Archive for September 2nd, 2021

David Janssen!

Thursday, September 2nd, 2021

As someone who enjoys mystery fiction and well-written true crime, I find CrimeReads to be about 50% interesting…and about 50% woke bushwa.

On the interesting side: “Remembering Harry O, The Seventies’ Second Best, Mostly Forgotten Private Eye Series” by J. Kingston Pierce (editor of “The Rap Sheet“).

I was a school kid during Harry O’s prime-time run, and its weekly installments commenced past my bedtime. So I didn’t catch up with the series until decades later. That it was waiting around for me to enjoy—that it existed at all!—owed a great deal to the audacity of its creator, the appeal of its headliner, and not a little good luck.

I’m pretty much in the same boat: “Harry O” was right at the edge of my consciousness, but I don’t remember ever seeing an episode. (As the author notes, the series has been released on DVD, but Amazon shows them as “temporarily out of stock”, and it isn’t on Prime.)

I was thinking about this yesterday, and I kind of put David Janssen and Darren McGavin into the same mental bucket: they both seem to me to be two guys who has some success as actors, but were still the kind of people you could have a shot and a beer and a conversation with.

In case you were wondering about that “second best”, I kind of think my readers can draw their own conclusion about which series was the best. But if you’re still wondering, at the tone leave your name and message, I’ll get back to you.

Posted in 1970s, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: September 2, 2021.

Thursday, September 2nd, 2021

My sincere thanks to Alan Simpson for sending over a tribute from the Libertarian Futurist Society to L. Neil Smith.

In 2016, Smith received the Special Prometheus Award for Lifetime Achievement for his many contributions to liberty and libertarian sf. (Only four authors have received this prestigious lifetime award, including Poul Anderson, F. Paul Wilson and Vernor Vinge.)

…

Although not as widely recognized by mainstream critics for his social conscience and passion for justice and liberty during his lifetime as this principled and idealistic author deserved, Smith regularly incorporated such themes into both his fiction and nonfiction.
For instance, a dramatic exposure of the evils of anti-Semitism and the Holocaust was at the moral center of The Mitzvah, Smith’s novel (cowritten with Aaron Zelman) about a Catholic priest, influenced by socialist ideas of the 1960s, who discovers that the German immigrant parents who raised him actually adopted him and that his true parents were a Jewish couple murdered in the Holocaust.
Smith, a longtime libertarian activist, also wrote two non-fiction books, Lever Action and Down with Power, that expressed his libertarian views, and founded, and regularly contributed essays to, The Libertarian Enterprise, an anarcho-capitalist journal.

Carolyn Shoemaker, comet hunter.

“Carolyn Shoemaker is one of the most revered and respected astronomers in history,” Jennifer Wiseman, a senior scientist overseeing the Hubble Space Telescope, said in a phone interview. “Her discoveries, her tenacious care in how she did her work — those things have created a legacy and a reputation that has inspired people who have come into the field after her.”

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In spite of feeling nervous around scientific instruments as simple as a calculator, she offered to help her husband, the revered planetary geologist Eugene Shoemaker, with a project gathering data on comets and asteroids.
Dr. Shoemaker believed that collisions with Earth by comets had been responsible for transporting to the planet water and other elements necessary for life, meaning that humans “may truly be made of comet ‘stuff,’” Ms. Shoemaker wrote in her essay. Dr. Shoemaker also worried that a comet hitting Earth could threaten human civilization. Yet relatively little scientific attention had been paid to the frequency and effects of cometary collision with planets.
As the dark phase of the lunar cycle began, making it easier to see faint objects in outer space, the Shoemakers would travel to an observatory on Palomar Mountain near San Diego. To locate previously unknown comets and asteroids, they aimed to photograph as much of the night sky as possible. The chirping of birds signaled bedtime.In the afternoons, Dr. Shoemaker would take the film they had used the previous night and develop it in a darkroom, then turn over the negatives to Ms. Shoemaker. Using a stereoscope, she would compare exposures of the same block of sky at different times. If anything moved against the relatively fixed background of stars, it would appear to float in the viewing device’s eyepiece.
Ms. Shoemaker was charged with discerning what was the grain of the film (and perhaps dust on it) and what was an actual image of light emitted by an object hurtling through space. “With time,” she wrote, “I saw fainter and fainter objects.”
It took a few years before she found her first new comet, in 1983. By 1994, in addition to hundreds of asteroids, she had discovered 32 comets, a number considered by the United States Geological Survey and others to represent the world record at the time.

Eugene and Carolyn Shoemaker are the “Shoemaker” in “Shoemaker-Levy 9”.

One comet, known as Shoemaker-Levy 9 (named in part for their associate David Levy), had stood out from the rest. Rather than making a lonely journey through the cosmic vacuum, Shoemaker-Levy 9 was on a collision course with Jupiter. By detecting the comet shortly before impact, Ms. Shoemaker gave scientists an opportunity to examine whether or not comets slamming into planets represented major astronomical events — and to test the hypotheses of her husband’s work.
The result had all the drama the Shoemakers might have imagined: whirling fire balls, a plume of hot gas as tall as 360 Mount Everests and a series of huge wounds that appeared in Jupiter’s atmosphere. Amateur astronomers could witness much of it with store-bought telescopes.
Anticipation of Shoemaker-Levy 9 and the spectacular show it produced made the front page of The New York Times and the cover of Time magazine, which called the Shoemakers “a husband-and-wife scientific duo who spend their evenings scanning the skies for heavenly intruders.” The couple and Mr. Levy were featured in a Person of the Week segment of the nightly ABC News broadcast and met with President Bill Clinton and Vice President Al Gore.

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Today, professional astronomers use remotely controlled telescopes and digital detection software. They tend not to pull all-nighters in remote mountain regions, guiding telescopes across the night sky and developing film in their own darkrooms, as the Shoemakers did. Yet scientists still depend on methods that Ms. Shoemaker perfected.
“She and her colleagues set the stage for how to identify what we would call minor bodies in our solar system, such as comets and asteroids,” Dr. Wiseman said. “We still use the technique of looking for the relatively fast transverse motions of comets and asteroids in our own solar system as compared to the slower or more fixed position of stars.”

Posted in Books, Obits, Science | 1 Comment »