THE LATEST TOY RAY GUNS

Mike just bought a rabbit ray gun (above) and he let me try it out. It's pretty good! It consists of a crazed rabbit's face (looking a little like Ren Hoek) in a bathroom plunger with rabbit ear sights. Not bad, not bad.

Before the rabbit pistol the best ray gun in the toy store (above) was the one from the Mars Attacks movie. My hunch is that the original prototype looked a lot better than the final production model, but it's still a good effort. Mike says there was an earlier model of this that looks better than the one shown here.

I love the idea that the gun is powered by a squirrel's brain. Of course the brain requires a life support system, thus the hose.

For years the best ray guns were water pistols (above) and nerf dart launchers.

Some of them were really elaborate (above).

My guess for the near future of ray gun toys is that they'll combine the best features of the Rabbit Invasion pistol with that of the Mars Attacks pistol. The next pistols may retain the cartoon head but be guided by human brains, maybe the brains of miniature plastic humans. Maybe they'll be powered by a globe full of real flies.

Yikes! I grossed myself out!

ROWDY 19TH CENTURY THEATRE AUDIENCES

That's the old Drury Lane Theatre above. It looks like an expensive place to run and I wouldn't blame readers for thinking that it must have cost a fortune to see a show there. Actually, it didn't. There were seats in every price range. 

Most people don't realize that 19th Century Londoners of all but the very lowest class were frequent theatre goers. It's as if they had TV even before TV was invented. Even then, nobody wanted to stay home at night and darn socks by candle light. Londoners wanted spectacle and drama after dinner, just like we do in 2014 when we turn on the TV.

Frequent trips to the theatre, even for people with minimal income, was made possible by the marvelous English tradition that allowed mixing of the classes (sort of) in theatres. Almost everyone could afford theatre tickets and that's because because the uppermost gallery in the big theatres was set aside for the working poor. 

This gallery wasn't exactly luxurious. People were packed onto backless wooden benches, shoulder to shoulder. Ventilation ranged from poor to non-existent and fist fights were common. In one theatre disruptive fights were broken up by big, burly security guards who would grab the combatants by the scruf of their necks and throw them into a chute which zig-zagged down to the street outside.

Maybe the management could sell the seats so cheap because they had other ways of making money. Roaving vendors sold alcohol and food. They also made money by double booking. More tickets were sold than there were seats, even after people were crammed in. You could be stuck with a ticket you couldn't use, like the couple above. I'm guessing that some smaller theatres even profitted from kickbacks from the prostitutes who plied their wares there.

Another source of revenue was the toys that were sold. These included paper cut-out theatres (above).

Prints, too (above).

I imagine that prints or photos of the performers (above) were also sold. The amazing thing is that so many of these cheap nolveties were actually worth having.

But I digress. There's more to say about the flamboyant theatre goers and something called The OP Riots of 1809. OP is short for "Old Prices." Theatre owners tried to nudge the rowdy lower classes out of the theatres by raising the prices and the cheap seaters rebelled. I pity all parties in disputes like that.

The poor were addicted to theatre. They named their kids after famous actors, and every kid wanted to be an actor someday. For them the thought of doing without was intolerable. On the other hand the poor could be unbelievably vile. The catcalls, baby screams, body odor, fights, vomitting and pranks generated by the lower classes must have been something to see.

Eventually the middle class won. By the beginning of the 20th Century ticket prices were up and only the vaudeville-style music halls carried on some of the old traditions.

Interesting, eh?

IT'S THE FOURTH OF JULY!!!!!!!

There it is...Old Glory. It's a symbol that I can't be owned by a Pharaoh or a Sun King, that I'm the author of my life's script.



This video (above) is from 1938, three years before America entered WW2. The song is by Irving Berlin. I like the preamble, which you never hear nowadays.



Geez, Red's reading of the Pledge says it all.



Woody wrote this as an answer to God Bless America. I don't think that song really required an answer, but you can't argue with the beautiful result. Woody expands on Berlin's lyrics about the country's natural beauty.



I like the opening title of the recent John Adams miniseries. The composer and art director might have settled for a Ken Burns-type treatment of Revolutionary War paintings and no one would have complained. Instead they wisely chose to illustrate with music and graphics that which is hard to put into words about that time.



Wow! Giametti was a great John Adams!

I like the way the series showed Adams as a tireless worker and blunt idealist who nevertheless had very little personal appeal. Franklin had to request that Congress withdraw Adams from the French court because he was alienating the French.

Poor Adams doesn't write often to his wife back in the States and she misinterprets it as neglect. When they're finally reunited he admits that the true reason for silence was that he failed in every undertaking in Europe. He was tortured by the thought that his life amounted to nothing and that he was an obstacle to his country and not an asset.

The show was produced by HBO who might be expected to emphasize only the negatives about America but the show doesn't come off that way. Even Adams' failures in the film showed greatness of heart. It was easy to imagine that he exerted a benign influence on his peers, even if they didn't realize it at the time.

MORE ABOUT TIME TRAVEL

I haven't been able to stop thinking about time travel since I posted about it last week. I still don't believe it's possible but it sure is fun to think about. It's especially fun since old photos indicate that the point of origin for the travelers might have been right here in good old 2014 or thereabouts.

