clarkblog

START YOUR ENGINES

By most reckonings, the International Space Station is a massive effort of waste and time. It sits in an inconvenient orbit and therefore won't be a stopping point on our way back to the moon. The actual costs have skyrocketed beyond previous estimates and resulted in huge cutbacks in functionality. And a sizeable percentage of hard research conducted there -- like the effects of zero-gravity on the human body -- has already been performed on earlier space missions.

Here's one bold if unlikely plan to salvage the ISS: turn the thing into a spaceship.

Above: Image of the solar transit of the ISS and Space Shuttle Atlantis, taken from the area of Mamers (Normandie, France) on Sep. 17, 2007.

STILL LOOKING UP

This week marks the 39th anniversary of the first manned Moon landing.

Here's what I wrote in 2005, which is just as true today.

100 YEARS AGO TODAY

On the morning of June 30, 1908, an object enters Earth's atmosphere and explodes over a forest in remote Russia.

The force of the blast flattens 80 million trees over an area of 830 square miles. Scientists later estimate the explosion to be 1000 times greater than the atomic bomb dropped over Hiroshima. For weeks, night skies around the world are bright enough to read by, due to dust thrown skyward by the blast.

The origin of the object has been debated ever since, with most scientists concluding this was a comet or asteroid. Differing minority opinions, however, run the gamut from a microscopic black hole to a chunk of antimatter to an alien spacecraft attempting an emergency landing.

This incident is known as the Tunguska Event.

CLARKBLOG IS THREE

Clarkblog is three years old. That's more than 700 posts, 500+ comments, and over 100,000 hits, most of them intentional. With these stats in hand, Clarkblog has officially outlived 99.9999999 percent of all blogs on the planet. Or, um, something like that.

To celebrate, I'm unhooking the blog from its Internet pipes and taking it to New York City. We'll be back in June.

DEATH IN DYATLOV PASS

On Feb. 2, 1959, nine Russians went on a cross-country ski trip in the Ural Mountains.

They were never seen alive again.

49 years later, their strange deaths remain a mystery.

via Wikipedia: The Dyatlov Pass Accident

CONVENIENT TRUTH

From Al Gore's Nobel Prize acceptance speech:

Seven years ago tomorrow, I read my own political obituary in a judgment that seemed to me harsh and mistaken – if not premature. But that unwelcome verdict also brought a precious if painful gift: an opportunity to search for fresh new ways to serve my purpose.

Unexpectedly, that quest has brought me here. Even though I fear my words cannot match this moment, I pray what I am feeling in my heart will be communicated clearly enough that those who hear me will say, “We must act.”

ELEMENTAL FURY

Last May, Griffith Park caught fire. I watched the firefight from the roof of a building just two blocks south of the evacuated area. It was hands-down the most frightening and surreal thing I've witnessed in LA. Thanks to the hard work of those brave firefighters, we avoided a major catastrophe. But I had no idea how close we came until I read this gripping article by Dave Gardetta in LA Magazine:

By nightfall on May 8, city residents faced the unforeseen, or at least the long forgotten —a forest fire in the heart of L.A. That evening, winds were blowing in gusts of up to 35 mph out of the northwest. Had those same winds been from the northeast—had L.A. been under the high-pressure blast of a Santa Ana condition— Griffith Park's blaze could have jumped into the densely developed Hollywood Hills and worked its way toward the 405 freeway.

ABANDONED FUTURES

Tonight's the Planet reading in Santa Monica. Come one, come all.

This play's got robots and rayguns and aliens all over the place. It's even got a spaceship that looks something like this:

Yeah, they sure don't make 'em like they used to. Planet is about, among other things, how we used to imagine the future and how that future changes. And how some of us look back at those discarded futures and ask: what happened?

But it's not just the spaceships of Buck Rogers we've left behind. Look at these fantastic photos by Jonas Bendiksen of a spaceship junkyard in Kazhakstan.

Above: butterflies swarm as men climb on an empty rocket booster.

These images take me back to the 1970s-era short fiction of J.G. Ballard, who predicted a gloomy future in which mankind never reaches the stars.

I hope we get there one day. Until then, we just have to keep dreaming, and hope those dreams won't be forgotten.

INDIANA JESUS AND THE SECOND COMING

I was intrigued this week by obituaries for a man named Gene Savoy. That's him up there. Dashing, ain't he? Sort've got an Alan Quartermain meets Doc Savage kinda thing going on and that's fitting. See, he was a swashbuckling explorer who claimed to have discovered many ancient lost cities. Some folks thought of him as a real-life Indiana Jones.

Now, all that's pretty interesting. But what made me do a double-take was this paragraph:

"An ordained minister since 1962, Savoy established and became head bishop of the International Community of Christ, Church of the Second Advent, in 1971. He created a new theology called Cosolargy, which taught that the second coming of Christ had already become a living reality through a miraculous celestial event."

Whoa! A swashbuckling explorer who started his own religion? And he owns boats and travels the world?  L. Ron Hubbard, you got some competition!

But wait: what is this "miraculous celestial event" they're talking about? And what the heck does Cosolargy mean? During my searches, I was frustrated to discover that nearly every Savoy obit, from the AP newswire to the LA Times' Thomas Maugh, runs this same exact paragraph without any elaboration.

Seriously, is it too much to ask journalists to do their jobs these days? After the bullshit buildup to the Iraq War, apparently so. So these weak-ass ink-slingers can just stand the fuck back while this award-winning former journalist works his mad skillz on the Google.

Item: Savoy had a son, Jamil, who died at the age of 13 in 1962. Jamil made a bunch of prophecies that convinced the elder Savoy he'd fathered the Second Coming of Christ! For any Christians who believe Christ is gonna return one day, listen up: according to Savoy, that boy's done been here and left! Cosolargy (once known ominously as Project X) grew out of these prophecies and treats the power of sunlight as a supernatural force. Savoy wrote several books about all this that are, as far as I can tell, sadly out of print.

Citations found here, here, and here. If I were still a working journalist, I'd certainly want more verification for these claims. And I'd start by phoning Savoy's tellingly-named Jamilian University with some juicy questions.

Forget lost cities and swashbucking jungle adventures. Savoy's obit should read: "Jesus' Second-String Dad Dies."

And these people call themselves journalists. Sheesh.

YA DON'T SAY

"I'm saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: The Iraq war is largely about oil."

- Alan Greenspan,
Former Federal Reserve Chairman