[MoMo]

That sounds fine and dandy, but it's not allowed!
Captain Eddie

You're right Cap, I'll have to grow up!

And now it's a sad day. The writer who changed the world's way of looking at space is dead.

Clarke and Kubrik certainly changed my view of the cosmos !







Sir Arthur C. Clarke: The Times obituary

QUOTE]

Far-sighted science fiction writer celebrated for his contribution to the epoch-making film 2001: A Space Odyssey






Arthur C. Clarke was the foremost science fiction writer of his time. He wrote around 100 books, and his television series Arthur C. Clarke’s Mysterious Worlds brought him to the attention of a large audience not usually interested in the genre. Besides suggesting that geostationary satellites could be used as telecommunications relay stations, he was best known for his part in one of the most famous science fiction movies, 2001: A Space Odyssey, released in 1968.


Clarke’s work was infused with an enthusiasm for the future. Two constants were the technological wonders that could complete Man’s evolutionary destiny — taking him down from the trees and sending him up to the Moon — and the spiritual imperative that drove him towards this new age.


Although his oeuvre was not explicitly religious — “Any path to knowledge is a path to God — or Reality, whichever word one prefers to use”, he said — he did give Man’s journey a mystical significance and a quasireligious intensity.


This theme is most apparent in his book Childhood’s End (1953), in which mankind is helped to merge with a cosmic overmind by extra-terrestrials who look like the Devil and are excluded from the ultimate spiritual absorption.

The idea of Man’s Earth-life as a preliminary was extended in his collaboration with the film director Stanley Kubrick. The film 2001 drew on Christian mythology, with a narrative that unravelled a process of Man’s creation, damnation, redemption and salvation. The ending shows the man who has broken through the shackles of space and time, becoming a godling, a foetus about to be born to command worlds, the Starchild. Through such ideas Clarke implied both a sense of loss and an ache for better things
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Arthur Charles Clarke was born in Minehead, Somerset, in 1917, and attended Huish’s Grammar in Taunton. As a boy he displayed a great enthusiasm for the workings of the world. He had a crystal set, fashioned telescopes from cardboard tubes and developed an interest in fossils when his father (who died when he was only 13) gave him a Player’s cigarette card with a picture of a dinosaur. He learnt how to send Morse code from his mother, who ran the local post office. After buying a copy of Amazing Stories at Woolworth’s, he became addicted to science fiction magazines, on which he would spend all his pocket money.


He moved to London in 1936 to work as an auditor with the Exchequer. His interest in future science, fuelled by early reading of H. G. Wells and later of Olaf Stapledon, was not confined to speculation. He was a member of the British Interplanetary Society, which regularly met to contemplate ways in which Man could be sent to the Moon.


Clarke served in the RAF during the war, and was demobilised with the rank of flight lieutenant. Here, his fascination with technology was satiated when he was selected to join a US team to work on a radar project: a microwave beam unit. While on this project in 1945, he submitted an article to Wireless World on the possibility that radio signals could be bounced off a satellite with a geosynchronous orbit — he calculated that, at a height of 23,000 miles above the Earth, an object could sustain a fixed position over one particular place on the Earth. Clarke was paid £15 for his article which anticipated the age of satellite communications.


After the war he entered King’s College London, taking his BSc with a first in physics and mathematics in 1948.


His non-fiction publishing really took off with The Exploration of Space (1951), and his reputation was established with the still-classic novel Childhood’s End two years later. His writing, like his TV appearances, was stiff and gawky but unselfconscious. This was never more apparent than in his Dunsany-like short stories, Tales from the White Hart. His numerous factual books on popular-science won him the Unesco Kalinga prize in 1962 and his science fiction — in which technical knowledge informs the narrative — benefited notably from his scientific attainments.


He was a master at science fiction short stories, with tales such as The Star and The Nine Billion Names of God dramatising the conflict between rationalism and religious belief. Although no innovator, he strengthened and stiffened that traditionalist vein within science fiction that stems from idols such as Wells and Stapledon. His populism and his propensity to dabble in fantasy did not endear Clarke to the scientific establishment.


He once said that the three achievements he most valued were formulating the idea for the communication satellite, inspiring Gene Roddenberry to create Star Trek through his work Profiles of the Future, and 2001.

Kubrick had become interested in man’s relationship with technology during the making of Dr Strangelove (1964). When he declared his intention to read “everything by everybody” in the genre, a colleague suggested he read the best: Arthur C. Clarke. “Isn’t he a recluse, some nut who lives up a tree in India?” asked Kubrick — himself not without idiosyncrasy.


