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As My Brother Requested, A List Of What He Could Buy Me For Christmas

Thursday, November 14th, 2013

Did you notice the blog was down for about a week? I received the following missive from my brother explaining the absence:

“Dearest secondborn, it pains me to admit I forsook the required blog maintenance due to an abundance of stress that resulted from an inability to find Christmas gifts of a level high enough to show you the appreciation that you deserve. Pray tell, could you help as you have done in years past?”

Lest you think this is fake, his telegram didn’t include the hyperlinks. Those were my additions 🙂

It would be positively bestial of me to ignore such a cry for help, and thus I present – once again – a humble list of items that I would love to unwrap on that most special of days…

Books Category

“I Am The Doctor” – Jon Pertwee

This was Jon Pertwee’s last biography, and apparently is a smashing read, containing many and varied anecdotes about his life during and after the time he portrayed what everyone agrees is the best ever Doctor Who. For me, this book would essentially be a ‘how to’ that I could apply to living all aspects of my life.

Manual Of The Planes (1st Edition)

It’s possible I have one of the most complete AD&D 1E collections out there, since I have no less than fifteen different hardcover manuals including such esoterica as The Wilderness Survival Guide and Dragonlance Adventures. And yet the original edition of the Manual Of The Planes has yet avoided my ‘ever-expanding web of acquisition’ (a somewhat obscure AD&D magic item). Of course I have the 3E version, as well as other planar guides, but in the name of completeness I must have the above! If I were to live within driving range of a fabulous used book store that sells D&D manuals then I’d probably drive over there and see if they had this one in stock to buy and give me for Christmas……

Toys Category

Neo-Otyugh figure

This is one of those things that most of you would instantly ignore if you ever saw it in a store. Me? I’d buy it! As my brother will, to brighten my Weihnachten! Of course he’d have to find it first, which is no mean feat since it’s one of the less common figures in a figure line that failed miserably more than 20 years ago. Plus it’s a bendable figure, which means it was made in China out of some no doubt toxic rubber that after all this time has probably dissolved into poisonous gas. I guess I’ll find out on Christmas Day 😉

Imakarum Miribalis figure kit by Max Factory

This one’s been on this list before, and I’ve wanted it for years now. As availability evaporates, so too does the price continue to rise. In Japan earlier this year I fully intended to buy this; I was even prepared to pay an unreasonable amount for it. But I never saw it. I looked everywhere for it. I even took a solo trip to Akihabara and explored every figure shop I could find. It beggars belief that I never found it, because where else on Earth would this be available? I’ll tell you where: the place Bernard finds it. And buys it. For me. For Christmas.

Music Category

Who Is The Doctor – Jon Pertwee (7″ single)

This one’s been on my list for a while, for several reasons:
i) It’s sung by the person everyone agrees played the best Doctor, Jon Pertwee.
ii) It’s very, very good. Actually it’s even better.
iii) I still have a working and connected record player downstairs, and could therefore dance to it with Yossie.

Don’t believe me about how great it is? Judge for yourself:

I’d love to taste that ‘secret sauce’ on December 25th!

Oh, and Bernard… when you’re adding the above Jon Pertwee albums to your cart, and if you’re feeling especially generous, you may want to throw this one in as well:

Now that is a man’s album cover!

Electronic Game Category

Dalek Attack LCD game

It’s difficult to use the English language to even describe why I would want the above, so let’s use German: Der Grund hierfür ist, dass ich ein besessener Sammler bin und wollte diese, seit ich ein Sprössling war. I reckon Bernard’s going to have to use some sort of supernatural power to actually obtain one though, since I’ve never ever seen it, nor seen it for sale, or even know if it exists. This is the sort of item that makes the quest that is Christmas shopping so grand, and I am almost jealous of my brother that I have now given him the joy of finding this gem.

