THE GIRL BODYBUILDER STORY (PART ONE)

INT. LADIES' GYM:

MATILDA (VO): "The muscle tone's nice and sweet now."

MATILDA: "Maybe it needs to be just a tad firmer in the deltoids."

EDWINA: "I don't know. A little more baby oil and the deltoids'll look fine. Hey, I wonder where Daisy is?"

EDNA: "Hey look! She just walked in!"

INGRID: "Hi Daisy! How's it goin'?"

DAISY: "Horrible! It's my little sister! She met a gigolo and he wined and dined her,  and now she's gonna meet him in the park in half an hour."

FLORENCE: "Well, that's not so bad. What could happen in the park?"

Daisy shows her friends a picture of the gigolo.

DAISY (VO): "A lot could happen! She's gonna give him her life savings! He says he needs the money to buy her a diamond ring so they can get married!  I've heard about this guy! When he gets the money she'll never see him again!"

IRIS: "WHAT!!! Aaaarghhh!!! That's the lowest thing I've ever heard!"

INGRID: "Grrrrr! Somebody ought to do something about it!"

GERTRUDE: "Yeah, somebody like us! That dude is cruisin' for a brusin! What are we waiting for, girls!? The park is only 20 minutes away!"

OUT ON THE STREET:

INGRID: "Hurry up, Daisy! We've got work to do!"

ETHEL: "Sister! Come join us! We're after a gigolo!"

MILDRED: "A GIGOLO!? One of those guys cheated my cousin! Count me in!"

NELLIE: "Need another!? Count me in, too!"

The group swells as more and more girls join in the hunt.

ESMERALDA: "Girls! We're gigolo bashing! Join us!"

PENNY: "Gigolos!? I'm with you!"

RODNEYETTA: "Count me in!"

STELLA: "Just let me get my running shoes!"

BERTHA: "Me too!"

ENTIRE MUSCLE PAGEANT: "US too!!!"

The group swells further til it's a human tsunami.

It gets bigger and bigger....

...til every muscle girl in the city joins in. The group of runners is so big that they can be seen from outer space!

THE STORY CONTINUES IN PART II, BELOW.

THE GIRL BODYBUILDER STORY (PART II)

SWARMS OF MUSCLE GIRLS ARRIVE AT THE PARK:

MILDRED: "Okay girls, we're here! He's bound to be around here somewhere!"

MARIGOLD: "Spread out! We'll find him!"

DAISY: "I'll hold back the train so we won't be interrupted!

FERN: "I'll look behind this planter! Nope, he's not here!"

 TULIP: "He's not up this pole!"

LILY: "He's not in this crack!"

ELVIRA: "He's not in this shed, either!

HYACINTH: "Well I don't see him anywhere. 'Looks like he gave us the slip!"

Skulking in the shadow of a wall...it's the gigolo! He just finishes putting on a girl disguise when one of the women sees him. 

VIOLET: "Wait a minute! Who are you!!??"

THE GIGOLO (IN FALSETTO): "Er...hi! Nobody here but us girls!"

GIGOLO: "I'm so glad you're here to protect poor, defenseless women like me from that horrible gigolo."

VIOLET: "Glad to help, m'am! Well, I guess we'll be heading home!"

GIGOLO: "Home, yes...definitely home!"

GIGOLO: "HAW! HAW! Those muscle girls haven't got two brain cells to rub together!"

INGRID: "Wait a minute! How did you know that we were looking for a gigolo!???"

MISSED A DEADLINE!!!!

UNCLE EDDIE'S WIFE: "What's the matter, Dear?"

UNCLE EDDIE: It's the blog. I attempted something difficult, and because of that I won't get the blog up in time. I'll miss a deadline. Everybody'll hate me. 

UNCLE EDDIE'S WIFE: "Oh, I don't think it's all that bad. These are readers who've known you for a long time. Surely they won't hate you just because you're a day late." 

UNCLE EDDIE: "(GROAN!) You don't know them like I do. They've grown to depend on it.  They read it over their morning coffee. When it's not there they...they...well, it gets ugly. Addiction does something to your mind."

UNCLE EDDIE'S WIFE: "What are you going to do?"

UNCLE EDDIE: Do? What can I do? I'll distract them! I'll put up some nifty animation of a sexy walk that my friend Milt Grey just did. Maybe the readers'll see that and forget how much they hate me! If that doesn't work...well, we can always chuck everything and move in with my brother in Arizona."

UNCLE EDDIE'S WIFE: "The one with the goofy children and the dog that hates you?"

UNCLE EDDIE: "The same (GROAN)."

The walk:

WATER DROPS

The Daily Mail recently ran an article about German artist Markus Reugels' high-speed photos (above) of splashing water drops. He uses color filters but claims there's no digital manipulation...these are just the way the camera saw them.

The mushroom top is fairly common, so is the "skirt" around the middle. But where does the skirt come from?

 Sometimes it comes when a double mushroom appears at the top, and the bottom mushroom expands as it's stretched downward.

It explodes and forms a ring. That kind of ring is easy to explain...but not all rings are like that. Some just seem to appear in the middle.

Here's (above) a better picture of the double mushroom top before the bottom mushroom is torn apart. The long stem explodes at the bottom, maybe (I'm guessing) because its in two parts and the top part is collapsing onto the base.

