the prisoner

Good stuff. Stylish, clever, fun, a worthwhile new take on the original television series, and a bit dreamlike. Great actors in the leading roles. And a good score.

Vanilla Sky + Dark City + Matrix + Minority Report + The Prisoner (old TV series) = The [new] Prisoner.

And while I'm in the conceptual neighborhood, Dark City was really the same movie as Beautiful Dreamer, which isn't a bad thing. Watch both, and see if you don't agree.

Discussion about The Prisoner will follow, eventually. It really was quite good.

best client letter ever

This fabulous letter, along with his irreplacable blog post title, comes courtesy of:

http://noisydecentgraphics.typepad.com/

and was brought to my attention just now via the great Mark McGuinness:

http://www.wishfulthinking.co.uk/twitter/

To enlarge the photo of the letter, simply click on it.

Enjoy.

* * *

october verse

encyclopedia entry as poetry

* * *

CLOUDS

A cloud is nothing more
than a collection of water particles or
ice crystals floating in the
atmosphere.

There are ten different types of clouds.

Five of the ten types of clouds
can be found at
low altitudes.

They are called stratus,
cumulonimbus,
cumulus,
nimbostratus, and
stratocumulus.

Stratus clouds are spread out, dull clouds
usually found at
ground level.

Stratus clouds are so close to the ground
they are
identified
as fog.

Cumulonimbus clouds are piled up high like
scoops of dark ice cream.
These clouds usually bring rain showers.

Cumulus clouds are white and fluffy and
look like giant heads of cauliflower.

Dark, flat nimbostratus clouds often produce rain or snow.

Stratocumulus clouds are spread out heaps of dense cover
that rise higher in the atmosphere.

Altocumulus and altostratus are middle-altitude clouds.
Even though the word alto means "height" in Latin,
these are not the highest clouds.

Altocumulus clouds look fleecy
and have dark, shadowed sides.

Altostratus clouds are flat and
make the sun look as if it is being seen
through a misty glass.

Clouds forming in high altitudes are called cirrus,
cirrostratus, and
cirrocumulus.

It is so cold in the upper atmosphere
that high altitude clouds contain
ice crystals instead of
water particles.

Cirrocumulus clouds look like upside down waves
rolling across
the sky.

High, thin cirrostratus clouds look much like stratus clouds,
but cirrostratus clouds contain ice crystals and are much higher.

Cirrus clouds form
when the wind blows these ice crystals into wispy streaks
that look like thin horse tails.

* * *

when art surprises us from nowhere

* * *

Years ago, I awoke somewhere in the still-dark hours of a summer night to find a brilliant full moon shining into the bedroom. At the time I had four cats, and one of them was a couple of feet away on top of the bedcovers, scratching at an area where the light was falling. The sound or movement of the cat's paws on the blanket might even have been what stirred me to open my eyes.

Then the most fascinating thing happened. In my dreamy, half-asleep state, a small poem emerged instantaneously and fully formed... a haiku with the famous 5-7-5 syllable scheme.

Fortunately I wrote it down, not giving in to that all-too-common delusion that I'd remember it later.

It's still one of my favorite little creations, in no small part because it's genesis took place somewhere completely removed from conscious thought:

my cat scratches at
bright white patches of moonlight
on the night blanket

* * *

apollo 11 week continues

* * *

Reading list, fiction

Found by chance today in second-hand book shop

Discussion will follow

* * *

Update, January 22, 2010: This book proved to be too much of a committment for my present frame of mind. I was (and am) intrigued by it, but it proved too formidable for now... too many characters (there is a complete list to help the reader, which should tell you something); too much exhaustively detailed real science (even for a science buff such as myself).

When I finally decided to set down the book for a while, maybe even forever, it gave me pause. Has my attention span shortened from when I was a much younger person making her way through Michener? Have I shifted into preferring breezier forms of entertainment? Am I a literary wimp? None of that is quite right, but one of the ideas that occurs to me is, now that I am well over 50 years old-- egads!-- I have the nagging awareness of the So Many Books, So Little Time perspective.

No, it's not that I want fluff. But sometimes, you just have to pull the plug and move on if it's feeling like a chore.

Sorry, Buzz; it's not personal.

* * *

diary

Note: since writing this, I've finally found the diary in question. That post can be found here.

* * *

The old diary with the cracked white vinyl cover is somewhere in my garage; this I know. I've run across it since moving here. It's not something I'd ever throw away, primarily because in it, I wrote about the first moon walk while it was happening.

My hope was to find that diary in time to scan its entry for July 20, 1969 and share it here in Future World.

No such luck, but my searches were hurried. Like so many of us, I guess I've been busy and distracted. We live in strange, rapidly-evolving times with too many earthbound dangers and no moon quest to dazzle us.

Coming to grips with a time span like forty years seems like the first order of business, but it's unnerving to face head on. At first, I try to reason with those memories, hold them up to the light like so many glass cat eye marbles, but instead it all comes at me achingly, and at once. That one night could be refracted into a long meditation, but I'll discipline it into a cluster of fragments.

My sixteenth birthday was two months away.

Summers in my home town were always hot, and my memory of that night merges in that respect with countless others: the barest tease of coolness arriving only well after the last rays of that day’s sun. If it had been any other night and we'd wanted to cool off, we'd drive to get icy mugs of car-hop root beer, or go to the Concord library.

On this particular night we are all at home, of course: Mama, Daddy, my sister, and me. Every person I knew would be in their homes as well, all of us excited and waiting around the curved glass faces of heavy television sets.

The room is dark. I have a can of Shasta soda half finished and warming in my hand, and we’re waiting. In his corner chair, my father has a camera ready to take pictures of the television’s images.

What first strikes me now, beyond the sharp melancholy for that all but forgotten shared sense of pride, and wonder, and endless possibility, is that we could achieve so much with so little, and what that said about us, and how that has changed. Our technology was most certainly crude by today's standards, making a mission to the moon all the more heroic, a collective effort that spoke volumes about who we were, and proof of our rich, vast sense of possibility and even grandeur.

As we sat together that hot July night, the sleeping moon of Aristotle and Shakespeare and a million children's drawings had finally been prodded, transformed into ghostly dust under an astronaut's boot, and a brilliant slice of white on countless cathode ray tubes. The jumble of ideas it seemed to suggest was intoxicating. I couldn’t shake the realization that we’d crawled out of our caves, organized our activities in such a way that it culminated in this breathtaking moment.

After the first footsteps and the moving words I'll always feel proud of, when it felt like the world would never be the same again, I slipped outside, alone. The street, usually filled with summer restlessness, was quieter than I had ever known. I looked up and stared.

Once back in the house, the images were still being transmitted. The acute joy of it made me feel inexplicably sad, and in the midst of all that, I recall wondering how many times I would recall that night in the years ahead.

By the light of the televised moon, I wrote in my diary, It is beyond belief. It still is.

* * *