The Diamond Island

There’s a white furred Norwegian Forest cat living with us named Michael.  K is his officially adopted human, as he came up to her as a kitten on her birthday and said, “I’m living with you now.  Feed me!”  Oh boy, Minnie the Moocher is an amateur compared to this walking food beggar.  Michael has perfected the Meow-Bomb technology to smart-bomb levels, and can pinpoint your location with the perfect frequency for getting on your nerves.  When he’s hungry, this little monticore snap-dragon powder puff won’t let you rest until his tummy has been filled!  In particular, he has a knack for meow-bombing you when you are right in the middle of things, such as an important phone call, or coming home from work and trying to decompress to a human level again.

His fur is soft and double layered goodness, so there is the pet factor to consider.  But his guard hairs fall out easily, and a lot of time is spent keeping the hair infestation to a somewhat acceptable level.  Michael is especially good at covering dark clothes in his protective layer of shed fur.  Give him a kitty pie to lie in, or a blanket in a corner, and it’ll acquire a soft layer of Michael-fur.  Most disturbing are the egg-cases.  These are white masses of matted fur that become tangled and are pulled off when he rolls around on a surface.  I swear, they look just like moth cocoons.  Did I mention that this cat’s other other other nickname is pig-pen cat?

Michael’s stomach, for such a greedy eater, is remarkably sensitive so he throws up a great deal.  Hairball remedies don’t seem to work, though Gerber’s Baby Food Squash seems the most effective in settling his stomach.  Though, if it fails to do the job, get ready to bring out the ammonia on that carpet stain!  The countless times I’ve had to clean up Michael’s barf, it really doesn’t bear thinking about, really.  When the little monster gets into a puking spell, it’s Charles Dickens misery all around.

But the worst part is, this darn cat is expensive to own.  K got him for free, but we’re still paying for him!  The cat has a million things wrong with him, yet he refuses to give up the ghost.  He has urinary tract issues, so he has to have his food specially bought from the vet, for thirty dollars every month or so.  He eats and drinks often, so he has to go to the bathroom a lot, which means we have to buy a lot of kitty litter.  He has cardio-myopathy, an irreversible swelling heart condition, so he has to have a beta-blocker pill every day.  Man, kitty drugs are expensive!  He has to get yearly sonic scans of his heart to see how he’s doing.  And after all that, we get the welcome worry that one day he’ll keel over and bite the big one anyway!  I stopped counting after a thousand bucks, but Michael’s price tag is easily over three times that by now.

Last April, as we were moving, Michael decides to go on a rampage and puke all the time while having problems going to the bathroom.  Turns out, he has three bladder stones that need to be removed or he dies!  Fourteen hundred dollars, says the vet, and thanks for sending me to the golf course this afternoon.  Despite the chances of croaking under the anesthesia because of his heart, the tough little cat makes it through without a single complication and is more meow-bombingly active than ever!  Aieeee!

When Michael is not demanding food, he is sleeping.  If one of us is not on the couch or other suitable sitting unit, he will chirp and scratch at you until you move to the designated seating position.  He will then begin purring, dig at you with his claws until your limbs are in the right arrangement, and then he will plop his heavy boned frame down on you and purr himself to sleep.  Chances are good that within 5-10 minutes another cat will be attracted to your properly pacified form and add their mass to your immobilization factor.  You’d better hope you put a good DVD in the player, because you aren’t moving.

I keep thinking, what unholy universe spawned this feline?  What brutal, unimaginable world did this viking cat from hell come from?  The creature is an investment now, and he’d better live for a long time.  But how much longer can one’s sanity take such responsibility?  I hear some cats live as much as thirty years, and if Michael is one of those Methuselah cats he’s got many years left on the life clock.  Then I get to thinking about the secret lives of cats.  Is Michael a spoiled brat living on his fortunate choice of human servants?  Could he be a hard rockin’ biker viking cat living la vida loca in a parallel universe?  What monsters is he keeping at bay with a fully charged meow-bomb, bathing us in a fur shield and keeping the peace with nap power?  It might not be as one-sided an arrangement as it appears.

