Category: Sci-Fi

Who blinked

Whether it’s called Video on Demand, IPTV, streaming video, or whatever, once you’ve seen it you know it’s eventually going to take over television. At our house we take Netflix Watch Instantly for granted, on Eric’s Xbox 360 that’s hooked up to the video projector via component video, and on the Roku HD player that’s in regular composite SD video on my beloved Sony 32XBR100.

Last summer I wrote about a Doctor Who episode called “Love and Monsters” (the YouTube video I’d embedded was pulled). Another memorable installment, one of the most enjoyable hours of TV I have ever watched, is called “Blink”.

Recently, the whole family watched “Blink” on the Xbox 360. It wasn’t in HD, but it wasn’t supposed to be. The quality of the highly compressed widescreen picture was, to borrow a line from The Doctor, a bit “wibbly wobbly,” but it was serviceable.

Funny thing, though, because last night, on a lark I put the Roku player on the projector with an HDMI cable. “Blink” was in HD! There was no doubt about it.

This left me wondering if there’s a setting that needs changing on the Xbox 360’s Netflix software, or if Netflix upgraded the Doctor Who files without adding an HD logo. I’ll see tonight, when I have Eric play a bit of “Blink” on the Xbox again.

This video clip has a few minutes of “Blink” in HD on the Roku player and taken with the Canon digital camera sitting on top of the projector. I add to the suspense of the scene by sticking my fingers into the left of the picture at 1:45, so you can get an idea of the image size.

[flv:http://www.dograt.com/Video/2009/OCT/WhoBlink.flv 512 384]

From Moon to Mars?

On NPR this morning I heard author Daniel Wilson suggest that by now, 40 years after landing on the Moon, we could have made it to Mars. But I’m sure he knows as well as anybody that the reason America went Lunar roving was not for its own sake, but to beat the Soviet Union in the space race. With that goal accomplished, the pressure was off.

My opinion is that a journey to Mars is still too ambitious and costly an undertaking. The scenario postulated in “2001: A Space Odyssey” is what I favor — a Moon base with a way station. The future was indeed set in 1969, but it was the Arpanet going online, and not Apollo 11, that changed everything.

Which reminds me. Way back in my first month of turning my old web site into this web log, and I wasn’t yet embedding audio, I said that Buddy Holly recorded only three songs in stereo. That is incorrect. There is a fourth recording, called “Moondreams”, although this particular dub doesn’t bring out the full stereo effect.

[audio:http://www.dograt.com/Audio/2009/JUL/Moondreams.mp3]

And back on the subject of Mars, my son Eric has of late taken an interest in the early works of David Bowie, who has a song on “Hunky Dory” called “Life On Mars?”.

[flv:http://www.dograt.com/Video/2009/JUL/LifeOnMars.flv 400 300]

Whoever posted “Life On Mars?” on YouTube disabled embedding, so I had to work around that. I got the poster picture of Bowie looking like Keith Richard playing the Cavern Club from a 1972 issue of Rolling Stone magazine.

To the Moon! Bang! Zoom!

It was forty years ago today that Apollo 11 lifted off. A month ago, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter left Earth for the Moon. Congratulations to Professor Harlan Spence of Boston University, whose CRaTER payload is on the LRO, studying the long-term effects of radiation on humans. (I doubt that one of those effects is to turn people into super heroes, like the cosmic rays that created the Fantastic Four!)

The LRO will drop to an orbit of 30 miles above the Moon and take pictures of the Apollo 11 landing site. I’m really looking forward to seeing those. I wonder if anything’s been moved? 😉

Whose Doctor?

Thanks to the Roku Digital Player, my guilty pleasure has been watching the revived BBC series Dr. Who. I’m almost through the second season with David Tennant, who took over from Christopher Eccleston. The Doctor always has a young lady along for his adventures, and Billie Piper as Rose appears in both seasons.

Dr. Who retains the preposterous stories and hokey monsters of past incarnations, but I’m impressed by the human interest elements of the new series. The love triangle between Rose, her boyfriend, and The Doctor had a curious end. One episode in particular, “Love and Monsters”, uses the ludicrous sci-fi trappings of the last Time Lord as an excuse for memorably quirky character portrayals. The scenes with Rose’s hopeful mum and a younger man are both a funny and poignant. The episode features the delightfully mouse-voiced Shirley Henderson, who is Moaning Myrtle in the Harry Potter movies.

England in the early 60’s was the source of some of the all-time best theme music. The James Bond theme was composed by Monty Norman, but arranger John Barry disputes that claim. A man named Laurie Johnson wrote the theme for The Avengers, and the Dr. Who theme was composed by Ron Grainer at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop.