Meaning another stall in our work, with surgery Monday. I’m not going to get that fish tank moved before then, and after surgery I’ll have another month before I should be clear to do heavy lifting, with second surgery scheduled for January 6. After which I STILL can’t do heavy lifting for another month. Valentine’s, anyone?
Well, we’re better off than the people getting flooded, or the people with holes in their roof, so we’re not to feel sorry for, but shucky-darn!
We only got a little floor actually laid yesterday, but we’ll just plug away at it, and carry planks to and from the garage for sawing when it isn’t raining.
SNow’s in the forecast. Including for Monday. But the worse things was the 50 degree day that melted the snowcap off the mountains and sent it down the rivers—along with the rain—which has made misery for people living near the river.
I swear, we expect zombies and Martian invaders next.
Maybe this is Deity telling you to take it easy for a while. You haven’t had a break since before Halloween, what with the accelerated book schedule and all. If zombies and/or Martians show up, tell them you gave at the office. Bring on the hot chocolate!
What a visual. Marvin the Martian and some crew member telling him that the zombies are getting restless. When do they start the invasion? With the answer being, after the next Pineapple Express.
Aw, the Martians are just tourists. If you don’t wanna go in for cheap souvenirs, from someone who had a great yearning to see a duck*, then you could always sell them a shipment of bikes or dune buggies.
Marvin always seems so cranky. I think the little guy’s shorts were too tight. Give him some egg nog, he’ll unwind. 🙂
(*) The bit about yearning to see an actual duck, yes, a Firefly reference. 😀 Also, I reread Heinlein’s the Rolloing Stones recently and really enjoyed it again. Dated now, but still a fantastic yarn.
Zombies? They don’t stand achance around you and Jane! You have power tools and kitchen utensils and know how to use ’em.
But I like Chondrite’s and Mmberry’s takes on the subject.
Hmmm…. Sic a few plucky mahen traders on those offworld touristy types. Heheheh. Number one good local art-i-san, vintage Earth hand-i-craft! You got!
Yes, I just this morning saw the forecast for snow Monday here on the we(s)t side. No good will come of it.
You’ve got laminate flooring. You could start on that ark….
Though probably, you’d want a good starship engine on that ark, (w)right? 😉
Oh heck, invite the Martians along.
—–
Aside: Every now and then, I keep trying to remember a 1970’s era TV movie. Or I think it was a TV movie, rather than a theatre movie shown as a TV rerun. As I recall, this showed up more than once in the evenings back then. Science fiction, the post-apocalyptic genre popular then. The movie starts out with a family group and one or two friends who are caving. A solar flare or some event happens while they are conveniently underground, shielded, so they survive. But they come out and don’t know what’s happened. It seems like there was a father, mother, daughter, son, and one or two friends, and one was a black guy, I think. This wasn’t On the Beach or Alas, Babylon, I don’t think. (Different plots to those, besides.) I seem to recall there was something about a house with unsafe food. I don’t recall if they met other survivors. This was also not part of Fantastic Journey, a 70’s TV show set in the Bermuda Triangle, with Ike Eisenmann, Roddy McDowall, and Greg Harrison(?). — Does anyone remember the movie I’m talking about? It’s possible I’m mixing two movies from that period. I would’ve been under 12 at the time, and don’t recall seeing the movie since the 70’s.
From the same era, there was also a TV movie, probably a series pilot that didn’t make it, and maybe one of Gene Roddenberry’s various stories. This involved another apocalyptic event, with people who go into cryogenic suspension on a space station, then wake up a century or so later, return to Earth to see if it’s safe, and find, among other things, as they go on an overland adventure quest, an overgrown zoo with escaped animals and foliage. But the sets were TV low budget, so you didn’t get a whole lot for this zoo gone wild. — I don’t suppose anyone would remember that one either?
I’ve looked for these from time to time, but without a title or author or actors, I’ve only been able to ask other fans, and usually, people don’t recall either. As I recall, the first of those was better than the second, but the second was OK as a popcorn B-movie, and was fine for the time. They were both fun and excited for me as a kid, and entertained the parental units, so that we all watched each time. I have a feeling they’d hold up about as well as any 70’s era SF TV does now, which is to say, these were diamonds in the rough. Enjoyable, on par for when they were made.
