A Crummy Commercial

For some reason I thought of the song: Bandstand Boogie .  I found it on Youtube, there is the original instrumental by Les Elgart and his orchestra (which is really catchy and brief): source:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHiFsRQEHQw Then there's also the version with lyrics by Barry Manilow (longer but also good): source:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FTXWf2_H0FI Now this search was in a private window, so theoretically it shouldn't "pollute" my regular Youtube feed, right ? But then later in the day my regular Youtube feed recommended this: source:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BsLT-zRWWdQ I didn't actually watch this Youtube video, I watched the movie instead.       Escape From New York is a good movie, fast paced and entertaining but there's almost no music - except for the Les Elgart version of Bandstand Boogie !  Ernest Borgnine's character, Cabbie, has it on cassette in his yellow Checker cab.  And the song plays a ro...

Interesting article from IEEE Spectrum : https://spectrum.ieee.org/ukraine-ground-drones Yikes !  Killer machines flying AND rolling around ?  No, thank you ! The vision of killer robots reminded me of this Philip K. Dick story, The Defenders : https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/28767 It was dramatized on the NBC old time radio show: X-1  (note that the story isn't quite the same as the Galaxy  original but the essence is there): https://archive.org/details/XMinusOne560522052TheDefenders Spoiler alert:  The story starts years after a doomsday nuclear exchange between the US and the Soviet Union.  The remaining populations of both sides have retreated below ground to escape the radiation.  Both sides use robots called:  Leadys  to continue the fight above ground.  However the robots of both sides stopped fighting without ever telling the humans and instead created fake war news and video on how the war was continuing.  In the meantime ...

I didn't know about this: source:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41U78QP8nBk But of course Arthur C. Clarke knew: source:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c8N72t7aScY 1968 was 58 years ago and about the only thing we've accomplished above and beyond  2001: a space odyssey is that computers now can sing Daisy better: https://soundcloud.com/midnightalchemist7/daisy-bell-ai-evolution Or maybe (depending on your opinion) not even that ! Best Regards, Chuck, WB9KZY http://wb9kzy.com/ham.htm

Mentioned the 1931 Nautilus arctic expedition a couple days ago: https://wb9kzy.blogspot.com/2026/05/nautilus-radiogram.html Then I came across this term which also referenced 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea ?  Point Nemo https://allthatsinteresting.com/point-nemo Apparently there is a lot of space debris at the bottom of the Pacific at Point Nemo.  It's a relatively safe place to direct space junk because it is so remote.  But the Pacific is really deep at Point Nemo: This reminded me of an old time radio show called: Latitude Zero    Here is a brief article in Time Magazine , June 22, 1941: https://time.com/archive/6788665/radio-latitude-zero/ Unfortunately there is only one episode available in mp3: https://s3.amazonaws.com/RE-Warehouse/l/latitude_zero_1941-02-11_first_show.mp3 It was an unsponsored "summer replacement" - that was the summer before the attack on Pearl Harbor - this probably meant that a lot of the people working on the show, including Howard Du...

I'll admit it, somewhere along the line I started watching Rick and Morty .  It can be seen for free on the Adult Swim website.  Rick and Morty is a cartoon featuring 6 main characters, Rick Sanchez (mad scientist, wears a lab coat), Morty Smith (Rick's 14 year old grandson), Summer Smith (Rick's granddaughter, couple of years older than Morty), Jerry Smith (father of Morty and Summer), Beth Smith (daughter of Rick, mom of Morty and Summer) and Space Beth (it's a complicated story).  Anyway I finally decided to buy seasons 1 to 8 on DVD: 16 DVDs ! I've never seen this kind of DVD packaging before it has a spindle and a little button to hold them in place The Rick and Morty  show is heavily into the multiverse so this extended Smith family features Rick C137, the self proclaimed smartest being in the multiverse.  They live in a reality where the residents pronounce parmesan as par-me-zee-ann.  Rick and Morty go on adventures, usually involving crime, viole...

