Hans my Hedgehog

Part of it is the fact that I'm a maudlin fool who'll cry at the drop of a handkerchief. However nonetheless the first story told by the titular character in The Storyteller was very fine indeed as the less than half hour show had me dripping tears. If I were a parent I would purchase the single disc that contains all nine stories put out by the Jim Henson Company immediately as they are storytelling at its best. Truer than life and twice as wondrous.

I've no doubt that when I finish the last of the 216 minutes I'll be left, once again, to rage at the massive stupidity of network executives. Ah what might have been if only NBC had had any sense back in 1987 and not mucked about with its schedule and so on. Such is the fate for a lot of really good shows. Ah well I still have every bit of it and not having more good television should inspire parents to turn the damn box off and read to their children more.

More fairy tales and less American Idol.

Dream Log: Was it Spite?

I dreamed there was a huge many trunked apple tree growing through a chain link fence. It was the largest apple tree in my city. When next I saw it only a stump was left. I heard that the neighbors of my friend had it cut down, though it was only half theirs, because they'd overheard someone talking about apple trees as symbols of paganism. I was angry and embarrassed as I'd been the one talking with people in the back yard in a very speculative way, not referring to any source. I was rather angry at the Christian neighbors who cut it down for so slight a thing. One of the greatest trees in the city.

Space is not the New World

I grew up believing the revealed truth that man's future was in space just as Europe went forth to conquer and settle the Americas. It was inevitable as gravity that we'd find huge advantages to living in space and we wouldn't be displacing any locals this time. We would build giant habitats out of asteroids, special smelting systems powered by solar mirrors, and fast inexpensive rocket ships. The brave future of colonizing the solar system and eventually the galaxy.

Looking again I think it more likely that space will be more akin to Antarctica. It will be a place tourists will go, where scientists will go, and it will remain uninhabited. The resources of the southern continent would be easier to exploit and we do not. Why oh why would we go mine asteroids and build glass domes on mars when we don't do it in the more forgiving extreme environs of Terra?

Until there are domes over high mountain valleys in the Andes I think it terribly unlikely that we'll be glassing over craters on Mars or the Moon. The future of man living in space is still more than a century away if it comes at all.