Ah, the second one may have involved an organization called PAX, which I think may peg it as one of Roddenberry’s shows, but I’ve seen both of those (Genesis II and something else) recently. I think the second movie is something else.
Any ideas, anyone? Sound familiar? If I’m mixing multiple shows, I’d still be interest4ed in knowing.
(By the way, Fantastic Journey is not on DVD/Blu-Ray. It’s out of print on VHS.)
(Steven Spielberg’s Earth II from the 1990’s is on DVD, but not on any streaming / download service, nor is Above and Beyond.)
:shrugs: (Oh, the rapid pace of tech change, that’s orphaned so much of pre-2K SF&F TV and film and boks.)
They were Roddenberry. One was Genesis II and the other was Planet Earth.
Thanks, Phil! I will check both. I’m sure I saw both as a kid, and I’ve seen at least one since, as an adult.
Hmm. Though I think the one with the family group and the solar flare is something else, still. I’ll report back when I’ve watched. 🙂
He also did a sort of supernatural / science fiction pilot (Spectre? I don’t recall the title) that was shown as a TV movie but didn’t sell as a series, I think. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen the Questor Tapes. I’ll look on imdb about his shows for the one title.
Thanks again.
I’ve also found “Strange New World,” related to “Planet Earth,” apparently a remake pilot episode. Both are on DVD, but don’t appear to be on iTunes or Amazon. “Genesis II” is, though. There’s also “Earth II” from the 70’s, but this is about a space station, and I’ve seen it recently.
As far as I can tell, Spectre isn’t available in any digital or online format.
* Goober just waltzed across the keyboard and contributed, /.///. Which seems to be some sort of cat abacus or numbering system. Cat binary?
Periodically, I look to see if Steven Spielberg’s 90’s TV series, Earth 2, has made it to online / streaming services, but so far, only a DVD format which my players don’t always care for. Also, James Cameron’s Dark Angel TV series, since my DVD set is now iffy.
Send the zombies and martian invaders over here to the coast, and WE will send the problem children swimming. That’ll eliminate the bad eggs. We’re getting 30 to 40 ft breakers, thunder and lightning, hail, squalls that will peel paint off the fool hardy motor homes trying to go anywhere on 101…
The beach below the house here has turned into a several mile long giant stone polishing device…
They had 40mph gusts on the Golden Gate Bridge, and they’re expecting 30-foot waves. Plus rain, hail, lightning, snow…up to a couple of feet of snow in the Sierra.
BCS’ plot somewhat resembles the Twilight Zone episode with Burgess Meredith as the guy who snuck into the bank vault to read during lunch. 😉
Across the river, Vancouver had an EF1 tornado today! 😮
BCS, ask an old fart and you will get an answer. LAND OF THE LOST. 1974. I could picture the characters and story line and finally found the information.
Off topic, but so interesting. Think of the potential! This is only photos, but the young man was born without a hand and a mechanical hand was 3-d printed and put together for him. I forget how many they actually made, but two are shown. Speed School bioengineering students create hand for child who was born without one. I believe the news reported the difference in cost between traditional and printed.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/uofl/sets/72157662224998045
Hmm, Mmberry, what I’m thinking of is different than the “Land of the Lost” Saturday morning kids’ show, where Marshall, Will, Holly, and I think one black teen at one point, get in a rafting accident and slide down into…the age of the dinosaurs, complete with Chahka the apeman boy(?) and the Sleestaks (with extra gratuitous hissing!). 😀 Yes, I watched that as a kid. Did you know David Gerrold was involved with that show for a while? Heck, I was such an overly-impressionable, overly-imaginative kid, that iniitially, those Sleestaks *scared* me. LOL. Though as an older kid, of course, I could laugh at that.
Unless there’s a movie of the same name from that period, it must be something else. Hmm, good guess, though.
