Speaking Of ...

The biggest problem Parkinson's presents for me is my voice. It's the result of several different things. There's standard aphonia, which is the usual problem Parkinson's patients have, and which makes me sound much softer than I think I am. But there's also dysarthria, which causes slurring (such as that from a frontal lobe infarction); this is harder to pin down because the cause of pathology is unclear. It could have been a physical insult to my speech center -- or it could be something completely different. And there's also the butcher job that an E.N.T. did on my uvula, which causes extreme hypernasality. Plus my lungs are weak; this is caused by lateral scoliosis not leaving them enough room. P.D. exacerbates this. In short, while an operation may solve part of the problem, it might not solve it all. I'm reluctant to have my head unzipped just to see what's going on in there. The more research I do, the less inclined I am to believe that one procedure -- or even two or three -- will provide the Hail Mary pass that's needed here. I may have to settle for a cyborg-style mechanism that'll bypass my voice completely. Because it's looking more and more like, even a combination of brain surgery and reconstructive laryngeal surgery might not provide the magic bullet.

Happy Birthday To Me

I can't resist this,especially since I came across it on my birthday. It's the table of contents for an anthology called "the Mammoth Book Of Ghost Stories", edited by Otto Penzler, and if you look real carefully you'll find I'm in sandwiched in between people who really know what they're doing,like Saki and H.P. Lovecraft and M.R. James and ... annd ... It's like the saying goes ... I'm the only person in it I don't recognize.  

CONQUEST OF SPACE

THE CONQUEST OF SPACE, a 1950s Disney(!) film, is a truly amazing movie. You can find it on You-tube (of course). It bears watching by anyone who's an atheist. Why? How? (SPOILERS ...) Certainly not for things like story; pedestrian at best (outside of ... well, you'll see), or acting; Ross Martin is the only non-cringeworthy thesp in the lot, and he doesn't last long. The rest are terrible, although they don't have much to work with -- they're all cultural stereotypes. (One gets the feeling that if a black crew member had been included, he'd be asking for watermelon-flavored food pills.) The vision of the future is the usual 1950's society with a couple of decades tacked on. Nevertheless, it is truly amazing for one character's through-line only: the expedition's leader, a Bible-thumping Fundamentalist who comes to the conclusion during the voyage that leaving Earth without the permission of the Almighty is an offense unto Him, and who eventually sabotages the expedition before being killed by his own son. Heavy stuff, for an obviously teen (at most) oriented family film. But what really had my jaw hanging was that there was no effort at all made at the end to absolve either the Captain (other than the fairly obvious conclusion that he was batshit crazy), or God. Nothing is said to the effect that it's cool with God for us to leave the cradle, nor is any attempt made to justify the Captain's actions (not among the crew, at least, although there is consensus that he'll be presented to the public as a martyr). But we get the strong sense that his faith had nothing to do with his sacrifice, or so they'll spin it. Again, hard as it is to believe, the film takes a very clear stand for atheism (or at least against organized religion), with no mealy-mouthed apologies. Truly amazing ...

Spaceman Jones' Locker

The last post has kept me thinking about how different the solar system is from what we thought it was, even just fifty years ago. Was a time when Venus and Mars were the odds-on favorite for life.

And now?

My personal odds-on favorites for places most likely to support life in the solar system? Not what you'd think. First off, I wouldn't bother looking in the inner system. Mercury is blasted by a sun so close its apparent disc fills half the sky; even extremophiles would have to wear sunglasses. Venus? Oy. It's hell, pure and simple: victim of millions of years of rampant greenhouse effects that have turned the surface into seething lava beds and the atmosphere into a dense and boiling ocean of sulphuric acid. Mars? The best chance of all the inner worlds, but still not the way to bet. If only it were as big as Earth; but, as they said on Firefly, "if wishes were horses, we'd all be eating steak." Mars was simply too far from the sun, and too small to hang onto its core warmth, and thus its magnetosphere dissipated. With no magnetosphere to protect the planet (think of the magnetosphere as a planetary-sized deflector shield) from the sterilizing UV rays, there wasn't much chance for life to develop.

So we have to look further out. A lot further.

