One Sunday morning I woke up to a strange squawking flock sound that reminded me of something very specific.  It was the sound I heard while exploring the telegraph hill area of San Francisco and a green cloud of Parrots left a tree, circled the hill, and came back. The problem is I live in Bernal Heights on a different side of town.  Later that Sunday I was removing the last of my stuff from the basement of my previous place less than a block away and I saw parrots, at least 5, eating from a porch bird feeder three houses down. My first thought was these people somehow brought the wild parrots to our neighborhood.

The very next day I was taking a lunch break walk at Justin Herman Plaza downtown and I heard the same sound.  Over by the square tube fountain sculpture thing was a very tall leafy tree full of parrots.  Took a bit of scanning the tree to finally see them but judging from the other passers by looking up, I guessed this was unusual.

This is exactly the kind of thing you see. (Thank you dianaclark of youtube)

Click here to view the embedded video.

A little reading and I learned that these feral parrots are able to survive here because of introduced plants and birdfeeders and the like providing year-round food.  What I don’t know is if the parrots are actually new to these two locations (Bernal Hill and Justin Herman Plaza) or if they move around more depending on the season or if they’ve always been there and I just never noticed.  I think I would have been woken up by them in the past though.

And the Wild Speculation Begins

I wonder if they’ve recently had a birth explosion and in my mind I see this geometric expansion on a map and at some point they reach a critical mass and the mayor will be on the news talking about what to do about the “Parrot Problem.”  The parrots are finding food year round but what happens if their population exceeds the food supply? Suddenly I’m reminded of a film I saw where parrots were actually attacking sheep in Chile or Argentina at night. San Francisco emergency rooms at night will be full of people with flesh eating parrot bites and someone invents a ridiculous hat that keeps the parrots away and you can’t leave the house after dark without it.  Of course there will be a contingent of Bay Area pro Parrot activists that think we should communicate with them and give them the right to vote along with their dogs who already own some of the nicest beaches in the area.  Any thoughts of taking action to cull Parrot population is met with strong resistance from the Parrot Liberation Front as activist circle the parrot trees chanting “Free the Parrots! Parrots are People!”  And the parrots, being parrots, take up the chant too but they end up with a more truncated version of the chant that sounds like “Feed the Parrots People!”

Eventually the PLF finally fully understands the threat when  group of them late at night are coming home from a protest on city hall and hear “Feed The Parrots People!” repeated as the flesh eating feral parrots descend on them.  One of them gets off a 911 call and for a moment they think they’re going to be saved as they hear fire engines coming but in truth it’s just a flock of parrots that live in a tree next to the fire station that learned how to mimic the siren and now they’re joining the feeding frenzy.  People fear the night and if they hear someone screaming “help, parrot attack!” nobody dares help because the parrots have heard people shout “help! Parrot attack!” so many times that they have learned how to say that too.  Who will save us when Polly doesn’t want crackers anymore?

Back to Reality

But seriously I really do want to know if they are new to those locations or if I just didn’t notice them before so if anyone currently studying the San Francisco feral parrots reads this feel free to educate.

Click here to view the embedded video.

In an episode of Golden Girls an invitation mix up leads a group of several Elvises to be invited to Sophia’s  wedding.  The “No Way” moment comes when you look and see that one of the Elvises is Pulp Fiction Director Quentin Tarantino.

Click here to view the embedded video.

This man singing is in fact, Willie Nelson. . .

Click here to view the embedded video.

So if you want to tell a story that spans star systems, you have to either find a way to travel faster than light or tell a story that includes, years, decades or more just getting from point a to point b.  But what if you just want to communicate with another star system? If you want to send an email to your friend orbiting Alpha Centauri (the closest star to us not including the sun) you hit send and the message zips up to a satellite aimed at the star and the message gets attached to a radio signal and is off!  And 4 years later your friend gets the email and can send a response.  So it takes you about 8 years to get a question answered.  It’s another mind boggling testament to how big the universe is.  I always thought it was amazing that I could send an email to Japan from California instantly or even have a live text chat, not to mention skyping with video.  When it comes to the speed of light or even very close to that speed, everywhere on earth might as well be the same place.  One of my biggest wow moments in learning about astronomy was finding out that radio waves were actually light with really long oscillations, way way below the visible spectrum.  At interstellar distances, instantaneous communication goes out the window.  Sucks if you wanna do a story about interstellar pen pals but I’m sure a good writer can find a way to make a cool story with that.

