Thursday Detritus

The rains have cleared away, leaving cold air in their wake. This pattern will keep repeating in the coming months, getting successively colder until snow replaces rain and mere cold air is a polar vortex or some such. Bah. At least the trees are coloring up nicely.

An open question for YouTube: how, in the age of digital spying on consumers — so I hear — can YouTube offer me such wildly off-the-mark ads? Lately I’ve been getting a lot of anti-vapping ads, for instance. Aimed at teenagers. Not, I have to add, ahead of much content that that demographic might watch on YouTube. The chances of me taking up vapping are pretty close to zero, YouTube.

Some time ago I picked up a copy of The Shipping News by Annie Proulx (1993) for $1 at Half Price Books. Now I’m reading it. It’s a good read and there are some good lines in it. Here’s one that helps introduce a character:

For the devil had long ago taken a shine to Tert Card, filled him like a cream horn with itch and irritation.

One of the author’s idiosyncrasies is constructions like that, with “filled” instead of “filling.” But you get used to it, and it works. That’s a wonderful sentence that pretty much sets the tone for Tert Card. We’ve all met people like that.

From a press release over the transom the other day, a subject I have no professional interest in. I’m more interested in how the thing was written. I suspect the writer is a fairly fluent but nevertheless non-native speaker of English (all sic):

Businessmen hailing from UAE have an interest in making some investments in Armenia. The trade turnover in between the two countries has risen 10-folks from twenty-five million to about 250 million USD in the last five years as told by Zaki Nusseibeh, the Minister of the State after the sidelines of the ministerial conference of 17th Francophonie summit…

After Ruddigore on Saturday, Ann wanted ice cream. At about 10 in the evening in Evanston, Andy’s Frozen Custard seemed the only place still open serving something close to ice cream. She agreed that was close enough, so we went.
That image doesn’t have many people in it, but not long after we got there, the place was packed. Seems that selling frozen custard late on Saturday evenings near a major university is a pretty good business.

I’d never been to Andy’s before. Turns out there are about 60 of them, mostly scattered around the central U.S., though as far north as metro Chicago and as far south as central Florida. Andy’s makes a good frozen treat. Too good, in fact. I should have gotten a small triple chocolate instead of a medium.

Who did the score for Doctor Zhivago? I found myself wondering that yesterday. Maybe that’s something I should know, but I looked it up: Maurice Jarre.

That came to mind because I’d turned on the TV and DZ was playing. In fact, the very scene in which Yuri and Lara reunited. The Lara’s theme leitmotif was part of the action. I watched about 15 minutes of it.

“What’s this movie about?” Ann asked. I had to think. It’s been how long since I’ve seen it? In the summer of ’81 at the Texas Union Theatre, or in Japan in the early ’90s, when I saw so many movies on VHS? Either way, over 25 years ago.

“Well, let’s see. Doctor Zhivago, that’s him there, Omar Sharif. He’s a doctor of course, and he has a wife. He likes her well enough, but he really loves this other woman, who’s on screen now. I don’t remember who played her. Anyway, there’s a love triangle and they all get caught up in the Russian Revolution and are often in danger. Bolsheviks show up. Zhivago’s also a poet and sensitive fellow. He spends a lot of time looking off in the distance. And there’s a lot of scenery. Wide shots of the steppes of Russia. It’s an epic of a movie. Did I mention that it’s over three hours long? It’s an epic of epic proportions.”

Despite my flip description, I remember liking the movie whenever I saw it. Odd how details of most movies you see or books you read or music you hear or places you go tend to evaporate over the years, leaving a residue like the one I told to Ann.

Never have read Pasternak, so I don’t even have a residue of the book. Maybe I should, but life is short and Russian novels are long. The most recent one I read, a few years ago, was August 1914. Pretty soon into it, I gave up trying to keep track of all of the many characters.

Maurice Jarre, I learned, is the father of Jean-Michel Jarre, known to me for Oxygène. Back when people had record collections, there was always one kid on each floor of each dorm at your college who had unusual records, things no one else had ever heard of. I can’t remember the lad’s name, but he was on my hall freshman year, and that was one of the records he had.