I hate it when main power goes down, and auxiliary power fails shortly after that. I can’t maneuver or shoot torpedoes for very long on emergency power. Shields? Forget it, I’m on reserves and goin’ down! I don’t know how it happened, but the Moavian Waoowl got loose, and every crew member on the ship started busting a move and getting jacked. Either that or the Councillor of Moppaplu snuck aboard and gave everyone some damn MeeGees. Either way, I change into one of my least favorite shtuper-heroes, El Sicko!

Have a linkdump! It all started when I ran into the butt-biting bug video on Boing Boing. Little did I know the Chaos that would ensue. My friend, The Liephus, sends me a countervideo, Human Tetris. Whoa, the sound you just heard was the sound of my synapses getting a charlie horse. Then my other friend, Doofball, sends me a video by the Squirrel Nut Zippers. The associations this has for me, not the best in my growing state of mind-mold. It’s about this time Cthulhu madness has set in, and I dare The Circuit to utube me more cowbell! Just a little softening up of the brainstem for the coup de grace, Miss South Carolina’s amazing escapegoat speech. I’m down for the count, Booji Boy style, and not even the New Mutants can pipe me in their smoke and put me!

In the words of the Riddler, bummmmmmerrrrrrrrr! It took some major hypersleep, followed by some tea and honey to even restore minimum temporary auxiliary power. The fevered dreams I had, whoo doggie, I don’t think I can relate. Cleaning up cat barf in the wrong house while the backwater mutants from Gummo invade your personal space sounds like a pretty exciting scene from a David Lynch movie. I still don’t know what to make of the extremely detailed grand tour of the Tower of Babel, where the representatives of the masters of the universe (not the He-Man kind, the plutocracy kind) were having their meeting. Time to bogue out on the millennium falcon! I sure hope that old man got the tractor beam out of commission or this cloud city’s chocolate sundae made by the damned is going to be one creepy desert.

Luckily, K was there with the proper antidote, a Wendy’s double cheeseburger and fries. Sometimes the way out is in! Warp core breech averted, ready to begin repair and reprogram procedures! Looks like the scene where the Moavian Waoowl is tamed by the Lieutenant of feline ancestry has occurred, and the episode is about over. It’s going to take some Slack points to repair all that engine and structural damage. Yes, I’m the Beavis who made the cheeseburger that saved The Enterprise, huh-huh, uh-huh-huh-huh, that was cool. I think I may understand why the cats want them. Fast food, fast times, fast relief. Chtulhu, you can’t handle the cheeseburger!

The family gathering was pulled off with a minimum of fuss.  Charcoal-grilled Nature’s Promise hamburgers, homemade peach cobbler, and plenty of generic chips, freezer-thawed french fries, and garden vegetable salad with mom’s homemade dressing.  Nothing beats a fresh slice of garden grown tomato on your burger, whoo-eee!  Then, crack out the Labor Day punch and talk family business to candlelight in the backyard.  Yeah, the Slack bonus points were a-cumulatin’ in the Slor that day I can tell you.

The book revisions have reached the 55% mark, which is awesome.  I got more done this weekend than I did my week long vacation to sit and write, even though I am sick with a sore throat and a clogged ear.  I can’t explain the discrepancy in the space-time continuum, though I believe it has to do with hitting a stretch where the writing didn’t need as much work, and the fact that the revisions are gaining momentum on the remaining pages.  Still need to do that polish stage, and complete my artwork for the cover, but I’m happy.  The revised material is much better than the first draft stuff.

K has been watching the first season of the Highlander television series, and I keep getting drawn in to watch.  We finished the first season this weekend, and all I can say is Darius!  I still think the first movie is the only one that counts, the others being pretty lame.  Part of that is nostalgia, and part of that is revulsion at the franchising effect on the story.  If you forget the movies, the television series is actually pretty good action, with some nice camp and an attempt to tell a story in exploration of the alternate universe.

The tomatoes from the garden have totally defeated us; we’re just giving them away now.  The weeds have gotten out of control, and the groundhog roams at will.  The sunflowers have pretty much bitten the dust, but there isn’t a seed left on them, so at least they are dying satisfied, so to speak.  We planted some fresh basil, which ought to produce for us some nice pesto in the next few weeks before autumn forces our hand to garden mark two.  We have a lizard now!  About seven inches, black with brown and ochre markings, living in our pile of unused wood.  We threw him some baby tomatoes and the next day we were rewarded with a pile of skins.  Yea!  Feed the animal bonus points!

