13 September 2013

Birthdays
Colin Trevorrow b. 1976 (Safety Not Guaranteed)
Clyde Kusatsu b. 1948 (Star Trek: The Next Generation, Godzilla)
Frank Marshall b. 1946 (Raiders of the Lost Ark, Back to the Future, Amazing Stories)
Richard Kiel b. 1939 (The Twilight Zone, Eegah)
Don Bluth b. 1937 (The Land Before Time, The Secret of Nimh)
Barbara Bain b. 1931 (Space: 1999)
Roald Dahl b. 1916 died 23 November 1990 (Charlie and the Chocolate Factory)
Daniel Defoe b.1660 died 24 April 1731 (Memoirs of Sundry Tranactions from the World of the Moon)

On today's birthday list, only one person is younger than I am and Trevorrow's Safety Not Guaranteed is the only film or TV show on the list produced this century. As for the Cute Girl = Picture Slot rule, Barbara Bain has no competition here, but while I was looking for photos on Google, I saw this picture of her action figure, mint in box no less, and I just had to use it.

Many happy returns of the day to the living mentioned here.

Prediction: 13 September 1999: Nuclear waste stockpiled on the far side of the moon detonates in an enormous thermonuclear explosion, pushing the moon out of earth orbit and into deep space at colossal speed.

Predictor: First episode of Space: 1999, first aired 04/09/1975

Reality: Okay, multiple problems here.


1. Turning radioactive waste into a bomb doesn’t just magically happen.

2. If the storage is on the far side of the moon, any resulting force should push the moon closer to the earth, not farther away.

3. Moon = big. One big explosion could change its orbit, but knocking it out of both the earth’s and the sun’s gravitational pull would take some doing, because gravity is working 24/7.

Looking one day ahead... INTO THE FUTURE!

A new regular feature for Saturdays debuts tomorrow, with a whole mess of folks from 1893 predicting what life will look like in 1993.

Join us then... IN THE FUTURE!

 (Note: This post has been fixed. An earlier version said the first date is 13 September 2000, but it was instead 1999. I likely mistyped it in my notes, since a quick check of my usual sources for such a date all agree on the 1999 date. I also slandered Gerry and Sylvia Anderson for shoddiness when the fault was mine. While this does not improve my opinion of the show in retrospect, the error was completely mine and I apologize. I would also like to thank Tom Singleton for sending the comment that let me correct this error. I am so happy people are reading this blog and the folks who send comments have been first rate without exception.)

12 September 2013

 Birthdays
Alfie Allen b. 1986 (Game of Thrones)
Emmy Rossum b. 1986 (The Day After Tomorrow)
Hans Zimmer b. 1957 (Batman Begins, Pirate of the Caribbean, Inception, Man of Steel)
Joe Pantoliano b. 1951 (The Matrix)
Ian Holm b. 1931 (Lord of the Rings, Alien)
Freddie Jones b. 1927 (Dune, Krull)
Stanislaw Lem b. 1921 died 27 March 2006 (Solaris, The Futurological Congress)
Edward Binns b.1916 died 4 December 1990 (Twilight Zone)

While Ms. Rossum is certainly cute enough to get the Picture Slot, she only has the one role in a genre movie, so instead I lead with a picture of the author Stanislaw Lem. It does all start with the writing.

Many happy returns of the day to the living.

Prediction: 12 September, 2000: Julian West and Edith Leete listen to the 5:00 pm concert in Boston, live artists conveyed by telephone.

Predictor: Looking Backward:2000-1887 by Edward Bellamy, published 1888

Reality:  Bellamy writes his story after the invention of the telephone but before the invention of radio. Musicians in various locations are playing twenty four hours a day. There is a German chocolate postcard that extrapolates on this idea, adding a projected movie as well.

It can’t be hard to create full employment , but I don’t envy the guys playing Souza at 3:00 a.m.

Looking one day ahead... INTO THE FUTURE!

Yet another exact date, this time from a TV show that first aired in 1975.

Join us then... IN THE FUTURE!

11 September 2013

Birthdays

Ariana Richards b. 1979 (Jurassic Park, Tremors)
Virginia Madsen b. 1961 (Dune, Star Trek: Voyager)
Roxann Dawson b. 1958 (Star Trek: Voyager)
Michael Sacks b. 1948 (Slaughterhouse-Five)
Brian De Palma b. 1940(Carrie, Mission to Mars)
Charles Dierkop b. 1936 (Star Trek, Land of the Giants, Batman, Lost in Space, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea)
Ian Abercrombie b. 1934 (Army of Darkness, Jurassic Park: The Lost World, Star Trek:Voyager, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Babylon 5)
Earl Holliman b. 1928 (Forbidden Planet)
Herbert Lom b. 1917 died 27 September 2012 (Mysterious Island, Count Dracula, The Dead Zone)

While I put Ms. Dawson in The Picture Slot because her time under the turtle forehead may be her best known role, we have a great selection of character actors who are probably better known for other work. This includes Dierkop from Butch Cassidy and The Sting, Holliman in Police Woman and a passel of Westerns, Lom from The Pink Panther films and Abercrombie, who played Mr. Pitt on Seinfeld. We also have Michael Sacks, who was the lead in Slaughterhouse-Five and Ms. Richards, the child star from the first Jurassic Park, and Virginia Madsen. All the women on the list deserve the Picture Slot based on fabulosity.

Many happy returns of the day to the living.

Prediction: We may consider it as practically certain that the pleasures of the new age will be largely intellectual in their nature. The stupidity of merely sensual pleasures will revolt the intelligence of the future. Athletic sports of some kind, facilitated by certain inventions which can easily be foreseen, will no doubt be a source of much enjoyment, though the growing gentleness of mankind will abolish, as barbarous, games which take the form of modified assault, as football, boxing, wrestling, fencing and the like.