Zelda Game-&-Watch

I’ve actually seen the above product, more than once, always in Japan. Every time I beheld it I wept, for two reasons. Firstly, because I wanted to own it that badly, and secondly because the price literally brought tears to my eyes. Especially for a mint-in-boxed version, which is of course the one I would want. Once, when only I was present and no-one else could have possibly heard him, my brother said: “No item is too expensive at Christmas!” Approximately 41 days from today, I’ll see if he remembers those words.

DVD Category

Sword & The Sorceror

This was released quite a few years ago in the US, but it’s all-but-unavailable now. Which is a shame, because I want it! I religiously check amazon for reissues, and even went so far as to buy a bootleg ripped-from-VHS version at NYCC (which didn’t work). Those of you that have seen this dreadful film may wonder why the obsession with seeing it again, and I may not be able to easily answer. Until Christmas day 😉

Video Games Category

Snow Brothers (Game Boy)

Picture this: you’re in a used game shop, perusing the ancient Game Boy cartridges. Your eyes fall on the above, and what do you do? I reckon nothing. You’d barely even notice it as you scanned the titles. You almost certainly wouldn’t know you were looking at $200 of plastic and microchips would you? I would, and I’d eagerly rip out my wallet and buy the little sucker.

Of course the above story is pure fiction, since it would never ever, EVER happen. I know because – for twenty goddamn years now – I have scanned game boy cartridges in used game stores and have never seen Snow Brothers.

It warms my heart to think that my brother, as he drives around to every single game store within 5 hours of his house, actually will find Snow Brothers. And he’ll buy it for a song. And I’ll sing the same song when I open it on Christmas Day: “To taste the secret sauce of life”!

Might & Magic Games (SNES)

These are the gifts that, as I open them on Christmas day, will cause me to say aloud “He didn’t!” While I wouldn’t put anything beyond my brother – especially where it involves brightening my Christmas – the organization, acquisition and innovation required to obtain both Super Nintendo Might and Magic cartridges and give them to me in one gift box would be no less than godlike. Lest you find my words hyperbolic, know that Might And Magic 2 is Japanese only, and despite fervent searching throughout all five of my Japanese trips I have never seen it, and that the second was released in very small quantities and is very difficult to find boxed these days.

As an aside, I have played M&M3 SNES. Back in my fanzine days, FCI sent me a pre-release EPROM with the game on it, that I stuck into my SNES and played. It is one of my regrets that I ever returned that to the company…

Atari Lynx + Gauntlet Third Encounter

aka ‘The One That Got Away’. As with every other human on this planet, I cared less about the Lynx back when it was released in 1989. By the time I got to America it had failed spectacularly, and by the time I started collecting games in early 1994 it had disappeared from stores. These days working versions fetch high prices, much more-so if they are boxed. This is interesting since it was a crap system with crap games… except for Gauntlet: The Third Encounter.

I want a Lynx. I have wanted one for years, and have come close to buying one once or twice. What has held me back was the fact I have essentially no interest in any games for it except for Gauntlet, which means I’d be paying what is now around $300 for something I’d never used. Furthermore, Gauntlet itself is quite rare, and the Lynx + Gauntlet combo (boxed) could be upwards of $500. If you could even find either.

So Bernard, as you spend every weekend between now and Christmas driving the length and breadth of California in the almost-certainly-futile search for a Snow Brothers game boy cartridge, remember me if you spot a cheap Lynx + Gauntlet Third Encounter combo 😉

‘Dream Item’ Category

Doctor Who Pinball Machine

For a few years now I have seriously entertained the idea of buying a pinball machine. I did some research, and very quickly the above bubbled to the top of my list. It was released in 1992, it’s beautiful, it’s very complex, and it would look marvelous in my house.

The machines don’t seem that difficult to find, as long as you can somehow arrange shipping (Bernard could I’m sure) and have more money than sense (…). If nothing else, the thought of how beautiful the cabinet would look reflecting the lights of our tree moments after I unwrapped it surely moves even the most miserly of souls? This is truly a gift that would enable the recipient to fully enjoy the ‘secret sauce’ of life!

