MA-13 - Splitting Mad: More Nuclear Numbers

Here's a re-post of a recently re-upped music compilation. 

The goal? to take up where the soundtrack to The Atomic Cafe left off, documenting our society's uneasy relationship with the concept or nuclearity (hey Mom! I just made up a new word!)

Through the manipulation of clip art I keep hoping to be offered a job as a graphics designer of the inept or cheesy sort.

A NOTE ON TRACK 2, "Shh-Boom!": 

The song was first recorded on Atlantic Records' subsidiary label Cat Records by The Chords on March 15, 1954 and would be their only hit song. "Sh-Boom" reached #2 on the Billboard R&B charts and peaked at #9 on the pop charts.  It is sometimes considered to be the first doo-wop or rock 'n' roll record to reach the top ten on the pop charts (as opposed to the R&B charts). This version was ranked #215 on Rolling Stone's list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time and is the group's only song on the list.

Supposedly the song originated like this:  A group of friends was sitting in a car in their neighborhood, listening to the radio.  An announcer broke in to announce the successful explosion of the world's first H-bomb.  The fellows got to wondering what such a blast would sound like, finally settling on "sh-boom."  Then one of them took this phrase of doom and decided to make a song about it.

1    Fireball Boogie         Camille Howard               1948

2   Sh-Boom   The Chords               1953

3   Watch World War Three (on Pay TV)         Crown City Four              1960

4  The Sun Is Burning    Simon & Garfunkel                1964

5  I Come And Stand At Every Door  The Byrds               1966

6 Atomic Bombs Away Blues Creation 1971

7 Nuclear Blues Blood Sweat & Tears 1980

8 Your Attention Please Scars 1981

9 After the Rain   Comsat Angels 1982

10 99 Red Balloons Nena 1983

11 Party at Ground Zero Fishbone 1985

12 Protect And Survive The Dubliners 1987

13 Everyday Is Like Sunday Morrissey 1988

14 I Like Chinese Monty Python 1989

15 April 2031 Warrant 1992

16 Nuclear Supremacy Dayglo Abortions 1995

17 Jesus Hits Like an Atomic Bomb Chanticleer 2004

18 Bring Back the Bomb GWAR 2004

19 Brighter Than A Thousand Suns  Iron Maiden 2006

20 The Iranian Bomb Tal Gilad 2011

 The final track, originally from 2011, seems as likely to come true now as then.

https://www.filefactory.com/file/2jd1x6lvnmow/MA-13.rar

See you Monday!

 

Memory Lane - Starlog Magazine - SNL's "The Last Voyage of the Starship Enterprise"

From Starlog #14, cover-dated June, 1978 ....

The illos by Jack Rickard, in the style of Mort Drucker or Jack Davis, are a lot of fun.  And the performance by the SNL cast, aided by guest star Elliott Gould, is so much fun to watch.

A Wikipedia article gives you too much info.

See you next time.  Happy New Year!

Tomorrow's Tech ... Today! #3

Tomorrow’s Tech … Today!

Many futuristic inventions have come to pass, while some may never be realized.

[Some of this was used as content for the Program Book of SoonerCon 24 in June 2015.  Hope you like the idea!]

MATTER TRANSFER

          George Langelaan’s “The Fly” appeared in 1957, but an 1877 story “The Man Without a Body” posited matter transfer, beginning with a cat; then things go awry.  In 1913 Charles Fort coined the word “teleportation.”

          From Yu-Gi-Oh! to Star Trek to the Tarnhelm in Wagner’s Ring cycle, matter transfer seems to pose a myriad of problems that must be solved.  Larry Niven warned that things such as planetary rotation and inertia would affect a technologically based teleportation system.  Star Trek, while bandying such jargon as “boost your matter gain” and “wide-pattern dispersal,” isn’t much help either. 

           And what happens to a person’s soul when you destroy the original body?  Does it snap like a rubber band to the “new” body, as suggested by Philip José Farmer in his Riverworld  series?  Although we may never have a real-life matter transfer device, we’ll always have “Beam me up, Scotty.

*********************************************************

RAY GUN

            Zap beams have been a staple of SF because they’re so cool (in a totally destructive way).  Perhaps HG Wells’ 1898 Martian heat rays were the first, but they’ve become the Swiss Army Knife of SF.  More refined types can be set to Stun or Kill, as in Star Trek.  Others simply take you away faster than Calgon, with no intermediate steps, as demonstrated in Mars Attacks!

          While bad guys such as Ming the Merciless and the evil spies in Jonny Quest’s “Mystery of the Lizard Men” only want to lay waste, good guys such as Buck Rogers and Han Solo take a more surgical approach to the Blaster, the Zapper, the Phaser, or the Ray Gun (unless they SHOT FIRST). 

While LASER and MASER research continues in today’s world, nobody has yet reached the attainment of Duck Dodgers in the 24½ Century, featuring the Acme Disintegrating Pistol, which … disintegrated.

I’m taking off next Thursday for New Year’s.  See you January 4^th!

  

Stephen King and I Think Horribly Alike

In Stephen King’s 2015 anthology, The Bazaar of Bad Dreams: Stories, one of his twisted tales is a novella called Ur , originally published as an eBook in 2009.

In Ur, an English professor who’s wedded to books decides to take the plunge into electronic reading, and buys a Kindle.  When it arrives, it turns out to be a *special* Kindle, which apparently has the ability to access eBooks from other realities.

Then he finds out it can also read newspapers from the futures of this and other realities, as well, which leads to a horrifying revelation ….

This story bemused me for several reasons.

1)         It’s often been an interesting “What If?” kind of thought experiment:  What if I could sidestep to a universe next door (pace e e cummings) that didn’t happen to have the Beatles, or Beethoven, and “compose” that music to great acclaim in the new world?

Of course, my next depressing thought is that a world whose history was so different as to not produce The Fab Four or the Great Beetle-Browed One, would likely as not be a world that didn’t appreciate their music.  A whole lot of things led up to great works, and trailed after them (streaming glories, pace Wordsworth), so it’s not as if I could come down from Mount Sinai with the White Album and expect to get away with it, right?

2)         The more interesting amusement is how similar in basic concept this story is to one I wrote in 1981, called “On the Cable,” about a guy whose cable box fritzes out and gives him TV programming from other realities.

This amazes me and amuses me, that Mr King’s mind and mine are twisted enough (in some of the same ways) to have independently come up with the same concept.  I feel honored that I was able to dip into the same trough, so to speak, as that crafter of great stuff.

Of course, there are other angles on the same idea, such as CBS’s 1996-2000 Early Edition.

“On the Cable” was concocted as an entry in The Twilight Zone magazine’s short story contest.  The first version had a downer ending.

 I received this nice postcard back

Being a clueless, snotty-nosed type, I immediately took this as encouragement and rewrote the story to come out happier.  Since the story is the same until page 6, that’s where this scan of the second version starts.

 

I didn’t win anything, but it was a fun effort.

When I read the King story in The Bazaar of Bad Dreams, I was soon smiling as if greeting the child of a best friend, in whom I see a family resemblance.

Mr King’s craft and talent take the idea to much more realistic and outré heights, you’ll agree.  But I hope you’ll also agree with me that it’s kind of humorous that we came up with semi-similar variations on the whole foresee-the-future-through-technology angle.

Mr King, I salute you!  (Even though I like the cut version of The Stand better.)  If you want to read more of my rejections, send me a note!