Over the next several weeks I am going to post some of my most favorite books from my youth during the 1960’s. I had an aunt who taught me to read before kindergarten and my love of reading started right then and there and continues unabated.

The book shown above, BUCK ROGERS, was bought by my Aunt Margie for me Christmas 1968. The book is h-u-g-e! It collects original Buck Rogers daily and Sunday comic strips. A gas!

My synergy from the Sunday talk shows: the energy revolution is real, and its coming and its going to redistribute wealth like a hurricane redistributes boats and trailers. That's my opinion, but my most articulate source is Thomas Friedman and his inteview on CNN's GPS.

Of course, Friedman mentions several times that he goes into this in some detail in his new book(which I'll likely read, but find it yerself). But his premise was that those who innovate are going to win big, and those who dig i with fossil fuels are going to perish. But it will take a while.

The central difference between this and other technological revolutions is that the old technology is pre-existing and cheaper. For now.

Here's a fact I know in that regard. To replace my water heater with a standard gas heater runs about $800. To replace t with a solar heater - even after rebates - runs about $1500. That pays for itself over a couple of years, but if you have only a thousand to spend in the first place - that's still not a choice at all.

But yet the world keeps heating, and the oil fields keep shrinking.

Those tax rebates have yet to be renewed by Congress.

GPS, BTW, is the Sunday talk show for true wonks. There are no campaign surrogates exchanging sound bytes. Fareed Zakaria interviews actual experts about things going on in the world.

(I mean, really, how difficult is it to determine where Senator Boxer (D-CA) stands on abortion? Do I really need Wolf Blitzer to ask that question for me?)

Buck Roger's actual first name is Anthony in the original novellas, but was William in the 1980's movies and TV series.

In a neighborhood like Olney, people sorted themselves out from each along a variety of fault lines. Phillies fans versus those who allied themselves with Connie Mack’s pitiful Athletics, those with Lionel Electric trains against those with American Flyers, Schwinn riders against the Raleighs, Luckies or Camels, and on and onand on. But the defining separation among the people who populated the neighborhood of my childhood was the religious split between Catholics and the Protestants. Among Catholics like us, the prevailing interpretation of Protestantism encompassed anyone who wasn’t a Catholic.

The Catholicism of those years was reflexive, exclusionary and total. And it was Irish. It didn’t matter if your background was German, Italian or Polish. The Archdiocese of Philadelphia was Irish in its soul, and the brand of Catholicism we experienced reflected all of the irrelevant strengths of a national church standing valiantly against the oppression of a hostile occupying power.

Muscular American Catholicism in the late 1940’s had an almost xenophobic defensiveness, a distrust of and a wariness toward all things not of our own. The Church seemed to grudgingly acknowledge that the Wars of Religion had indeed ended in the 17th century; but still, you couldn’t be too careful. You certainly wouldn’t want to let your guard down by doing something as dangerous as attending a wedding at an Episcopal church. The Hungarian-born historian John Lukacs described Philadelphia in 1948 as the kind of a place where if an Irish boy from Frankford married a Polish girl from Bridesburg, it was considered a “mixed marriage.”

Catholics in Philadelphia were not encouraged to choose the church they would attend. Moving to the 400 block of West Delphine Street in August 1945, we became de facto members of the parish of The Incarnation of Our Lord located at the corner of Fifth Street and Lindley Avenue. There was only the formality of parish registration. My own first trip to Incarnation was not propitious. The Sunday after we moved into our new address, not yet eight years old and three days uprooted from everything familiar to me, I was sent to the nine a.m. children’s mass. The move from my aunt’s house in Wissinoming had left me feeling like Buck Rogers marooned on a distant asteroid. I dutifully went to the children’s mass, asking an usher to point out the section reserved for the third-grade boys. Directed to a pew, I sat through mass among what I thought were my peers. My shame and humiliation were total when meeting a cousin on the way out of church, I was told that I had been sitting among the youngsters in the second-grade section. I felt it was something I would never get over.

To be enrolled in a Catholic school in the 1940’s was to be handed over to the care and authority of a uniformed organization of celibate women. At Incarnation, it was the Sisters of the Order of the Immaculate Heart of Mary. The good sisters of my experience were as devoted to the well-being of their charges as they were to the Savoir they had wed. Even among the least generous, the least broad-minded, and the most simplistically superstitious of the Order, they reflected the fact that they had offered their lives in the service of a higher calling. Considering the resources available to them, they did a much better job than could have been reasonably expected in imparting to us the civilizing educational and ethical values of a benign Christianity. A few of them I would say could have been, under any criteria, candidates for sainthood.

That’s not to deny the victimization experienced by some of my contemporaries. Consideration for what we’ve come to call “learning disabilities” was noticeably absent. Some kids were OK; some were not. Some were smart; some were slow or even dumb. Some were bad, and often the lines got blurred. Little slack was granted to those who fell off the norm, even marginally. The nuns did beat kids. A boy from our street was so badly mistreated by a sixth-grade nun that his otherwise devout mother removed him from the Incarnation school and sent him to the local public school. He wasn’t the only one. Despite the justification of their cases, the kids who left were always looked at like the guys in the army who didn’t make it through basic training. On the whole, most of us gave as good or better than we got.

I don’t discount the horror stories recounted by adult Catholics and former Catholics of having been traumatized by what they remember as brutal nuns. What I remember was my own class of eighth-grade boys. On one end of the spectrum, we had among us the model Catholic boys; the altar boys, the kids who would go on to high school honors, and to college and graduate school accomplishments. Also in our midst were more than a few my mother would have called “bad actors.” Most of us, caught up as we were in the demonic thrall of puberty, were highly excitable and borderline unmanageable. The majority smoked cigarettes, and many were already regular beer drinkers. While I don’t recall any real thugs, there were several volatile types who required careful handling. Sister Mary Martin would prove to be no match for this crowd. I learned much later that she was only twenty-two years old and that we were just her second teaching assignment. From the very first day of class, she had trouble extending her span of control beyond the first row of desks. The sharks smelled blood. Early in the school year, Father Buckley had been brought over to restore order. Examples were made and there were threats of expulsions. The matter seemed settled, but with Sister’s vulnerabilities exposed, the least civilized among us began a low intensity insurgency. The worse it got, the more she tried to hold on to her authority, and on many days we reduced Sister Mary Martin to tears. Our instinctive awareness that she had the full powers of the church behind her tempered some of our more outrageous impulses. But once we had her on the run, group solidarity or just the cowardly fear of being ridiculed by our peers, kept some of us in the game long after we knew that she deserved better from us. I still get a bad feeling about a lot of what went on in that classroom.

On another level, the revelations of horrendous sexual misconduct by members of a supposedly celibate male clergy lies beyond the denial of even the most ultra of Catholics. Yet with the exception of one genuinely harmless Christian Brother who had a hopeless thing for young boys, I never encountered in all of my years of Catholic life anything remotely like the evil and predatory clerical behavior that’s surfaced of late. You don’t have to be a church scholar to understand how and why so many of these sexually deformed people found themselves priests of the church. In my own time, boys as young as eleven or twelve years old were being identified for their piety and spoken reverently of as having vocations to the priestly life.

One morning in the sixth-grade, Father Smith knocked on our classroom door. After some whispering in the hall, Sister Mary Gregory announced from the front of the room that I was to come to school the next day dressed appropriately for a visit to the seminary. All eyes in the class were on me. Whatever was going on, I certainly didn’t know. Unquestioningly, my mother sent me off the next day in my Sunday best. Just after the start of class, Father Smith came to the door and motioned me to come out into the hall. With him was a kid a year behind me, a fifth grader named Robert Groban, with whom several years later I was to have one of my very few fist fights.

Father Smith was an old friend of my father’s, and at the time, the most popular priest at Incarnation. Bing Crosby’s success a few years earlier in “Going My Way” and in “The Bells of Saint Mary’s” had put a premium on young, good-looking, regular-guy kinds of priests. That was Father Smith. He drove us out to Saint Charles Borremeo Seminary, on the grounds of a sprawling, wooded estate just off City Line Avenue. A ride in a car was a big enough deal for me. We were taken on a tour, told and shown all about what it was like to be a seminarian. At the end of the morning, nothing had been clarified, but being a kid, I went with the flow. I wasn’t all that impressed. Becoming a priest certainly didn’t measure up to being an Indian scout or a commando. Leaving the seminary, we drove into downtown Philadelphia for lunch at Bookbinders, a seafood house then regarded among Philadelphia’s best eating places. I could count on one hand the number of times I’d been in a restaurant, and never in anything on the scale of a Bookbinders. We were near the end of our lunch, my mother’s repeated warnings about me minding my table manners still playing in my head. The dessert I’d ordered, a gigantic chocolate éclair, had just arrived at the table. As I began to dive into the éclair, I must have said something to make Father Smith realize that a mix-up had taken place. I was not the sixth-grade boy he had been instructed to take to the seminary. I was not the boy that the nuns had reported as showing signs of having a vocation to the religious life. He had brought the wrong kid. To his credit, he burst out laughing, and I continued working away on my éclair. My other companion for the seminary tour, Robert Groban, if he ever had a vocation, soon got rid of it. The fistfight he and I had as paperboys several years later had to do with the affections of an eighth-grade girl.

