13 October 2013

Birthdays
Katia Winter b. 1983 (Sleepy Hollow)
Ashanti b. 1980 (Resident Evil, Buffy)
Jennifer Sky b. 1976 (Buffy, Xena, Cleopatra 2525)
Sacha Baron Cohen b. 1971 (Hugo)
Christopher Judge b. 1964 (Stargate, The Dark Knight Rises)
Hiro Kanagawa b. 1962 (Arrow, Caprica, The Day the Earth Stood Still, Smallville, Millennium [TV Series] )
Wayne Pygram b. 1959 (Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith, Farscape)
Chris Carter b. 1956 (writer, The X-Files)
John Lone b. 1952 (Iceman)
William Zappa b. 1948 (Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior)
Melinda Dillon b. 1939 (Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Harry and the Hendersons)

Long birthday list, everybody is still alive (yay!), and a tough decision for the Picture Slot. I would argue the biggest name in terms of genre is the writer Chris Carter and the biggest name in terms of show business in general is Sacha Baron Cohen. I could also go with Christopher Judge or Wayne Pygram because their characters are part of the iconic look of Stargate and Farscape respectively. I instead went with Jennifer Sky, not only because of the Pretty Girl = Picture Slot rule (d'uh!), but she also wrote an interesting op-ed in The New York Times last month about how much of an influence it was on her life to get a role on Xena: Warrior Princess.

Movies released
Strange Days released 1995

We will get some predictions from Strange Days later in the year, since the movie gives not only a year when it takes place, but also exact days, the end of 1999 and the beginning of 2000.

Prediction: December, 2001: Benjamin Driscoll, something like the Johnny Appleseed of Mars, plants trees with the intention of making the atmosphere more oxygen rich. The trees sprout to full height by the time he wakes up the next morning.

Predictor: Ray Bradbury in The Martian Chronicles, published in 1950

Reality: I remember way back on The Simpsons when Bart ran for class president against the chubby nerd Martin Prince. Martin's campaign promise was that the library would be stocked with the ABCs of science fiction, Asimov, Bester and Clarke.

His sickly little pal pipes up. "What about Ray Bradbury?"

Martin looks at his friend dismissively. "I'm familiar with his work."

Martin is representing the people who call the genre "SF" instead of "sci-fi", the people who like more science with their fiction. (Neil DeGrasse Tyson put out a tornado of tweets last week blasting the science of Gravity, but ended saying he still enjoyed it.) Bradbury was a storyteller, not a scientist, and in many chapters of The Martian Chronicles, it shows. A lot.

Looking one day ahead... INTO THE FUTURE!

An exact date from H.G. Wells, not from The Shape of Things to Come and technically not from the future even from his point of view, but I'm letting that slide this time.

Join us then... IN THE FUTURE!