Even the legendary pizza of doom has a beginning. In Athens, Ohio there used to be this pizza joint called “Big Red’s Pizza”. The railroad used to go through the college town; past a train depot that is now only a run down old building (if it even is still there at all). When the folks and me were in town, we would stop there, get a pizza, and eat down at the depot on the concrete steps near the tracks. Sometimes, a train would pass through and we’d eat in the rumble of the cars and shout out, “box car”, “tank car”, and “flat car” while we munched on pizza and drank RC Cola straight from the glass bottle. If the train car had a Chessie System emblem on it, with the tell tale kitten doing a lie down on the pillow, we’d call out “Chessie System” as an override.

The guy who ran the joint, “Big Red” as I remember him, made what must be the greatest pizza I have ever had the pleasure of eating. I’ve eaten good pizza, I’ve eaten pizza that sent you to other universes of ecstasy, but nobody could do it like this guy. His Kung Fu was beyond any comprehension. The Spartan layout, the smell of his goods cooking in the ovens, every morsel of detail about his pizza, the guy’s unassuming and plain demeanor; these things are imprinted on my brain like a stain that won’t come out. One thing I remember was a large cardboard, full-color poster of a man in a top hat, with an umbrella in a suit. His torso was a huge red beefsteak tomato.

One day, making the best pizza in my reality came to be too great a burden, and Big Red left the business to get into computers, and I never saw him again. The joint closed, and was empty for a while, but has since reopened as something else. But before he left, he passed on a few secrets to my folks, and when I was old enough, they trained me in the ways of Pizza Kung Fu. Since then, I have strived to meet the challenge and find the secret formula for myself. I’ve come close, at times, either to the crust or the sauce, but never in enough combinations to match the flawless, complete, bountiful flavor, texture and ineffable magic that radiated from Big Red’s effortless gifts. While it is perhaps my greatest recipe in my bag of tricks, and is indeed legendary, with the power to cure minor ailments of moodiness and depression, still it is not “the one”.

So I raise a toast to Big Red, wherever he may be. To the inspiration of my quest, and the creator of unforgettable experiences.

The so-called “Magic Kingdom” doesn’t seem to have what it takes for me to take notice these days. The mouse has roared, Neverland offers discount coupons, and I’m clapping for Tinkerbell, but she’s passed out drunk on the floor with phone cameras snapping away. Where did it all go wrong? The decadence of King Arthur’s court can only end in Mordred at this stage.

Yet, there is a time I remember when I lived for the Magic Kingdom and all its wonders. Perhaps the decrepitude of today is worth it for the glories of yesterday. I suppose it’s a fair trade, and I’ll always have Paris, if you want to look at it in a stoic, Humphrey Bogart kind of way. I loved Peter Pan; he was my idol. Dressed up for him on Halloween once, and I probably have every line from the record memorized for all eternity in some reptilian part of my medulla oblongata.

But today, I’m jonesin’ for a hit of one of my favorite all time movies, Escape to Witch Mountain. The movie is about as primitive as you can get by today’s standards, but imagination needs so little to take flight, I don’t care. Mild spoilers follow.

Tony and Tia live at the orphanage. They are siblings but don’t remember much about their parents, save jumbled images that come to them in dreams. The other kids don’t like them, because they’re weird. I’ll say! The two children can communicate with each other telepathically, and possess varying degrees of telekinesis (the ability to move objects with the mind) and precognition (the ability to see the future). Tia can sense the future better, while Tony can move objects better, but only when using his harmonica as a focus. Tia also has a pet black cat named “Winky” with whom she can communicate with.

One day, they save a rich, evil multi-millionaire from death in an auto accident by predicting it and warning him. He adopts them, and gives them anything a kid could want – huge playrooms with countless toys, tennis courts, horseback riding, the good life. But they can’t leave his estate, and they have to predict the stock market for him. He’s got lots of guards and attack dogs to keep them from attempting any foolish ideas.

Plot devices move forward and Tia discovers a clue that might lead them to answers about their past: A place called Witch Mountain. So using their powers, they make a break for it and become runaways looking for Witch Mountain. They experience many hardships, and find both friends and enemies along the way. Meanwhile, Mr. Evil Capitalist does his best to find and recapture his prized “assets”.