Posted in Blog, Books & Comics, Family, Games, Miscellaneous, Movies, Music, Otaku, Tech, The Unknown, Time, Toys | 3 Comments »

Return Of The Comic Ads!

Thursday, November 7th, 2013

Once again my friends, I obtained a pile of comics at NYCC the other week. The pickings in the 25-cent bin were slim, and I’d be lying if I said any of the books I purchased were actually good. But the ads my friends, the ads! As I will show you here, some shining examples of playing to the dreams and fears of children were to be found in those musty books…

I’ll start with something relatively tame. The above ad (from a 1966 comic) answers the question in every child’s mind: “What can I do to be more interesting?” Of course it has particular relevance to readers of comics, who no doubt were unsatisfied with their amateur sketches of superheroes. Props to the copywriter who came up with the criminally obvious lie wonderful tagline: No Talent! No Lessons!

The above advert (from a 1980s comic) is fundamentally the same: selling a product that promises to make life more interesting. But oh my god, what the hell is this ad talking about? ‘The Badge of the Future’??! Learn what at home in spare time? How to sleep under pines or catch breakfast from icy streams? I can only imagine the disappointment that resulted from ambitious youngsters sending away for the above and quickly learning that their future was not actually Grizzly Adams.

Most comics of those days include ‘get-rich-quick’ ads designed to separate children from their pocket money via what must be only a technicality away from a pyramid scheme. And then we have ads like this one (from a 1980 Star Trek comic) that deliver a more enticing promise: be a salesman! In particular, this product must be a sure thing, appealing as it no doubt does to millions of prospects every year! I wonder how many children believed that, and how many fewer actually made any money selling these things. My guess is very, very few.

Here’s an advert from 1980 for an upcoming blockbuster film:

What’s that you say? You don’t remember the shameless Jaws ripoff beloved and heart-rending film Orca? To quote an amazon reviewer: “It’s hard to say which aspect of this film is the stupidest”…

…the art in the ad is amazing though isn’t it! 😉

Anyway, moving on to the other type of advert very common in comics – ads selling stuff to kids. Here’s a few notable examples:

Even today, I only have to read the ‘Can be heard 5 miles‘ headline to know that as a kid I would have sold body parts to obtain one of these. This is also from the 1966 comic, and one wonders exactly what these products were and specifically what they fired. If the claim was even half true, it seems unlikely that these would have been legal!

Jump forward to 1981 and this amusingly bad ad for licensed Star Wars caps. The sketches look like they took someone at least one second! And if you’re going to sell Star Wars merchandise, why caps?! How many kids bought these and wore them to school and got beaten senseless as a result?

Speaking of being beaten senseless because of something you are wearing, check out this from a 1983 Conan comic…

…was that really a successful ad?

As usual, I try and leave the best for last, and I believe I have two absolutely epic advertisements this time. Let’s start with one from a 1981 Star Trek comic:

Ok let’s analyze this point-by-point:

1) This product lets you dominate the minds of others…
2) Including complete strangers…
3) To do anything you want…
4) ‘Willingly and cheerfully’…
5) Without even knowing you are doing it!

I’ll be honest and admit I never knew this product existed, and frankly now that I do I am unsettled. Every moment of every day I may be being controlled by an unknown mind-puppeteer who, 32 years ago, purchased this product after reading a terrible Star Trek comic. The thought gives me chills.

On the other hand, now I know this is possible I need to obtain this product myself! The mind boggles at what I will achieve when I can dominate everyone secretly, and at the very least we’ll probably see more stuff like this in the world:

That said, I think the powers bestowed by witchcraft were more expansive 😉

Could there even possibly be an ad that makes you double-take more than the above? Yes my friends, sadly there is:

I thought the live seahorses was bad, but sending live monkeys in the mail?! Even though it was less than 50 years ago, this really makes me reflect on how different the US was back in the 1960s (which is when this ad was ran). Did anyone take advantage of this offer? How many monkeys were mailed? How many survived, or were released into the wild? And how many were dressed in cute costumes and forced to put on shows? Incredible.