The two biggest planets in our solar system are Jupiter and Saturn. Together, they have over a hundred moons (hell, they probably have thousands if we count rocks from the size of baseballs on up. If you count all the rock and ice fragments making up the rings, we're into millions. This way lies madness. We're only interested in two: Europa and Enceladus.

They're very similar (despite Europa belonging to Jupiter and Enceladus to Saturn); So similar that we can generalize both of them into one. The major difference is size; Europa's about twice the size of Enceladus. Other than that you can barely tell 'em apart. They're both huge balls of ice; snowball moons. Utterly inhospitable on their surfaces, they nevertheless represent the best chances for extra-terrestrial life.

How? they're both covered with ice. Ice several miles deep, in fact.

Ah, but UNDER the ice ...

... is water. WARM water.

Wait, what? How is this possible? We're not talking colder than your Frigidiare cold, or even Antarctic cold; we're talking minus 300 odd degrees below zero cold. that's not just cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey, that's cold enough to shatter it into powder with one blow of a ball peen hammer.

But nevertheless, if you could somehow drill down through several miles of rock hard ice, you would find water. Water warm enough, and filled with enough amino acids that, given a few billion years of sloshing around, the chances of life -- complex life -- developing are almost inevitable. How do we get warm liquid water in such an inhospitable place?

One word: torsion.

Europa and Enceladus have one other thing in common: they're the inmost orbiting moons of both their primaries. their orbits are close enough for Jupiter's and Saturn's gravitational pull, working against the gravity of the other moons, to cause massive tidal forces. And what does that mean?

It means the same thing that happens to any closed volatile system when outside energy is introduced:  it produces heat. A lot of heat. Enough, over the eons, to keep an entire ocean liquified.

So, with kinetic heat generated by the gravitational equivalent of a huge taffy-pull and a nice insulating cap of ice sitting on top of them, the oceans of Europa and Enceladus could be sitting there, nice and cozy, for millions of years. More than enough time for complex life to develop.

Of course, "complex" is a -- well, complex concept. It could define anything from simple multi-cellular lifeforms you need a microscope and a powerful lot of squinting to see, all the way up to critters that (given the high salinity of the water plus the lesser gravity), could make a blue whale look like a rainbow trout. Hell, why not? As Sagan was known for saying, "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." True enough, but if I might humbly propose a codicil: "Extraordinary evidence demands extraordinary imagination to be recognized." Most planetary geologists, exobiologists and the like will pee up one leg and down the other if they find so much as an ice moon's equivalent of a paramecium Out There. Me, I'm voting for the marine equivalent of Argentinosaurus. Something that can pick its teeth with Nessie.

If you're going to dream, why not dream big? We used to think that the clouds of Venus hid a steaming swampy world that teemed with exoraptors. We got rogered real good on that one. But maybe, even though the inner worlds weren't exactly the stuff of which dreams -- or at least masthead novelettes for a nice, shiny nickel a word -- are made, perhaps, in the black depths of those exolunar oceans, a second chance worthy of the name Leviathan may yet lurk.

Moon Man

Some years back, a friend of mine (I don't recall, which one, sorry) said that, as far as he was concerned, the best part about the first moon landing were the names of the first two men to step off the Lander.

I'm happy to say that, though I didn't get it at first, it didn't take me long because I had the proper cultural references. Think about it. The first two men who actually set foot on the moon ...? Maybe it'll help to imagine a multi-tentacular monster lurking behind the nearest rock. No? How about if they both have rayguns? Work with me!

All right, stop sulking. But you're gonna do a facepalm when I tell you --

The first man on the moon was named Neil Armstrong. Maybe you can come up with a name that sounds more quintessentially two-fisted and All American than that, but if you can my fedora's off to you, pal. Neil Armstrong isn't the name of an "astronaut" -- it's the name of a spaceman. A lean, muscular rocket jockey who knows the business end of a laser pistol, who's bronzed by alien suns, and who's on a first-name basis with the Queen of Outer Space. I mean, could it get any better?

Well, hard as it is to believe, yes it could. Because not only did the Commander (he had to have been a commander; there are some things that are just non-negotiable) have a name to strike fear into the cold, flinty hearts of space pirates everywhere, but his second in command was a feisty fella nicknamed -- wait for it -- "Buzz"! Okay, granted his last name wasn't "Lightyear", but that would've been too good. As it is, the dialogue practically writes itself:

"Smokin' rockets, Commander! Is that a Tenta-Man lurking behind that rock over there?"