My own seminary visit highlighted the design flaws in a recruiting system that targeted young boys for a process that led toward a life of priestly celibacy. There were other pressures as well. Mothers proud and pious; nuns making a fuss over the devotion of such good boys. Small wonder some of these guys ended up confused; or worse, twisted. Maybe no one should be allowed to consider becoming a celibate cleric until they’ve figured out their own lives, maybe not until they’ve passed the age of thirty or forty.

Too many memoirs of Catholic childhoods fall to either innocent comic nostalgia, or to dark recountings of the wounds suffered at the hands of sadistic nuns and brothers. Like any larger reality, the truth is often more complex. The context of the archdiocesan educational system in Philadelphia in the late 1940’s was that it provided a basic education funded by the contributions, however meager, of the mostly working class parishioners. We had no gymnasiums, no science labs, no lunchrooms; nothing but the four fundamentals; Reading, Writing, Arithmetic and of course, Religion. As the product of twelve years of intensive religious education, I remain confounded that the Conservative Right in America, a movement supposedly characterized by hard-headed realism, devotes so much of its energies to the issue of school prayer. Like so many other veterans of an educational process steeped in religiosity, I can bear witness to the doubtful efficacy of prayer in the classroom. Enforced piety often creates something very different than its intended result.

Catholics, as everyone seems to know, are required on pain of mortal sin to attend mass on Sundays, and on designated holy days of obligation. There is also the business of one’s Easter Duty, the specifics of which I no longer recall. What I do recall is that a preponderant amount of my time as a Catholic elementary school pupil was devoted to the prayers and rituals of the Faith, both in the classroom and in the church building itself.

I was never an altar boy. A daily afternoon newspaper route precluded the after-school Latin classes required of altar boys. Until my voice changed, I did spend a couple of years as a choirboy, a role that didn’t have quite the status of being on the altar. As a choirboy I was in church for all of the attendant command performances; singing at High Mass, at first mass on holy days, at some funerals and at other forgotten liturgical functions. In addition, there was all of the other church time required of Catholic school children. Children’s mass on Sunday, mass on holy days, 7 a.m. mass and communion on the first Friday of each month. Mass every day in October, something to do with the Blessed Mother. They pushed for mass in advent before Christmas, but it was like a pro team’s optional practice. If we didn’t have to do it, we slept in. Mass every day during Lent, and mass every day in May, more Blessed Mother stuff.

Attending mass however, wasn’t the end of it. There was confession on Saturday afternoon. And there were novenas and there were missions. Novenas were prayer sessions held over a period of several days and missions were conducted by visiting clergy, usually something exotic like Franciscans in brown robes with ropes around their waists. Missions were the only time I can recall when the forbidden topic of sex came up. Mid-week of the mission, there was the big night with separate sessions for the men and for the women of the parish. Usually it was Wednesday night and everybody knew that “you know what” was going to be the topic. While the mission priests were capable of thundering and shouting, their allusions to sex were always circumspect, veiled. The mission preachers relied on phrases like respect for the sanctity of life, and all references to sexual acts were so sanitized, references to our bodies as temples of the Holy Ghost, so that I could never quite understand what they talking about. Later at an all-boys high school, mission week sermons were more direct. We knew exactly what they were talking about; making out with girls and playing with yourself.

There were other things I never quite got the drift of. One was called Forty Hours and took place in the Fall, usually in November. Forty Hours was a series of evening services that, like most Catholic services, were wrapped up with Benediction. Benediction was a relatively short form ritual, with smoking incense, ringing bells, no sermons, and a couple of hymns that can imbed themselves forever in the psyche. “Oh Holy Gooooddd, we praise thy name. Lord of all…; Tantum ergo sacramentum, vene remur cere nui.

A Momento Mori is in order. Lest anyone ever forget, the liturgy of the Roman Catholic Church of my experience was conducted almost entirely in Latin. Virtually every utterance from the altar, everything other than the sermons and homilies, was in a language entirely incomprehensible to the overwhelming majority of the congregation. We were told by one of our nuns that the Christmas Carol, “Oh Come All Ye Faithful” was of suspect, read Protestant, origins. If the song were to be sung, we should, as Good Catholics, be careful to sing it only in the Latin version of “Adeste Fidelis.”

In the Church of my childhood, forty days and forty nights didn’t reference the biblical flood, but rather the holy season of Lent. We were expected to offer up sacrifices in recognition of the coming Passion of Christ. Not at all a bad idea. Translating the spiritual concept of the mortification of the flesh into practice in our neighborhood usually came down to giving something up for Lent, something like not going to the movies or not eating candy or not drinking sodas. By eighth grade, we were trying to give up cigarettes for Lent. Lenten scorekeeping and rule bending took on Byzantine complexities. If you could break your pledge on Sundays in Lent, then what about holy days? Did St. Patrick’s Day count as a holy day? Or St. Joseph’s Day? While the voluntary nature of Lenten sacrifice was conceded, good luck to you if the word got out that you’d been seen going into a matinee at the Colney or the Lindley on a Saturday afternoon during the Lenten season.

There were dietary rules that further complicated our lives. Friday’s of course were meatless. Fried flounder, codfish cakes and oyster stew were the Friday staples in our house. My father got the oysters and we got what was known as blind oyster stew, or the flavored broth, not that we would have eaten anything that looked like an oyster. During Lent, the rules on what could be eaten and when it could be eaten got problematic. Once in high school, when my mother ran out of lunchmeat and sent me off with a cheese sandwich, I was told it was the Octave of Donut Day, a day of fast and abstinence.

On top of having to attend mass every day during Lent, there were the Stations of the Cross each Friday after school. By seventh grade, half of our class had Evening Bulletin newspaper routes and there would be trouble every week when we bagged stations to serve papers. “Young man, ask yourself, what is more important, serving newspapers or the state of your immortal soul?” During Holy Week, the week ahead of Easter, the church functions reached a frenzy level that included having to visit three different Catholic churches on Holy Thursday. As a kid coerced into spending three hours in church on a Good Friday afternoon, I gained a fuller appreciation of the concept of agony.

In May, over half of our school days were spent in the church practicing for the parish equivalent of the Super Bowl, the May Procession. We practiced lining up by height and by class. We practiced walking the route around the parish property and inside the church. We stood and we knelt, and we practiced the hymns, over and over and over. The May Procession also incorporated the graduation for that year’s eighth-grade class, and one of the eighth-grade girls would be selected in advance by the nuns as May Queen. The May Queen would march in a long white gown, holding a large floral bouquet and wearing a crown. We were never informed of what the criteria were for the picking of the May Queen, but by the eighth-grade, we had our own picks for May Queen. Everyone in the parish held their breath hoping for good weather on the Sunday chosen for the procession. Women would make novenas, praying for a sunny Sunday.

A little known talent found among many Catholics of a certain age, lapsed or active, is an ability to zone out, to trip off into a dreamlike state while giving off all the appearances of engagement and attentiveness. I know. As a veteran corporate bureaucrat, I cruised my way through endless rounds of mind-numbing meetings by employing the secret skills I’d honed as a Catholic schoolboy. Forced to sit through and chant the repetitive decades of the rosary, I had learned to compartmentalize my mind. The call of “Hail Mary Full of Grace…” followed by the rote response of “Holy Mary, Mother of God… quickly lost all semblance of meaning. A kind of mental multi-tasking took over during so many of those long mornings, evenings, and afternoons spent drifting along in a fog of incense and Latin. With the good nuns ever watchful for slackness, it took subtle adaptive skills to pass muster while you went off into your own head to help Randolph Scott battle Comanches at a desert waterhole. Dreams of toys you knew you’d never get, of heroics you’d never perform, of revenge you’d never taste; the fantasies to be explored and manipulated were limitless. Once you’d mastered this Zen-like art and discipline of advanced day-dreaming under pressure, a universe of pleasure became yours. The risks of the endeavor only added to the pleasure. A shrill “Young man! What are you doing?” would jolt you awake to the moment. Or worse, a hard wallop upside the head that would snap you back to the Sorrowful Mysteries of the Rosary. It took skill and daring to pull off these escapes, but the rewards of spending the afternoon with Zorro fighting the evil Mexican soldiers seemed well worth the risks. It certainly beat the dreadful tedium of a drowsy classroom after lunch, being read a story about some pious kids in Latin America “who were known throughout the region for their devotion to the Blessed Mother. One day the soldiers came for them and …”

In their zeal to make us saintly children of our Holy Father, the good sisters all too often made us complicit in our own sinfulness. “I’m sure that tonight, after dinner, when you kneel down in your living room with the rest of your good Catholic family to say the rosary..." Say what? The only time my father ever got on his knees in our living room was to tack down an unruly carpet edge. Or, “I’m sure no one in this room has ever risked the immortal souls of their family by allowing a book to come into the house that didn’t contain the Imprimatur of our Holy Mother Church.” I looked across the aisle and caught the expression of incredulity on the face of Louie Carr. I doubt there was a book of any sort in the Carr household.

