5 Greatest Spaceships of All Time

They'll never exist. Not in reality. But I sure wish they did. I'd gladly fly in any one of these.

1. USS Enterprise

My first love. I talked about it in another post a couple years ago, so I won't rehash it here, but it's still the starship against which all others are measured. I want to live on the bridge.

2. Eagle 1

Space: 1999. So dated, so disregarded, so wonderful. Again, I wrote a post about this a while back but suffice it to say these craft inspired a lot of imaginative play. I wanted to build my own mock-up of the cockpit. And wear my custom-made shirt with a single red sleeve.

3. Millenium Falcon

I know what you're saying. "What a piece of junk!" Well, she may not look like much but she's got it where it counts, kid. And, sadly, I quoted that from memory. Yes, I am a nerd.

When I used to imagine what I'd do if I were granted three wishes, I developed a complicated list that would result in me having a full sized, working Millenium Falcon with unlimited fuel and the knowledge of how to fly it. I figured I could at least run as a high end competitor to Federal Express using a slogan like "When it absolutely, positively has to be there right now." I figured I could shuttle people and stuff between continents in a matter of minutes. Ah, the dream life of being a courier. Sadly, I did not make an allowance for also obtaining a Wookie co-pilot. Or a life.

4. Sky One 

UFO took place IN THE FUTURE. 1980 to be exact. *sigh* It involved a shadowy organization (see what I did there?) fighting malevolent marauders from outer space. While the moon-based interceptors were cool (and I still have my Dinky Toys version of it) I always thought Sky 1 was more cool. It launched from the ocean, attached to a submarine, then flew into the atmosphere to shoot down flying saucers. Yes!

5. Jupiter 2

Speaking of flying saucers, this Lost in Space ship WAS a flying saucer - but one built by the good guys! It also seemed to have the property of being bigger on the inside than it was on the outside. How else could they have jammed the chariot and pod in there, not to mention the voluminous lower lever of living quarters. But I loved the spinning lights on the undercarriage and as stupid as the show it self was, the ship was always cool. And the robot. Duh.

What did I leave out? What are some of YOUR picks?

Holy Donuts

 A Short Story

            Torus of love. Frosting of light. Sprinkles of peace.

            Wherever we gather, whenever we gather, we take the donut, we break it and we bless it, saying, “Take. Eat. Holy pastry purchased for you.”

            And so it is with the coffee. We fill our mugs and bless them, saying, “Brown liquid of understanding, poured for you. Take, blow gently, sip. Creamer is in the back for any who need it.”

            And the service begins.

            Most days, Jack shares first.

            “Good morning. My name is Jack and I love donuts.”

            “Hello, Jack,” we reply.

            “Sunday mornings were all about the donuts,” he begins. “My parents popped an 8-track into the stereo, usually the Kingston Trio, but sometimes Neil Diamond or America’s Greatest Hits. Then Dad would say, ‘Let’s go,’ and we’d hop into the car and drive the ten blocks to Dunkin’ Donuts. I’d always pick the chocolate crème filled, even though I kind of thought it was gross. My sister would get maple logs or some other godawful thing. I used the comics section of the Sunday paper to capture the drifts of powdered sugar.”

            Here he gets a little misty-eyed. “Damn, I miss those times.”

            And we raise our mugs to Jack and we dunk or not dunk, depending on our personal choice of donuts, and we take a large bite, savoring it, trying to become one with the donut, even if only for a moment.

            After we go around the circle – always a circle – I step up to the center and make my plea.

            “Friends, we thank you for coming. We thank you for partaking in the holy donut. And we thank you for your generous love offering of cash or gift cards.”

Folks drop what they can spare into the coffee canister I keep perched on a chair next to the door. They shuffle out, with promises to return next week.

Today, a young woman, she’d called herself Ruth during her testimony, held back after the rest of the group cleared out. She helped me stack chairs.

“I wanted to thank you,” she said. She couldn’t have been more than 25. Not conventionally pretty, she maintained an air of disarray that vanished, I’d noticed, while partaking in the donut.

“No, no,” I said. “Thank you for coming. We wouldn’t be here without folks like you.” Trite, I know, but in my experience, donut worshipers prefer their pastries large and their talk small.           

            She stacked the last chair and followed me to the front of the room.

            “I just know there’s something in them,” she said. “It’s, well, more powerful than us.”

            I nodded. “The sugar. Real addictive. You’ve got to be careful.”

            I flicked off the lights and motioned for her to lead us out of the room. She lingered in the doorway.

            “No,” she said. “It’s more than that. There’s an energy. A light. You guys seem to understand it. There’s power there, something…” She trailed off, bit her lip, then finally walked outside.

            I pulled the door closed.

            “We all sense it,” I said.

We put the group together last year when Jack and I found ourselves waxing poetic about the appeal of donuts. We started meeting at a local Dunkin’ Donuts until a rather dour woman named Charlotte started going on and on about Krispy Kreme. So to be more ecumenical, we started meeting at a local rec center.