Recently deceased: moviemaker, Frederick Wiseman, and actor, Robert Duvall.   Duvall was in LOTs of TV shows and movies - each role seemed to be completely unique although all feature that eerie penetrating gaze.  One of my favorite Duvall appearances was on The Outer Limits two parter called: The Inheritors .  Duvall plays a relentless government investigator of weirdness and strangeness with his trademark intensity. definitely NOT Fox Mulder part 1:  https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x6okyqt Wiseman made documentaries that could also be eerie.  Every once in a while his latest film would get played on PBS, one time and that was it.  There aren't any full examples on the internet but I do remember this from Belfast, Maine (packing sardines scene): don't let me hear any whining about how hard work is in the 21st century source:  https://youtu.be/Tc_Zim1Ra-0 In addition, Youtube recently served up this pretty freaky little movie: flamboyant in N...

I was reminded recently of the author, Paul de Kruif - one of his most popular books was called: Microbe Hunters which I read as a kid.   https://archive.org/search?query=microbe+hunters+de+kruif&sin=   (you can tell it was a popular book by all the copies on archive !) Hunger Fighters was another of de Kruif's books and has a Wisconsin connection in the last three chapters: https://archive.org/search?query=hunger+fighters+de+kruif&sin= I made it through four years of college at UWM (University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee) with an Electrical Engineering degree.  But the University of Wisconsin at Madison is the biggest school in the state and arguably the best.  It has a long history of accomplishment.  One of the tellers of those tales of UW history is Professor Dave Nelson.  Here is one of Prof. Nelson's lectures on PBS Wisconsin: source:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0axP7Hq6HzQ   (Tom Zinnen must be a dad because he does tell dad ...

Not sure why but I remembered the name: Wendell Urth - a character who assists the police in four Science Fiction mystery stories by Isaac Asimov: The Singing Bell , page 98 https://archive.org/details/Fantasy_Science_Fiction_v008n01_1955-01 Perhaps the inspiration for a singing bell might have been a burnt out vacuum tube or even a burnt out light bulb with filament particles ?  But it took Asimov's imagination to make something like that an ethereal sound maker. The Talking Stone , page 108 https://archive.org/details/Fantasy_Science_Fiction_v009n04_1955-10 Asimov was an expert in biochemistry.  So maybe it was natural that he kicked around the idea of alternative life forms based on silicon rather than carbon ? The Dying Night , page 3 https://archive.org/details/Fantasy_Science_Fiction_v011n01_1956-07_MadMaxAU The rapid disappearance of actual silver based photographic film has been amazing - it'd be hard to try to make a video of this story considering that people aren...

The Tenth Victim was a movie based on a story by Robert Sheckley published in the April 1953 issue of Galaxy Magazine: The Seventh Victim (there was victim inflation then ?): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seventh_Victim Here is the story: https://archive.org/details/galaxymagazine-1953-04/page/n39/mode/2up And here is the episode on X-1: https://archive.org/details/XMinus1B/xminusone_570306_TheSeventhVictim.mp3 But I didn't remember either the original story or the radio version.  I remembered the movie, or at least I remembered the opening: https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x8kvh0m In Milwaukee channel 4, WTMJ, showed movies in the afternoon, they were called Theater 4 or Theater at 4, something like that.  The hostess was Judy Marks, the weather lady at the station.   I forget what time the news started but WTMJ had to cut the movies up quite a bit to get them into an hour or an hour and a half.  The Tenth Victim is a terrible movie but that ballistic brassiere ...

I tried searching for the word: caspetitious    found here: Did you really mean: capricious (Google) or captious (Bing) ?   Why no, if I had meant something other than caspetitious I would have entered it, right ? This is the only link Google found: https://s3.us-west-1.wasabisys.com/luminist/EB/O-P-Q/Pohl_ed%20-%20Assignment%20in%20tomorrow.pdf Which happens to be a link to the same story I was reading but the title is different: The Frightened Tree , page 163.   Here is the one I was reading:  Protective Mimicry , page 37, February 1953 issue of Galaxy Magazine : https://archive.org/details/galaxymagazine-1953-02 I have mentioned the Luminist archives before: https://wb9kzy.blogspot.com/2023/08/luministorg.html Here is a link to the Luminist site:   https://www.luminist.org/archives/ Plenty of reading material on Luminist. So what does caspetitious mean ?  There is a word: cespititious: Since it's only 2 letters different let's say Galaxy made ...