Clarke, who since 1956 had been living in Sri Lanka, was keen on the collaboration, and went to New York to meet the director. Starting with the film adaptation of H. G. Wells’s Things to Come (1936), Clarke took Kubrick to see all the chief science fiction cinematic works (most of which the director loathed), and they also read palaeontological works by Louis and Richard Leakey. They were particularly influenced by Robert Ardredy’s African Genesis, which emphasised Man’s ability to hunt with tools as a key evolutionary motor: this became the inspiration for the “Dawn of Man” scene in the film.


Like Kubrick, Clarke felt that the effects on civilisation of Man’s voyage into space would be comparable to the effects of the Renaissance travels on medieval thought: it would dramatically change the way we thought of ourselves. Clarke also saw it as Man’s destiny to continue the evolutionary process.


Kubrick had been inspired by Clarke’s 1948 short story The Sentinel, which pictured the discovery of an alien object on the Moon: “a kind of burglar alarm, waiting to be set off by mankind’s arrival”. They jointly wrote the screenplay for the film, while Clarke simultaneously fleshed out the story into a novel. Overall, 2001 took five years to make.


Though the film was visually spectacular and engaging in its sheer ambition, many found it baffling, if not plain boring, and only with recourse to the original book could they make sense of the tale. Nevertheless, it acquired cult status among hippies and Vietnam veterans, who filled cinemas to smoke marijuana during the “ultimate trip” sequence that concludes the film.


Of course, when the year 2001 arrived it proved to be nothing like as futuristic as the film; recession had put paid to the space race in the 1970s. But to Clarke it was merely the timing, not the predictions (or warnings), that had been incorrect. At the beginning of the 21st century he maintained that by 2030 human beings would have made contact with intelligent life in the Universe, and that by 2090 we would have discovered the key to immortality.


Those who regarded such predictions as febrile nonsense were gently reminded by Clarke and his admirers that he had already accurately foretold the advent of mobile telephones, space stations and men on the Moon. As Clarke once said: “When a distinguished and elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.”


Less spectacularly, Clarke mooted in a short story in 1957 a scheme by a college science department to silence the howling and wailing of the music society’s new opera by producing mirror-image sound waves that cancelled out the frequencies. In 1994 a pair of headphones appeared on the market that offered the chance to do just that
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Clarke wrote a sequel to 2001, 2010, published in 1983, which, under the director Peter Hyams, became a less incomprehensible — and less enticing — film the following year. A third novel, 2061, appeared in 1989, to be followed by 3001: The Final Odyssey in 1997, in which he spoke of a society in which human life is immortalised and capable of being downloaded from computers at will.


Another much admired series of books was the Rama sequence, which began in 1972 with Rendezvous with Rama and continued from 1989 with three more books written with the space engineer and novelist Gentry Lee.


His appearances in the television series Arthur C. Clarke’s Mysterious Worlds brought him a wider audience, which shared the fascinated awe that he evinced in the contemplation of events and circumstances which seemed to be scientifically intractable. His writing suggests that while his mind might ponder scientific solutions to problems, he enjoyed the mythic sense that the Universe itself was a very mysterious place. Paradoxically, it seemed cosier that way.


Clarke had originally gone to Sri Lanka in 1956 to pursue his interest in scuba diving, which enabled him to experience something akin to the weightlessness of outer space. He established a deep-sea diving school there, and he became an honoured resident of the island and Chancellor of Moratuwa University. The diving school, at Hikkaduwa, 60 miles south of Colombo, was destroyed in the December 2004 tsunami and then rebuilt.

Clarke, usually seen wearing a Hawaiian shirt and sarong, became a semi-hermit on the island, the first resident of what Alvin Toffler, the author of Future Shock, called an “electronic cottage”. Partially immobilised in a wheelchair after contracting polio, he sat surrounded by radios and monitors, receiving around 100 e-mails a day from friends and fans. A standard reply he sent to writers looking for guidance was: “Advice to authors: read at least one book a day.”


Because of his post-polio syndrome, he was surrounded by a number of “valets”, young men who did errands and chores for him. If he liked to talk about himself, he was also eager to please, and was known for his sense of humour. He always retained a trace of his old Somerset accent
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He had been appointed CBE, in 1989, and he was knighted in 1998. The Prince of Wales, visiting Sri Lanka to celebrate the anniversary of its independence, was expected to do the dubbing. Then a storm broke as the Sunday Mirror published allegations about Clarke’s behaviour with the local boys he employed as carers. Clarke postponed the investiture to save the Prince embarrassment, and denied the charges absolutely. He was later given his honour at a quieter ceremony, but the rumours lingered even though no other paper followed them up
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He had been married — to Marilyn Mayfield, in 1953 — but the marriage was dissolved in 1964, and there were no children. “It didn’t work out,” he commented. For years, Clarke responded to “impertinent reporters” asking if he was gay with the signature oneliner: “I’m merely mildly cheerful.”



