Category: History

The Sky Is Falling

  • May 14, 2021

Back in July 1979, I feared that I might die because of Skylab falling on me.

Skylab was the first ‘space station’, built and operated by the USA for 10 months from mid 1973 until early 1974. When the final crew departed they put Skylab into a higher orbit with the intention of leaving it in space until 1983 when the (in development) Space Shuttles could service it. Ultimately nature had other ideas and by 1979 it was clear Skylab would fall to Earth.

NASA’s calculations suggested it would land in the eastern Indian Ocean somewhere. But they didn’t know precisely where or when, and in Australia we were very aware there was a chance it would land smack on us! I can still recall schoolyard doomsayers predicting it could land on someone’s house, and to 7-year old me this was (very briefly) the new big scare to replace King Kong snatching me out of a window one night.

On July 11, 1979, during its 34,981st orbit, NASA made a last minute adjustment to prevent Skylab from falling on the USA. Later that night it entered the atmosphere and while most of it burned up as it fell some parts eventually rained down on remote areas of the western Australian outback.

It didn’t fall on our house, or anyone’s house for that matter. At best it may have given a kangaroo a bit of a start.

The madness quickly transitioned from ‘Skylab will fall on you!’ to ‘If you find Skylab pieces you’ll be a millionaire!’ and treasure hunters of all stripes descended on the outback to find what remained of the space station.

Some were successful, finding many pieces including some very large ones. Much of it is on display now in a museum in the town of Esperance, but some made its way into private collections. While the USA claimed that Skylab was still its property, it never made any attempt to claim debris. Quite the opposite actually: president Carter apologized to Australia and NASA gave memorial plaques to those that found the first pieces of debris!

In the end Skylab was a successful mission, the falling to earth didn’t hurt anyone, and everyone emerged smiling. The world moved on.

There have been many more cases of spacecraft raining down in the years since, and every time it happens (as recently as last week) the media reminds us once again that they might land on our houses! Let’s hope, like Skylab, that when our space trash does fall back to Earth it’s careful enough to land far away from any of us 🙂

  • Posted in Australia
  • Robert

Crimes I Have Committed

  • March 11, 2021

As we grow older we tend to spend more time in self-reflection and invariably our thoughts end up turning to the moments we gave in to temptation and ‘obtained’ items that were perhaps not ours for the taking. This post describes two such incidents in my life.

Operation Tuck Shop

This happened in 198X. Bernard, myself and two brothers of a certain family we were friends with were bushwhacking around the wilds of Kahibah. We stride through a sports field and came upon an old brick tuck shop at the edge of the car park. It was closed up since the field wasn’t being used, but it was one of those very old buildings with sturdy iron grates in place of doors and windows which allowed anyone to look inside.

And look we did, and to our astonishment we saw delicious vittles just sitting on a counter inside! These were lollies no doubt intended for sale during an event, but to us – young teenage lads – they were the devils own temptation. Alas we couldn’t open the door, and we weren’t the sorts who would consider breaking and entering. But there was no one around except us, and it seemed wasteful to simply ignore the lollies we could see only a few feet away.

At this point we noticed there was a sizable gap under the iron grated door and that one of our company – let’s call him Hurdy Gurdy Boy (HGB) – could fit underneath. I recall he was opposed to the idea but he was a) younger and b) smaller than us and therefore easily coerced persuaded.

So HGB squirmed under the grate like a criminal worm until he was inside, and then he hastily handed us vittles and – as I recall – even ice cream (!) through the grate! The three of us remaining outside stuffed our pockets and ran away gibbering in terror that we’d be caught and incarcerated! I seem to recall HGB shrieking from inside as we fled since he thought he was trapped, but he obviously extricated himself and caught up with us quickly.

We didn’t take much since we were worried about being caught; maybe only a few lolly bars and an ice cream each. And we ate them all quickly on the way home lest our parents find out. It was a small heist, but a successful one.

Operation Bingo

This was a few years before the previous incident. A friend of mine – let’s call him Bingo Boy (BB) – regularly hosted slumber parties at his (large) house at which a good amount of ‘the guys’ in my year would attend. We were all cool dudes, and spent the time in his (gigantic) pool, or playing darts or Atari 2600 or watching horror flicks on VHS.

I was good friends with BB, and more than once I went to bingo nights with him since his mum was one of the organizers. (As an aside this was held at Charlestown, not too far from the library, in a building that also contained the first RPG game shop I ever visited and eventually bought D&D at!) One of his mum’s responsibilities at Bingo was running the lolly shop, where drinks and lollies would be sold to gamblers for some extra cash.

At one of the slumber parties, BB just happened to mention to a room full of teenage boys that he knew where his mum stored the bingo lollies! They were ‘hidden’ in a high cupboard in a sort of storage room in their (massive) house. I think he told us this without considering the implications.

