Exploring Space: 1999

I've accepted the Blogging A to Z Challenge. All month, I'm going to blog about Books from A to Z.

Yesterday I mentioned that back in 1987 I  began keeping a list of books I read. The list lives in the back pages of a notebook. Each page has a date range at the top (the first page says Nov 87 - Nov 89) and then the list of books in the order that I completed them.

One page is dated Sept 98 - Dec 99. I could see that I could reach the bottom of that page, mark that last entry, in December of 1999, then start a new page for January 2000. So I thought I should try to read something appropriate for the date.

So, the last book I read in 1999 was a great scholarly tome titled Exploring Space: 1999. It covers, yes, the seventies TV show Space: 1999, a show I loved while growing up, despite some, well, pretty obvious flaws, not the least of which resided with the writing staff. But more than the stories themselves, i loved the production design. I enjoyed the atmosphere. I really loved the spacecraft. I even dug the (no horribly dated) uniforms. I constructed my own "one sleeve of color" shirt out of some old pajamas and a long sleeved T-shirt. And I really loved the jackets, the seventies jogging suit-style jackets they wore for the show's second season. I also had a huge crush on the character Maya from that same season.

Anyway, I always wanted one of those jackets. I would obsessively draw the arrow emblem depicted on the breast of the jacket. I figured I'd wear it everywhere. You can see some examples of the jacket here. The most distinctive feature was the white band around the left forearm. It's only on the left sleeve, not the right.

Flash forward a few decades. The arrow patches went on sale. I managed to acquire one. Now I needed a jacket. So I got a fleece jacket and decided to make a sort of "updated" "modern" version of the original.

Now, I finally have a jacket. And, well, I wanted to have that band on the left sleeve, so I got one put on. Sadly, though, instead of actually incorporating that section into the fabric of the sleeve, the band was sewed on top of the sleeve, making it, well, a bit bulky looking. Oh well. I still love it.

But I don't really ever wear it out of the house.

Oh, and, by the way, the first book I read in the year 2000 was a book I'd been toting around for years but hadn't gotten around to reading, a science fiction anthology from 1972, edited by Harry Harrison, titled The Year 2000. Oh yeah.