You don’t even have to go to another star system to experience communication lag time.  Take an imaginary situation where someone is orbiting Venus and got a little too far away from the ship on a space walk and it will take them 6 minutes to get back to the ship but the thrusters to leave Venus will ignite in 3 minutes.  Back on Earth somebody has the instructions to override the thruster sequence and give you more time.  You send your radio signal and wait for the response.  What you have to know for your story is where Venus is in relation to Earth.  Lets help them out and say they went on the mission to arrive when Venus was the closest it could get to earth which is 38 million kilometers.  Will they get the info in time?

Well it turns out 38 million kilometers = 2.113 light minutes.  Earth received the message and there’s still time.  They upload and send the instructions and when the message is less than half way to Venus, doh!, the thrusters ignite and your space man is stranded orbiting Venus; Sad.  If you want your people to communicate real time from Venus to earth you need some new technology that doesn’t exist yet.  Like any sci-fi story, you don’t have to know how it works but you should mention that it’s there.  Take the same story and have the people at Venus’ furthest distance from Earth and the message takes 14.51 minutes to get there.  This time the message wouldn’t even get to Earth on time. I’m not really one to nit-pick for its nit picking sake but when I see people speaking real time over radio signals across interplanetary distances it is distracting. I sometimes wish I didn’t know some of this stuff when it gets in the way of the story like that.  It just becomes a better story when you include the lag and impresses upon us just how big these distances are.  If we were sending an emergency message from Jupiter to Earth the best time we could get would be about 35 minutes.

If you don’t want to do all the math someone created a very helpful conversion table at following website.

http://www.easysurf.cc/cnver15.htm#slk2x

They have several different conversions to choose from.  I had to remember that all of these distances from Earth are variable because any two planets are constantly moving, getting closer or farther away.

I’m in the grocery store with a list, actually a notepad list that I thumb typed while looking at the whiteboard at home.  I suppose I could have taken a picture of the list but then I couldn’t delete each item as I added it to the basket.  That’s not the unexpected use.

My girlfriend is very specific of what she needs for the cooking and since she’s a phenomenal cook I like to get her exactly what she needs even if I don’t know the difference.  The next item on my list is Mint and when I see the sign for it in the store it reads Mint/Dill 1.50 per bunch.  Below the sign are two different plants and I’m embarrassed to say I don’t know what Mint or Dill look like.  Yes, really!  I’m a suburban hot pocket and frozen burrito guy.  One roommate called me a box-etarian and someone else question: “what, like you can only make Macaroni and cheese?”  “Oh my no, Macaroni and cheese is far to complicated, there’s like a pot and water and maybe stirring.”  So yeah, there are plenty of plants I don’t know the names f0r and plenty of cooking ingredients that I wouldn’t recognize in their natural habitat.  I look around embarrassed about to ask the produce guy that already thinks I’m an idiot because I can’t tell the difference between Cilantro and Parsley.  If only I had the internet . . . oh but I do!  Back out of my grocery list on the notepad app, pull up Safari browser with the hand that’s not holding the basket and I type in “mint plant.”  There’s a wiki entry and I pull it up.  The picture of mint is a little small so I do that touch screen thumb and forefinger thing that makes it larger and hold it up next to the two plants.  Good, nobody saw me, now I know the difference between Mint and Dill.  Sad but hey if you have a tool, why not use it.  I’m waiting for the app that will take a picture of the plant and tell me what the plant is.

I suspect that maybe the economic downturn may have hurt Leno’s portfolio and he is unable to keep his current lifestyle if he retires. Otherwise, why? Does having people cheer for you every night entitle you to do whatever you want?

What Kanye West did to Taylor Swift is nothing compared to what this talentless childish pathetic hack who can’t even read a que card without stumbling over his tongue is doing.

