The Extreme Sinus Problems of Outland

Just been fortunate to find a DVD copy of Peter Hyam's "Outland" for next to no money in the usual shop of ill repute.

Set in a drug addled mining colony on Jupiter's moon Io, it features an excellent Sean Connery in what is essentially a sci-fi update of "High Noon"; a lone white hat surrounded by corruption and having to take on the bad guys unaided.

Making use of the same blue collar vibe as Alien, with added lashings of the ever amusing "music of the future" and oily PVC clad space pole dancers, it's a pretty decent film. But the standout memory for the young me, seeing this movie as a thirteen year old kid or so, are the exploding heads.

People have drug freak outs in Outland. They think their working spacesuits have spiders in them, and they take their helmets off in a panic. Exposed to the vacuum, they undergo a troublesome cerebral expansion...

The fun doesn't stop there of course, and entering a depressurising airlock without a spacesuit is seen to cause major gastric issues.

When the bad guys arrive, despite being alone, Sean Connery is of course well up to the task. This David Crosby lookalike falls foul of the cunning of 007 and a chain smoking comic relief Doctoress.

The special effects, consisting of what appear to be inflateable footballs with crude faces stuck on them, are of course laughable now, as is the science - you don't blow up like Mr Creosote when exposed to a vacuum. But to a teenager, it was damn scary to imagine the panic, the fear, the terror of feeling your face, and eyes, and skin, and tissue, expand out into the unforgiving cold of space and rip you to shreds in a lengthy burst of stretchy agony.

Brrrr. Shivers...

The air is rent by flashes

As I write, the most violent rain and thunderstorm I can ever remember in my little corner of the world has been underway for about 4 hours now. The air is nauseating with a stench of burnt ozone, and is as thick as treacle.

The rain has caused flash floods four feet deep in places. A river of tarmacced water runs past my home bearing leaves and branches and drinks cans, taking them far out to sea.

Conditions are ripe for strange things to happen, cars struck by lightning and disappeared back in time like The Philadeplthia Experiment. Creatures could take advantage of the flooding and arise from the drains and gulleys in mutated form to seek warm flesh amongst the bedraggled populace.

Cyclists electrified by malicious sky gods, pressure headaches so severe your sinuses burst and your eyeballs are forced out into the waterfalls of water upon the pavement. I may yet walk home and see sprite gods above the anvil clouds, and exchange pleasantries with inhuman demons who will leave me alone as they know I feel as little as they do.

Then they head to the houses of innocents to wreak carnage before returning to the sewers as I sleep undisturbed.

The Sport of Huxley's Brave New World

We've had a real festival of sport the last few days; Wimbledon obviously, but also Formula 1, and the tortuous action of The Tour De France - a sport where a lot of debate and murmurings these days is of a highly scientific, and indeed science fictional, nature.

I was thinking of Aldous Huxley.

His "Brave New World" describes a world where needless consumption is necessary to sustain its economic and caste-based social structures. Sport is not immune; nothing simple can exist, everything must be complicated to the n-th degree. Huxley mentions several of these athletic pursuits.

The first, if it qualifies as a sport per se, is "Centrifugal Bumble Puppy", and is the only activity Huxley describes in any detail at all. It is a child's game in which a ball or some other object, is thrown into a sort of tall tower device, which as it rotates at high speed spits the ball back out via a series of random direction chaging contrivances, for the children to catch. Sounds fun enough. But Huxley's other games are more shrouded in mystery.

"Obstacle Golf" sounds straightforward enough, to me, it sounds like crazy gold played on a full golf course scale - imagine hitting a four-iron through the legs of a hundred metre high donkey. But his other golfing game, "Electro-Magnetic Golf" is more curious - I envisage a standard golf game where giant electro magnets act upon a metallic core of the ball in a complex, but predictable, manner. The ball swings about all over the place as it flies down these magnet surrounded fairways. Perhaps the game is played in three dimensions - a hole suspended in mid-air amid the powerful magnetic fields.