Posted in Animals, Art, Books & Comics, Miscellaneous, The Unknown, Time | Comments Closed

For Your Eyes Only

Saturday, September 28th, 2013

Operation ‘First Fleet’ is confirmed.

Operatives ‘Slim Dusty’ and ‘Banjo Patterson’ will disembark at Mascot in 81 days. Though their transports will be different, they have synchronized their schedules to arrive near simultaneously. While their identities are a closely kept secret, here are artists sketches (SD on the left):

Shortly after arrival they will rendezvous with their local contact, ‘Henry Lawson’, who will provide a safe house from which the operation will be carried out. Lawson’s current appearance is uncomfirmed, but he is believed to have not changed much since this photograph was taken:

The operation will last for roughly three weeks, and the principle mission objectives are:

– Interact with locals, especially those working as vendors in fast-food restaurants
– Determine via personal experimentation the sugar content of local sweets and toroidal baked cakes
– Carry out rigorous experiments to estimate payout percentages of local lottery tickets and gambling machines
– While not performing the above, activate ‘profligate wastrel’ disguises to keep mission objectives secret

Operatives will regularly report on progress via this or a similar channel. Stay tuned…

Posted in Blog, Family, Miscellaneous, Time, Trip | 1 Comment »

Dam It!

Tuesday, September 24th, 2013

When I was a kid, I loved to dam creeks.

I was lucky since we always seemed to live somewhere near a creek or two. And when I say creek, I don’t mean in the American sense, where raging torrents are sometimes referred to as ‘creeks’. I mean shallow little waterways easily jumped over (at least during the dry season) although big enough to carry the occasional fish or yabby. I loved playing in and around creeks, and many adventures were had.

And there almost always came a time when, for arcane reasons ununderstandable to adults, I had to dam the creek! And this wasn’t once or twice, I did this many times.

Take this one for instance:

That’s our Kahibah house. There was a creek behind it that ran under the road. The main portion of the creek ran off the bottom right of the picture, but behind our house it took a 90 degree turn up and ran more or less parallel to the road. This tributary was small and muddy and fun to play in. Many frogs were caught; many tiny fish were collected. And the high dirt walls were structurally perfect to sustain a dam.

At first these were piddling affairs; just dig out a bit of mud and pile it up, maybe mixing in a few found rocks and a fallen branch or two. The water would build up and eventually wash everything away. This was of course fun, but I could do better. And I did. In time I would learn which types of mud worked better and how to divert the water through a (hand dug) side channel to allow unimpeded construction.

Within a year or two I had veritably obtained my PhD in ‘child creek construction’, and these were the days in which I would ‘bake’ mud bricks in the hot sun using old icecream containers as molds. The bricks would be hardened with grass cuttings and cemented with rich black mud dug from the walls of the creek. Using this technique I once turned this flimsy little creek from something ankle deep to something I could sit in and be up to my neck 🙂

And this wasn’t the only creek:

I wonder if the people living in those houses know there is a creek running underneath their properties? Back in those days (198X), my brother and I and a few of the neighbourhood delinquents took what mother nature had provided and terraformed it into a waterslide. We smoothed the dirt walls with water, built a small dam downstream to create a pool and actually slid down the gently sloping creekbed like we were at Wet & Wild.

Such were the amusements of the proletariat urchins in 1980s suburban Australia.

