"When I was a young Warthog..."

Master Chief: "You told me there wouldn't be any cameras."

Sergeant Johnson: "And you told me you were going to wear something nice!"

- Halo 2

Today, Karli and I paid a rare visit to Walmart in search of the perfect shower curtain ring - we'd purchased a new shower liner at Bed Bath and Beyond, but Karli didn't like their hardware options for hanging it, so we decided to look elsewhere.

While we were wandering around the store, I did a quick pass through their toy section.  Walmart stores often have a surprising range of movie and video game related toys, and I always like to take a look at their shelves to see what's on display.

This time, I was surprised to see a boxed Warthog Light Reconnaissance Vehicle from the Bungie Studios Halo gaming franchise, on sale at half price: twenty dollars rather than the original $39.99 sticker price.  Generally I'm much more of a browser than a buyer, but in this case I decided to add a Warthog to our shopping cart - what's life without the occasional spur of the moment purchase?

The Warthog comes in several pieces, with some assembly required, as toy package labelling cliché would have it. It's not terribly challenging - you snap the tires onto the ends of the axles, mount the tribarrel machine gun into the socket on the back of the vehicle and connect the ammo feed, clip the four red fuel cans onto the rear storage rack, and you're good to go.  The Master Chief figure which is packaged with the vehicle fits snugly into the driver's seat - it's unfortunate that there isn't a second figure to man the tribarrel, but I acknowledge the manufacturer's inevitable desire to make a buck by having you buy a standalone figure or two to fill up the crew.  

My purchase clearly illustrates the difference between what we'll refer to as play-grade and collector-grade toys.  The Warthog mold is detailed and comprehensive, and the body finish has been given some manufacturing equivalent of dry-brushing* for a more weathered look.  However, I feel that a collector grade toy would have more moving parts than just the wheels. The undercarriage is glued together rather than a single piece, but there's no articulation for the suspension, winch or axles, and the tribarrel mount isn't really designed to rotate, which is kind of a shame. The tribarrel itself also seems to be a less sharp mold than the rest of the pieces.

The 3 3/4 inch Master Chief figure doesn't have a lot of detail, although it does have reasonably good joint articulation, which, admittedly is probably better for play time than the opposite. And that's a key element regarding the comments above: a plastic toy made with extra moving parts and realistic suspension probably wouldn't last a day in the destructive hands of a playful 9-year old.

Ultimately, I recognize that it's just a toy, and as such it's definitely a fun little piece of shelf decoration that wasn't too expensive - if you'd like one for your bookshelves, I encourage you to hurry on down to your local Walmart while supplies last.  Oh, and Karli strongly recommends their shower rings, in case you feel that you need a more adult excuse to do some shopping.

- Sid

*  For readers not involved in miniatures and modelling, dry brushing is a painting technique in which almost all the paint is wiped off the brush, and then the remaining paint is lightly applied to a basecoated model to accentuate details and edges, which gives the model a more realistic appearance.

Virtual Insanity?

In other news, Meta né Oculus is raising the price of their Quest 2 virtual reality headsets by about 30%.

It's an unexpected decision - normally as a new technology gains a foothold, the price goes down, rather than up, and Meta has been doing its best to increase its presence in the marketplace.  So far, Meta has sold almost 15 million of the Quest 2, which represents 90% of VR headset sales to date, and you have to think that affordable pricing is a large part of the reason for their market share.

In their reluctant defence, my god, what ISN'T getting more expensive right now?

- Sid

Although probably a better choice than Portrait mode.

Since the release of its first full-colour image on July 14th, NASA's James Webb Space Telescope has created a new standard for astronomical imaging.  

Located in a halo orbit around the L2 Lagrange point*,  the Webb Telescope is the most powerful space telescope ever built, and has already produced epic, breathtaking images of outer space unlike anything previously seen. I just wish that they didn't look like they were shot with the $20 starburst filter that I bought in my first year of photography classes at Ryerson.