Predictor: T. Baron Russell in A Hundred Years Hence, published 1905

Reality: Russell does some great predictions, but he does have a tendency to be a moralistic scold.

Or put more succinctly,

FUCK YOU!!!! GO NINERRRRRRRRRRS!!!!!1!
 Looking one day ahead... INTO THE FUTURE!

Another exact date, this time from the early boss of Victorian utopian futurism, Edward Bellamy.

Join us then... IN THE FUTURE!
    

10 September 2013

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!
 

9 September 2013

 Birthdays
Henry Thomas b.1971 (E.T.)
Jeffrey Alan Combs b. 1954 (Deep Space Nine)Angela Cartwright b. 1952 (Lost in Space)
Topol b. 1935 (Flash Gordon)
Margaret Tyzack b. 1931 died 25 June 2011 (2001, A Clockwork Orange)
Cliff Robertson b.1923 died 10 September 2011(Amazing Spider–Man)
Neil Hamilton b. 1899 died 24 September 1984 (Batman)

Several actors on the list today are best known for their work in genre, and in that group I would include the young man in the picture slot, Henry Thomas who played E.T.'s pal Elliott.

Many happy returns to the living.

Prediction: Homes will have inches deep "lakes" on the roof as a device for air conditioning.

Predictor: Popular Mechanics in 1928

Reality: We never got around to this. If you have 2500 square feet of roof surface, each inch of water adds about 1,000 pounds of weight, not inconsequential but not a deal breaker, either. The major problem I would imagine would be how much  difficulty this would add to the mosquito abatement problem.

Looking one day ahead... INTO THE FUTURE!

This week we get some exact dates from futurist novels of the 19th Century.

Join us then... IN THE FUTURE!
 

8 September 2013

 Birthdays
Martin Freeman b. 1971 (The Hobbit, The World's End)
Thomas Kretschmann b. 1962 (King Kong)

Air date of first episode
Star Trek, 1966

No disrespect to either Mr. Freeman or Herr Kretschmann, but today is the 47th anniversary of the words "Space, the final frontier..." being spoken, and in science fiction history, that is indeed a Big Damn Deal. If someone in 1966 predicted that Star Trek would be the most important TV show Desilu Studios ever produced, that person would have been called mad. Star Trek could never eclipse I Love Lucy in the history of television, right?

Well, that's at least partly right. Star Trek left the small screen and became a movie franchise or more accurately, three movie franchises, the original cast, the Next Generation cast and now, the reboot.


Many happy returns to Mr. Freeman and Herr Kretschmann, and here's hoping the reboot series can get around to making a good movie instead of just successful ones.

 

Prediction: In August 1999, the telepathic Martians begin to sense the thoughts of Second Expedition. When the four men land, they are assumed to be figments of the imagination of some insane individual, one of the aspects of insanity on Mars.

Predictor: Ray Bradbury in The Martian Chronicles

Reality: I didn't read The Martian Chronicles when I was a lad. I did read Bradbury's Golden Apples of the Sun and R is for Rocket. I think if I had read this one back then, I would have soured on Bradbury completely. This is a really depressing work.

Looking one day ahead... INTO THE FUTURE!

There have been several interruptions of our regularly scheduled features over the past few Monday, but tomorrow we get another prediction from the pages of Popular Mechanics.

Join us then... IN THE FUTURE!
  

7 Septmber 2013

Birthdays
Evan Rachel Wood b.1987 (True Blood)
Alex Kurtzman b. 1973(writer, Transformers, Star Trek)
Toby Jones b. 1967 (Harry Potter)
Mira Furlan b. 1955 (Lost, Babylon 5)
Michael Emerson b. 1954 (Lost)
John Phillip Law b. 1937 died 13 May 2008 (Barbarella, The Golden Voyage of Sinbad)

Given my age and interests, I think of Mira Furlan as the best known name on this list in terms of genre, but Babylon 5 has been off the air so long, it's becoming famous for being obscure. Younger fans will likely think of Michael Emerson from Lost as being the most recognizable person here. For outright pretty, you can't go wrong with Even Rachel Wood, who sits in the Picture Slot, but if I'm going to check my male heterosexual privilege, John Phillip Law was incredibly pretty in his heyday. He made his best known films after he was 30 and film makers did everything they could to make sure he took his shirt off.


Many happy returns to the living.
 

Prediction: Aliens called "Vulcanids" have monitored the Earth for millenia, occasionally capturing people and meddling in human affairs, to the extent of building the pyramids. On September 7, 1973, the human race is destroyed, along with most other life, by the premature detonation of Professor Vogel's thorium bomb.  

Predictor: World in Eclipse by William Dexter, published 1955

Reality: It's bad enough destroying humanity and most life on Earth, but by premature detonation? That's gotta be embarrassing.

So far, all the predictions I have used from the fictional nuclear holocausts found in the extensive research done by Professor Paul Brians have been on exact dates. Soon enough, his work will get a day of the week of its own, probably Saturdays. A problem with this is if he has Saturdays and Bradbury's Martian Chronicles has Sundays, the weekends are going to be incredibly depressing.  Regular readers will be waiting in hope of Mondays for Popular Mechanics or OMNI Future Almanac.

Thank Odin, Vishnu and the little baby Jebus I have predictions from the 1890s and T. Baron Russell in 1905 just to keep things optimistic.

Looking one day ahead... INTO THE FUTURE!

Once again, it's Ray Bradbury's turn to tell us about the early encounters of Earthlings and Martians. If you haven't read the book, here's a general spoiler: Things don't go well.

Join us then... IN THE FUTURE!