Conan is more naturally funny. He has true wit and Charisma and he’s a professional. Plus he’s a risk taker in the best sense; he and his writers try things that are funny to them that may fly over the heads of some folks.

NBC this Leno at 11:35 business is a bad bad idea. Somebody grow a back bone and lose Leno. Jay Leno, it’s not too late for you to step down and see salvage some shred of respect in the industry. Everyone can make a mistake. What Kanye did was a drunken mess but every time Jay shows his face as a late night host on NBC before Conan’s show is a Kanye moment.

Big thanks to the folks at the Slice of Scifi, Obscure 80s and Megapodzilla podcasts for encouraging my esoteric audio bits. My Skiz-audio tab has some examples of these bits. Not only do they encourage me but their weekly podcasts give me lots of fuel for putting ideas together. For example on one podcast Tim Adamec puts the idea of Joss Whedon wanting to buy the Terminator franchise into the phrase “John-Connor’s Sing-a-Long blog” and I ask myself: “how might that go and how can I convey it in a minute or less?” And the result goes something like this:

http://skiznot.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/Skynet-phonecall.mp3

Whether it works or not, I still get the experience of trying to tell a story or convey a joke using sound effects, music and editing.

Even when I have very little time, I can have fun with Garage Band (the software), my Kazoo, my voice and other face noises:

http://skiznot.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/Tron-Cars-Kazoo.mp3

The good news is I’m working on a secret project (I always call them secret until their done) to do music for a new podcasts, no jokes or singing, just an original theme for a reboot of one of my favorite podcasts in recent years. I have such a big list of projects I want to do so hopefully this year I can trade my thimble for a coffee mug or (cross my fingers) a bucket and put more stuff out. I take lots of inspiration from the podcasters that find a way to create new content once a week on their own free time. Some of you guys really deserve to create that content for a living and not have “day jobs.”

Cheers podcasters, I look forward to what you’ll have going on 2010.

Skiznot

October 23, 1984

A bunch of priests and rabbis got together to condemn Ronald Reagan for repeatedly bringing up the Armageddon Theory.

Ronald Reagan, People Magazine interview, Dec. 6, 1983: Never, in the time between ancient prophecies up until now, has there been a time in which so many of the prophecies are coming together. There have been times in the past when people thought the end of the world was coming, and so forth, but never anything like this.

The news conference of religous leaders was crashed by Jerry Falwell and friends (the Moral Majority) who denied Reagan ever predicted a nuclear war with the Soviet Union.

The Christic Institute (the anti-Armageddon theologians) asserted that the religious right was promoting a theology where: “reconciliation with America’s adversaries (was) ultimately futile.”

Jerry Fallwell in response urged Presidential candidates of both parties: “to repudiate any association with any extremist world view which demands a nuclear Armageddon.”

Jerry Fallwell LA times March 4, 1981: We believe that Russia, because of her need of oil – and she’s running out now – is going to move into the Middle East, and particularly Israel because of their hatred of the Jew, and that it is at that time when all hell will break out. And it is at that time when I believe there will be some nuclear holocaust on this earth.

It seems like not so long ago but imagine if a president today said the following to the Director of the American-Israeli Public Affairs Committee: “I turn back to your ancient prophets in the Old Testament and the signs foretelling Armageddon, and I find myself wondering if, if we’re the generation that’s going to see that come about.”

One of Reagan’s responses about statements he made suggesting that the end of the wolrd was comming was featured in the video for the song World Destruction by Africa Bambaataa and ex-Sex Pistol John Lydon (a.k.a Time Zone).

Click here to view the embedded video.

Now, whether or not you know how your characters are getting from one star to the other it is a good idea to get an know how fast they can do it, and stay consistent. You have galactic spanning stories like Star Wars where the space culture conquered the speed of light and relativity limitations and traveling the Galaxy is analogous to traveling anywhere on Earth for us. Then there’s Star Trek where, even though humanity is able to go beyond the speed of light, most of the action takes place in one quarter of the Galaxy and even at their best faster than light sleeps it takes about 70 years to traverse from one quarter of the Galaxy to another.