These dams would last days, sometimes weeks. I recall building rudimentary crenelations atop one, and putting little twigs up their to represent flags atop the castle wall. I’d play in and around them, getting awesomely dirty and muddy, and then we’d run along home and hose each other off before going inside. Sometimes we’d had to pick leeches off as well, since they were common foes. If they’d had enough time to get a good suck going there would be blood when you removed them. I’d occasionally collect these guys as well and keep them in a tank, but I think my parents used to discourage this 🙂

Dam building hit it’s apex probably when I was about 10 or 11 years old. At that time I never saw a creek I didn’t want to dam in some way, even if it was just throwing a dead tree into it. It couldn’t have been an interest of mine only, since sometimes we’d fine dams on creeks obviously build by others. I should have formed a guild.

As with all interests, time caused it to fade, and during my highschool and college years I’m sure the last thing I ever thought about was trundling into the bush and building a muddy creek. And yet…

That’s lovely Valentine, where my then-girlfriend SMC lived. One day we were walking along the lake and came upon a lovely little creek behind a sport field. Amazingly we ended up spending some hours building a decent dam. I guess the spark hadn’t disappeared after all!

Posted in Family, Miscellaneous, Nature, Time | 2 Comments »

The Voyager

Thursday, September 19th, 2013

You may have heard the news: last week NASA confirmed that the probe Voyager 1, launched back on September 5 1977, had left our solar system and is now in interstellar space. Moving at over 60,000 km/hr, it is now headed toward the Great Unknown, and in a decade or two will leave humanity behind.

For such a brave and successful explorer, this future is both appropriate and yet deeply saddening.

That was Voyager before it was launched. For it’s time, it had the most sophisticated computers, detectors, imaging systems and transmitters known. The software was upgradeable, and it even had a 64 kB tape drive on which it could backup data if it was temporarily unable to transmit it home. The primary mission of Voyager, following on from the earlier Pioneer probes, was to explore the outer Solar System, specifically Saturn and Jupiter.

And how it succeeded! 14 months after launch Voyager reached Saturn (the ‘Jovian system’) and began to send back spectacular images like this:

That’s Jupiter with two of it’s moons, Io (left) and Europa. Voyager was about 350,000 kilometers away when this was taken, and this and other images gave us knowledge of Jupiter and it’s moons – such as rings, volcanic activity and the atmospheric winds – that we could never have known without such close-range observation. Voyager spent about 5 months close enough to Jupiter to study it and then continued on toward Saturn.

It took almost a year and a half more to get to the next planet, but once Voyager arrive it once again astonished everyone back here at home with not only its scientific discoveries (including details of the surfaces of the many moons and complex structures of the rings) but also photos like this one that has become famous:

This angle is not observable from Earth, and obviously it is impossible to image Saturn with this resolution from here (or even Earth orbit). Were it not for Voyager, we simply wouldn’t have had an image as beautiful as this.

After Saturn, in November 1980, Voyager’s primary mission was ended, a little over three years after it had begun. That was 33 years ago.

But Voyager didn’t stop! Unlike Cassini (which is even now orbiting Saturn and at the end of it’s mission in four years will crash into the planet), Voyager continued along a trajectory which would take it to the very edges of our Solar system. It was still powered and scientists at NASA continued to use the instruments for experiments related to the composition of space and the influence of the Sun at long distances, but Voyager continued moving further and further away from home.

in February 1990 Voyager took its last – and perhaps most famous – photograph, shortly thereafter dubbed ‘Pale Blue Dot’:

See that tiny bright spot about halfway down the brown stripe on the right side? That’s where you are now; that’s Earth. This is Voyager looking home 13 years after it had left. This is the farthest-ever photo taken of Earth, taken from a distance of 6.5 billion kilometers. Shortly afterwards Voyagers cameras were shut down; the software uninstalled, and the computers back here on Earth used to interpret the images mothballed.

I wonder if any camera will ever photograph this planet from a distance greater than this photo?

And so Voyager continued, moving into the farthest reaches of our Solar System. In 1998 it passed Pioneer 10 (which had been launched 5 years before Voyager) and became the farthest man-made object from our planet. And yet it continued onward, and continues still.