Ruddigore

On Saturday, Ann and I went to see Ruddigore by the same troupe that did The Pirates of Penzance last year, the Savoyaires, who do their shows at a junior high auditorium in Evanston. Musical direction by Timothy Semanik, stage direction by Kingsley Day.

Except for the hard seats, it was a good time. I understand that the work was originally the followup to The Mikado, which must have been a hard act to follow, but Ruddigore was topsy-turvy fun anyway, as Gilbert & Sullivan tends to be. Probably it helps that we have no reason, more than a century later, to compare one work too closely to another that happened to come just before it.

Ann said it was enjoyable too, partly because the story wasn’t quite as convoluted as the other productions she’s seen. Not that the story’s ever the main thing, but as she said, it was nice to be able to keep track of the characters.

All of the main cast acquitted themselves well. I was particularly fond of the energy that Jonathan Joseph Larson, a large man with a large beard, brought to the sailor Richard Dauntless, and Lane Halverson’s amusing performance of the relatively small part of Old Adam, Robin Oakapple’s faithful servant. He has his moment when he’s tasked to abduct a maiden.

There were some laughs. Maybe not as many as in Patience, especially when the Duke of Dunstable emerged in pink tights, but even chuckles are impressive in a work that’s more than 130 years old. Some clever lines I chuckled at:

RICH. And I make bold to ax your honour’s advice. Does your honour know what it is to have a heart?
SIR D. My honour knows what it is to have a complete apparatus for conducting the circulation of the blood through the veins and arteries of the human body.

ROB. My good sir, if I can’t disinherit my own unborn son, whose unborn son can I disinherit?
SIR ROD. Humph! These arguments sound very well, but I can’t help thinking that, if they were reduced to syllogistic form, they wouldn’t hold water.

MAR. Listen – I’ve come to pinch her!
ROSE. Mercy, whom?
MAR. You mean “who.”
ROSE. Nay! It is the accusative after the verb.

Of course, no joke about grammar is as funny as this.

Mass Entertainment

Here’s a list I spent some time with recently: Wiki’s List of highest-grossing media franchises. Being Wiki, there’s no telling how accurate it is, but I will note that there are an enormous number of notes and references. So I’ll take it as accurate enough.

The list is interesting for a number of reasons, but mainly for information on the high-grossing franchises I’ve never heard of, which are quite a few.

Most of them are Japanese: anime, manga, even franchises whose most profitable expression is pachinko machines. As far as I could tell from my years in Japan, pachinko parlors were insanely bright, intensely noisy places to throw away money. But I was just a barbarian outsider. Apparently the machines are branded, and the branding is big business.

Take Fist of the North Star which, originating way back in 1983, would have been around when I was in Japan. I’d never heard of it until today. Though starting as manga, the franchise has enjoyed nearly $16.8 billion in pachinko machine sales, plus a few billion more in manga and other games.

Pachinko, incidentally, comes up 13 times on the list. Most of those are Japanese franchises, but not all. There have been $2.85 billion in Disney Aladdin pachinko (and arcade) machines sold. Spider-Man pachinko machines are popular to the tune of $308 million in sales, and Tomb Raider has sold $300 million.

I was curious how many of the franchises I’ve supported, either for myself or my children, so I counted: more than I would have thought, about 50. That includes mostly through ticket sales, as well as small-screen viewing (at least occasionally), but also the quarters I spent on Pac-Man and Space Invaders, and things my daughters watched that I never would, such as Sailor Moon and Dora the Explorer.

Mass-market entertainment’s pervasive. Even when your tastes tend to run to less successful shows.

The Milwaukee Theatre

On October 14, 1912, former President Theodore Roosevelt took a bullet in the chest at the Gilpatrick Hotel in Milwaukee, but went on to deliver his presidential campaign speech at the Milwaukee Auditorium across the street soon afterward.

“Friends, I shall ask you to be as quiet as possible,” TR said. “I don’t know whether you fully understand that I have just been shot; but it takes more than that to kill a Bull Moose. But fortunately I had my manuscript, so you see I was going to make a long speech, and there is a bullet — there is where the bullet went through — and it probably saved me from it going into my heart.”