It got worse. Standing up at the end of 10:15 mass to take the Pledge of the Legion of Decency, promising I’d boycott all movies condemned by the Church, knowing even at the age of thirteen that I’d do no such thing. I never did see “The Moon is Blue,” a tame piece of fluff that precipitated the 1950’s clash between Hollywood and Rome. In fifth-grade, we had been told that we were not to attend the Lindley Theater on Saturday afternoons while it was running a fifteen-part serial called “The Curse of the Purple Phantom.” At this point, I’d seen the first four chapters. Each cheap, innocuous, twenty-minute episode that preceded the feature films would end with a cliff-hanger designed to get you back in your seat for next week’s resolution. If you got your card punched for attending the first fourteen chapters, you’d get in for free for the final episode. Somehow someone had told someone that in some way this stuff was injurious to young minds, and Sister Mary Gregory issued a fatwa on “The Curse of the Purple Phantom.” Now it just so happened that during that very week, every afternoon when we returned to school from lunch, the same Sister Mary Gregory would read aloud to us for at least a half hour from a book on the sufferings of the North American Martyrs. While the Campbell’s soup, baloney sandwiches, milk and cookies of our lunch digested, we listened to detailed, grisly descriptions of the tortures and slow deaths inflicted by the savage Iroquois upon Saint Isaac Jogues and the Jesuit missionaries to the Hurons.

While there was pro-forma respect for and deference to the priests and the nuns, no one was exempt from being tagged by the parish wise guys. There were no dispensations for position. One of the priests at the rectory, a strange bird, gaunt and ascetic, almost devoid of people skills and given to stalking about the parish grounds in a pom-pommed baretta and a cape-like cloak, was known as “Black Bart.” The wonderfully gentle Mother Superior at the convent and principal of the parish school, all four feet, five inches of her, got nailed with the name of a diminutive Indian chief in the Red Ryder comic strip, “Little Moose.” The perennial terror of seventh grade boys, Sister Mary Agnes, was less creatively capped with “Aching Aggie.” For reasons I don’t recall, my seventh grade wasn’t assigned to get Aggie, although her replacement, Sister Mary Matthew was another intimidating bruiser.

Late on a warm September afternoon, early in the school year, with classroom windows open to the street, a passing “J” bus on Lindley Avenue delivered a chorus of adolescent male laughter and the chant of “Aching Aggie, stick your feet out the window.” As freshmen at Northeast Catholic High School for Boys, these imaginative young men felt they had finally moved beyond the authority of mere elementary school nuns. Every kid and every nun in the school heard the challenge gleefully blasted from the passing bus. The next day, more of the same, but louder. By the third afternoon, everyone was waiting. Before the laughing and yelling had died down, the bus came to a sudden stop. Father Buckley, standing on the corner at Fourth and Lindley, had flagged the bus down, and stormed aboard. The culprits were marched off the bus and down Lindley Avenue to the school hall where Sister Mary Agnes awaited their arrival. I’m still not sure they all weren’t executed.

By seventh-grade, too many years of total immersion in mandatory religious rituals and practices coupled with the onset of puberty would create a volatile, combustible mix. For many of us, the routines of spirituality, the liturgy of transcendence had become an increasingly irrelevant background noise to the more pressing realities of our lives. We were long past hearing the message and we began to find ways, not always as passive as daydreaming, to get us through the tedium. In church, we’d try to steal glances at the girls across the aisle. A few of the more daring even read comic books laid out on the seats of the pews in front of them. The most memorable, most spontaneous and most dangerous of our rebellions against the light was the great eight-o-clock Mass farting contest.

It began with one slight buzz from Ray Feldmeyer that set off some stifled giggling. Then seconds later Bobby Yanks tilted to one side and ripped a moderately good one. That produced audible guffaws reaching all the way back to the formidable seventh-grade boys nun, Sister Mary Matthew. She left her place, and marching up the aisle, cuffed a couple of the gigglers on their heads. For a few minutes, order was restored. Then “A-Bomb” Tommy Leary, so-named for his ability to fart on cue, fired a moist, rubbery arpeggio that sent even the devout Martin Ecsterowitz into a choking fit. As an outraged Sister again got to her feet, already swinging at the heads of the guys in the pew just in front of her, Charlie Quires then cut a killer. Sounding like the call of some large animal in heat, it bounced audibly off the hard wooden surface of the pew, echoing and reverberating against the stone arches and gothic balustrades of the sacristy. An old woman in an adjacent pew shook her beads at us and stage-whispered the word “sacrilege.” Even the priest at the altar seemed to realize that something was going on. Unable to identify the culprits, and on the verge of making a scandalous scene, Sister Mary Matthew ordered our entire class out of church and on to the Fifth Street sidewalk. Those who continued to find the situation amusing were severely thrashed, and we were marched to the school auditorium where we were threatened with everything from school expulsion to eternal damnation. Father Boyle was brought over to read an ecclesiastical riot act. Since no one would or could admit to being the perpetrators, the entire class was punished collectively. I think we had to write out decades of the rosary and were told we’d be staying after school forever, or for weeks anyway. We were a disgrace to our parents, to the church and to respectable humankind. We knew we had crossed a line. At least some of us did.

All those years of intensive religious education, and I don’t think that I ever really got it. That I went on to lose my faith or lapse wasn’t the case. I don’t remember ever having felt any of the things I was supposed to feel about God, about spirituality, about my eternal salvation. I just never understood it, never felt it, never grasped it. Who’s to blame? Certainly not the system nor the people who did their very best to turn me into a good son of the church. Certainly not my parents, who dutifully sent me off every day to be educated by the Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary. Blame isn’t even a consideration. At age seven, I made my First Holy Communion and thought, “O.K. Now what?” No bells, no clouds parting, nothing. Life went on the next day as it has every day since. Nothing or nobody I could call God has yet to reveal himself, herself, or itself in my life.

While the relevance of the church on my conscious mind seems to have been reduced to a level comparable to my choice of socks, I can remember the sense of betrayal that I felt when a guy I hardly knew changed his religious affiliation and anglicized his family name. All done to facilitate taking his place among those he seemed to believe were his betters. Why would someone ever do something like that? As a non-observant Jewish friend remarked in regard to his own ethnicity, “who’s going to let me be anything different?” Imagine my shock, my repressed fury in the mid 1950’s, when as the first of my kind working in the heart of an old WASPy business establishment, I found myself being patronized not for who I was, but for what I was. It was the old, “you know you’re really O.K., not like some of the others that we wouldn’t want working here.” Now in what seems like the blink of an eye, the near infinity of distinctions that went with a name, face and a background like mine have disappeared. But like Popeye, I yam what I yam and I was what I was. Although there were times when I tried very hard not to be.

I often feel something like envy when I meet people who can believe they have a transcendent place and purpose in what appears to me a starkly indifferent universe. On a functional level however, I’m forced to admit that it did stick, all of it. All twelve years of total and intensive indoctrination in a closed system that now seems utterly surreal, a subculture of vestments, rituals, pagan babies, fish on Fridays and Bless me Father for I have sinned – In my first confession, I owned up to an overdue library book. Given everything, given my utter incomprehension in the face of anything almighty, I remain, and will remain always, in the depth of my soul, in the marrow of my bones, an Irish-American, Roman Catholic, a product of my time and of my place.

1. Shatter
2. Come Back Around
3. Buck Rogers
4. Just The Way I'm Feeling
5. Insomnia
6. Lost and Found
7. Just A Day
8. Breed

First, you'll need to read some science fiction.  Preferably a lot of science fiction. This is an unfortunately necessary first step and one that can't really be skimped on. You could try getting by on a little urban fantasy or maybe some paranormal romance, but it is generally a good idea to go with the genuine article.

If you aren't exactly sure what science fiction is, don't worry! Most other people don't have a clue either, but that hasn't stopped them from reading it!  Just look for the words 'science fiction' somewhere on the cover of the book. If those two words are printed anywhere on the cover - front or back - you'll be in safe territory.  (Not finding those words on the cover doesn't necessarily mean it's not science fiction. In fact it probably is. Publishers do this occassionally when they want to actually sell a few copies of a book.  You can read it, but for now it's best to invest your time with books that are properly labelled.)