Take a look at the lady in the 50s bus above. Isn't that a digital snapshot camera? It looks like a camera you can buy right now.

And this photo from the 40s (above, circled red on the right)....what's a 2014 hipster doing in this crowd? He looks like somebody you'd see in Starbucks. Was he Photoshopped in? I don't know.

Lots of old photos contain pictures of people who are still here. How did that come about?

And why do old photos contain so many pictures of people in modern dress?

The other day I was looking at some pictures (above) by the 40s/50s jazz cover artist, James Flora. I almost did a double take. These covers look like they were done in Illustrator or Flash, computer programs that wouldn't exist for another 60 years!

You have to wonder why people would choose to live in the past. In order to bet on winner-known-in-advance horse races, I guess. Or maybe the near future didn't shape up so well and these travelers are refugees. I wonder if any of them were able to go back?

 **********************

P.S. Here's a link to the site where I got some of these photos.

http://www.ryot.org/evidence-of-time-travel-popping-up-all-over-the-internet/84113

EVIL OLD LADY (EXPANDED)

Yikes! Sorry for the absence! No sooner did my marathon Downton Abbey series end than my kid came to visit, and I've been busy doing things with him. One of the things we did was talk about Photoshop and I made the the sloppy collage above to illustrate a point.

My kid might work on a project that requires him to sign what he does and I offered to help him come up with a signature. There's lots of reference on the net.

I tried my hand at it myself. My first name is easy to write in a flamboyant style but my last name is long and resistant to design. Maybe I should just call myself "Eddie." That'll be a tip off that I'm either famous or utterly insignificant.

I envy Jerry Lewis. His first and last names are short and are full of letters that look good in script. The "J" and "L" in particular lend themselves to lavish thick and thin.

DOWNTON ABBEY

I can't believe that I neglected my blog and just about everything else so I could sit in front of the TV eating potato chips and watching discs of "Downton Abbey."  Man, that show's dangerous! It's the most addictive miniseries I've seen since "Fargo" which, come to think of it, is the most addictive miniseries I've seen since "Sherlock."

Good Lord! What's happened to me? I used to be better at resisting things like this.

The really frustrating thing is that I can't figure out why the show works so well. The premise doesn't sound impressive at all. It's about an English manor house and its struggle to stay relevant in the modern world. I mean, it's not like it hasn't been done before.

There must be a lot about writing stories that I don't understand. How does a writer keep our interest in characters when the story outline is something we've already seen? Why do I still end up in tears over this stuff?

Maybe it's because the ostensible premise isn't really what the series is about. All that about the collision with the modern world is just an excuse to have a show. The real story is more subtle and more difficult to summarize in a few words.

For me this story exists to celebrate the English character. The master of the house struggles to keep the house "alive" because it's a cultural symbol, something that unites the present with the mythic past, that defines what it is to be English.

It's horrible to think that one day we could all wake up and decide that our country is just a random spot on the map, that our neighbors are just unrelated individuals, and that we have no common aspiration or ideal to bind us together. My gut tells me that a country so constituted would lapse into stagnation and decay.

Most of us know what England contributed to the world in the fields of law and liberty, literature and education, and of knightly behavior even if it's observed more in the breach. Maybe it's less well known how the national character made those advances possible. For me that's at least part of what Downton Abbey is all about.

THE LATEST ASTRONOMY PICTURES

I never tire of looking at pictures of the Milky Way taken from the surface of the Earth. This one (above) was taken from Reunion Island in the Southern Indian Ocean. 

What we call the Milky Way is actually a spiral arm of our own galaxy which is closer to the galactic center than we are. 

One of the biggest fears of space scientists is that Earth might might one day find itself looking down the polar axis of a nearby star which is about to go supernova. Until now no star fit the description but one has recently been discovered and we appear to be looking right down the barrel of the gun. 

That star (possibly a double star) is Wolf-Rayett 104, about 8,000 light years distant. Sometime in the next million years this star (above) will explode and the remaining core will fire a massive gamma ray jet in our direction. We don't know enough yet to predict whether the jet will hit us directly or score a near miss.

It's unlikely but we can't rule out the possibility that the star has already exploded thousands of years ago and the gamma rays simply haven't arrived yet. They could be here tomorrow.

 Above. the rings of Neptune. 

Above, a heat map of the sky taken by the COBE satellite. It shows that one side of the sky is warm and another relatively cold. By measuring the difference scientists can calculate how fast the Earth is moving through the universe relative to the background radiation. Our speed it turns out, is an unexpected 600 kilometers per second. That's very fast. No one knows why we should be moving at that speed. 

What you see here (above) is a recent imrovement on the deep field picture we all saw on the news a couple of years ago.  These are some of the most distant stellar objects it's possible to see. The galaxies shown here are all very young, only a few hundred million years old. 

It's puzzling because you'd think that stars would form first then clump together into galaxies, but that doesn't seem to be the case here. Maybe stars were abundant but were too small for the Hubble to resolve, but it's also possible that galaxies of some sort precede stars.