In later years, especially during an early 21st-century renovation, the Milwaukee Auditorium evolved into the Milwaukee Theatre, which is officially the Miller High Life Theatre these days, because beer money bought the naming rights recently.
Never mind that. What I want to know is, where is the plaque commemorating TR’s speech?

Maybe there is one, but I didn’t see it. Or why didn’t our tour guide through the theater on Saturday mention this remarkable event? I knew the story of the attempted assassination, but didn’t connect it with the Milwaukee Theatre until today.

In any case, the theater looks like a first-rate venue, seating more than 4,000. The view from the stage.

Here’s the view from the stage when space aliens started kidnapping people standing there, via tractor beams (and how do those work, anyway?).

Or maybe I jiggled the camera during a relatively long exposure.

We toured other parts of the venue as well, including the elegant side halls Kilbourn and Plankinton — named for long-ago donors — with the former decorated by murals depicting Milwaukee history. We also saw the green room.

Where Miller High Life Theatre-themed cupcakes were offered for our refreshment. I have to say that’s something I’d never seen before.
You’d think a light shade of green would be the thing for the green room walls, for tradition’s sake, but no. Then again, I’ve read it isn’t clear that most green rooms ever were really green. Just another phrase origin lost to time.

Next to the theater is the UW–Milwaukee Panther Arena, which seats as many as 12,700. That too was open for the Doors Open Milwaukee event.

These days the arena is home to the Milwaukee Panthers men’s basketball team of the NCAA, as well as the Brewcity Bruisers, a roller derby league based in Milwaukee. For the record, the Bruisers are a member of the Women’s Flat Track Derby Association.

I Am What I Am, Even on Thursdays

Something else I snapped while on foot downtown Chicago last week: the front of the I AM Temple on W. Washington St.

I didn’t go in. A sign on the door says ring bell and wait for someone. I prefer my religious sites to be self-service.

The organization’s HQ happens to be in the northwest suburbs, not downtown. Without digressing into detail — a foray into the rabbit hole, that is — it’s enough to say that, according to Britannica, “I AM movement, theosophical movement founded in Chicago in the early 1930s by Guy W. Ballard (1878–1939), a mining engineer, and his wife, Edna W. Ballard (1886–1971)…. Ballard claimed that in 1930 during a visit to Mount Shasta (a dormant volcano in northern California), he was contacted by St. Germain, one of the Ascended Masters of the Great White Brotherhood.”

Is it possible that Popeye is a prophet of this movement? After all, he appeared ca. 1930 and was known to say, “I yam what I yam.”

Also, why are rabbit holes a metaphor for endless, bewildering complications? Are rabbit holes that complex? Maybe warrens are, but that isn’t the way the saying goes. Wouldn’t ant nests or prairie dog towns be more suitable?

Another day, another stash of Roman coins dug up in Italy. Late Roman imperial era, the article says.

Bonus: they were gold coins. That’s something I’d like to find in the basement, though strictly speaking, we don’t have a basement. Roman gold-coin hordes must be pretty scarce in the New World, anyway.

Late Roman imperial era, eh? I can imagine it: “Quick, find a place to bury the gold! The Visigoths are coming! We’ll come back for it later.”

The event probably wasn’t that dramatic, but someone put the horde there, presumably not to lose track of it — but they did, for 1,500 or more years. Distant posterity is the beneficiary.

Strictly by coincidence, Ann and I watched the first episode of I, Claudius last weekend, which is available on disk (but not on demand: what kind of world is this?). Been a long time since I’ve seen it. Early ’90s, I think, as it was available in Japan on VHS. I also saw it when I was roughly Ann’s age, on PBS when it was pretty new.

The other day I used bifurcation in an article. That’s more common in business writing than one might think, since it’s sometimes used to describe markets dividing in some way or other (often, winners and losers). It’s also I word I can never remember how to spell, so I always look it up.

Google has replaced a trip to a dictionary as the default for spelling. Sad to say, since the possibility of lateral learning is rife while thumbing through a dictionary. Many times in earlier years I spied an entry, not the one I was looking for, and thought, I didn’t know that word.