It was confirmed recently by NASA that Voyager has now entered interstellar space, which means it had left our solar system (the area of space subject to the solar winds of our sun). It has been traveling for over 36 years now, and still continues to send data back to Earth. Voyager is now 18.7 trillion miles from Earth, and its messages take 17 hours to arrive. While some of the instruments have ceased to function, Voyager still has enough power to take measurements of the composition of deep space and send that data back to Earth. However in about a decade the instruments will be powered down, and in about 20 years Voyager will be out of our range. At that point, it will truly be gone.

One aspect of Voyager that made the probe famous from the very start was the Golden Record:

This disc is bolted to the craft, and contains images and sounds from Earth. This was intended as a sort of introduction to the people that created the probe, intended to be decoded by any intelligent race that may one day recover Voyager. The record is attached to the side of the craft and is protected against collisions with space dust by an aluminium case. It is presumed the record will be viable for over a billion years.

The contents of this disc are hopeful and wonderful and inspired. This ‘message in a golden bottle’ is not a plea for help; it is a plea for friends. Greetings in 55 languages (and ‘whale sounds’) are included, ranging from the very simply “Hello” (in Hebrew) to the poetic “Greetings to our friends in the stars. May time bring us together” (in Arabic). There is hardly enough information in these brief recordings to decode any meaning, but the intent is beautiful.

Additional sounds include those of nature (frogs and rain), industry (trains) and humanity (heartbeats, laughing). 90 minutes of music are also on the disc, including my dad’s favourite, Beethoven. Many images are also included, of all manner of topics including people, animals, science, nature and space exploration itself. I particularly like that the Sydney Opera House is on the disc.

As a child I used to wonder a lot about who would find this disc. I would have assumed that they would be able to play it and decode the images and sounds, and that one day they may find their way to the planet on which it was recorded. However the simple truth is that such a possibility – even if the aliens exist – is almost nonexistent.

Voyager is headed into deep space, on a mission with a duration that will make the 18 months between Jupiter and Saturn seem like a walk in the park. Voyager isn’t headed toward any particular star, much less the closest, and therefore it is difficult to predict where it will end up.

The distances in space are vast – so big as to be beyond human understanding. NASA says in about 40,000 years Voyager will be in the vicinity of the star Gleiss, which has an unusual elliptical orbit and will then be, at a distance of 3.6 light years, the closest star to Earth. But Voyager will (at best), be only about 1.6 light years from Gleiss. If it continues at its current speed, that means at best Voyager will only get within 28000 years of Gleiss. NASA is throwing us some hope with their statement: the truth is Voyager will continue for a very, very, long time before it actually ends up anywhere, if it even does at all.

And will it be found? In about 20 years Voyager will ‘die’; it’s power supply will shut down and it will stop transmitting. Think of the transmitter as a beacon. By then it will be too far for us to detect it, but presumably someone else closer than us might. But once the beacon is off, the finding such a tiny piece of metal in the impossibly vast expanse of space will become almost impossible. This is not a challenge that can be overcome by more and more sophisticated detection equipment; the inability to find Voyager will be due to simple laws of physics. Without any beacon to guide a potential discovery, Voyager will only be intercepted if it is literally stumbled upon.

The likelihood is that this will never happen, and Voyager will continue forever, alone and unfound, until one day perhaps it is captured by the gravitational field of an unknown sun billions of years from home.

Spare a thought for this little guy. He’s further than any human will ever be. He’s seen things no human will ever see. He will survive every person on this planet and very likely every person that will ever live on this planet. He may even survive this planet itself, when it is absorbed into our ever-growing sun billions of years from now. If that day ever arrives, the only history that we ever existed will be the remaining space probes, and Voyager will likely remain the farthest one that we ever sent into the Great Unknown.

Posted in Miscellaneous, Nature, Tech, The Unknown, Time | 4 Comments »

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