The one with the cavers involves a lot of scenes of green and gold fields, early on, as the group wanders around afterward. This was taken as a serious, post-apocalyptic thing. They’re earnest about it, attempting to discover what happened. I don’t recall what happened, other than the movie narration at the start says something about a solar flare, I think it was. But apparently, the people disappeared, while plants, animals, objects, stayed. Not sure if the people were simply off-camera, because for TV they didn’t want to be too gory, or what. My memory of the same movie has them finding a house, one (the daughter?) eats some canned food and gets sick, something like that. They discuss this, radiation and so on, but of course, it’s a movie so she (and the group) are all right later. The movie was set in the “present day” or “near future,” meaning they were 70’s Americans in a generic Anytown and Countryside setting.
The other movie with the overgrown zoo scene sticks out, in part because it’s a smallish set in places and in others, they may have redressed an actual park or zoo. But of course, they’re being chased by wild animals, bad guys of some kind, maybe mutants, and the plant life looks like it didn’t get pruned for a few years, instead of centuries to take over the concrete and so on. Heheh.
Neither of these were Damnation Alley, either, which was yet another in the subgenre. When I rewatched that one a while back, I was surprised how good it was, but how much movie standards (effects, sets, etc.) have changed from back then.
Aarrgh, the browser’s auto-incorrect spell-checker refuses to turn off….
That 3D-printed artificial hand — There are a couple of YouTube videos, one about that hand and another about another model of hand or arm. Two different projects. Really amazing, but I could see there’s room for improvement in what the prostheses could do and in how they look.
If the designers used some of the flexible, slightly spongy material used for skin in special makeup effects or in making some dolls / action figures, I bet they could create very realistic looking skin covers for the prosthetics. That could go a long way toward a prosthetic limb that looks natural.
The thing is, those are super exciting, in terms of what can be done now and in the near future.
Also, one of those videos has the boy thanking the man doingthe interview and the group designers. It’s very sweet and very telling, the boy’s young perspective on it all. His perspective as an older teen and young adult would be really useful to the design team, I’m sure. The other video gets the reactions of a boy using a prosthetic arm created by his dad. The boy is, as much as he can be, a typical, active boy. Both videos are great. I’ll grab links for those; I’d saved them in a playlist.
Several weeks back, one of the 3D fabber houses announced that they were making prosthetic forearms and hands for kids with their choice of one of 3 surfaces. Kids could choose from having a hand that looked like Iron Man, Elsa’s glove from Frozen, or a Star Wars lightsaber-like hand.
http://www.techtimes.com/articles/93434/20151009/open-bionics-unveils-iron-man-star-wars-and-disney-themed-prosthetics-to-make-kids-feel-like-superheroes.htm
One of the prototypes went to a young boy, and they got Robert Downey Jr. to come in as Tony Stark and give him his new Iron Man hand. I think Mr. Downey got a big kick out of doing it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oEx5lmbCKtY
I got a kick out of the Robert Downey clip……I love it when people who are famous actually bring themselves to do stuff like this for kids…..and for Albert working on designs to make them less expensive. I got a kick out of the “electronic whirr” as the fingers on his gauntlet worked…and his remark that HIS light works…. LOL.
Loved that. Alex is the boy from one of the videos I linked to, with Albert as the college guy involved in the project.
You know, Robert Downey, Jr. really gets one tough acting challenge there. He’s trying to stay in character as Iron Man / Tony Stark, yet he’s also supposed to be accessible as himself, the actor. The boy likely knows he’s both. Robert has to try to stay cool and in character, but he can’t know what Alex might come up with, questions, fan stuff, positive, negative, anything. And anyone with any heart has to want Alex to be totally happy with this whole thing.
Trying to pull all that off…well, ultimately, all he can do is try to be a nice guy.
Likely, he hasn’t had a lot of experience with what it’s like to live with a disability. Most people haven’t. He does a good job here.
Alex is thrilled with it, een though you can tell he’s also in on it. He knows Mr. Downey’s an actor playing a superhero role from the movies. he’s grinning ear to aer like a fanboy who’s just got a visit from a favorite star. 😀 Plus he’s getting something really meaningful to him, the arm…with a pretty cool look to it, not a toy, but a real benefit for his life. …And something that just might make it past the other kids’ reactions.
This is super. Gotta love how they all handle this.