Then again, there can be sideways learning with Google. If you let it. Not satisfied with mere spelling, I fed “bifurcation” into Google News to see what would happen. Every single hit on the first page linked to items in the Indian English-language media.

From the Times of India:

GMDA can’t plan drain bifurcation now, say greens

Bifurcate HC too: Centre backs Telangana’s petition in SC

Bifurcation of Badshapur drain on cards to avert flooding in Hero …

From The Hindu:

‘Telangana drawing water from NSP without KRMB approval’

Demand for bifurcation of municipal corporation getting stronger

From the New Indian Express:

Centre to expedite High Court bifurcation: Vinod Kumar

Clearly, the word gets more mileage on the Subcontinent than in this country.

Thursday Plattero-filleto-mulleto-turboto-cranio-morselo-pickleo-acido-silphio-honeyo-pouredonthetopo-theouzelo-throstleo-cushato-culvero-cutleto-roastingo-marowo-dippero-leveret-syrupu-gibleto-wings.

Just having fun with the head. As I did a few years ago. It’s one of the English translations of the Greek, which is transliterated lopado­temacho­selacho­galeo­kranio­leipsano­drim­hypo­trimmato­silphio­parao­melito­katakechy­meno­kichl­epi­kossypho­phatto­perister­alektryon­opte­kephallio­kigklo­peleio­lagoio­siraio­baphe­tragano­pterygon.

I didn’t even have to find my copy of the Book of Lists to find it. All I did was Google “long Greek word leftovers,” and I found it right away.

Considering that it’s the “first day of summer,” it’s pretty cool and rainy around here. That’s nonsense anyway. It’s the Summer Solstice. That’s all.

Saw a few fireflies early in the week, but not since. They’re just the early ones. Around here most of them show up in July.

Not sure whether the rain pleases the toads or not, but I’ve seen some lately.

Something I didn’t know until recently that I found out in my work: the Seminole Tribe of Florida owns Hard Rock Cafe Inc. Since 2007. I probably should have known that, but I didn’t.

Not long ago I sat down with Ann and watched the 2011 Captain America movie on DVD. I’m rarely in the mood for comic book movies, but I thought I’d give it a go.

Not bad. I thought the best idea — which might be true to the comic, I have no clue — was that Captain America, after his conversion by Science from a 98-lb. weakling into a super-soldier, spent much of WWII on bond tours.

Then, of course, through an insane convergence of circumstances, Captain America got to defeat the badies in pitched CGI battles, be sad about his buddy’s death, and fall in love with a tough-but-tenderhearted British bombshell. Right, whatever. That’s what the 15-year-old boys (and some girls) paid to see.

I would have preferred a movie about a fellow who spends the war doing over-the-top patriotic shows, in a ridiculous costume, to sell bonds. He wouldn’t even have to be sad about his situation. Just before V-E Day, he could accidentally take a few hundred Germans prisoner, something like Don Knotts might have. It could be a comedy. That kind of thinking is what I get for not being a 15-year-old boy for a good many decades now.

Space Odyssey

I’m much of my way through reading Space Odyssey by Michael Benson, which was released this year in time for the 50th anniversary of 2001. The book is subtitled “Stanley Kubrick, Arthur C. Clarke, and the Making of a Masterpiece.”

The book doesn’t pretend to be a biography of either Kubrick or Clarke, but a tale of creating the movie, beginning with the extended deliberations by Kubrick about what to do after Dr. Strangelove and the critical ideas Clarke contributed to the genesis and eventual shape of the movie, and taking the story through production, post-production and release, all of which were behind schedule and over budget.

Both Kubrick and Clarke come across as towering intellects, which no doubt they were, but with certain flaws. If he thought it was good for the end product, Kubrick was perfectly willing to take advantage of Clarke or put his actors in danger on the set. For his part, Clarke couldn’t stand up to Kubrick, or say no to a money-sucking leech of a lover, though eventually his association with the project made him wealthy indeed (indirectly, because he had no points in the movie itself).