In particular, they find an old man driving around in a Winnebago camper who has become bitter at the way his life has turned out. He’s a good man who just needs to learn to let go of the past and live again, and the two kids in true mouse moral fashion, bring out his true character. He becomes their companion and helps them thereafter at great “risk” to himself.

Since it’s a mouse movie, of course the children reach their goal, and find the answer to who they are, and what they are. Happy ending? You betcha! Hey, I bought into it; I’m not going to complain.

What particularly moves me is the interaction between the old man and the children. He very closely resembles the person they need to speak with at Witch Mountain, and so it makes sense that they would form a bond with him. But I can’t help but feel that the main character of the movie is the old man, rather than Tony and Tia. Their adventure is important, and the dangers they face very real, but there’s almost a strangely divine character to them, as though their problems were of a higher order then mere human existence. Though I’m sure they operate just fine as a means for children viewers to project upon and imagine themselves as being!

The old man has no magic powers, and it is his assistance that the children need. Their predicament only allows them to travel so far, so fast. Being an adult, he is able to investigate for them in ways they could not, and take care of them in ways they haven’t learned for themselves. But it goes both ways. They provide psychic assistance when his own experience can’t meet the demands of their ordeal, and they give him a joyous sense of being alive again. He gets to protect the children he never had, and makes peace with the demons that have haunted him. The scene where Tia tells him exactly what is eating him alive is devastating, and a release. Pretty heady stuff for a kids show. But sometimes the message gets through in the most mysterious of ways. In the end, he is reconnected with himself, and is the real winner. The bad guy should count his blessings. A lesson about greed, perhaps.

I never tire of seeing it. Simple, decent length, fantastical elements, moral lessons, and a solid story that resolves itself. The mouse can keep his Mulan 8 “The Final Chapter Begins” and Cinderella 4 “In the Hood”. I got the hookup right here.

I’m old enough to remember the days of pong, and the video games that sprang up around it. Nowadays, video games are visually exciting, but as other experts in the industry have commented, gameplay has lagged behind technological mastery. Those old games looked like etch-a-sketch doodles, but crumbs, you could get some game play out of those simple ideas. They had to be fun to play, they weren’t much to look at. Games like these needed an experience that would draw you in and engage your imagination.

One game in particular was a favorite of mine, because it always seemed to be at the Howard Johnson’s restaurant my folks stopped at, and I’ve always thought submarines were really darn cool. I’m talking about Sea Wolf. You plopped in a quarter, stood on a small stand, and looked through a periscope with a firing button. You got a limited amount of time to play, though maybe that could be extended by scoring high in a round, I don’t know.

The screen was arranged so that you had three rows of ships moving on and off in both directions, along the surface of the “water”, and below them you had a random assortment of floating mines that were obstacles. You played the part of a submarine captain firing torpedoes at the ships for points. The torpedo started at the bottom of the screen and moved to the top, where it either detonated with a target or disappeared once it reached the top. You moved the periscope left and right to adjust where the torpedo fired.

Everything was in monochrome blue, and the graphics were not pong-style blocky, but reasonably recognizable as ships and mines. The sound effects included the familiar “sonar” pinging as a background soundtrack, with satisfying booms and whisking noises for the torpedoes. But the sound effect to beat was that of the annoying PT boat. The smallest ship, and the fastest, it was worth the most points if you could get it. It always announced itself with a kind of grating, high-pitched, whirring duck-call. Just enough to totally throw you off your game and leap greedily for the big bonus with a big fat miss.

The thing was, the PT Boat sound effect was the only sound effect you could hear when you were not playing the game. You’d be sitting at your table eating dinner, and the video game would make the duck-call and you couldn’t ignore it. At least, not at my age at the time. Devious, huh? That ding-dang-darn PT Boat was just daring you to take a shot at it. Go ahead; knock that battery off that shoulder. Give it your best shot, punk. Mom, dad, gimmie quarter! I have to shut up the PT Boat! Can’t you hear it?

Despite the simplicity, the game is actually pretty challenging. The mines, the mix between larger (less valuable points-wise) ships and smaller ships, and the need to time your shots combine into a really exciting game. You shoot for the easy ship, but hit the mine instead, or you go for the hard shot, and the PT Boat appears to throw you off for a fraction of a second and you miss completely. For 60 seconds of fun, its pretty basic brain stimulation, but I got a kick out of it.

