"Congratulations, it's all yours!"

 Hi sid_plested,

We hope you enjoy your BUCK ROGERS XZ-38 DAISY DISINTEGRATOR RAY GUN 1935 COPPER ORIGINAL. Pay now to get your item as quickly as possible.

eBay.ca

Welp...I just bought a used ray gun on eBay.

(Come to think of it, last week I found a time machine, this week I bought a ray gun:  is ANYONE ELSE'S March going a bit oddly?  Or is it just me?) 

I can't really say I did it by accident.  As per my previous post on Buck Rogers weaponry, the idea of spending over $150 on an antique Buck Rogers disintegrator pistol activates some kind of mental governor that just stops the whole process.  Unfortunately, the eBay seller in question must have read that posting, since the opening bid that they requested on their item was, you guessed it, $149.99.

In my defense, I honestly didn't think that I would be the only bidder.*  In fact, the lack of other interested geeks makes me wonder if I've paid more than I should have (with no offense to the buyer, I refer solely to lack of discriminating knowledge on my part that, based on the photos or description, should have stopped me from placing my bid).

The pictures on the listing look about the same as all the other pictures of 80-year-old Daisy pistols that I've seen on eBay - you can see that the finish is a bit worn, there's some rust on the emitter bell, and a bit of verdigris on the barrel, but again, they all look like this to a greater or lesser extent.  I've actually seen XZ-38s for sale at about the same price that looked like they'd been literally buried in someone's basement since 1935, so this one is not too bad.

However, it's a bit late for second thoughts - I bid on it, I won the auction, it's mine, and, honestly, I will not miss any meals because of the $150 that I spent on an antique toy.  The XZ-38 will be here in about nine days, at which point I'll be able to inspect it to my heart's content.  And then - release Wilma Deering or beware my wrath, evil hordes of Han! 

 - Sid

* I know, this sounds a lot like my defense for purchasing a Major Matt Mason figure.  Obviously I'm a little self-conscious about this sort of thing.

Things To Do With A Time Machine (Other Than Kill Hitler).

"Oh, about sixty C's up the Road I'm an archaeologist.  Every now and then I come back to bury a few things. Then I go forward and dig them up again. I've already written the paper on this batch. Actually, it's a pretty interesting piece on cultural diffusion. I've got some really nice artifacts from Mohenjo-Daro this time around."

Roger Zelazny, Roadmarks

"If I miss a program I just pop back in time and watch it.  I'm hopeless fiddling with all those buttons."
"You have a time machine and you use it for watching television?"
"Well, I wouldn't use it at all if I could get the hang of the video recorder."

Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

"Ten minutes to you, L.M.," Barney said, "but it's been hours for us. The machine is okay, so we're over the first and biggest hurdle. We know now that Professor Hewett's vremeatron works even better than we had hoped.  The way is open to take a company back in time and film an accurate, full-length, wide-screen, realistic, low-budget, high-quality historical."

Harry Harrison, The Technicolor Time Machine

"But you must understand, it's mostly criminals who seek their refuge in time machines."

"I can't blame them...  What's the price of such a thing?"

"How far do you want to go?"

"Well...uh...my intention is to write the history of the Jewish people."

Paul van Herck, Where Were You Last Pluterday?

 - Sid

The Coming of the Martians.

 It is the year 1895.

There is no television, and Auguste and Louis Lumière have only just shown their first moving picture in Paris.   Science fiction does not exist - it does not even have a name. Jules Verne has published his Voyages Extraordinaires, but ultimately they are just that, extraordinary travels, and he bristles at the suggestion that his tales are based on anything but the facts of science.

And yet, a young English writer named Herbert George Wells was able to sit in his study in the town of Woking and create the following astonishing passage about an alien war machine, part of an invasion from Mars:

And this Thing I saw! How can I describe it?  A monstrous tripod, higher than many houses, striding over the young pine trees, and smashing them aside in its career; a walking engine of glittering metal, striding now across the heather; articulated ropes of steel dangling from it, and the clattering tumult of its passage mingling with the riot of the thunder. A flash, and it came out vividly, heeling over one way with two feet in the air, to vanish and reappear almost instantly as it seemed, with the next flash, a hundred yards nearer. Can you imagine a milking stool tilted and bowled violently along the ground? That was the impression those instant flashes gave. But instead of a milking stool imagine it a great body of machinery on a tripod stand.

Seen nearer, the Thing was incredibly strange, for it was no mere insensate machine driving on its way. Machine it was, with a ringing metallic pace, and long, flexible, glittering tentacles (one of which gripped a young pine tree) swinging and rattling about its strange body. It picked its road as it went striding along, and the brazen hood that surmounted it moved to and fro with the inevitable suggestion of a head looking about. Behind the main body was a huge mass of white metal like a gigantic fisherman’s basket, and puffs of green smoke squirted out from the joints of the limbs as the monster swept by me. And in an instant it was gone.

The modern reader has a wide range of sources to draw upon in their interpretation of the Martian tripods:  Transformers movies and cartoons, Japanese animation, the various Imperial Walkers from Star Wars, and so on - a plethora of giant machines, metallically marching to battle. The creative leap performed by H.G. Wells in The War of the Worlds is unaided by any of those influences, and is all the more amazing because of that, especially when you consider that his audience could only be reached by comparing the Martian tripod to a milking stool.

 - Sid