            “Well,” I said, “thanks again for helping straighten up.”

            Ruth nodded, shoved her hands into her pockets and walked toward the parking lot.

            I locked the door, then turned to find myself face to face with her.

            “Oh,” I said.

            “I’m Jessica,” she said.

Before I could ask about the name change or even blurt out my own name she backed me against the door and kissed me.

And kissed me.

And kissed me.

I did not resist.

She took two steps back, shoved her hands back into her pockets and then smiled at me.

“The power of donuts,” she said.

I nodded. The power of donuts indeed.

“Same time next week?” Ruth who was actually called Jessica asked.

All I could do was nod and watch her vanish into the darkness.

Torus of love. Frosting of light.

Burrito

A Short Story

Kevin unwrapped his burrito, poking at the interior with his spork.

“I knew it,” he said, spearing a particularly large kernel of corn.

“It’s called a veggie burrito,” I said. ‘What did you expect?”

Kevin flicked the kernel onto the floor, where it landed near the leg of my chair.

“I expected vegetables,” he said, re-rolling the tortilla. “You know, mushrooms, kale, bean sprouts. Good healthy stuff.”

“What planet, exactly, are you from?” I asked. “You’re lucky there’s anything more than rice and beans in that thing. You’re lucky there’s a cheese-like substance in there to hold it all together. Count your blessings, my friend.”

He took a tentative bite of his burrito, then muttered, “Corn is the devil’s vegetable.”

“It’s a grain, not a vegetable,” I said.

“That’s exactly my point!” He wadded the burrito into a ball and flung it across the room. It smacked into the wall, leaving a brown smudge on the fading yellow paint.

“Nice,” I said.

Kevin shrugged. “Plenty more where that came from.” He reached over and grabbed one of my nachos.

We sat in silence for a few moments, polishing off my nacho platter.

“We ought to clean that up,” I said, staring at the remains of Kevin’s burrito.

“Go ahead,” he said. He stood and crossed toward the exit. “You coming?”

“You’re really not going to clean it up?”

“It had corn in it. Corn!”

“Excuse me.”

I turned to see two men in black. One held out his wallet, flashing a badge.

“We’re from the Corn Refiners Association. We’re going to have to ask you to come with us.”

Kevin glared at the men. “Are you kidding me?”

“No, sir, you’ve violated the by-laws of the Corn Refiners Association.”

“What are you talking about?”

The men in black grabbed Kevin’s arm and dragged him outside to a giant corn cob shaped paddy wagon.

“This is ridiculous,” Kevin shouted, struggling to free himself.

“I’m sorry, sir, the by-laws are very clear.”

They shoved him inside and slammed the giant cob behind him.

One of the men approached me.

“Sorry for the trouble,” he said, handing me a thimble-sized container of high fructose corn syrup.

I watched as they drove Kevin away. Later, I stopped at one of those roadside stands and bought a bushel of corn. Mmm. I love corn. All hail corn!

The Burbs

I paid good money to see The Burbs in the theater. When it was over, I wanted my money back. And my time.

The Burbs came out the year after Big. It was THE NEXT TOM HANKS MOVIE (I think Punchline was the next movie production-wise, but it got held back. I saw it at a preview sometime after The Burbs. At least this is how I remember it 2 decades later.) Anyway, anticipation ran high for The Burbs due to the charm of both Hanks and the movie Big. Plus it had Carrie Fisher in it, always a boon to big Star Wars nerds like me.

(By the way, does anyone else recall in 1988-89ish when Starlog printed a story titled something like "Is Star Wars Fandom Dead?")

Anyway, expectations were high. But The Burbs fell flat. Labored and unfunny, I remember little about the film except that i was bitterly disappointed.

I knew nothing about the Varese Sarabande Soundtrack Club (original incarnation) until after it died, so the initial release of the soundtrack completely passed me by. I eventually heard the End Titles on the Varese 25th Anniversary set and it didn't really strike me as anything extraordinary. It has a pleasant enough tune, with a goofy Patton pastiche and then the "hilarious" whistle stuff at the very end. in short, it didn't make me want to fork over the big bucks for the out of print club cd.

Then the expanded edition came out.

I ordered it, caught in a wave of Jerry-mania. My expectations were again high. Here was music that fetched a high dollar on the resale market, so it had to be good, right?

Lesson learned. Sometimes a CD is scarce for a good reason.

This score left me flat, just like the movie, It's Jerry in his mickey-mousing comedy mode, which is hardly Jerry at his best. Goldsmith and comedy generally never went well together. And this movie, which strove to be both weird and funny, didn't even benefit from a fabled "Jerry scored the ideal movie in his head rather than the crappy movie in reality" boost. It's just as labored and unfunny as the film it accompanied. Really, the End Titles neatly sums up the entire score. Everything you'd ever really want from The Burbs is contained in that suite.

So if you're one of those just now getting into Jerry and kicking yourself for missing the now sold-out deluxe edition, don't worry. You're not missing anything. It's just another bottle cap in my collection and one I rarely dig out.

