Was wandering around on IMDB looking at various entries, as I often do, and after getting curious about something, I discovered that George E. Elliott, Jr. passed away last year. Name doesn't ring a bell, you say? Not surprising. :-)
Elliott was a radar operator stationed in Honolulu on the morning of December 7, 1941 -- he's the guy who, when working at his radar station, was the first one to spot the incoming fighters. The blips he spotted were mistakenly identified as a fleet of American bombers, which, of course, they weren't. This is a little trivia thingie for World War 2 buffs such as myself.
In my case, though, there's an extra interesting item. Both of my parents were actors, as some of you may know, and as it happens, they were both living in Honolulu at the time that the World War 2 film Tora! Tora! Tora! was being filmed (I was a wee tot at the time). They both tried out for the film; my mother didn't get a part, since there are very few female roles in that film. My father, however, did get a small role: none other than George E. Elliott, Jr., the radar operator (he isn't actually named in the film, but it's the same guy).
My father has only two lines in the film, IIRC, and he isn't even named in the credits, but it's still kind of a neat little bit of trivia.
I'm an atheist, and every now and then I read books on freethought. Some, such as George Smith's "Atheism: The Case Against God", are pretty good (although Smith, like so many other freethinkers, gives in to the unfortunate-but-difficult-to-resist tendency to be polemical). Some are just so-so. Then there's the occasional one that's really around the bend.
One in that last category is Lloyd Graham's "Deceptions and Myths of the Bible". The cover touts it as an inquiry into the roots of the Old Testament (such as the parts that were cribbed from the Babylonian Genesis), but it isn't, at least not entirely. I've tried a few times to read it, but I've never made it past the section entitled "Premise", because that section ends with this passage (I swear I am not making this up -- you can't make this shit up. Or at least I can't...)
A sun is a planet in the process of becoming. Such is the lord of our solar system today -- a future earth, a forlorn moon. Our earth is now a planet, but it was not always so; it was once a sun. It was not, therefore, cast off from the sun; it is older by trillions of years than the sun: indeed suns are the youngest visible bodies in the universe. Our moon was once a life-bearing planet; it was not, therefore, cast off from the earth or sun; it is older by far than either of these; in fact, moons are the oldest globular bodies in the universe. Our moon is the last remaining member of a solar system when our earth was a sun. Jupiter, with its swarm of moons, was such a system once, a solar family when Jupiter was a sun and its moons were planets. And someday all our planets will be moons about a planet that is now our sun.... In what follows the reader will find these statements fully justified.
If I didn't know better, I'd think that Graham had entered some kind of contest to see how many scientific errors you can cram into one paragraph. Each time I've tried to read the book, I've gotten to this passage on page 25 and had to stop. It's impossible to take someone saying such things seriously.
I've had this book listed for sale on Amazon and Half for almost a year. No takers so far, even though (much to my incredulity) there have been a number of positive reviews of the book on Amazon. OK, OK, so they've read it in full and I haven't, so they're probably better qualified to comment, but even so -- it's hard to imagine anything worthwhile coming after that passage.
Jeez. After looking for who knows how long, I finally found the author and title of a novella that I've always wanted to re-read after having first read it in junior high. The story is about a human starship that meets an alien starship several thousand light-years away from Earth. It's the first alien species that humans have ever encountered. The aliens and the humans manage to create a language together and begin communicating, and it turns out that the humans are the first alien species that they've ever encountered, too.
The problem that each side has is that they don't know whether they can trust the other: they each have to consider the possibility that, if they travel back home, the other species will follow them, and an interstellar war will break out. So the two ships simply sit there in the Crab Nebula, talking about the problem and trying to solve it. As they do, even though they can't take the risk of trusting each other, they begin to form friendships and to like each other as they both sit there, stuck, unable to leave.
Really, really neat story, with a great ending (which I won't reveal here, in case anyone wants to read it). Anyway, last night, after having gone so long not remembering the author or title, I finally found it: "First Contact", by Murray Leinster. Turns out that this novel is considered a classic in the field, so much so that the title of the novella became the name of the entire genre.
Turns out it's included in several different collections, so now I just need to decide which one I want to buy.
So things are going relatively smoothly right now. I made five batches of candles yesterday and have two more to make this evening. I also placed an order with one of my candle suppliers, since I'm running low on some supplies (which is a good thing, of course), and I dropped by Staples this afternoon to pick up two big bags of shipping peanuts.
Plan for tomorrow is to head over to the polling place first thing in the morning and vote. I'm set on almost everything -- I've researched everything on my sample ballot and am settled on all my votes except for "Judge of the Circuit Court, Judicial Circuit 6" -- unfortunately, I'm having trouble Googling information on the candidates, so I'll have to think tonight about how I want to handle that.
Then, after I get back from the polling place, I gather up all the orders that I have to ship, go to the post office to ship them, then hang out for a while at Starbucks over my newspapers (I'm a little behind on my newspapers right now). Then I have to head to another post office to pick up some shipping supplies that I ordered a while back.
Leaving the house is becoming much easier -- my MP3 player, combined with the Koss ear buds that