Birthdays
Chris Columbus b. 1958 (Gremlins, Harry Potter)
Harry Groener b. 1951 (Star Trek: The Next Generation, Buffy the Vampire Slayer)
Edmond O’Brien b. 1915 died 9 May 1985 (1984, Fantastic Voyage)
Robert Wise b. 1914 died 14 September 2005 (Star Trek: The Motion Picture, The Andromeda Strain, The Day the Earth Stood Still)
Two guys known for their work in front of the camera and two guys known for their work behind it today in the birthday list, and I give the Picture Slot to Robert Wise, though probably his best known work are two musicals West Side Story and The Sound of Music.
Best wishes to the living.
Movies released
Resident Evil: Afterlife released, 2010
Back in the day, I wrote video games for a living, but I am not that loyal to the genre. I don't even known how many Resident Evil computer games or movies have been made and I have no intention of ever playing or watching even one.
Prediction:10 Sept, 1988: Gabriel Weltstein, newly arrived in New York City, begins to write a series of letters to his brother Heinrich in Uganda. The population of New York City is 10,000,000, the largest city that has ever been in the world.
Predictor: Caesar's Column by Ignatius Donnelly (writing as Edmund Boisgilbert, M.D.), published 1890
Reality: New York was just over 7,000,000 in the late 1980s and is not the largest city in the world by population, well behind several cities in Asia and even Mexico City.
Caesar's Column was an "answer novel" to Edward Bellamy's popular work Looking Backward: 2000-1888. We will be getting another exact date prediction from Bellamy later this week. Looking Backward saw a socialist utopia, while Caesar's Column saw a dystopia of a corrupt wealthy class and the downtrodden masses. Donnelly was a successful writer in his day, but little remembered now. His most famous invention is the lost continent of Atlantis. While I can't be certain of his motives, he wrote Caesar's Column under a pen name probably to avoid the controversy that would arise from the book's deeply anti-Semitic nature. The cruel rich are almost entirely Jewish and even the uprising against them is seen as being incapable of Christian charity because the second in command is a Jew. As for a tale of exciting adventure, I'd give this one a pass. The hero is just too damned stupid to live, but the author lets him live anyway.
Not my favorite hours of research for this blog.
Looking one day ahead... INTO THE FUTURE!
We are back to our regularly scheduled weekly fare tomorrow, another prediction about the 21st Century from T. Baron Russell, who was writing from the perspective of an Edwardian gentleman in 1905 London.
Join us then... IN THE FUTURE!
I remember when Andromeda Strain first came out, I was fascinated with the labs and computers. Watching now is like watching film of the Wright Brothers first flight.
ReplyDeleteI remember Colossus: The Forbin Project. They used an IBM 1620 console with a few added knobs and flashing lights. People in the industry knew the 1620 was a slow and clunky machine, not the terrifying "supercomputer" that would eventually rule the world.
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