I guess you could call Sea Wolf my first video game crush. Before Pac Man fever, there was Sea Wolf puppy love. That was the seventies for you.

Everywhere you look these days, it seems fashionable to be a tyrant. From high to low, oppression is raking in high dividends and mighty thrills. And think of all the excitement for the oppressed! You can’t get that kind of gut-churning fear just anywhere. It’s got to be manufactured the old fashioned way, with a boot smashing a face forever.

I can’t help but think it’s a dead end. Not, in the sense that I need to believe that evil doers eventually get their just deserts, or I want to dissuade career-minded people from raking it in, but in the sense that I wonder if there isn’t some fundamental need for tyrants that overrides rational, intelligent decision-making. Joseph Campbell talks about the need for an “enemy”, because the enemy is the instrument of your destiny. Can civilization and culture come about without them? Without the need to measure yourself against something, or someone, would you develop in the same way?

None of this intellectualizing does the dead or the currently suffering any good, of course. The outbreaks of insane aggression leading to fear and bloodshed are real, and threaten all life on this planet. The problem of what to do about it is a deeply human concern that requires a lot of attention. The problem is if you cast out your demons, you have to be careful you don’t cast out the best part of yourself at the same time. Nobody is getting out from under the shadow of human evil, so it pays to face it. And I think we’ve reached a point in our destiny where some of the issues can be approached on a human level and some questions answered.

So I look at it on the more personal, immediate level and look at who the local oppressor is. It seems like everyone I know has, to use a video game analogy, a “boss” character running the underlings that trouble them on the level they are trying to complete. As they used to say back in the day, “Who’s on the throne?” Who is the high chair bully, giving orders and having his or her needs attended to at the expense of everyone else? It’s easy to see everyone else’s shadow, how about your own? Not so easy. That tyrant has your number, and it’s time to get the boot to your face!

Who is that tyrant? What kind are they? Do you have the muah-ha-ha kind, who always gets beaten down at the end of the show of your current, personal television series? Is it more serious than that, forcing you to make drastic choices just to survive tremendous abuse? Maybe you only have a tyrant of the week, that relative you can’t stand, who comes into town for the weekend and eats you out of house and home. Or it could be the crummy person at the checkout counter giving you a hard time, a petty tyrant taking out what small gloating satisfaction they can from their backyard empire of chickens such as will have them.

The tyrant exists solely at the silent consent of others. Our evildoer will often have to enforce that consent actively, through the use of outright force, or in the case of more sophisticated societies, with deception or harassment. But comes a day, the people demand that the sacrifice, the victim, the fool pay up. The tyrant either pays with an ignoble end, the traditional favorite, or they pay with something more intangible. Something is lost to them; they die on the throne and fade away, like a withering, crumbling old thing.

Is that what the tyrant aspires to? To be the bad guy in somebody else’s movie? To be the victim at the end, or to win and die on a sack of gold, and in both cases not knowing what it is they do? Or if they do choose such a course, is that not insanity or criminal naiveté? Who but a fool would want to be king for a day? What kind of people are we, that we need a bad guy just to feel good? Or is it that we need someone to ritually re-enact our own shadows, our own lust for death and destruction? That is what the shadow of humanity’s evil is, after all, a secret wish to plunge from the highest heights to the lowest depths. And we decide, impersonally as a group, when it is time for that sacrifice to plunge into the fire pit, preferably dead, but alive draws out the suspense longer.

What’s scarier, the tyrant or the people propping him or her up on their shoulders as we make our way to the appointed place? Friends, supporters, oppressed all playing a part and secretly waiting for the time when everyone decides it’s time for the fool for a day to pay the price.

Stop the insanity! Time for the real fool to jump in and make monkeys of us all, because we’re all paying the freight on “unconscious village.”

Who’s on the throne in your life? Who put them there? They pay now so you can pay later, but we all have to pay! Abort before takeoff. Get a payment plan, and get right with yourself. Don’t expect someone else to muah-ha-ha for you. Be your own villain and bushwhack yourself. It’ll be more fun that way (what, you want to live vicariously through someone else?), and your audience will find the tragedy and/or comedy more to their liking.

