News and Commentary on Space
Despite all the hype about it being the Best Movie Ever Made! and The Ultimate Entertainment Experience! and whatnot, it looks like Avatar lost the Best Picture Oscar to Hurt Locker, a movie I hadn’t even heard of until about two weeks ago.
Heh. I think I just schadenfreuded.
Looks like the Disney-Pixar live-action/animation version of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ A Princess of Mars will be filmed in and around Moab, Utah, instead of Colorado.
Increasing taxes and a hostile attitude towards business from our Democrat overlords would seem to have consequences…
“Film production now is driven by incentives, and right now, Colorado is toward the bottom of that list,” said Kevin Shand, executive director of the Colorado Film Commission, explaining why Colorado lost out on the production.
“It’s the only reason films are coming to Utah,” confirmed Marshall Moore, director of Utah’s film commission.
Along with iconic desert landscapes, Utah offers a menu of tax and rebate incentives for film producers that includes a 20 percent post-production rebate or tax credit and tax rebates and exemptions on everything from film equipment to lodging. That incentive was bumped up from 15 percent last year.
Colorado has some smaller, more complicated, incentives that include up to a 10 percent rebate for out-of- state production companies that spend at least $1 million in Colorado, including at least 75 percent of payroll and 75 percent of nonpayroll expenses.
Looks like Colorado will have to make do with the Mars Science Lab and the Mars Society as its connections to the Red Planet.
I vaguely remember watching this show a couple of times when it was originally aired. I remember it being cheesy, but ye gods, I had no idea…
Like watching a Kevin Costner movie or reading a Cormac McCarthy novel, it’s so awful it makes one’s brain hurt.
I finally finished scanning all 500-odd of my uncle’s old slides yesterday, and found a couple more aerospace shots in the mix, including this:
I’m not a plane expert, but I believe this is a C-124 Globemaster II. One thing that struck me about looking at the plane from this angle is the vague resemblance to the forward fuselage of a 747 — which is interesting given that the C-124 was a Douglas product.
If anyone is interested, the scanner used is a Nikon Coolscan 5000ED with the slide autofeeder attachment. I honestly can’t say enough good about the thing.
Oh, and among the slides not related to aerospace — puppies!
(Also known as “shameless link bait”.)
While visiting family in Michigan over Thanksgiving, I happened to mention to my uncle that I had bought a slide scanner a couple of years ago, and that I had scanned in my grandfather’s (his father-in-law’s) old slides from the early 1960s. This led to him dropping off a box the next day, with around 300 slides he took in the mid-1950s, for me to take home and scan for him.
A number of them are of aerospace interest, as they show various then-current planes, including a tarmac filled with C-97 Stratofreighters and a Flying Boxcar:
What I didn’t expect was this slide:
It appears to be a shot of WWII hero and actor Audie Murphy during the filming of The Guns of Fort Petticoat, a movie taglined at IMDB thus: “GOOD WOMEN…BAD WOMEN…BRAWLING WOMEN…BRAVE WOMEN! They were all soldiers in skirts! “ I cropped the slide down to about half size, but there is a boom microphone to the right and a camera in a blimp to the left (above the shoulder of the guy in the white hat).
You just never know what you’re going to find.
Rand’s observation that the impending end of the decade, um, isn’t actually, any more than 1999 was the end of the last decade/century/millennium, dovetails in a way with an experience I had last week.
While visiting family in Michigan for Thanksgiving, I arranged to speak to my nephews’ middle school on space exploration, space settlement, and math and science. (Yes, a little shilling for Orion was involved, but mainly as an excuse to entertain the kids with cool space-y animations.) At least three times, in Q&A, the subject of the world ending in 2012 was raised.
Naturally, I explained it as a misunderstanding of the Mayan calendar and associated legends, and as a repeat of the Y2K end-of-the-world hysteria from ten years ago. Nonetheless, it was a little disappointing to have it come up at all…I blame Hollywood.
On the other hand, it would have been entertaining to see their reactions to an explanation of the Singularity, which I remember once upon a time being forecast for the same year…
This guy clearly has a lot of media cards for his camera.
More at rossching.com. And details of how he did it can be found at Digital Photography School.
What surprises me (and perhaps it shouldn’t) is that it took roughly 15,000 still frames to generate the film. I bought a Nikon D80 two and a half years ago, and since have taken it on two trips abroad, on two trips to Moab, up eight Fourteeners, on at least five significant hikes, four trips to Michigan, one cross-country trip, four moonbat rallies, two tea parties, and numerous other events, and still have only taken just shy of 14,000 pictures with it (not including RAW/jpeg pairs).
Okay, so it’s only a subset of major movies and TV shows, but this visualization of fictional time travel timelines is pretty interesting nonetheless – especially the path-crossings by unrelated time travelers and the amusing crossover movies/episodes one can imagine resulting from these “paradoxes”.
Ares 1-X is set to launch on Tuesday, weather permitting.
John Scalzi takes on the bad science/design of the Star Trek franchise.
I actually used to like ST:TNG when it was first broadcast. Nowadays, I find any manifestation of the franchise insufferable. Bad acting, lazy writing, trite speechifying, cross-episode amnesia re:new discoveries/innovations, Patrick Stewart, etc.
That said, I caught a bit of Star Wars: Episode I in the hotel on Monday evening. I thought it was pretty weak when I saw it in the theater, but seeing it again made me cringe over how godawful it really was. The “Ewan MacGregor Jinx” was strong with that one.