"Yes it is, Cadet. Now remember what you learned back at Space Academy, Buzz; drill him right between the first pair of eyestalks ..."

"I'll try, but the real thing is sure different from the holos ...!"

They didn't get much else right, sad to say; instead of a sleek and silver rocket out of a Bonestell painting, the Lunar Landing Module looked more like a wadded-up piece of tinfoil. And even worse than that, there was no girl! This was really unbelievable. You need a girl to (a) faint and (b) be carried off to service the improbable lusts of the Tenta-Men.  Otherwise how are you gonna reach that 5,000 word limit?

But the worst part of all was the ending. I will give the American public this: it took every writer, editor and critic completely by surprise. Even the really gonzo ones, like Phil Farmer and Roger Zelazny, didn't see it coming. And yet, in retrospect it worked perfectly within the confines of its reality. Which, unfortunately, was also our reality.

I never got a chance to meet Neil Armstrong, but remind me to tell you about the time Buzz Aldrin came to our house. It was a hot, still, August day, and yet somehow, I swear to God, he'd arranged for a breeze to be blowing on him, enough to rustle his hair slightly as he stood on the front porch, arms akimbo, and said, "Hi, I'm Buzz Aldrin."

I still don't know.

This was in 1984, and by this time we'd all of us, astronauts and authors alike, accepted  the bitter truth; that we weren't going back to the moon anytime soon. In a way, it was almost better, because the reality of the mission was so much less. Instead of the ship from DESTINATION MOON, we had this bizarre little thing that would have looked complete only with a NIXON/FORD bumpersticker. We built a space station, which resembled the austere magnificent double wheel of 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY in much the same way that a Big Daddy Roth creation resembled a Porsche 911. And it smelled like old socks. If there's one thing we can take away from all this, it's that style means nothing in space.

I don't know ... maybe if we'd paid a little less attention to getting there without any style at all, and tried getting at least one decent coffee table book out of the whole damn thing, people might have not had the one reaction to the space program that no one expected:

 Maybe they wouldn't have gotten bored.

But Armstrong did his part. And, while doing it, achieved true unique-ness: now and forever the first Man On the Moon.

RIP.

Rant

Every woo-woo snake charmer with two chakras to rub together has greeted the development of quantum mechanics with the same naked greed as that of a couple of starved Siberian tigers greeting the unexpected arrival, out on the frozen tundra, of a Craft Services truck. They all latch onto the same thing: quantum entanglement and Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle. The concept that subatomic particles are, among other things, "connected" through higher dimensions, so that one electron instantly "knows" what's been done to its twin, even though they're billions of lightyears apart, causes them unbridled ecstasy. "Consciousness is the key!" they bray. "The universe is me and I am it!"

These are the same people who believe that unicorns fart rainbows and that nice friendly spacemen dressed in the worst styles of the 70's would happily give us cosmic secrets if the nasty ol' government would just stop getting in their way. They believe that the universe is a happy, shiny and loving place that cares about us and tucks us in at night. They believe this with exactly the same fervor and intensity that led them to clap their hands as hard as they could when they were children to bring Tinkerbelle back to life, and with exactly the same dewy-eyed confidence that tells them that God answers prayers and that Jesus is real because he reincarnates periodically in a bit of cheese toast.

Well, good luck with that worldview. No doubt the dinosaurs that were swept up in the ejecta hurled skyward by the asteroid that nearly punched a hole through the world thought it was really cool to be the first sauroid saints lifted up to Heaven -- except  that they probably had a hard time thinking anything at all, considering how thoroughly and completely dead they were.

My belief is that the only brittle, hard-nosed realists in all this are most likely the con artists like Chopra, who know the real score and are going Ommmm ... all the way to the bank.

Having trouble following my logic? Then riddle me this:  Approximately 30 billion people have lived on this planet, and (presumably) died on it. Most of them inconsequential, to be sure, but some of them were bona fide geniuses. Think about that. Archimedes, Paracelsus, Galileo, Newton, Einstein --the one thing they have in common is death -- and, if the legends are true, revival on the other side.