Win, Lose or Draw

A post at Topless Robot about the Top 20 Nerd Commandments plucked a painful memory for me. Specifically, this commandment:

5) All nerds must be able to sketch, from memory, the basic outlines of the Millennium Falcon, USS Enterprise (NCC-1701), and the TARDIS.

Yes, I drew the TARDIS as my big project for a High School art class. Sadly embarrassing in retrospect.

But then there was the embarrassment of doing something similar on NATIONAL TV.

In 1988, I appeared on the game show Win, Lose or Draw. Midway through the game, it was my turn to draw and I was shown my phrase: Beam Me Up, Scotty. As a lifelong Star Trek nerd, it felt like some kind of strange providence. But in my nerdliness, I could not figure out how to parse up the phrase into chunks that the "celebrities" could then guess. So I started drawing what I thought was a passable Enterprise, hoping the celebrities would get the Trek reference and start throwing out catch phrases.

It did not happen.

Vicki Lawrence, the host, complimented my drawing afterwards, but it didn't help. My celebrities were Peter Marshall, aged host of Hollywood Squares, and Marc Summers of Nickelodean game show "fame." He told me when I sat down on the couch that he had never seen even a single episode of Star Trek.

Sigh.

In the end, though, I did win the game. Woo hoo!

Favorite memory of that game: Our female celebrities were two women from soap operas, neither of whom I'd heard of before. I still can't remember the name of one of them. The other was Jackie Zeman who people later told me they recognized. At one point, while the women's team was taking a turn, we sat on the couch watching. Peter Marshall nudged me and pointed at Jackie, who was leaning forward displaying her cleavage. Peter Marshall smiled and winked at me.

Last memory: While I was being introduced, Vicki asked if there was anyone out there I wanted to say "Hi" to. I couldn't think of anyone right off hand, so I said something like "How about that blonde in the front row," indicating a very attractive young woman sitting in the audience. Well, for the remainder of the game, whenever I was on screen playing the game, viewers were graced with cutaway shots to that blonde in the front row. When the episode was over, I stood around chatting with Vicki while Marc Summers did what I should have done, what, in my infinite stupidity, I didn't even think to do -- he made a beeline to that blonde in the front row and started chatting her up.

And I'm embarrassed about the Enterprise.

Sigh.

Like Nothing You've Seen Before

Last night I saw part of a documentary about the making of Avatar, and one phrase just stuck in my craw. Cameron said a couple of times that he wanted to create something you've never seen before.

That's funny, because in my mind, if that was his goal, it didn't work. (As I sort of covered before.)

The plot, as has been mentioned in many places, is as old as the hills. White guy goes native. Seen it.

And don't get me started on the music.

Aliens. The movie, that is. It's influence is EVERYWHERE (as I mentioned before) in Avatar, from the colonial marines to the loader-like AT-AT things to Sigourney Weaver to the Paul Reiser-type corporate weasel guy to the design of the hardware.

The aliens. As in the life forms on Pandora. The devil dogs seemed not far from the "dog" that Christopher Lloyd's Klingon kept as a pet. The dragon-looking flying things were, well, dragon-looking. The blue people were, well, very much like people except with pointy ears and tails. Never seen pointy ears and tails before. Horses. Hammerhead dinosaurs, not anything like that Hammerhead guy from Star Wars or, I don't know, hammerhead sharks.

Landscape. Floating mountains. Like from an old Yes album cover. Trees. Waterfalls. Wow. How original. Oh but the forest floor lights up. And they have intelligent dandelion puffs. Wow.

Or am I just too jaded?

Ark of Venus

Paul Magrs blogged about keeping a list of all the books he's read and, more specifically, books he's forgotten. I, too, have been keeping a record of all the books I've read. Mine started in 1987. I also tried to think through and list books I'd read before that, going back as far as I could. Lots of books inevitably slip through the cracks of time, but a lot of them came back to me. I haven't yet gone through the list of Alfred HItchcock and the Three Investigators books I read, but I know I devoured tons of them.

One of the books that "got away"was called Ark of Venus by Clyde B. Clason. In, oh, third or fourth grade, I moved to a new school where we participated in something called the SRA reading program. One of the books was Ark of Venus. I remember reading it and the descriptions of the jungles of Venus and the wacky space monkey they found. But I never finished reading it. I think we moved again before I got to the end, or the semester ended, I don't know the reason, but I didn't get to find out what happened to the intrepid space family and their space monkey in the jungles of Venus.

Flash forward to post-college and I mention this book to my friend Clif who, it turns out, remembered reading the same book when he was a kid. I was in Houston by then and I decided to see if I could find it at the library. They actually had a copy in the stacks, dug it out and let me borrow it. I read it. And now it's on my list of books read.

Sadly, it's now been another 15 years since I read it in Houston and I still couldn't tell you how it ended.

Amazing how, thanks to the miracle of the internet, I can find an image of the cover of this obscure book.