Why all the interest in water drops? Well, for an artist the appeal is obvious, but there's more to it than that. For a physicist the fascinating part comes when the splash debris expands and thins out. There's a point at which purely mechanical effects recede from our attention and you have to wonder if the indirect results of quantum effects are coming into play.

Weird, unearthly shapes (above) appear for an instant. It's hard to account for some of these, but maybe that's because there's so many variables. The artist sometimes used additives like sugar and Rinse All, and who knows what minerals were in the water?

To understand simple splashes we'll need even more improvements in high speed photography. The world of the small is surprisingly strange and unfamiliar. I read somewhere that no one actually understands how things catch fire. So many chemical and state changes take place in a small amount of time that no one can keep track of it all. The author thought that high speed photography might help, but that it would have to be much improved over the current state of the art.

I SAW "ATLAS SHRUGGED!"

Well, I saw Atlas Shrugged and loved it.

I have to be honest and admit that I'm not objective and was predisposed to like the film, almost no matter how it played on the screen. I saw the very first show at 2PM on Friday and the theater was about 20% full, which is good for a matinee, but not what I'd hoped for. The audience had a number of people who might have passed as business magnates, but a much larger number were nerds like myself with iphones and ipads which the manager had to beg us to turn off.

The verdict...it was great! Flawed but great!

I feel silly talking about the flaws. No doubt the filmmaker himself would agree with a lot of the criticisms that are leveled against it. He was a first-time feature director working with a minuscule budget and a sacrosanct script. He did better than most would have under the circumstances, and I'm just amazed that the film turned out as well as it did.

Condensing the first third of Rand's story must have been a nightmare. I'm reminded how awkward Tolstoy's "War and Peace" looked when Hollywood tried to condense it into two hours. A 6 hour (or was it 8?) Russian version done in the 70s made Tolstoy's points a lot better. Hollywood also reduced "Brothers Karamazov" down to two hours, but once again it was much, much too lean. Boy, the great Russian novels don't condense very easily. I hate to say it, but this version of Atlas suffers for the same reason. The story needed more room to breath. It needed to be a miniseries.

No matter. I was ecstatic. For two hours I got to live in a different world, and it was Heaven.

BTW: The film should be in the Landmark Regent for another week at least.

MORE PREDICTIONS OF THE FUTURE

What will the future be like? Fortunately we have a pretty accurate idea based on sketches by artist Wally Wood. In matters of this sort Wood is never wrong.

That's a Wood prediction above. Men will develop giant brains and ride everywhere in jet-propelled wheelchairs. Robot girlfriends will replace real women. It has the ring of truth. Gads! How does Wood do it?

Inspired by Wood, I'll make a few predictions of my own: increasingly intelligent birds will disdain to make strenuous migrations the way their forerunners did. They'll take a plane (above) like everybody else. Actually, some of them do that now.

 Spiders will take up the whole suburban lifestyle, and won't be content to crawl up walls and eat bugs anymore. Probably they never liked bugs, but didn't know what else to eat. Future spiders will indulge in  hamburgers like the rest of us, and drive where ever they need to go.

About the time spiders stop crawling up walls, expect humans to take it up. New advances in body glue will enable us to take shortcuts never thought possible.

 Of course old people will take the same shortcuts, slowing down the wall traffic.

 We may as well be honest, and face up to the fact that not everything in the future will be rosy. Previously law-abiding citizens (above) will be tempted by the glitz of modern life.

 

Animals will become increasingly surly.

Some will be downright rude.

Fortunately when the world becomes too abrasive future man will have the solace of his gadget-filled home...that is, if he can find it.



I'll end with this little gem of a film about office work in the future. I suggest watching only the first 3 1/2 minutes.

BTW: Thanks to Mike Fontanelli for the terrific scans of Wood's futuristic illustrations for "Blobs."

WHAT HAPPENED TO SPACE HELMETS!!!????

When I was a kid everyone was excited about outer space. All of us kids couldn't wait til we grew up and could go to other planets and battle monsters of indescribable ferocity.

Wally Wood nailed it in this picture (above). Every kid had his trusty tricycle and his 

Davy Crockett and Prince Valiant paraphernalia. The only inaccurate thing about this picture is the space helmet.  None of us kids, at least in my area, could lay his hands on one. 

To judge from the media of that era, toy space helmets were common as water....

...even girls had them....but it wasn't true. NOBODY had them!!!

Look at that lucky kid above,  grooving with his new helmet and a pocket full of quarters for the rocket ride. What I think of when I see this picture is, where the heck did he get it? I begged and cried, threw tantrums and fits, and still couldn't get one. I never even saw them in the stores.

My parents said the helmets I saw in magazines were probably specially made for the photographs, but I wasn't buying it. They had the look of mass market toys. See that blow-up plastic ring
(above) around the bottom? That says mass production to me.

I have to face the possibility that my parents lied to me. Maybe parents had a boycott going. It's possible that some psychologist somewhere went on the road with an EC comics-type scenario where a kid falls off his tricycle, causing his helmet to shatter into shards and disfigure him for life. It was the beginning of the age of parental hysteria, egged on by so-called "experts."

I'll bet warehouses were full of unsold space helmets, including the premium "Space Patrol" helmet shown above.  Eventually many tens of thousands of them were probably crushed and used as landfill. I and millions of other kids were left bereft. Now I'm an adult and I stand before you a mental and physical wreck. I sleep in doorways and life is what happens while I await the solace of death and oblivion. Like so many of my generation I was lied to and denied a basic necessity of kid life, and this...this has been the tragic result.