So do you really believe that, with such an unbelievable brain trust working on the  biggest question that has bedeviled humanity since Homo ergaster was a pup, the best communications device they've been able to put together so far is the Ouija Board?

Ray

A bit after the fact, I know, but better late than never ....

Never bury your lead, they say, so -- Ray Bradbury's dead.

I never knew him that well; others, like Marc Zicree, knew him much better than I. I started losing my voice about the same time Marc was getting to know him, and I made no effort to ride on his coattails, because I couldn't see the point. Ray wasn't the sort of guy with whom one could spend long companionable silences with. Like Sidney Greenstreet in THE MALTESE FALCON, he liked talking to a man who liked to talk.

But I'll let others speak about that. I'll keep this memoir to what I knew about him.

What I remember most about Ray was his joy.

How exuberant, ebullient, and just plain gosh-wow over things he was. Not just things having to do with writing, but just about every damn thing in the world. Ray could rhapsodize over milk. He could get teary-eyed, not just over sunsets and kittens, but such admittedly unlikely things as the flensing of a whale. (He once wrote a poem about Ahab and Moby Dick, in which he took the relationship to ... unprecedented territories, and at one point got positively misty-eyed over, uh, a scene it's probably safe to assume Melville never envisioned. Of course, a lot of his audience was having the same reaction, though not, I think it's safe to say, for the same emotions. I've heard Ray referred to as the Proust of science fiction prose, and I can certainly see that. But if one were to call him the Wordsworth of sci-fi poetry, I don't think the comparison's completely invalid either).Nevertheless, I credit Ray with inspiring me to be a writer. He spoke at my high school once, and he so obviously loved what he did that I, who'd been waffling uneasily between being an FBI agent and a commercial jet pilot (or  something equally absurd), left the assembly thoroughly and utterly convinced to do neither. I would cast my lot instead with the muse, and fuck her brains out. (Hey, don't blame me; it was Ray's line. He caught some hearty staff disapproval for it too, this being 1968, as well as a huge laugh and spontaneous applause.)

About 30 years later, when his HALLOWEEN TREE beat me out for a second Emmy, I wrote him a note to congratulate him, and also mentioned that bright storybook spring day when he had helped fix my course and steady my hand on the helm. I wish I could bring this thing to a proper conclusion by telling you about the nice reply I got. But I never heard back. Which is okay; it wasn't a callback for him. It was for me.

Adios, Ray... and thanks again.  
Nevertheless, I credit Ray with inspiring me to be a writer. He spoke at my high school once, and he so obviously loved what he did that I, who'd been waffling uneasily between being an FBI agent and a commercial jet pilot (or  something equally absurd), left the assembly thoroughly and utterly convinced to do neither. I would cast my lot instead with the muse, and fuck her brains out. (Hey, don't blame me; it was Ray's line. He caught some hearty staff disapproval for it too, this being 1968, as well as a huge laugh and spontaneous applause.)

About 30 years later, when his HALLOWEEN TREE beat me out for a second Emmy, I wrote him a note to congratulate him, and also mentioned that bright storybook spring day when he had helped fix my course and steady my hand on the helm. I wish I could bring this thing to a proper conclusion by telling you about the nice reply I got. But I never heard back. Which is okay; it wasn't a callback for him. It was for me.

Adios, Ray... and thanks again.


Nevertheless, I credit Ray with inspiring me to be a writer. He spoke at my high school once, and he so obviously loved what he did that I, who'd been waffling uneasily between being an FBI agent and a commercial jet pilot (or  something equally absurd), left the assembly thoroughly and utterly convinced to do neither. I would cast my lot instead with the muse, and fuck her brains out. (Hey, don't blame me; it was Ray's line. He caught some hearty staff disapproval for it too, this being 1968, as well as a huge laugh and spontaneous applause.)

About 30 years later, when his HALLOWEEN TREE beat me out for a second Emmy, I wrote him a note to congratulate him, and also mentioned that bright storybook spring day when he had helped fix my course and steady my hand on the helm. I wish I could bring this thing to a proper conclusion by telling you about the nice reply I got. But I never heard back. Which is okay; it wasn't a callback for him. It was for me.

Adios, Ray... and thanks again.