Since movie-making is such a collaborative effort, a lot of other contributors to the ultimate outcome make appearances in the book. Each is fascinating in his own way, such as the very young man who shot highly kinetic scenes from a helicopter over Scotland, for part of the Star Gate sequence; the mime who choreographed the movements for — and played — the lead ape-man in the Dawn of Man sequence; the designer who built the astonishing centrifuge set; or the stuntman who did the incredibly risky shots of astronaut Poole floating in space.

Perhaps the most astonishing thing about the movie that the book makes clear is how much of 2001 — a multimillion-dollar project with a large staff — was essentially made up on the fly by Kubrick. A fair number of bad ideas were winnowed out along the way, and good ideas came from various and unexpected sources, all of which the director wasn’t shy about using.

I’ve gotten to the chapter that describes the filming of the Dawn of Man. Reading about that process in detail reminds me of the reaction to the movie by someone I recommended it to years ago (in college in fact). He wasn’t impressed by 2001 or its mystique. Afterward, one of the things he asked me was, “What were those damned monkeys doing?”

The Producers

Remarkably, Ann wanted to see The Producers, so we went this afternoon. Another movie released in 1968, but about as different as can be from 2001. She seemed amused by it.

I had given her the gist of the story — the producers schemed to pick a play that would certainly fail, so they could keep the over-subscribed investment, and then it doesn’t fail. I think she had wanted some context for “Springtime for Hitler,” which she must have seen on YouTube (probably the 2005 version, though).

I don’t think I spoiled anything by telling her that. The joy of The Producers is in the execution. In the good many years since I saw it last, I’d forgotten how much fun the movie is. And how much is slapstick. It in the hands of lesser actors and a lesser director, it would have just been low comedy. With Mel Brooks and Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder and Kenneth Mars, what you have is inspired low comedy. For his part, Mars’ loopy German might be the best ever put on film.

As funny as the leads were, I have to say I laughed the hardest at Lorenzo St. DuBois (L.S.D.)’s audition song, as performed by Dick Shawn. Known, according to Wiki, for “small but iconic roles in madcap comedies, usually portraying caricatures of counter culture personalities.” He certainly nailed the dimwitted hippie in The Producers.

Somehow I’d forgotten that he was wearing a can of Campbell’s Soup around his neck during the audition. Nice detail. Ann didn’t ask me about it, and maybe she just considered it a passing oddity. But it was pretty clear to me that Mel Brooks, already entering middle age in 1968, didn’t think much of hippies, Pop Art, Timothy Leary, etc. The rest of the audience — mostly my age or older — got the joke, and laughed a lot at L.S.D’s antics, too.

Something I didn’t know until I did a little reading: Estelle Winwood, who played one of the old women Zero Mostel dallies with to get money for his plays — the one with the most lines — had a long career, acting well into her 90s, and living to be 101. She also was associated with the Algonquin Round Table.

Speaking of longevity, since it was a TCM showing, the movie was proceeded by a recent short interview with Mel Brooks. He’s a hale fellow for 91.

2001 at the Music Box

Just before the screening of 2001: A Space Odyssey at the Music Box Theatre in Chicago at noon on Saturday, one of the theater’s managers spent a few minutes telling us what to expect. Not in terms of content — it was a safe assumption that most (but not all) of the audience had seen the movie sometime in the last 50 years — but that there would be a few minutes of introductory music to a dark screen, and an intermission.

She also mentioned that the Music Box was one of a relatively small number of movie theaters nationwide equipped to screen the new 70 mm print of 2001. Interesting that a neighborhood jewel box of a theater from the 1920s has the latest movie screening tech.

I’d read about the new print. It was made recently from the original negatives, the goal of which wasn’t to clean up the images or digitally goose the movie, but to re-create as closely as possible what an audience would have seen in 1968. When I read about that, I knew I wanted to see it, even though I’ve seen the movie n times over the years.

For one thing, it had been a long time since I’d seen 2001 in a movie theater. I know I did at some point in the early ’70s, when I was old enough to be dropped off at a movie theater, the Broadway Theater in Alamo Heights, but not old enough to drive there myself. I saw it again at some mall theater during high school, after which I read Arthur C. Clarke’s book. In college, I saw it a few more times, at the Vanderbilt student cinema, and I think at an early multiplex in San Antonio during an early ’80s summertime revival.