You will probably notice that there are many different kinds of science fiction. Don't let this confuse you. Publishers like to put labels on books so that they can be put into the proper box.  These labels are, for the most part, nothing more than arbitrary adjectives - the same kinds of things you'll find on bottles of household cleaners, things like 'environmentally friendly', 'new and improved', 'lilac scented formula' and 'safe for pets'.

While mostly meaningless, these lables can be useful later on, so don't worry about them now, but do make note of them.

You may also notice that these books come in a variety of thicknesses.  Since you need to read a lot of titles in a short period of time (presuming that you wish to make converts as soon as possible) it would be a good idea to stick with the thinner books.  Right now, thick is in. Book thickness is yet another publishing fad - like straight-legged jeans or flare-legged jeans - and like fashion, this trend is constantly changing. We're concerned with volume right now, so don't worry too much about wearing last summer's bikini, at least you're wearing a bikini.

The second thing you'll need is a person.  Preferably someone who is not dead and preferably someone who can read. That's not a hard and fast requirement - there are audio books, podcasts, movies and even anime versions of science fiction that the illiterate can enjoy, and lord knows there's more than enough zombie fiction for readers who have passed on - but the ability to read on the part of your intended convert will help speed the process up.

One other thing to clear up before we move on to the actual conversion process. Some people get confused by the names used for science fiction. Here we use the full, formal, term - Science Fiction. Other people sometimes use SF (where the 'S' stands for Science and the 'F' for Fiction) or Sci Fi or SyPhy or Speculative Fiction or Speculative Literature or Science Fantasy or even 'That Buck Rogers Stuff'.  Don't let this fool you. It's all Buck Rogers 'stuff'. 

Buck who?  He's the guy that played Captain Kirk before that upstart William Shatner came along.  Yes, it is way past the time that they should start calling it 'that Captain Kirk stuff', but science fiction as an industry is so so much living in the past that we won't see that happen for at least another century. That is, if the singularity doesn't happen first.  But we're digressing. If the singularity does happen, none of this science fiction stuff will matter and if it doesn't happen, reading about it will have been a waste of time.

So now you need a reader.  This is perhaps the most difficult requirement, as readers are elusive creatures who often go to great lengths to hide their true nature. You may also find yourself fooled by 'writers' who claim to be readers (they do this as a fairly successful strategy to lure in readers). Of course not all writers claim to be readers - only the good ones.

The easiest way to identify a reader is to find one holding a book. In the olden days you could usually count on finding people holding books in bookstores, but these days most of them seem to be holding coffee or DVDs rather than books.  You can try a bookstore, you might get lucky. You can try other public spaces as well. Libraries, like bookstores, have a lot fewer people in them holding books these days. Bathroom stalls can sometimes prove to be rewarding, if a bit awkward.  The best advice is - just keep your eyes open and go to places where there are lots of people.  Eventually you will find someone holding a book.

Next - examine the book. You'll want to make sure that it's a work of fiction - or at least a biography or history text. People reading non-fiction like "How To Get Rich In Ten Easy Steps" or "Your Political Philosophy Sucks - And You're Stupid" are unlikely to make good candidates for conversion.  They're hung up on 'the real world' and can't waste time on make-believe, they need that time to catch up on cable news.

Assuming that it is a work of fiction that your intended convert is reading, you're just about all set.

Next Week: Popping The Question

Es wurde ein schöner Überblick geboten, angefangen bei den Klassikern wie Tarzan, Jungle Jim, Buck Rogers oder Flash Gordon, die in den 30er Jahren entstanden und auf der Leinwand durch Legenden wie Buster Crabbe oder Johnny Weissmüller verkörpert wurden, die beide im Laufe ihrer Karriere in die Haut mehrerer Comichelden schlüpften und interessanterweise beide erfolgreiche Schwimmer waren, bevor sie sich der Schauspielerei zuwandten.

Die franko-belgischen Klassiker wie TIm & Struppi, Lucky Luke oder Asterix waren ebenso vertreten wie einige hierzulande ziemlich unbekannte italienische Comics und natürlich die unumgänglichen US-Helden von DC (Superman, Batman) und Marvel (Spider-Man, X-Men, Hulk, Daredevil). Selbst einige Graphic Novels neueren Datums, wie Frank Millers Sin City oder Alan Moores From Hell und Die Liga der außergewöhnlichen Gentlemen wurden berücksichtigt. Dafür vermissten wir aber z.B. V wie Vendetta oder Road to Perdition.

Für jeden der insgesamt 34 ausgestellten Comics wurden in einem Schaukasten neben einigen Heft- und Buchexponaten ausführliche Hintergrundinfos zu Inhalt und Entstehung, den Schöpfern, sowie zu den gedrehten Verfilmungen geboten. An den Wänden hingen zahlreiche Filmposter, sowie Originalzeichnungen und Strips und es wurden sogar einige Filmkostüme von Batman, Spider-Man, Daredevil und Wolverine ausgestellt, sowie Requisiten wie die Maske des Green Goblin oder Conans Schwert.

Wir waren uns einig, dass uns die Ausstellung sehr gut gefallen hat und dementsprechend kann ich sie auch jedem, der sich für das Thema interessiert, weiterempfehlen. Die Ausstellung läuft noch bis zum 5. Oktober.

Als krönenden Abschluss haben wir uns dann noch "Die Mumie: Das Grabmal des Drachenkaisers" im Filmpalast am ZKM angesehen. Hier gingen die Meinungen dann etwas auseinander, aber ich muss sagen, ich wurde gut unterhalten und der Film hatte einige gelungene Gags zu bieten, vor allem da er - wie schon seine beiden Vorgänger - ziemlich selbstironisch daherkommt. Sicherlich kein filmisches Meisterwerk, aber solide Action-Unterhaltung, bei der man das Hirn weitestgehend abschalten kann.

An early Buck Rogers comic strip in The Atlanta Journal October 17, 1937. Buck Rogers has been credited with bringing into popular media the concept of space exploration.
"The invading armies of Venus had fled from the earth in panic..."

Included here are a list of Characters with a brief synopsis of their key strengths. It would be interesting to see peoples responses or additions. I also wanted to include a list of not just the Heros but also the anti-heros (eg. Darth Vader) Maybe I will save that for another entry...

So without further build up here is a list I complied I'm sure you will see ones you haven't ever seen or haven't thought about in years:

Dr. John Robinson - Lost in Space (original series) One of the original models for the Captain role! Dr. Robinson is commander, a pilot, and the father of the Robinson children. He is an astrophysicist who also specializes in applied planetary geology. He can also throw a good punch when needed to a pesky alien.  Who else could navigate his lost family back home while dealing with all the problems caused by Dr. Zachery Smith.  Why the Robinson's didn't just leave him on the first planet they could I'm not sure.

Capt. James Tiberius Kirk - Star Trek Captain of the USS Enterprise, space explorer, alien chick magnet, and pretty good with a sword or a phaser. He is Errol Flynn of Space. He's Kirk, and he's survived countless battles and alien encounters (not to mention alien STD's I'm sure) .  Kind of the prototype Capt,  Kirk was the bar for which all Star Trek Captains to come would be measured by and also influenced more than a couple of the roles listed her in the list. He battled Klingons, and saved whales for Earth...Not sure how he would have done against the Borg though...

Professor John Robinson - Lost in Space (1998 movie) William Hurts' version of Professor Robinson is a bit different.  He has a edgier disposition than the original. In the updated Lost movie we have some better effects and more suspense than the original.  Gary Oldman nails the Dr. Smith character though, to hamper the Robinson family and gives Professor Robinson all he can handle.

Captain Lee Crane - Voyage to the bottom of the Sea. Captain of the Seaview. While Admiral Nelson called a lot of the shots it was Crane that was the muscle for the show.  Identified as Star Trek but with fish The Seaview and her crew are harassed by aliens sea monsters and even Dinosaurs.  Its Capt Crane that holds it all together to save the world!

Capt. Nathan Bridger - SeaQuest DSV Captain of the Seaquest its kind of a mix Sgt Brody from Jaws and a bit of Jack O'Neill from SG1. In what seems to be a updated version of Voyage to the bottom of the sea Bridger (for the first two seasons) commands the SeaQuest and doesn't take much flack from the crew or his superiors.  Interestingly  Bridger (Scheider)  is replaced in season 3 by Capt Oliver Hudson played by (Michael Ironside) whom appears below in another role...