This morning I heard a snippet of a Dimension X old time radio show.  From July 12, 1951: Time and Time Again .  Usually I don't care for time travel stories but this was an interesting one.  Most of the Dimension X and X-1 shows were derived from short stories which appeared in Science Fiction pulp magazines.  Time and Time Again was written by H. Beam Piper and was published in the April 1947 issue of Astounding magazine: I *did* notice E. A. Van Vogt on the cover :)  So I find the first page of Time and Time Again : But on the facing page I saw this: Even in 1947 these two things were present: mistakes and humorous acknowledgement of those mistakes. :) BTW here is an mp3 of the Dimension X episode: https://www.oldtimeradiodownloads.com/sci-fi/dimension-x/time-and-time-again-1951-07-12  Here is the April 1947 issue of Astounding  magazine: https://archive.org/details/Astounding_v39n02_1947-04_AK/mode/2up  Best Regards, Chuck, WB9KZY http://...

The 1950s and 1960s had a LOT of fiction written about nuclear war.  Recently I encountered what I thought was the most effective piece of fiction on the subject:  Tomorrow !  by Philip Wylie.  This takes the form of an Old Time Radio show (for the Civil Defense) from 1956: https://archive.org/details/otr_civildefensewithorsonwelles It's really a well done program - and as you might expect it does come with a "commercial" for Civil Defense.  The cast includes Orson Welles as the narrator and Marshall Thompson (who I remember as Daktari on 1960s TV) as a character named Chuck Connor.  Maybe being a radio show makes it more effective with excellent original music and a really annoying siren over some of the dialog.   The book is available on Archive although I haven't read it yet: https://archive.org/details/tomorrow-philip-wylie-288-f-ocr As I say there are a bunch of shows and books on this subject but this one was worth an hour of my time.  I lis...

I remember a Bradbury story where a spaceship flies close to the Sun and then extends a ladle to scoop up some of the Sun.  It was called: The Golden Apples of the Sun here is the wiki on the book the story was published in: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Golden_Apples_of_the_Sun the story can be read here (page 23):    https://archive.org/details/PlanetStoriesV06N03195311/page/n22/mode/1up As was always the case with Bradbury, his stories are heavy on the poetic, lighter on the science but still Science Fiction :) But on Christmas Eve 2024 the Parker Solar Probe is going to do something similar to the ship in Bradbury's story: actually fly close enough to the Sun to make measurements on the origin of the solar wind.  Here is an article about the Parker Solar Probe by Eric Berger on the Ars site: https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/12/were-about-to-fly-a-spacecraft-into-the-sun-for-the-first-time/ This is as close as anyone has ever gotten to realizing the imaginat...

Recently Youtube recommended this video: source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bO9oSyR-5UM I never heard of Judy-Lynn del Rey before.  A very interesting video.  Although I have them packed away somewhere, over the years I've bought many of the Science Fiction books that she edited - including the novelization of the first Star Wars movie. Anyway, a really unexpected and delightful video. Best Regards, Chuck, WB9KZY http://wb9kzy.com/ham.htm

This is a really cool article: https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/07/were-building-thermonuclear-spaceships-again-this-time-for-real/ DRACO from NASA/DARPA source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_thermal_rocket Atomic spaceships cruising the solar system !  Just like in the Heinlein stories - I recently listened to The Green Hills of Earth: https://archive.org/details/xminusoneotr/X_Minus_One-The_Green_Hills_of_Earth.mp3 where the hero is blinded by radiation from an atomic rocket motor. Best Regards, Chuck, WB9KZY http://wb9kzy.com/ham.htm