I think some of the more interesting space sci-fi I’ve read recently takes place in futures where humans can’t break the laws of physics and go faster than light. This limits one kind of story but opens up so many challenging alternatives for our space hero. We can’t really have a Galaxy spanning culture that can interact real-time but what kind of stories can we have? Orson Scott Card tells a story where humanity has worked out how to get close to the speed of light (the ships are called “light huggers”) but there is still the pesky relativity. The problem, as covered in my Fun With Time Dialation post, is that the closer someone gets to the speed of light the slower time moves for them. The main character in the Ender series does so much interstellar travel that in his 30-some years of life he is able to witness thousands of years of human history. Think of the possibilities. What if a trip from San Francisco to New York meant that while you were in the plane for 5 hours, 2 years went by on the ground? Every time you landed on one of your trips you would basically be seeing 2 years into your future. Also a lot can happen in 2 years, perhaps New York won’t be a safe place to land anymore.

Another cool space science fiction series that doesn’t go faster than light are the “Revelation Space” books by Alastair Reynolds. A good example of a very different kind of interstellar story happens in “Chasm City” where part of the book is dedicated to a story about a flotilla of ships that have a top speed of 8% of the speed of light. Now compared to Star Trek and Star Wars, this is a extremely slow crawl. In this sort of story, instead of focusing on several exotic destinations the Author focuses on all the trouble and hardship it takes to get to a single destination. In “Chasm City” the flotilla story is told as history but I find it the most compelling part of the book because it takes the crew of the ship generations to get to their destination and the different ships become like different countries with different cultures. Some readers and viewers of sci-fi have been so spoiled by the galaxy spanning shows/stories that there is often little respect for how vast these distances are. I spoke about 8% of the speed of light as a crawl but it’s actually 23,983.40 Kilometers persecond! At that speed someone could circle the entire equator in 1.67 seconds. Using our handy closest star outside our solar system, proxima centauri it would take our 8% of light speed ship 52.75 years to get there. At these speeds the story about interstellar travelers is not about explorers; it’s about pioneers. They’re doing things for the next generation and that takes a different kind of human. Well in the case of Chasm City they were doing for the next generation and a cargo of frozen people who would be thawed out once they got to the destination.

All these different kinds of stories can be found in sci-fi books but so far I find them very skewed toward the galaxy spanning kind in TV and movies. I think the sci-fi in media that uses space/space ships and alien worlds as merely exotic backdrops to an action story do a disservice to the genre and underestimates the intelligence of the fans. Understanding how far away this stuff is from us is one of the first steps towards a true sense of awe for our universe.

Episode 2: My Girlfriend and I need to return something at the Apple Store in the San Francisco Marina. We walk up to what looks like a front register but it’s actually the Genius Bar, where folks can put their name on a waiting list for tech support. We look around some more and, guess what, no registers! All the Mac-drone ultra hip employees have retail utility belts. So, in order to do our return we have to corner one of the lime green or pink shirted drones. Instead of waiting in a cash register line we have to compete for attention of one of these folks. We catch a girl the same way you might catch a busy waitress during a peak lunch crowd and she responds: “I’llseewhatIcandoafterhelpthiscustomercant’stoprightnow.” Finally a young scruffy guy who looks like he was just pulled out of his dark basement and given a fresh coat of lime green paint, we’ll call him Green Cheeto, tries to help us but, wouldn’t you know it, he operates his utility retail belt like a grampaw in the 80s trying play the Game boy with no batteries. He has to keep asking one of the Genius bar guys, thus slowing him down also. While Green Cheeto is figuring all this out, two people ask if they have to make an appointment to buy something slowing him down even more.

Epilogue: We get it apple store, you’re hip. Nice store layout. The downtown store with the free software classes is brilliant, but please bring back the old sales floor helper/cashier caste system; let the helpers give out info and cashiers ring you up. Right now buying something at some of these stores is like trying to flag down a bar tender and I don’t have the cleavage to get his attention. I suggest that anyone who goes to an ultra-hip apple store and there’s any trouble buying something, just start stripping until someone comes to ring you up. If you’re attractive they’ll help you faster, if you’re not they’ll help you faster to make you stop.