Since then, I’ve seen it on VHS, DVD and on demand, but not in a theater. I was miffed that TCM didn’t pick it for its big screen series this year for the 50th anniversary, while choosing to show entertaining but lesser moves like Big and Grease. But maybe that’s because the 70 mm version was in the offing elsewhere (including Cannes, where it was first shown not long ago).

More than wanting to see 2001 in a theater, I was intrigued by the idea that it would look like it did 50 years ago. I wasn’t old enough to see it then. I’ll never have the experience of seeing it when it was just a strange new movie — no one ever will again — before it worked its way into the common culture, inspiring volumes of interpretation and giving us an unshakable image of a killer sentient computer with an unctuous voice. Still, this would be as close as I’d get to an original showing.

Ann went with me. Yuriko did not want to go and Lilly had a conflict. The Music Box wasn’t full for the showing, but there was a fair crowd, and not everyone was my age or older. The 70 mm “unrestored” print didn’t disappoint. It also showed, if there was ever any doubt, that 2001‘s special effects were special indeed, from the closest foreground to the furthest background.

Odd how those model spaceships, on actual celluloid, look more real than any GCI spaceships I’ve seen in a digital medium. That observation might be conditioning left over from my youth, or valid for most people, or meaningless all together. I don’t care. That’s what I see.

I noticed a few imperfections in the print: a scratch or two, minor pops of light, that kind of thing. That took me back. Do I remember right that probably as late as the 1980s, movies displayed those kinds of visual ticks?

Speaking of visuals, one new thing that occurred to me during this viewing, and there’s always something new each time, was the visual debt that some of the backgrounds owed to Chesley Bonestell and Luděk Pešek. For instance, a long shot showing the vertical landing of the ship that took Dr. Floyd to the Moon, with unrelated astronauts in spacesuits in the foreground, instantly brought Bonestell to mind — this time. You’d think I’d have noticed that before.

The soundtrack was loud. Except when it wasn’t. At first I thought that was a function of the more advanced sound systems of our time compared with 1968, and so not quite like an original audience would have experienced it. Now I’m not so sure.

“The team also went back to the original six-track soundtrack and faithfully transferred it to the new prints,” the Variety article notes. “ ‘The film is mixed in a very extreme way,’ [director Christopher] Nolan says with awe. ‘There are incredible sonic peaks that are beyond anything anyone would do today.’ ”

Sonic peaks from the get-go, I’d say, as the heavens align to the “Also sprach Zarathustra” fanfare. But for me the most startling sonic peak comes when HAL decides to murder the hibernating astronauts. The cut is from the quiet of the spaceship while Bowman is out retrieving Poole’s body to a sudden, full-screen, flashing COMPUTER MALFUNCTION accompanied by a loud beeping. Louder, I believe, than in other versions of the film. I heard at least one audience member gasp when the scene started.

As well she should have. In my earliest viewings of the movie, that scene disturbed me the most. Sure, you can say HAL went just a little funny in the head because of contradictory programming. Or maybe he was just an evil bastard willing to murder people in their sleep. You know, like some people are. I’m hardly alone in noting that HAL was pretty much the most human member of the crew, for better and definitely worse.

Then again, the sound wasn’t always loud, or even quite intelligible. The more-or-less idle chitchat on the space station at the very beginning of the spoken dialog was a little hard to hear. Everything is intentional in a Kubrick movie, so I suppose that fits with the movie’s well-known lack of exposition.

That was one of the few things I told Ann before the movie. I didn’t want to over-prepare her, but I did say that obtrusive exposition wasn’t one of the movie’s characteristics. Had there been voice-over narration — the original script apparently called for that — I believe that would count as obtrusive, and the movie wouldn’t be regarded as highly. I never did quite like the brief narration at the beginning of Dr. Strangelove, though I can see why it’s there.

Here’s something I never noticed in the soundtrack. Again, during the idle chitchat at the beginning, there’s a background PA voice announcing the following. Twice.

A blue lady’s cashmere sweater has been found in the restaurant. It can be claimed at the manager’s desk.

How did I never hear that before? It popped out at me this time. Maybe that’s a function of the new print. Or maybe it’s just one of those things tucked inside a densely layered work of art that isn’t noticeable early on.