You can imagine what happened! The above image shows me in my purple with sky-blue-trim dungarees and matching flame-orange tank top (neither of which probably existed) commandeering full boxes of Mars Bars from the aforementioned ‘hidden’ closet. We found entire boxes of Wagon Wheels, Smarties, Snakes Alive and all sorts of other lollies. We had found the storage closet of our dreams!

There were maybe a dozen of us and we ate like demons. We weren’t caught during that stay, but eventually his mum discovered the theft, and BB got in a good deal of trouble for it since the lollies actually belonged to the church and she had to pay for replacements herself. Naturally the rest of us got off scot-free, and had a good laugh at his expense as teenage boys do!

So there you have it. Two confessions of incidents where crime did pay. Am I proud of these? No I’m not. But at the same time the guilt (if it ever existed) has long since been replaced by the happiness of these memories 🙂

Magazines

  • March 1, 2021

I’ve been buying magazines since I was a little squirt. Indeed, when I think back to the first things I bought with ‘my own money’, magazines are on that list. In those days it was mostly the British 8-bit gaming magazines that would find their way – months late – to the Australia newsstands, and I eagerly purchased and devoured the contents of Computer & Video Games, Commodore User and the mighty Zzap!64.

While ostensibly aimed at younger readers, these magazines didn’t simplify their editorial and even when I was 12 I knew the content wasn’t just trash for kids (as compared to another mag I bought, Smash Hits). The UK computer magazines were loaded with content and not easily read in a single sitting, I would invariably read every word including detailed hints or walkthroughs for games I would never own. I wrote to them as well, and sometimes even entered their contests. I suppose I optimistically thought that being on the other side of the world wouldn’t invalidate my entry!

All good things end though, but when I grew older and walked away from the 8-bit computer mags I simply replaced them with another essential purchase: the UK music rags NME and Melody Maker. These were pretentious magazines/newspapers covering all the bands ‘the kids’ (ie. late teenage me) were into. While I rarely read everything I lapped up the frequent content on the goth bands of the era, and even still have cuttings from some of the issues I bought back then! Of course with the rise of grunge in the early 90’s these rags changed their focus and I dropped them like an old shoe.

In these days I was also buying a few others: titles like Goldmine (for record collecting news), other music mags if they had an interview with a band I listened to, the occasional PC gaming mag and every now and then an RPG mag like Dragon, Dungeon or White Dwarf (before it went to a GW-only mag in 1987). These latter ones frustrated me since they weren’t on newsstands and only rarely available in (the very few) games shops I visited. I certainly would have bought them more often had they been more available.

Then came America. I gave away the few mags I still had before leaving Oz and within days of landing in the US I got into console gaming in a big way and very quickly started buying all the local mags like EGM, CGW PSM, Gamefan and (eventually) Next Generation. These were almost all trash: utterly beholden to the industry they covered and walking a very thin line between advertising and editorializing. Of course I knew this, but these were pre-internet days and if you wanted info on upcoming games this was all we had. I bought and read them all for many years.

For many years we also had a subscription to Entertainment Weekly, and even though I’ve never ever watched an episode I feel I have a deep understanding of Friends as a result of the countless articles on the show from that magazine! The RPG magazines were much easier to find here as well and I regularly purchased Dragon and Dungeon until they both folded. I also bought the occasional comic and toy magazines (absolute, utter trash like Wizard and Toyfare) and also some Japanese magazines on otaku topics just to look at pretty pictures 🙂

During these years though, and as a result of the internet, magazines started to die. I recently watched a stream in which a once-editor of classic 8-bit UK computer magazines lamented that it was trivial to make money in the 1980s since no matter what they printed the mags flew off the shelf, but that now it’s almost impossible to make money running a game magazine since the customers are all online and most newsstands won’t devote space to stocking them. In short: the younger generations find magazines quaint and unnecessary in an era of free information online, and the industry hasn’t find a way to counter this yet.

But I still love my magazines, and still eagerly purchase ones I like! Even during covid I’ve managed one or two trips to our local Barnes and Noble bookstore – which contains our only local newsstand of note – and the above photo shows the haul from my last trip. A stamp magazine, a retro-game specific magazine, a comic mag, a trading card magazine and two genre magazines (sci-fi and horror). With the exception of the card and comic ones these are all imported from the UK, and as a result of both covid and Brexit are hellishly expensive now! But I still read them avidly, and I’ll continue to buy them until the day they eventually go under.

I fear that day is sooner than later though, and I imagine magazines will eventually go the way of the DVD or physical game release. But I’ll hope for a renaissance – if vinyl returns surely magazine can as well? – and spend my time happily reading the latest and greatest issue of a magazine entirely devoted to games or movies released decades ago 🙂