My twinster Jean mentions here a bad 50’s sci-fi movie called “Queen of Outer Space.” Being the age that I am, I love 50’s sci-fi movies. A memorable screening I recall of one such movie, “This Island Earth,” from 1955, was in 1980, at a science fiction festival at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. The scene I’ve posted here got big laughs out of the audience.
In April, 1986 I bought my first Laserdisc player, and “This Island Earth” was one of the first discs I owned. Today, I use that same player for capturing video on the computer. I pushed up the bit rate on this video to show that a 20-year-old disc on a 20-year-old player looks not too bad.
The technology was introduced in the U.S. in 1980 by Philips of Holland, which later sold the format to Pioneer in Japan. I had written a paper in the 11th grade about the development of video discs, and I was really taken with the superiority of LD over VHS. LD never caught on with the public at large, but Philips was able to apply its optical expertise to the creation of CD, with Sony handling the digital side of the format.
The events of the past day bring to mind the end of the Marx Brothers movie, “Duck Soup.” There aren’t any exact parallels, other than the absurdity of it all and the undeniable glee of seeing the other side get what it deserves.
Well, at last. Donald Rumsfeld resigns — and Bush accepts the resignation. It’s a good sign that Bush didn’t waste any time after the GOP loss of majority in the House of Representatives. Virginia is now all that stands between the Democrats and a slim majority in the Senate.
Rumsfeld should retire and go away quietly. Or maybe he can hang out at the Heritage Foundation or the Cato Institute. I certainly hope that Rumsfeld doesn’t secure any sort of academic position at a well-known university.
(Graphic cropped/rearranged/reduced — apologies to the artist)
For the first time since Mike Dukakis left office 16 years ago, Massachusetts has a Democrat for a governor. And he isn’t a classic Boston-style pol, either. He’s Deval Patrick, our first black governor.
As the map shows, Patrick’s victory was by a wide margin, but not in our town. It’s hard to read, but Patrick had 46% to Republican Kerry Healey’s 45%.
I expected Healey to win, actually, because Hopkinton is mostly a GOP town. It’s home to EMC2 Corp. co-founder Richard Egan, who occasionally hosts Dick Cheney at his home.
Last night’s tag-team coverage of the mid-term elections by Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert on Comedy Central was fun. Here are the segments where these two top-of-their-game pundit comedians overlapped. An interesting bit in there where Stewart seems to be acknowledging that Colbert’s popularity is eclipsing his own.