Later, the PA says: Will Mr. Travers please contact the met office.

Whatever that is. Interesting detail, those PA announcements. As if to show that by the end of the 20th century, space travel will have some of the ordinariness of air travel in 1968. Many of the space station details — the customs screening, the restaurant, the phone call — point to that.

Guess that counts as 1968 optimism about the future of space travel. It’s easy to deride that in hindsight, but it wouldn’t have been completely unreasonable at the time. We were well on the way to the Moon, for one thing.

After that would come large space stations, Moon bases, voyages to Mars and rocket engines and spaceships large enough to mount an expedition to Jupiter in 18 months. The idea that extensive space travel would be part of the near future had jumped out of speculative fiction into the realm of serious expectation. Turned out no one wanted to pay for those things, but that was still in the future.

The movie is not, on the other hand, optimistic about future of politics, as you’d expect from Kubrick. That’s another thing that occurred to me for the first time. It’s only hinted at, but the hints are pretty clear. Mainly, the movie assumes that political bureaucracies will be the same prevaricating, susicious entities they’ve long been.

Dr. Floyd is either an important official of the U.S. government, or in a quasi-governmental body, but in any case the lid is slammed down on the discovery of the monolith on the Moon. He offers the official, and secret, reason.

Floyd: I accept the need for absolute secrecy in this and I hope you will too. Now, I’m sure you’re all aware of the extremely grave potential for cultural shock and social disorientation contained in this present situation if the facts were prematurely and suddenly made public without adequate preparation and conditioning. Anyway, this is the view of the council.

Eighteen months later, the monolith is still a secret, even from the astronauts going to investigate where the radio beam pointed. Talk about paranoid secrecy. It’s almost Soviet in its reach.

Floyd expresses the idea, which isn’t unusual in science fiction, that the discovery of extraterrestrials would somehow cause “cultural shock and social disorientation.” Not just science fiction. I seem to remember discussion along those lines — a “fundamental change” in our thinking or some such, if not shock or disorientation — as far back as when the Vikings were digging unsuccessfully for microbes on Mars.

I’m skeptical that any such thing would happen. Say we discovered an alien artifact tomorrow. Something indisputable, except that there would be a group of fools that disputes it anyway. But let’s say most people accepted it for good reasons.

Then what? Assuming the artifact isn’t attacking us or producing pathogens, nothing too dramatic. The reaction would be, how about that. Someone is out there. How interesting. Maybe over the course of decades or centuries, the discovery would change the way we think, but for most people in the here and now, it would be a curiosity. Our lives would go on. Besides, we’ve already been conditioning ourselves, in books and movies and TV and more, to the possibility of aliens for years.

Overall, I’d say 2001 is optimistic, assuming a certain common interpretation of the movie. After much travail — it is an odyssey, after all — mankind does reach for the next level of development, just as the ape-men did.

One more thing I thought about for the first time this time around: Why no redundancy for HAL? The astronauts talk about shutting down HAL and resuming the mission using Earth-based computers, which would certainly be a clunky way to go about it at that distance. And mission control mentions “twin” 9000 series computers at its disposal. So why weren’t at least two HAL-class computers built into the Discovery? In case, you know, one fails in some way, such as trying to go all HAL on the crew.

A nit to pick. After it was over, Ann seemed impressed, and had some questions and observations. She did sleep through some of the movie, though. Especially those long scenes outside the spacecraft.

She may or may not grow to like 2001 as much as I do. It’s an acquired taste, and not for everyone. But I’m glad she went.

Trans-Pecos & Llano Estacado 3,600+ Mile Drive Tidbits

Along U.S. 90, not far west of the town of Comstock, Texas, the road crosses the Pecos River. The east end of the bridge has a place to stop and take in the view. This is looking upriver.

Downriver, toward the Pecos’ meeting with the Rio Grande.

Hard to believe there’s that much water in West Texas. Anyway, the river (of course) marks the beginning of the Trans-Pecos.