Hearkening back to the old days, when I was a wee lad. There were many toys of great inventiveness that passed by my small hands. I recalled a visit to the parental units and my old closet of “potent archaeological relevance” earlier this year, where I sighted the old Strange Change Machine from days of yore. Since I’ve been pondering the effects of exposure to “ancient artifacts of alien training” on my brain’s development, I figured I ought to consider this interesting tool.

The machine is this square piece of metal, basically a heating unit, with a thin wire grille over the dark recesses of heat that emanate from the depths of who-knows-where. A hard plastic capsule with a sliding door covers the grille area, and there are three vents at the top to allow heat to escape. To the side of the capsule/grille is a small metal compactor area, like the kind used to crush cars into squares of metal, with a sliding plastic panel to seal it off and a crank that screws the compactor wall in and out.

The machine’s design suggests an infernal time machine created by some mad scientist not eating with both hands. Accompanying the machine you get a set of plastic tweezers, a plastic play-mat illustrated with a gorgeous “dinosaur era” landscape, and a number of green, pink, red and yellow plastic squares, all blazoned with the Mattel brand logo on them.

You plug in the machine, it heats up, and you pop a square into the capsule. As the square heats up, it unfolds and changes before your eyes into a monster! Cool, huh? You then take him out with your tweezers, let him cool (as he is a bit soft and very hot), and set him aside to work on the next one! Pretty soon, you’ve got a whole slew of characters for use on your play-mat, and its time to have them battle for supremacy and your amusement!

Some of the monsters included, a scorpion, a snake, a spider, a mummy, a brontosaurus, a tyrannosaurus, a winged mothman demon of some outlandish sort, and a pterodactyl. When you were done, you put them in the capsule to heat them up, and then you jammed them into the compactor, which was also hot, and gradually squished them back into a square! You plucked them out, let them cool, and had a pile of squares again!

I’m not exactly sure such a toy would pass safety standards today, since it’s really easy to leave the machine on and go watch cable and forget about it. Hey, what’s that smell? Oops, left the mummy in the compactor too long! I looked the machine up on the internets, and learned that the secret to the magic of the monsters is that they are made of a special kind of plastic, that when passed through a special chamber and bombarded with radiation, the molecules of the plastic are set into their current shape, and thus they will always try to reconfigure themselves to that shape even when squished into a hard square!

That was I as a kid, handling irradiated super-plastics and playing with high heat to make characters for my latest play-set. Was it the toys that made the adult, or did the child summon toys suitable for their own development? I wonder if natural selection favors those children who are able to acquire the right toys for their training. Is the future creating the present by manipulating the past? I start to get flashes of that old horror classic, Children of the Damned. Parents have every right to be concerned over what their child is playing with, because those toys are the symptoms of their own destiny!

What does it mean then, that so many toys with lead in them are being recalled? On the surface, it could easily be explained as despicable carelessness and reckless endangerment of the young. Is there some collective unconscious fear of the new breed of little monsters? Is the greed and unconcern for our children symptomatic of a sick desire at self-preservation against the future? Is it a mere obstacle of natural selection to be dodged, like so many things in life? Is it an experience summoned by the unconscious to test a new generation of children? Lead is not conducive to good health in reality, but in the dreamworld, lead is turned into gold. Or it could be a vital element in some great task – used in the building of a new shielding against hostile radioactive mutants, for example.

I think about Black Sabbath’s old classic, Children of the Grave, where Ozzy Osbourne sings, “Children of tomorrow live in the tears that fall today” and “Can they win the fight for peace or will they disappear?” The kids are training; their story has only just begun.

Just got through watching the first five episodes of Star Blazers again, courtesy of Netflix. Wow, it’s been a while since I’ve seen that one. The music is varied, evocative, and suitably dramatic. The rich, watercolor-like palette of colors create a dreamy, organic quality. The animation, while spotty at times, is at others breathtaking. The characters are at times caricatures, and at other times they shine with moments of humanity and triumph. The premise is solid, and the story keeps to steady movement. Nothing is allowed to stagnate, and yet the new makes sense and keeps you watching. These artists show talent and devotion, taking chances under the shadow of the clock, and it pays off. I’m impressed at how well it holds up now.

