings to my
grocery bill. I suspect I will end up money ahead. [-mrl]
===================================================================
4. LOST IN SPACE (a film review by Mark R. Leeper):
Capsule: A dysfunctional family learns to get
along with each other when they are marooned in
space in another part of the galaxy. The 1960s
TV series comes to the screen with a
spectacular visual style but also with a family
if anything more obnoxious than they were on
TV--not an easy task. Just when the science
fiction ideas get somewhat sophisticated, the
telling lapses into incoherence. Rating: 6 (0
to 10), high +1 (-4 to +4)
Back in the 1965 Irwin Allen created a TV series, LOST IN SPACE,
based on the comic book SPACE FAMILY ROBINSON, itself a science
fiction adaptation of Johann David Wyss's SWISS FAMILY ROBINSON.
The series lasted until 1968. In the series seven people are
present on an experimental ship on a space mission when something
went terribly wrong and the whole group became, well ... lost in
space. The characters were the five-person Robinson Family, the
pilot, and a stowaway enemy agent, one Dr. Smith, whose initial
goal was to destroy the mission. The family was unrealistic, even
for the 1960s in that everybody seemed to get along with everybody.
But Dr. Smith was adept at playing everybody off against everybody
else. Smith was the embodiment of every negative and dangerous
human impulse but subtlety, yet the Robinson family never seemed to
catch on. The special effects were bargain basement quality for
the most part. When the LOST IN SPACE premiered, no less an expert
than Isaac Asimov wrote a letter reprinted in "TV Guide" about how
absurd the concept was. It was a physical impossibility to travel
so fast and far in a few seconds that you could not even find
familiar stars in the sky. I believe he claimed it was comparable
to saying a child on a tricycle took a wrong turn and found himself
in another country.
There are at least two advantages to making a film of the story in
the late 1990s. The story can be presented with superb special
effects. I would rank the visual effects of this film just a few
microns below the quality one would expect from a STAR WARS film.
The other advantage is that in these days of all kinds of
theoretical holes in physics--black, white, and worm--you would
never get a reputable scientist willing to commit to the
impossibility of finding a few-second shortcut to some other arm of
the galaxy.
In the new film version the Earth has finally conquered war and is
ready to move on to conquering the universe. People live together
in peace--all but some nasty holdouts called the Sedition. John
Robinson (played by William Hurt) has devoted his life to science
at the cost of neglecting his loved ones. As a result he has one
deuce of a dysfunctional family. Wife Maureen and children Judy,
Penny, and Will--nobody gets along. The world is just not as
peaceful as it initially would seem. The Robinsons might almost be
better called the Bickersons. But John has a plan for bringing his
family together and at the same time further his work. The whole
family is going to take a little trip together to the Alpha star
system to set up a jump gate for instantaneous travel to that
system. After ten years of being cooped up together in space, of
course the Robinsons will get along. Everyone in the family
recognizes this as one of Dad's less stellar ideas, but he thinks
it will bring the family. Little does John know that the forces of
the Sedition have an agent, Dr. Smith (Gary Oldman) who is trying
to stop their little mission and kill the family. Except for the
maladjusted family this is really the plot of the TV series, but
remarkably when watching the film, one does not think of it as
being a retread. It feels freshly re-imagined as if we are seeing
it for the first time.
I cannot say I am very fond of William Hurt's acting in general.
Like Harrison Ford he usually has this distant quality, as if he is
just a little bit high all the time. Mimi Rogers plays a slightly
authoritarian Maureen Robinson. As Will Robinson Jack Johnson is
considerably more natural than was TV's Billy Mumy. Heather Graham
makes an okay Judy Robinson, but Lacey Chabert's Penny is annoying
and just about the last person I would want to be cooped up with
for ten years. Matt LeBlanc as the pilot on the make with Judy is
nearly as bad. Gary Oldman, however, is a big improvement over the
TV series. His TV equivalent Jonathan Harris was a comedy actor
who was miscast and never convincing as the sinister agent. Oldman
adopts many of the same gestures, but makes them sinister and
mysterious. And he does get some good lines like a playful
allusion to the original STAR TREK as he complains "I'm a doctor,
not a space explorer."
It has been a while since the look of a science fiction film has
done much to excite me, but if this film has a hero, it is
production designer Norman Garwood. Visually, LOST IN SPACE is
very evocative of 1960s science fiction, but not of TV science
fiction of the time. What I saw on the screen was what was on the
covers of magazines and books at the time of the TV series. It was
like the film was the result of someone watching the TV series in
1965 and then visualizing it the way cutting edge artists of the
time would have. I kept finding myself enjoying just looking at
the screen and thinking what a good cover for ANALOG science
fiction magazine this or that scene would make. Under Garwood's
design, space is a sinister place, much more so than it was in the
TV series. The one false move is a cartoon-like monkey that seems
like a fugitive from some other film. Garwood does a little
playing around with the design of the robot, which changes over the
course of the film, finally getting the crystal crown that was its
most memorable feature of the design from the series. The credits
list cameos from the original TV series. I must not have noticed
Angela Cartwright, but it is much harder to miss June Lockhart and,
of course, the voice of the robot is the same. The language is a
little salacious for what is predominantly a children's film, but
perhaps that is a sign of changing times.
With the exception of Oldman's performance, this is a film I would
rather look at than listen to. But it does manage to take old
material and breathe new life into it. I rate it a 6 on the 0 to
10 scale and a high +1 on the -4 to +4 scale. [-mrl]
Mark Leeper
MT 3E-433 732-957-5619
mleeper@lucent.com
Clergyman, n. A man who undertakes the management
of our spiritual affairs as a method of bettering
his temporal ones.
-- Ambrose Bierce
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