Capt. Jeffery Sinclair - Babalyon 5- I mean what can you say about a guy who isn't just the reincarnation of the Minbari leader and Hero (Valen) but actually the genuine article who traveled back in time 1000 years to become the hero and stop the Shadows. I mean willing to ram a ship after your fighter is disabled is pretty gutsy!

John Sheridan - Babylon 5- Filling Sinclair's shoes was not easy but Sheridan proved to be up to the task.  He wasn't afraid to get dirty. Dealing with Vorlons and Shadows as well as the Psi Corps was quite an achievement. He also had the Kirk-like distinction of xeno-relations, how can you not like this guy? He is strong and gritty and a long way from his Scarecrow and Ms. King role.

Capt William Anthony "Buck" Rogers - Buck Rogers in the 25th Century Buck is frozen for 500 years and then thrust into the 25th century, (this is apparently a popular beginning for sci fi shows). He adapts surprisingly well to a completely foreign technically advanced future. While he doesn't face the Alien encounter as his nemesis, Buck working for the Earth Defense Directorate, has his hands full with Princess Ardala and her Henchman Kane as they try to take over the earth. While missing the special effects of later shows, and having some dorky side kicks like Twiki the robot, this Buck still has enough of the pep seen in the old comic strip to save the day, I just wish he would have bagged Colonel Wilma Deering (Erin Gray was hot back then).

William Adama- Battle Star Galactica (New BSG series Edward James Olmos) A darker more brooding Adama is the leader of the Galactica and leads the rag tag group across the universe with Nasty Cylons in chase. His gravelly voice and rough demeanor make him someone you don't want to piss off. The guy jumped his battlestar into the atmosphere of New Caprica to launch his fighters and then takes on a fleet of Cylon basestars. That guy has quite a fraking set!

Commander Adama - Battle Star Galactica (old BSG series Lorne Green) - He was as much a politician as a military commander. Adama is a fair and beloved leader, with almost unquestioned authority. He is a deeply religious man who is shepherding the refugees to Earth. A different character when compared to the new BSG series Adama. More political and religious he matches the new Adama in accomplishment, just in a different way. Kind of a kinder gentler type but don't piss him off!

Han Solo- Star Wars Han Solo is a superb smuggler with a wry wit, skepticism,  a reckless disposition, and technological savvy who pilots the Millennium Falcon along with his Wookiee copilot Chewbacca. Lucas describes him as "a loner who realizes the importance of being part of a group and helping for the common good." Joss Whedon credits the Falcon as one of the inspirations for the Firefly ship and also Malcom's character. The Scene with Greedo I think sums up his ability to get out of a tight spot. Besides I wouldn't want to follow Luke down a lighted street at this stage of the story! Much rather buckle in the the Falcon to shoot down tie fighters.

Commander John Koenig - Space 1999 Leader of Moonbase Alpha Commander Koenig. Thrust into the role of leading a group of people riding on what is left of the Moon that was ejected into space after a nuclear explosion.  Koenig is moody and gruff but he makes the decisions he has to.  He battles aliens, asteroids, and robots oh my!

Capt. Jean-Luc Picard - Star Trek The Next Generation Much was said about Capt. Picard being able to fill Kirk's shoes in the new series.  It didn't take long before the new crew and new Capt carved out their own place in Star Trek Lore. I mean he has a Maneuver named after him (the Picard Maneuver) , Not to mention he was assimilated into the Borg and lived to tell about it! He also had his share of ladies to rival Kirk and his crew wasn't too bad at womanizing either...very much in the vein of classic Star Trek.

Colonel  Jack O'Neill - Stargate SG1O'Neill of the series is much more flexible and different than the Movie O'Neil (played by Kurt Russell). This Jack is much cooler headed and much more Intelligent. This Jack has more than just some displaced Egyptians and a single Alien to fight against.  Having the Goa Uld to contend with and 24 other teams of Stargate teams Colonel O'Neill had to handle plenty of issues as he explores the galaxy (he just doesn't have a space ship to do it in).

Captain Dylan Hunt - Andromeda Dylan Hunt is the Captain of the Andromeda Ascendant with a strangely familiar story of being Frozen for 300 years (on the edge of a black hole) and then waking up to a completely foreign world to the one he knew.  Stop me if this sounds all to Buck Rogers familiar... Of course getting none other than Hercules himself (Kevin Sorbo) to play the captain role evokes much power.  Capt Hunt leads a rag tag group of salvagers to try to rebuild the Commonwealth and restore order to the Universe...not a short order to tackle!

Cmdr John Crichton -  Farscape Farscape was yet another strangely similar in story to being a Buck Rogers remake but way better...add in the muppet puppets and a better story. John Crichton has some serious struggles adapting to his new future after pissing off a very powerful alien force. John is more of a leader running for his life than an captain but as the series unfolds he develops into a strong leader that has to make civilization altering decisions and becomes a strong battle commander.

Malcom "Mal" Reynolds - Firefly Mal is the Capt of the Serenity and its renegade crew. A veteran of the war he now wants to put that behind him and live free on the Firefly. Living a bit outside of the law though he finds plenty of problems with the authorities and it seems his War past is usually behind the problems he finds. Unlike a lot of the other captains, Mal often gets his hands dirty and he also doesn't have the best weapons or firepower he needs. He also keeps you guessing about his thoughts never quite know what direction he is going to go.

Capt. Kathryn Janeway - Star Trek Voyager Janeway is another unique SciFi minority being a female Captain of a starship. Propelled 70k light years into the Delta Quadrant she is all alone with her crew trying to get home. Janeway's style is aggressive and she makes the tough choices, but she has a less strict compliance to the prime directive.  She uses to Borg to help get her crew home in a gutsy maneuver, which ends up earning her the rank of vice admiral who gives Picard orders in the Nemisis movie. Hows that for bolding going where no Picard has gone before...?!?

Lt. Col. Tyrus Cassius "TC" McQueen -  Space above and beyond With quite a few characters in this short lived space marine story TC seems to jump out as the leader although not the main character.  He helps lead his group of pilots the "Wildcards" against the Chigs.  TC is a bad ass who is in the fight to the bitter end.

Sgt. Al Apone -  Aliens The Hardass Drill Sergent in command of the Space Marines sent to check out the disappearance of colonists.  From his loud growl to his "I love the Corps" one liners, to the cigar hanging out of his mouth, he is pure confidence and control. Seeing the other higher level people in charge it doesn't take long to realize that Apone is the best guy for the job of cleaning up Aliens! Not sure if any of the captains on this list have delt with anything as nasty as the Aliens.

Capt. Jonathan Archer - Star Trek Enterprise Archer is yet another different style Star Trek Captain. Being set in the role before Kirk at the dawning of space travel he commands the NCC-1701 (without a letter prefix). He has to blaze new trails and break in much new technology that we know comes later.  He is a diplomat, Military leader, explorer and you get to see the various transformations.  He's much less perfect that other Star Trek captains and in his struggle against the Xindi he becomes almost desperate and even morally questionable, of course with the future of Earth on the line it doesn't seem unjustified.

Johnny Rico - Starship Troopers Its not often do you get to see a hero rise up from cadet to a leader in a time span but by the end of the movie you know that Johnny Rico has become a true leader. Having endured losing his family on Earth, losing his Girl Friend, Johnny has a serious case of I want to kick some Bug Butt. He struggles as a new recruit but quickly climbs the ranks to become an officer. Another one of those get his hands dirty leaders!

Capt. Benjamin Sisko - Star Trek Deep Space Nine Captain Sisko was a different captain than Picard. The commanding officer of the station Deep Space Nine. One of the few African American captains portrayed, he discovers the Bajoran Wormhole and becomes the emissary of the prophets. Interestingly he has a extreme dislike of Picard due to a small issue with Picard being responsible for the death of his wife... Boy some people really know how to hold a grudge!

Lt. Jean Rasczak - Starship Troopers The Veteran, turned drill sergeant, turned active soldier.  How can you not like this guy.  I think him and Apone from Aliens would be a kick ass fighting force together. While Rico is taking the glory its Lt. Rasczak that takes names and kicks butts. Again you can't go wrong with Michael Ironside. Just having him on the show gives a feeling of strength.

So there is the list. I'm sure there are quite a few others might feel were left out but there are enough here I'm sure to spawn some good conversation, even if it is just to trigger the old memory about an old sci-fi series.

Someone mentioned Lexx, I did watch it and thought about including either Stanley Tweedle, but he is probably not a great leader...I did think about Kai as he is a strong character...but he is dead so that makes kind of strange.

Mijn zomergasten filmpjes vind je hier

En su Poética (III, 20), Aristóteles señala la distinción principal entre el nombre —es decir, el sustantivo— y el verbo: la diferencia radica en la intervención, en el caso del verbo, de la idea de tiempo. El nombre de un objeto cualquiera no nos da ninguna información respecto del devenir; en cambio, las variadas formas de la conjugación verbal nos dan la información necesaria para ubicar la acción de la que se habla en relación con el momento en que se habla. Sin tiempo, las acciones no se producen; y sin acciones, no podría haber narración (sólo descripción).