I swear this is a story from 25 years ago.  Miss America Asked to Quit When Nude Photos come to Light.

The headline pretty much says it all.  Its funny, Vanessa Williams remains the only Miss America I could name and most of the time I don’t even think of her in association with the pageant.  Only other thing I thought worth mentioning is this quote from the man who asked her to give up her crown: “The pageant celebrates the whole woman, and its spirit is intrinsically inconsistent with calculated sexual exploitation.”  Two words, swimsuit competition.

House of Reps. Decides the US Government Can’t Not Let Public Schools Not Let Kids Voluntarily Pray Perhaps Quietly and Such as. . .?!?

July 26, 1984.  Ending a monumental waste of time, the House defeated a proposal by Right Wing Republicans that would deny funds to any school that prevents prayer “by individuals on a voluntary basis.”  It was clearly a ploy by conservatives to paint democrats as people that are against prayer; “boo hiss.” At first it was about voluntary prayer time and later a rider was added endorsing silent prayer.  Silent prayer was already permitted under the law and if I remember correctly happened quite often before finals and no teacher ever said “nope, stop it! That’s cheating asking your god for help.”  “Dear Lord, what did you get for #24?”  Where they worried about teachers going up to kids who are sitting silently in thought and blowing an airhorn? ”You were silently voluntarily praying, weren’t you!”  Teachers have other things to worry about.

I swear this is a story from 25 years ago (Again).  U.S. Governments Spends $4.5 Billion to Rescue Chicago Bank.

 July 27, 1984. Continental Illinois, at one time the 7^th largest bank in the US , became insolvent in part due to bad loans they purchased.  FDIC jumped in to kicked in 4.5 Billion because they considered Continental “too big to fail.” And let’s see how it ended: Eventually, the board of directors and top management were removed. Bank shareholders were substantially wiped out, although holding-company bondholders were protected.  Oh and a few fat cats went to jail.

What has 2,500 pigeons, 84 Grand Pianos, 1 Jetpack and 0 Russians?

The 1984 L.A. Olympic opening Ceremonies! July 28, 1984.  I was 13 at the time and still I knew enough to be embarrassed about how over the top-cotton candy dipped in high fructose corn syrup this thing was.  So it starts with a guy flying by on a jet pack “We will intimdate all you other countries with our terrifying white clad jet pack man! Lookout!  Really the jet pack was cool but like so much of the ceremony, it seemed it was done just for the sake of doing it.  “Hmm now we should include “Rhapsody in Blue” because blues is an American musical form and Gershwin adds class to the show and ummm since its 1984 lets have 84 pianos playing it!”  I don’t know why the guy stopped there, he should have had the 84 pianos spell out the number 84 and taken 4 keys of each piano and made sure that all the players were 84 years old.  And there’s such a thing as tasteful fusion. I mean you don’t put Cheetos and whipped cream together in a bowl just because you like both.  “Hmmm square dancing, that’s American and. . . What?!. . .No I didn’t forget break dancing! (scribbles break dancing on his pad).”  Ok so I’m sure it was fun but it’s just hard to imagine that someone did this on purpose unless he was making a campy statement about commercialism.  And speaking of Commercialism, the Soviet Union blamed commercialism of the games and lack of security for pulling out of the games.  But we all know they were just getting back at us for boycotting the 80 Olympics over the occupation of Afghanistan.

Movies

 7/20/1984 “Electric Dreams” is released.  It’s a lovely story of a guy who’s PC falls in love with the girl upstairs by listening to her footsteps and cello playing and locks the guy out when he becomes jealous of his relationship with her.  Some of the best music Culture Club ever recorded was in this flick.

 7/27/1984 “Purple Rain.”  I’ll always remember watching this with a few friends who were staying over and when Prince in his purple Edwardian coat and white laces points to Apallonia’s anklet and says: “Gimme That!”  we all looked to each other in shock basically saying “it can talk!”  The thing I liked most about Prince, ego aside, is that he never let others define him.  Purple Rain was dark, moody and cathartic but the next time we saw him after the movie he was blue sky, puffy clouds and smiles.  He continued to do things his way, including the ploy to change his name until he could regain control of the rights to his recordings.