One of the grand hospitality properties of the Trans-Pecos is the Gage Hotel in Marathon, originally developed in 1927 by West Texas cattle baron Alfred Gage (born in Vermont), and designed by El Paso architect Henry Trost. Fifty years later, Houston businessman J.P. Bryan bought the rundown property and made it into a modern boutique hotel.

I didn’t stay at the Gage, though I had a good meal there and used its wifi. Instead, I stayed at the Marathon Motel & RV Park down the road. It has all the charms of a tourist court — separate cabin-like buildings of two or four units, even a bottle opener fixed to the wall — at a more modest price than the Gage.

There is an astronomy enthusiast at the Marathon Motel in the evenings, Bob, who sets up a couple of sophisticated telescopes a short walk outside the property and shows guests the night sky, which is pretty dark out in Marathon. I spent about an hour talking with Bob and looking his scopes the first night I was there.

Trouble was, the Moon was waxing gibbous, which made the sky a lot less dark. But we looked at some easy-to-find brighter objects, such as Jupiter and some of the Galilean moons, as well as Mizar and Alcor, and tried to spot the Orion Nebula. Orion was trending toward the horizon, about to bid adieu for the warm months.

Bob said the sky would be dark again a few hours before dawn, but I didn’t get up at that time until the last morning I was at the motel. At about 5 that morning, I woke (for the usual reason), but also got dressed and wandered outside for a few minutes. Bob was right. The Moon was gone, and there was what I wanted to see, no telescope necessary — the wispy, luminous edge of the Milky Way, billions and billions of stars at a glance. It was like seeing an old friend.

Speaking of nighttime spectres, not long after I left Marfa, I stopped along U.S. 67/90 at the Marfa Mystery Lights Viewing Center, which is essentially a rest stop with extra windows in the wall.

I wasn’t about to come that way at night and wait around for a glimpse of a desert will-o’-the-wisp, so I had to be satisfied with a daytime view of the direction of the Marfa lights. Eh.

While driving along I-20 in metro Midland-Odessa, I saw an official highway sign for the Midland International Air & Space Port. What? Space port? Seems a little optimistic on the part of the local airport authority.

Indeed, in 2014 the FAA approved the airport’s application to become first primary commercial service airport to be certified as a spaceport. XCOR Aerospace was due to start flying its Lynx spaceplane from Midland, but the company went bankrupt in 2017 before that ever happened. Oops. Maybe Fireball XL5 will start using Midland International soon. (That theme song has more traction than I realized. Even Neil Gaiman did a cover; once, anyway.)

In Amarillo, I saw another kind of sign. Fake street signs. I was driving along I forget which street, and saw a diamond-shaped sign, off to the side of the road but actually on private property, that said WE CALLED HIM COUNT DRACULA. It was a non-standard color, too: black with red letters.

Huh? But I had driving to do, and other cars not to hit, so the thought passed. Sometime later, I saw another sign — different color, similarly located — that said MINE BY RIGHT OF CONQUEST.

This got me to wondering, and I actually remembered to look into these odd signs. Doesn’t take long to find image collections of the signs, which are all over Amarillo, apparently.

According to Roadtrippers Chronicles — “The Raddest Stories From The Road” — “the strange signs are part of an art installation called The Dynamite Museum. Partially funded by oil heir and patron of offbeat art Stanley Marsh 3 (most famous for his work with Ant Farm on Cadillac Ranch), there are even a few in the nearby town of Adrian (it’s said that Marsh liked the idea of putting the signs in towns that started with the letter A).

“There was no rhyme or reason to the messages on the signs; the people behind the project would come up with ideas, or vote on suggestions sent in, and then install their favorites all over town.”

If I’d known that before I went to Amarillo, I would have looked for more.

The morning I left Amarillo, I had the radio to keep me company on the open road to Oklahoma City (I-40 in our time), and for a while I got a strong signal from Turkey, Texas, to the south. That day was Bob Wills Day in Turkey, and it sounded like a big to-do. The biggest shindig of the year for the town, probably. After all, Bob Wills is still the king.

I didn’t know until I looked it up that the King of Western Swing spent some of his youth on a farm near Turkey. The town of Turkey clearly remembers him. Sounded like fun, but it was too far out of the way. Just another thing missed because of scheduling.