He remained prolific, churning out at least one novel every two years in his old age from the house in which he lived with his business partner, Hector Ekanayake, Ekanayake’s wife and family and his own venerable one-eyed chihuahua, Pepsi.


Many of his later works were written with confederates such as Gentry Lee or Stephen Baxter, with whom as recently as 2003 Clarke began a new series, the Time Odyssey sequence. Often such collaborative efforts demonstrated a sludgy sentimentality and narrative vagueness that was light years from the snappy, clear-eyed prose in which Clarke had couched his best work; but the ideas were as forcefully proposed and as fertile as ever.
One of the most adventurous notions, and one by which he set great store, was the “space elevator”, a tube reaching up from the earth to a geostationary satellite. This device, described in The Fountains of Paradise (1979), would allow large cargoes to be raised from Earth into space, as a preliminary to interstellar voyages.


In the year 2001, to commemorate the film by which he was best known, the US company Encounter announced plans to send six strands of his hair into space. “My DNA is on its way to the stars,” Clarke told an interviewer with pride. “So, who knows, I might be created all over again. Think of that — a million years from now, half a dozen Arthur C. Clarkes floating around the galaxies.”


Sir Arthur C. Clarke, CBE, science fiction writer, was born on December 16, 1917. He died on March 19, 2008, aged 90
[/quote]

[MoMo]

LOOK JIM...YOU STILL HAVE TIME TO GO !

Link : Metheringham Area News




Dambuster Lecture 26 March 2008

After service as a navigator in the Royal Air Force Captain Creighton became a Senior Captain on independent airlines with 36,000 flying hours. He is a fellow of the Institute of Navigation and is the Organiser and Chief Judge of the Top Nav competition.

At the Metheringham Airfield Visitor Centre - in the old gymnasium - on Wednesday 26th March 2008 at 7.30pm. Admission: Members free, Visitors £3.00 including Refreshments. Children Free.
Enquiries to: Friends of Metheringham Airfield, Westmoor Farm, Martin Moor, Metheringham, Lincoln LN4 3BQ. Tel: 01526 378270

[MoMo]

CLAYTON MOORE,
THE LONE RANGER


Now, Shawn, here's one set of guns which I wanted to own ( aged five ) Jim too !

[jim]

Oh boy O boy, you bet.

Funny but I remember the name of his Indian buddy, Jay Silverheels I think it was.

William Tell overture was the theme tune.

[MoMo]

Correct Jim!

" Ahh, Tonto, my faithful Indian companion. "

Wouldn't it be great if everyone was as good as The Lone Ranger and Tonto?

( and as clever as Silver ! )

[MoMo]

p.s. no-one knows what " Kemosabe " means !

[jim]

Mo, I never understood why the mask was a disguise.

Every episode he was almost unmasked, but even as a child I could see what he looked like under the mask !

Great series for kids, good always triumphs over evil is not a bad lesson for children, (although we grow up to realise that its not always the case sadly).

Well not with our criminal justice system.

[MoMo]

Let's head them off at the Pass Tonto !

But Skunky and his gang will be sure to be waiting there, Kemosabe.

Then we'll get them all Tonto !

[jim]

I also have a vague memory of the Cisco Kid,
and there was a series called the Man from Laramie.

You have got me thinking now, what was that one about a rancher that took in a gunslinger that wanted to give up his bad ways and settle down?
Tenderfoot was a favourite of mine, it had that great actor Eli Wallace (the guy with the funny eyes)!

BTW where is ol Skunky?

[MoMo]

You have got me thinking now, what was that one about a rancher that took in a gunslinger that wanted to give up his bad ways and settle down?
JIM

I imagine that you are thinking about the movie " Shane " a classic western with Alan ( where's my soap-box? ) Ladd.

Skunky was last seen heading for El Passo with his gang of desperados. I think that their plan was to break into the bank and deposit loads of money in order to settle the markets and take the sting out of the mess that has resulted from the fallout of toxic bad debt, generated by the U.S. sub-prime collapse.

I'll get The Loan Ranger to arrange the loan of some silver to help out you guys.


NEXT TIME, REMEMBER : " IN GOD WE TRUST. " ...........EVERYONE ELSE PAYS THEIR MORTGAGE ON THE NAIL !