“Mine lights up.” Heheheh. Attaboy, Alex. 😀 …That’s gotta make Albert proud as a designer, and Robert proud as an actor, that it made a kid’s day and will improve his life for months, at least.
The bow tie is cool too. 😀 Looking sharp, kid!
BTW — I get it, from personal experience, a little of how Alex feels. From about 1st or 2nd grade on, I carried vison aids like a magnifier, and then a mini-telescope, a monocular like half a pair of binoculars, with me, as well as thick reading glasses. By high school and since, I have had distance glasses that have a single mini-telescope attached. So as a little boy Alex’s age and after, I grew up withbeing the different kid in class, in the school, with that monocular or those glasses. In elementary and junior high, this could be especially rough. I oculdn’t do team sports like other boys, unless it was basketball or volleyball or dodgeball. Football’s a no-go for me too, even though the ball’s about big enough. I got a heckuva lot of being made fun of, and I hated that. However, there were also some kids who were cool, understanding, smart, curious, more tolerant, and they and most teachers made it OK for me. I was also a smart kid who liked school, just not the bullying and being made fun of. Books, reading and drawing, including science fiction especially, were something I loved. By high school, things got mostly better, though there could be times involved with that too. Along with this, for me, there was the growing realization that some of the things other boys said about me (being gay) were true. I grew up about as well adjusted to having a hancicap as you can be, which is to say, mostly, but not always. The other, being gay, was not expected and not really allowed, and I didn’t know what to make of it, except that I felt that way and knew it, but couldn’t qutie accept it yet. I know all those early experiences made a difference in how I deal with other people in life. How my parents acted also made a difference. I wish they had not been so overprotective and sheltering. I look back and see they were doing the best they knew how, what they believed was right, but I can see as an adult, and often saw back then, that it wasn’t the best or most right solution. I did not know nearly how severely that affected me in personailty or social life, in relationships, until I was an adult out on my own, and more so, once they were gone. But to be fair, even now, there is precious little information out there for parents of handicapped kids or for people who work as teachers and counselors for special needs kids. The school systems try, but are still often set up so they don’t do a great job, or are so worried about being sued that they don’t do what’s ultimately good for the kids. It’s still tough to navigate all that, even when everyone tries to work for the best interest of the special needs kid.
Alex and kids like him today, and the average kids out there too, and yes, the kids who are LGBT and just beginning to know it — They are growing up in a time when we are better off about this, when there’s more of a chance for everyone to be included, and yet we can see out there that people are still often made to feel excluded, outside the group, for any perceived difference. (Such as religion or ethnicity too.) So there is still such a long way to go.
And special needs like Alex and other kids and adults have are really not going to disappear with better technology. There will still be people who are born with physical and mental/emotional/cognitive differences from the “norm.” There will still be diseases and accidents and injuries. There will still be kids who grow up being different from the other kids around them, for whatever reasons, physical being or otherwise. So our technology has to give them the best chance to adapt, and — importantly, how we act, how we treat people as a society,and as individuals, really has to change, so that people can be more accepted for things like this.
Alex will certainly get kids who like him, with or without a prosthetic arm, who will be curious and friendly and want to learn and be with him. That’s fantastic. But Alex and other kids also have to deal daily with the kids (and adults) who react badly, meanly, to him having a prosthetic arm and lacking a natural, biological arm like most other, average people have. That’s a challenge he has to learn to live with, and it’s one that all of us, “normal” or “different,” have to deal with in some way.
This showed Alex when life’s awesome. I can hope that life’s a lot more awesome a lot of the time, for kids like him. Been there, done that. Oh, yeah.
My own condition is something that requires a lot more high-tech hurdles to overcome to match regular vision. Plus, the nature of vision implies there are important moral questions involved too, because part of vision is how to process neural input/output into information the brain can use and the nerves can transmit and the eyes (or artificial eyes) can sense and process into neural signals. In other words, how our nerves and brains and eyes “see” images and turn those into visual information our brains, our thoughts, can understand. Because if we know how that’s done, it’s a big step towards those “neural interface chips” and knowing how other information (our thoughts) are transmitted and processed into thoughts. So there are moral issues to be dealt with, besides the physical practicalities. It’s not just sticking a couple of cameras on your head…and not quite (maybe) like growing replacement eyes, biological organs. So…. Whether that’ll happen, and whether that’s a good thing down the line for humankind, are still questions to solve. That said, if there was a way, it’d be worth a chance, for my left eye, which is worse, and if that worked, for my better-but-still-not-great master right eye.