La literatura, como la música, es un arte del tiempo; por eso, la comprensión cabal de una obra literaria o musical se produce en un recorrido que va de la parte al todo, y nunca en el sentido contrario. En la pintura o la fotografía —en las artes del espacio— puedo tener una impresión general de una obra, de un solo vistazo, y luego concentrarme en los detalles; en una novela, una película o una sinfonía esto es imposible, ya que debo recorrer la obra capítulo a capítulo, escena a escena, movimiento a movimiento, para tener por fin una idea cabal del todo.

De estas constataciones sencillas se desprende cuán central es el manejo del tiempo para el arte narrativo, y de ahí el interés de los autores acerca de esa variable, la necesidad de dominarla y, por fin, el deseo de volverla plástica y maleable, para así jugar con ella y aprovecharla para sus distintos fines narrativos.

La primera decisión al respecto tiene que ver con el tiempo verbal en que se elige escribir cada relato (¿narraré en un cinematográfico presente, en el tradicional pretérito de los cuentos infantiles, en un profético e inusual futuro?). El tema da para un análisis que puede ser tan complejo y minucioso como el de Paul Ricoeur en Tiempo y narración (II), pero antes de entrar en esa dimensión filosófica del problema, podemos distinguir dos formas generales de jugar con el tiempo en un relato:

1) Las que tienen que ver con alteraciones en la trama, es decir, en el orden con que se nos presentan los hechos de la narración, que no siempre respetan lo cronológico, el tiempo histórico. Algunas estrategias conocidas: el comienzo in medias res, cuyo ejemplo clásico es la Odisea; el racconto, el flashback (o analepsis) y el flashforward (o prolepsis), como los que encontramos en la serie televisiva Lost, ya sea salpicando una narración cuyo eje sí es cronológico o bien de manera tal que la línea temporal se fracture por completo para poder ir y volver por el tiempo a antojo y conveniencia del autor: así lo hacen William Faulkner en El sonido y la furia o Carlos Fuentes en La muerte de Artemio Cruz. El lector debe hacer un esfuerzo por reconstruir la cronología. También es posible invertir por completo el flujo temporal, narrar de atrás para adelante, como lo hace Martin Amis en La flecha del tiempo o Christopher Nolan en la película Memento (que en ciertas ediciones en DVD viene con el "extra" de una versión completa del filme con la cronología normalizada...). Julio Cortázar también juega con el tiempo en 62/Modelo para armar: en esa novela, narra diversas situaciones que se citan recíprocamente, una como antecedente de la otra; así, con la línea de tiempo destrozada, es el lector quien tiene que decidir qué sucedió primero y qué después.

2) Las narraciones que toman el problema del tiempo como tema y lo incluyen en la acción del relato para proponer variantes de diversa índole (fantásticas, sobrenaturales, de ciencia ficción…), aunque en sí misma la trama del relato se presente en la forma cronológica convencional.

En síntesis, formas de jugar con el tiempo del relato o formas de jugar con el tiempo en el relato. Sin afán de ser exhaustivo, a continuación nos entretenemos recordando algunas variantes con ejemplos ilustres para la segunda de las vertientes señaladas.

Viajes por el tiempo

El río es la metáfora más natural que encontramos para el tiempo tal como lo pensamos a diario, aunque otras concepciones puedan proponernos metáforas diferentes. En el viaje temporal, un individuo consigue “saltar” de golpe a un punto lejano de la corriente de tiempo, río abajo o río arriba. Llegar ahí, mirar, sobrevivir en esa era extraña y, si es posible, regresar a su época original, son los desafíos básicos de los protagonistas, desafíos a los que pueden sumarse otros más complejos.

Puede tratarse de un revelador viaje al futuro como el de la clásica novela de H. G. Wells, La máquina del tiempo (The Time Machine, 1895): su protagonista llega a ver el descorazonador crepúsculo de la Tierra. Otro ejemplo popular es el de Buck Rogers, quien luego de un raro accidente despierta en el siglo XXV y, más que regresar, trata de insertarse culturalmente en esa nueva época... lo cual es exactamente lo contrario de lo que quisiera hacer el protagonista del Planeta de los simios (Planet of the Apes, Franklin J. Schaffner, 1968).

En la recordada serie de TV El túnel del tiempo (The Time Tunnel, de 1966) se alternaban viajes en ambos sentidos del tiempo, pasado y futuro. Los viajeros eran dos científicos atrapados en la lógica desquiciada de una máquina que, por un desperfecto técnico, los enviaba cada semana a vivir aventuras en diferentes épocas.

Una novela que adoro es La hierba roja (1950), quizás la mejor novela de Boris Vian. En ella, la máquina del tiempo reaparece para ir al pasado, pero ya no en clave de ciencia ficción, sino con un lirismo casi surrealista. El creador de la máquina, Wolf, no quiere ser testigo de la Historia de la humanidad, sino de su propia historia como individuo. Es una visita íntima a los hechos —y personas— determinantes de la vida de Wolf, quien aprovecha la máquina para revisar su propia existencia y comprender sus errores, sus obsesiones.

Las paradojas temporales

El juego se hace mucho más complejo cuando los viajeros, en lugar de contentarse con ser meros testigos de otra época, buscan modificar hechos del pasado para alterar así el presente, ya sea para conseguir un beneficio, ya sea para restituir un orden vital.

Por ejemplo: la serie de TV Viajeros (Voyagers!, de 1982) presentaba a un niño que acompañaba en sus aventuras a un miembro de una fantástica liga de viajeros en el tiempo, cuya misión era transportarse a diferentes épocas para “reparar” posibles errores históricos. Así, este viajero se presentaba como un determinista que lucha ante las posibles irrupciones del azar y los embates de lo casual sobre un destino previamente escrito.

Pero el ejemplo más popular quizás sea el de la trilogía de Volver al futuro (Back to the Future; Robert Zemeckis, 1985, 1989 y 1990). Aquí no se acata un determinismo histórico; el "deber ser" de la Historia está regido sólo por los deseos de un personaje, Marty McFly, que busca restituir el orden de su propio presente, después de un desarreglo que él mismo provocó al viajar al pasado; por su parte, el antagonista, Biff, descubre la posibilidad de enriquecerse valiéndose de un almanaque deportivo.

Recuerdo también el excelente cuento “El ruido de un trueno”, de Ray Bradbury (en Las doradas manzanas del sol, 1953): una compañía ofrece safaris a la era de los dinosaurios, con la condición de que el cazador temporal no altere absolutamente nada durante su viaje...

La variante: un ser que viene del futuro a modificar nuestro presente, para alterar así su propia época. Ejemplo más famoso: toda la saga de Terminator, la cual amaga con no terminar nunca... Y es que todas estas historias siempre corren el riesgo de quedar atrapadas en distintos tipos de paradojas, para las que el narrador deberá ofrecer explicaciones y soluciones. ¿Al alterar un hecho pasado, el curso del tiempo se modifica por completo, o es que el tiempo se desdobla en múltiples líneas temporales? ¿Se generan universos temporales paralelos? Cualquier especulación posible, si es sólida, puede ser la base para una historia. El autor también deberá proveer a los personajes alguna clase de salida, al menos temporal, es decir, temporaria...

La paradoja suele producirse por la formación de un “bucle temporal” —un loop, una serpiente que se muerde su propia cola— que obliga a que la historia se superponga a sí misma una y otra vez. Esto sucede en Volver al futuro II; para salvar el problema y sus complicaciones, el guionista inventa una prohibición: McFly debe evitar encontrarse consigo mismo o morirá. El truco funciona bien y la película mejora sin enredarse.

Una paradoja siempre es interesante, pero únicamente cuando damos una sola vuelta completa por la historia; si siguiéramos adelante, llevando la historia a sus últimas consecuencias, comprobaríamos que los hechos están condenados a repetirse y superponerse una y otra vez (tal como al poner un micrófono frente a un parlante; una especie de “acople” narrativo). Por ejemplo, esto sucedería si siguiéramos adelante con la película de Terry Gilliam, Doce monos (Twelve Monkeys, 1995), cuyo concepto le debe todo a un excelente cortometraje de 28 minutos de duración, hecho exclusivamente con fotos fijas: La Jetée, de Chris Marker.

La Jetée (Chris Marker, 1962). Parte 1/3

Parte 2/3

Parte 3/3

En la segunda parte de este artículo, dejamos los viajes temporales —de los que hay muchísimos ejemplos más— para relevar otras maneras de jugar con el tiempo dentro de una narración.