Escalator Squash is another sport referred to by Huxley, his character "Helmholtz Watson" is mentioned as a world champion at it. One's mind can only boggle as it conceives a variant of squash played in an enormous court, played with a super bouncy ball, with elevators and lifts filling the space like a crazed version of Chuckie Egg. Of course, it might be a smaller scale version played on shopping centre escalators, but really, that would be boring.

The real humdinger, however, is "Riemann Surface Tennis". A mass game being played by several hundred pairs of lower caste players is mentioned, but no other description is given.

Hardly surprising really, as a Riemann Surface is a one dimensional complex manifold surface used in hyper-boggling topological studies. A simplified version of it looks like this;

Fancy a hit about on that folks?

Mr Huxley, if I hadn't done it a thousand times already, I take my hat off again to you sir.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 08.07.2013

Dimension X and X Minus 1

Thought I'd just take a few minutes to tell you about my new late night listening habit.

When the skies are clear, well, it's astronomy time, and I'm out there with my 10x50s and a drink, enjoying trying to track down the Messier Objects and stars of interest I can see in between the large sycamore trees that dominate my garden area. But when skies are cloudy, lit sickly orange by the streelights, I find other entertainment.

I've recently downloaded through my podcatcher a number of episodes of 1950-51 US radio series Dimension X, and later show X Minus 1. Both are thirty minute sci fi radio playlets, often adaptations of short stories by classic sci fi authors like Ray Bradbury and Isaac Asimov that had previously turned up in print in magazines like "Astounding Science Fiction." Several, for instance, are taken from Bradbury's "Martian Chronicles".

Believe me, listening to them outside in the dark is a really atmospheric experience! The stories are of course straight out of the 50s, with maniacally dramatic music and yelling actors at the moment of the "reds under the bed" reveal that half the crewmen of your ship are actually alien agents, or that the parade an eccentric businessman has organised to promote "Mars Day" is in fact a full on Martian Invasion, complete with ray guns. Of course, whatever women show up in these stories are there to scream and be neurotic, but yet, the stories still have more depth and imagination than most of the B pics that were being shown in the cinemas at that time - one talks about how a miniturised man and women act as the beginning of a complex society that evolves and dies on an electron orbiting a proton within 10 of our full scale seconds.

You didn't get that in "It Came from Outer Space"!!!

To Lick a Quantum

The Dimension X story I listened to the other day, featuring a male dissident and a typically attractive woman, involved people being reduced to a size way beyond the sub-atomic, and living their lives on a planet like electron orbiting a nucleus.

In the space of ten of our seconds, Einsteinian time dilation caused them to spawn an entire - presumably rather inbred - race that reached a glorious peak before dying out to leave one last message for folk in the our-scale reality.

*Note - Dimension X and X Minus 1 need an article to themselves one day.*

For some reason, this made me think about the curious property known as Quantum Flavour Number...

Sub atomic particles indeed have a flavour - leptons can be flavoured as electrons, tau particles or muons, ditto their corresponding neutrinos. Quarks are flavoured according to charm, strangeness, topness and bottomness.

As ever, this is essentially made up stuff designed to cover up  immensely complex mathematics and the all but beyond understanding properties of these particles. You could call them "banana, strawberry, blackcurrant and lime" and it wouldn't make a difference.

But what if it really did? What if all the quarks, neutrinos and leptons did actually taste of something. Imagine being shrunk down to a size by which relative to you, an electron is the size of a lollypop. Lick it! Perhaps you might get a jolt of electric charge to add to the experience, but then the flavour bursts through. Is it sharp and citrusy? Or sweet and mellow. Will sucking the cranberry flavoured charmed quark ease an acid bladder? Perhaps a blueberry flavoured tau super neutrino will de-fur your arteries, and reduce your risk of a heart attack?

But the crazy thing is, even this wild surmising is nowhere near as fantastic as the universe of the super small actually is. I don't understand it, and I suspect the number of people on the planet who really do is barely in double figures.

It's a mad universe, however it tastes.