But seeing things like the progress on artificial limbs or enabling para- and quadriplegics to walk, hearing implants for deaf / HoH folks, those give me hope that there can be more progress for blind and vision-impaired folks like me. 🙂 — And by the way, computers and the internet, really are a great equalizer, or can be. So who knows what the futre can bring?
But for kids like Alex, an affordable, better working prosthetic limb, that also looks pretty kick-butt, is a darn good thing. 😀 I can cheer for that. That’s winning one for the good guys. Gotta love that. Their design team is also looking at it as a humanitarian thing, not for profit, which I think is remarkable, espcially these days. Way to go, folks. Good job. More, please.
Here are the links for presthetic limbs:
https://youtu.be/AcLh-aSUdx0
An Affordable 3D-Printed Arm
YouTube Channel: Veritasium
https://youtu.be/FGSo_I86_lQ
Boy gets prosthetic hand made by 3-D printer
YouTube Channel: CBS Evening News
Grr. Between small type in the edit box and auto-incorrect, I’m getting way too many typos I should be catching.
Prosthetic. With an O, not an E. I know better, really.
CJ – left you a note on Genealogy re Family Tree Maker’s demise.
Bummer of a decision, that. Ancestry’s online software maneuvers like a drunken elephant in molasses. Bad, bad, bad.
You need a “Like” Button.
We appear to have lost our chances for snow on Monday–though it continues to pile up on the mounta, err, volcano. 😉 I won’t miss it here on the “valley floor”.
It’s so windy out today that both my cats decided their much-coveted daily visit in the back yard was a no-go, after only a few minutes. They zipped inside twice. So we’re back in. It is not overly windy, just blustery. It’s still very warm out, though the forecast says to expect rain today or tomorrow and Monday, more seasonal temps for those days, and seasonal temps by the end of next week. In between, warm, sunny days. No forecast yet for after that. The cats, at least, are satisfied, because it was their decision, not mine, for them to come in. 🙂 Smokey is now observing from the office bedroom window, while Goober has joined u on the filing cabinte. 🙂 The heater, fixed pricily, has had no reason to come on. So it’s resting. Heh. Here’s hoping all of you are as cozy.
65 for a high today on the East Coast. We have occasionally woken up with light frost during the last few weeks, but that’s it so far for us.
SE Arizona is having rain with occasional snowflakes. The mountains will definitely have snow when the clouds clear enough to see them. We had such bad winds last night that I expected shingles to be torn off the roof and trees downed, but I haven’t noted any widespread disturbance.
The cats had good sense as usual. (They do more often than they make doofus mistakes.) — What they got and I missed was that a storm front was moving in. About 30 min. to an hour after we came in, it turned very dark and we’ve had blustery rains off and on since, cloudy and semi-dark and windy when it’s not raining. The rain isn’t heavy, though. All’s well here. It’s turned cooler, but this is only more typical temps for this time of year, and still not truly cold, just cooler. We’re supposed to have a spate of warm, sunny days during the week, followed by more cool/cold stormy, rainy days next weekend. So it’s been good to be inside. The newly-fixed thermostat and heater have not yet come on, but are fine; the house just hasn’t lost enough heat from the day to need the heater to come on yet. Glad, though, to have it, and to be warm and dry and cozy inside. Heh, I had Wolf brand chili, sharp cheddar cheese, and tortilla chips for supper, comfort food and saving a little money. 🙂 Enjoyed it a lot. I’m going to write some, then read some tonight. Not sure which story idea will get worked on. But I’ve promised myself later to sit back and outline on a few, since I, ahem, haven’t been writing much, while concentrating on doing fonts. But my attempts at writing need time too, if I’m ever going to get something new completed. I think a few ideas are percolating, but haven’t yet shown up consciously. We’ll see.