[Leer la segunda parte]

Anywho, the guys were talking about celebs signing autographs at the convention when Paul mentioned that Erin Gray was there. This struck him as odd, because why is the girlfriend of the Dad from Silver Spoons at Comic Con signing autographs?

What Paul didn’t realize (or he did and was just being very witty and I missed it) was that Erin Gray is better known as Col. Wilma Deering from Buck Rogers in the 25th Century (and Lilah from Six Pack, but I creepily digress). Paul and Jason wouldn’t know that since Paul was 3 years old and Jason probably younger when it aired.

I was 8.

That makes me old.

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Nice, but I call for a reimaging! Buckaroohawk if you should choose to accept this mission you will be rewarded by having a whole new generation of Battlestar geeks hitting your site. Of course, you're going to need to reimage Buck before Frank Miller mucks with it. One suggestion, though, would be to go back to the orignal source. Yes, reverse reimage it! Bring back inertron, anti-gravity belts, rayguns, and air ships.

Backstory 1:

TV sitcom legend Graham Linehan kindly linked to this site, praising my William Friedkin smackdown, and precipitating a giant spike in my stats for the day. (Thanks, Graham!) Then, regular Shadowplayer and all-round good egg Simon Kane linked to the above video in a comment at Graham's site, mentioning it as a sort-of Shadowplay type thing. (Thanks, Simon!) Then I stole it.

Backstory 2:

It's Buck Rogers! And he's having adventures in the 25th century or whatever! I know pretty much nothing about the early 20th-century phenomenon that is Buck Rogers, so I can't really compare to see if this game stays faithful to its source material or if it just uses the name in an attempt to get people to buy the game. In any case, you're in a ship flying over a pseudo-3D planet landscape that consists mostly of scrolling lines and mountains in the background. Your mission: fly through goalposts. No, really, that's your mission. It's basically an intergalactic slalom course. Occasionally little flying saucers show up that look like mushrooms that you have to kill lest they run into you and blow you up, and sometimes a little hopping guy comes along with a freckly face and squinty eyes that look like a bully staring at the sun (in later levels the hopping bully (and occasionally the goalposts) shoot at you). Every third level you're suddenly in space and you have to destroy a certain amount of mushrooms, after which a "mother ship" shows up that looks like a flugelhorn gone horribly wrong. Once you shoot it twice, it blows up and. . .you guessed it, you do the whole thing over again, only the background has changed color and the enemies go faster!

Something fairly unique to the game (if you haven't played Zaxxon, anyway) is the fuel meter, which goes out faster if you miss too many slalom posts. Even that, though, isn't really enough to save this lackluster game from failing on several counts: the gameplay is a little too repetitive, and in later levels, extremely frustrating when there are so many mushrooms, bully-things, and posts on the screen that flickering happens and a mushroom takes you out before you notice it was even there (there is also a very noticeable lag when there is anything on the screen besides just your ship and a pair of posts). There ae better shooters out there, and there are better skiing games as well, and if you're looking for any sort of tie-in to the actual Buck Rogers mythos you won't really find it here. I'd say play if you're bored, but don't expect to be wowed.

Joust

Joust, on the other hand, is one of the best arcade games out there, and still popular at Nickelcades. You play as a man on a flying bird with a lance, and your object is to bop the other birds on the head, killing the man and letting the bird fly off the screen. A certain number of birds spawn each level, and your object is to get rid of them all. The difficulty comes once the levels start progressing: platforms begin disappearing, giant hands come out of the lava to try to grab you (and the other birds: it's an equal-opportunity lava monster), and sometimes the birds drop eggs when killed that you have to collect before they hatch into more birds. In addition, each wave has a slightly different goal: a survival wave, where you get bonus points for not dying; an egg wave, where you have to grab a bunch of eggs before they start hatching, and the dreaded Pterry wave, where a pterodactyl comes along that is nearly impossible to kill (you have to bop him right on the nose with your lance).

Joust is a lot of fun on one-player mode, but where the game really shines is in its multi-player mode. A second Jouster comes on the scene, and you can either work together to rid the world of the little red jousters, or just concentrate on killing each other. In fact, there are certain waves designed for both: a gladiator wave where you get bonus points for killing each other, and a team wave where you get bonus points for not killing each other.

This game is a game that, similar to Mario Bros. but even moreso, shines in its simplicity. While the gameplay might seem like it gets repetitive, somehow it never really seems so, as the flight patterns of the birds, as well as the different configurations of the platforms each level, always propel you to the next one, just to see what kind platform will go next, or if it's a Pterry wave, or if it's finally a gladiator wave so you can justify killing off Player 2. Add to that some corny medieval elements (such as the game stating "Thy game is over" when you lose) and you've got a winner in the form of Joust. But you don't have to take my word for it!

Kaboom!

A game that takes a deep look at market research, what makes a deep, engrossing storyline and a multifaceted gaming experience, and then tosses it all out the window in favor of "Guys like stuff that blows up!" Kaboom! stars you, three pad-things that move in parallel motion on the bottom of the screen. Your mission: catch all the bombs that the poker dealer/Hamburglar tosses at you in an erratic and increasingly rapid fashion. If you miss one, all of them on the screen explode, the Hamburglar gets a smirk on his face like "Finally! I just blew up this city! Now for a quarter pounder!" and you lose one of your pads. Once you've lost all three, the game is over.

Kaboom! doesn't offer a ton in the way of variety (you can play with a joystick or a paddle, and you can either have narrow or wide pads), but for some reason it's infectiously fun. Every time you catch a bomb it plays the next note of the 1812 Overture, which goes pretty dang fast in the later levels. Also, if you catch enough bombs, the villain gets this shocked look on his face like he expected a McRib sandwich and ended up with a Whopper. In addition, there is a two-player mode where the players can alternatively control the burglar and the pads which is a lot of fun.

Kaboom! makes no pretenses: it's a simple hand-eye reflex game, but it's a good, colorful, fun one, and I recommend it for anyone who just wants to turn off their brain for a moment and play the 1812 Overture.

Popeye

Ahh, licensing. The creation of many a game, good or bad, came from a licensing deal. In this one, based off Popeye the sailor man, you are Popeye, trying to win your beloved Olive Oyl from the clutches of the big brute Bluto. There are three distinct stages. In the first, shown here, Olive Oyl stands at the top of the screen and tosses love to Popeye, who must catch the hearts and use them to build a house (I guess). In the second Popeye is running around the outside of a building at nighttime, while Olive Oyl tosses down music notes that spell out, I dunno, their love theme, I suppose, although the background music during this scene sounds like the Harry Belafonte song "Matilda" featured in Forever Plaid. The third and final level Popeye the sailor man fins himself on a sailing ship, catching "HELP" letters thrown by Olive Oyl to build a ladder to the crow's nest where she is sequestered.

Common to all these levels are two things: a hag that tosses cans of something at Popeye on occasion, and, of course, Popeye's nemesis Bluto, who roams around each level looking to pummel poor Popeye. Also common to each level is a one-use can of spinach, which causes the Popeye theme to play and Bluto to run away from Popeye. If you can catch the guy Popeye pops 'im one and sends him off the screen for about 10 seconds or so.

Popeye is a pretty fun pseudo-platformer and worth a look. It may, like the cartoon and comic before it, get the kids to eat their spinach, and that, at least, makes it a worthy cause. (Besides, a good spinach vinegarette salad is one of the best things in the world, and if I can beat up guys more easily after eating it, well, why eat anything else?)

Side note: is the buff guy that is Popeye's nemesis named Bluto or Brutus? I've heard both, and I don't know who to believe!

BC's Quest for Tires

Loosely based on the comic strip B.C., this game stars you as the title character, who is riding on a wheel to rescue your sweetie pie. You've got to jump over holes and rocks, duck under tree branches, jump on turtles over lakes while avoiding being hit by some broad with a club (no, really, her official name is "The Fat Broad"), all to end up in a cave inhabited by a dinosaur who kidnapped your girl. You start at a certain speed but can increase it by holding down the trigger and moving the stick (an essential tactic later in the game, when you have to jump over a lake). It's a colorful, well-designed game, with a parallax-scrolling background, fun sound effects, and challenging but not frustrating gameplay.

Back when I first played this game I had no idea of the comic strip connection, but it isn't really necessary to understand the comic strip in order to enjoy the game. Our version, however, had some sort of weird graphic glitch (that you can see on the edge of B.C.'s wheel in the screenshot), so instead of getting sad and falling over whenever he hit a tree or rock of whatever, his head just plain exploded into a mess of glitchness. I'm sure that Johnny Hart's head did something similar when he first saw this game. Another fun fact: this game was designed by Sierra On-Line, a company that would soon go on to define the adventure game genre with classics like King's Quest and Space Quest.