To summarize, an alien empire begins bombing Earth with “planet bombs” that cover the planet in radiation and drive everyone underground. Earth’s spacefleet has been completely defeated, and in 1 year all life on the planet will be extinguished. An ancient battleship wreck, the Yamato, has been secretly turned into a space battleship with the intention of being a “space ark”, which will take a small number of people to some other place they might be able to colonize and thus preserve humanity.

Another alien planet takes pity on Earth and sends them a message of hope: Come to their world and they will give us the “Cosmo DNA”, a means to resurrect the Earth and defeat the evil aliens. With the message are plans for a new form of space engine and an ultimate weapon – the wave motion gun. The Yamato is fitted with this new technology, and the crew’s mission is changed: They will be known as the Star Force, and they will take humanity’s last chance in a go-for-broke-gamble to reach the planet and return with the Cosmo DNA instead of fleeing to another planet.

Every episode covers a step along the way to reach the good alien planet, with the evil aliens attempting to find and destroy them, and ending with a countdown number so you know exactly how many days are left before its too late. As the story progresses, the space battleship faces all manner of obstacles, from gravitational pulls while the engines are being repaired, to hostile, matter-consuming, semi-intelligent gas monsters. There’s usually some kind of attack by the forces of the evil aliens, requiring the Star Force to use their wits and survive long enough to blow the aliens away with the wave motion gun. Meanwhile, the crew members face personal struggles, both private and public. It’s pretty mature for a kids show.

It just got me thinking about the first anime I saw as a kid, one of several manufactured for the American market – Speed Racer, and later on down the line, Marine Boy – truly a lost classic deserving of DVD release! There were other shows, like Ultraman and Johnny Socko and His Flying Robot, that were live action, but they brought over an influence from Japan that is pretty much mainstream and taken for granted today. These shows were like precious secrets you were lucky to be able to see, back in the day when TV stations were more independent and diverse, unlike the monopolies we have today. It was a blast to catch these on television and be able to talk about it with your friends on the block about “the mammoth car” or “oxygum and electric boomerangs”.

Makes me wonder what kind of secret treasures are floating around out there now, mutating the brains of youngsters and creating new fountains of creative expression that take root now, only to flower many decades down the line. The culture broth out there holds uncounted mysteries brewing who-knows-what-is-to-come. The messages of these transmissions are coming to you from the good aliens, giving you the solution and the tools, but you’ve got to do that task yourself to save the planet, be the best racecar driver/human being you can be, protect the oceans, defeat the monsters, you name it – the final task you’ve got to do yourself.

Today, the Terminators, Destructoids, and jack-bots are really gunning for small fry. Crumbs! And my super-zapper recharge ain’t got that swing. Forgot to load up on torpedoes or re-energize the shields. I may as well leave the door open for the droids looking for live-brains! Thank goodness for cloaking devices. Sometimes you need to keep a low profile to avoid being seen. And you Monty Python freakazoidals know what I’m talking about! Do not stand up when your name is called!

On the sensor arrays, my science officer, Kool Kat, informs me that you can adopt a Nauga. I’m surprised, I thought the program had been shut down by the Empire a ways back. Not quite as ferocious a breed as those 60’s versions of the Nexus-6, I imagine. But there’s no telling what a plastic-harvested anipal might get as a random power during the transfer flight through the radiation barrier. You pick up these things when you’re running silent past the Gamalons.

In other news, stocked up on supplies for the cat colony. The high end food particles must be made from quadro-triticale grain to cost so much in the way of Ducats, but I guess its for a good cause. The catazoid power hour does sweep the neighborhood free of meeses and hostile organism globules. Maintenance costs if you want to live in the rebel base. It’s a way of life and it freaks me out! Yea, baby!

Programming the food banks to have me manufacture some chili, lasagna, and BLTs in the next few days. At times like these, the crew gets nervous when the food supplies have to be made to order during the actual increase in hunger levels, and I don’t want to risk getting fleeced out there in the communal food bank kiddie pools. You just don’t know whose DNA you’re ingesting these days when you get it to go. But its all in a days work for, Duck-and-Cover Man. I just need to decipher the name of that manga I overheard this morning on the internets. You never know what kind of goodies are out there! They might save your life/sanity/soul, or even reveal a powerup. Need the Mario double-up stat!