That'll do it for disk 6. Coming up next will be disk 7, featuring Starbowl Football, Pole Position, Pitstop, Speedway Blast, Reversi, and Super Cobra. Catch you next time!

O segundo herói, é um piloto da Força Aérea Americana que acordou algures no séc. XXV. Chama-se Bidi Bidi Buck.

O último herói fuma charutos, joga pyramid, é piloto de vipers e gosta do engate. É o Lt. Felgercarb.

Estes três bonecos são os Foldskool Heroes.

At first, the idea was a bit off-putting. What, no service with a smile?

This past week I ventured into the future and gave the new-fangled device a shot.

Fortunately, I started with a simple purchase. God only knows what may have transpired, otherwise.

First, pursuant to the instructions on the screen, I scanned a bottle of reduced-fat milk. Yeah, have to watch the old gut, 'ya know?

When I was asked to input the code for the next item or proceed to pay, I chose the latter option.

At this juncture, I was instructed to place my purchase in a bag.

However, when I sat the milk carton inside of the spacious sack, a rude message popped up on the screen and lamented - "object blocking area" - or something to that effect.

When I plucked the beverage from the open bag (which was neatly nestled into a device to frame it just so at the point of purchase) I was instructed to scan another item or hit the "finish and pay" button.

I tapped the screen to close the sale - at which point - I was given several pay options - debit, credit card, or cash.

Amazingly, when I slipped two crisp dollar bills into the slot, correct change jangled into a small change catch-all basin below the register.

Then, a receipt flew out of a groove, and landed squarely in my sweaty palm!

So, I trundled off with my milk in hand (sans bag) a little bemused by it all.

Would a more complex sale be a snap, too?

For instance, the purchase of produce would require that I input the price per pound, I expect. In that event, I guess shoppers would be wise to carry a pencil and paper around in their cart to jot those prices down.

I wonder, if I fudged on the numbers, would a siren go off to warn management and embarrass me in front of the other customers?

Something else I noticed, too. All the instructions were in medium-sized type way below the natural eyeline on the screen. So, at check out - if you needed glasses to read script - you'd be SOL if you left 'em at home or in the car.

In that event, you'd have to call for assistance, fer sure.

For the most part, it appeared to be a fairly painless experience.

But, I have to wonder...

As we start using automation in various areas of our daily lives, will we start to get lazy?  Worse than that, is it wholly possibly that without daily use, we'll slowly lose our faculties to add, count change, or even communicate in idle chit-chat at whim in the check-out line?

Ultimately, will we be replaced one day, too?

Shudder the thought!

I like to think I am one-of-a-kind, irreplaceable.

Yeah, tell that to your boss!

Chuck Palahniuk once said,
"When did the future switch from being a promise to being a threat?"

Fabriqués et mis en scène avec plus ou moins de succès, ils n'en restent pas moins aujourd'hui des personnages cultes de notre conscience télévisuelle collective.

Pour rédiger cet articleJe me suis volontairement limité aux séries télé non animées, car au cinéma,les robots ont littéralement envahi l'écran et il serait impossible de les énumérer !

Voici à mon goût, les 5 robots, qui ont marqué le plus, de leur empreinte digitale nos tubes cathodiques, ces dernières décennies :

N°5 Le Robot Vicki de la série Small Wonder/ La Petite Merveille

Une série qui a eu un petit succès en France (4 saisons de 85 à 89), qui mettait en scène de manière récurrente une fille robot humanoïde vivant dans une famille américaine modèle. Certains spécialiste affirment qu'il s'agissait dun premeir robot lesbienne et que lorsque la voisine venait lui parler une tension érotique se produisait entre les 2 personnages. Perso j'ai jamais remarqué.

N°4 Twiki de la Série Buck Rogers

Robot Playmobil, plus connu que la série dans laquelle il jouait, Twiki, était un robot au language très sommaire, ponctué de "bidi bidi", dont le seul rôle était de porter un médaillon contenant le cerveau d'un scientifique appelé le Dr Theopolis.

Certaines mauvaises langues racontaient que sa tête avait une forme phallique.

N°3 K.I.T.T. de la série Knight Rider

Vous me direz  c'est une voiture, oui mais elle est dotée d'une intelligence artificielle et possède des super options pour un modèle de série ! De plus quelques fois elle réagissait comme un être humain...

Si vous voulez en savoir plus sur la nouvelle série Knight Rider Next Gen, j'en ai parlé ici

n°2 :Les Cylons de Battle Star Galactica

Aussi appelés les toasters, ces être robotiques inventés par les humains vont se rebeller contre leur créateur et engager une guerre sans merci contre la flotte du Battlestar Galactica

A noter que le look des grille-pains a quand même bien évolué au fil des années !

n° 1 Steeve Austin de la Série l'homme qui valait les 3 milliards

Ok ce n'est pas complètement un robot mais plutôt un homme bionique, mais vu tous les implants qu'on lui a mis, il n'est plus vraiment humain mais humanoïde, enfin moitié homme et moitié robot, comme les Biouman !

Alors pour moi c'est le personnage robotisant qui a le plus marqué la télé, qui ne s'est jamais amusé à le refaire et à jouer l'homme bionique ??

This is what's doin'...Stacie Ponder over at Final Girl has created a film club. We all watch the same movie then post a review or whatever on our blogs or websites on the same day and link over to her site. She does the same and then we all geek out together through the tubes of the internet!

So today, let's share our thoughts on LIFEFORCE!

Wow...VAM-PIRE! VAM-PIRE! VAM-PIRE! VAM-PIRE! VAM-PIRE! VAM-PIRE! VAM-PIRE!

I know you're all excited about Space Vampires, and you should be, but we're talking Tobe Hooper, not Vorvon, kids.

I haven't watched LIFEFORCE in over a decade, so I was a little worried how it would hold up. Sure, sure, there's a hot naked space vampire running around, but was the movie itself any good? Tobe was riding high (on the coattails of Stephen Spielberg) thanks to Poltergiest so I'm sure it wasn't too hard to secure a three picture deal with Cannon. He somehow managed to fuck his whole career up though...but who knew COCOON was gonna' be such a big hit and that remaking INVADERS FROM MARS was a stupid idea?

Working from a book by Colin Wilson, Dan O' Bannon and Don Jakoby came up with a nifty script melding science fiction and horror...Honestly, I've never been a big fan of vampire movies (especially the whole gay vampire thing Anne Rice forced the horror community into), but the idea of naked space vampires causing a zombie-vampire epidemic across the pond was pretty damn awesome in my opinion. So, as I ramble on about LIFEFORCE you can enjoy some screenshots I took while watching the film.

Hey, my eyes are up here, pal.

Oh, real quick, if you thought you were going to see a naked space vampire here, you can turn back now. Jesus, you're all the same...just Google "Lifeforce" or "Mathilda May" and you'll see all the boobs you want, perv. Sheesh...

EEEEWWWWW......1,000s of dead man-bats in the creepy space-vagina.

The cast was pretty strong..we have Steve Railsback....man, what a cool name...Railsback....Railsback.....Railsback...you know, I think that's going to be my new mantra from now on...anyway, Steve Railsback (Helter Skelter) gives the sweatiest performance this side of Harry Dean Stanton as the tortured hero...Peter Firth (Equus) is the cool as ice, but tough as nails SAS man...Frank Finlay (Count Dracula 1977) is the silver haired doctor looking for life after death...and Patrick Stewart (Excalibur) is the unlucky host for Space Girl, Mathilda May (uh....Lifeforce). Pretty solid, huh? They all do a fine job sweating, shouting, shooting, and well...walking around naked (sorry, nerd-ladies, Mr. Stewart keeps his clothes on) and playing the whole thing super straight.

This is it, kids....that's the closest you'll come to seeing space boobs.

The Fx were pleasing to my 35 year old eyes...very old school 80s stuff...Swirling lights, zombie makeup, a head shot, bullet wounds, exploding cars, full body burns, a severed arm (that's still alive!), cool space floating around zero-g action, and a monstrous man-bat. You know, I can't tell you how sick I am of all the damn CGI George Lucas and his little toadies have shoved down our throats for the past decade! Way to improve films, guys. What happened to you, Hollywood? Huh? What happened?! For shame, putting all those puppets and midgets out of work...for shame! Lucky for us, Lucas defector, John Dykstra and his team whipped up some computer effects and weren't afraid to use puppets or real explosions (sorry, no midgets)!

Moisten lips, Angle your head, Close your eyes, Go slow...

I remembered the first half of the film pretty well, but once the Space Girl started jumping into other bodies and then Patrick Stewart showed up, well, it was like watching a whole new movie. Maybe I changed the channel once the nudity slowed down thirteen years ago or got fo