- Sid

* Lagrange points are locations in space where the gravitational attraction of the Earth and the Sun balance out, allowing satellites to remain in a stable orbit.

Can I get an amen from the Amen Corner?

My sincere compliments to CBC's headline creation staff, "Ready Prayer One" is somewhat brilliant.

- Sid

Nostalgia.

Admiral Blackwell:  "Captain Picard Day?"

Captain Picard: "Oh uh … Yes it's a … it's … it's for the children. I'm a … I'm a role model!"

Admiral Blackwell:  "I'm sure you are. Starfleet out."

The Pegasus, Star Trek: The Next Generation.

June 16th, and we celebrate another Captain Picard Day - June 16th being the best approximation of Stardate 47457.1 that the fan base was able to calculate.  We're first introduced to this celebratory event and the Captain's reluctant involvement in the seventh and final season of The Next Generation, where Picard expresses his displeasure with the circumstances to an amused Riker in no uncertain terms.

And then, 30 years later in the first season of Picard, we see that he has preserved the banner in his personal archives at Starfleet, along with all of the other treasured memorabilia from his career and life. It's a subtle and poignant comment on how we sentimentalize the past as we age.

- Sid

Lost in time.

Honestly, I expected to just have a relaxing long weekend getaway in Whistler with my wonderful wife - we've been there before, and other than Whistler Village's unnerving evocation of the Village from the 1967 cult classic TV series The Prisoner, I really didn't think that there'd be anything blogworthy.

It took us some time to find our AirBnB, the numbering in the rental complex was surprisingly nonlinear. There must have been some kind of rational system, but we never did figure it out.  We finally found the right door, keyed in the entry code and made our way upstairs with our luggage. 

Karli had found us a pleasant little two-level condo, with an outdoor deck on each level - it says a great deal about life in Whistler that the upstairs deck was considerably larger than the living room area.  We unpacked and, while Karli was getting ready for go out for a walk around the village, I casually turned on the TV to see what was available.

I was intrigued to discover that the listings included a Classic Doctor Who channel, which was in the middle of showing The Hand of Fear, a Tom Baker episode originally broadcast in 1976.   

A little research revealed that Classic Doctor Who is part of the Britbox offering, which probably shouldn't be a huge surprise - although it's a bit confusing given that the new Doctor Who episodes are on Crave, it seems odd that they'd split them up. It seemed equally odd that it was part of whatever streaming package our host had chosen for his rental guests: with the best will in the world, not a lot of people are going to ditch their weekend plans* in favour of catching up on the full catalogue of the Doctor's classic adventures, in all of their cardboard-tube-and-bubble-wrap** special effects glory.

Although, in a way, it's not completely accurate to talk about the full catalogue of Doctor Who episodes.  There were 253 episodes of the series produced between 1963 and 1969, and 97 of them are missing.

This sounds like a tragic mistake in the era of fandom and franchises, but in the 1960s, the standards were completely different. During the 1960s, BBC productions were generally videotaped for broadcast. The tapes were quite expensive, and as such they were erased for reuse shortly after they were shown.  In fact, none of the Doctor Who episodes from the 60s have been recovered from videotape, they were all erased.

However, the episodes were also distributed internationally, and due to the differing requirements of global broadcasting, the solution of choice was to use a telecine process to transfer the episodes to film masters, which were then used to create copies for distribution.  As time went on and space ran out, many of the original masters were disposed of, but over the years, many of the copies have been recovered from archives and storage lockers all around the planet, and in some cases borrowed from the libraries of private collectors, and used to digitally recreate the episodes. 

However, the random nature of the recovery process has resulted in a number of alternative solutions for recreating missing episodes.  Animated versions have been created based on amateur audio recordings of the episodes***, and low resolution NTSC videotapes have been used as guides for colourizing scans of 16mm black and white versions. 

To illustrate the degree to which these missing episodes have become valuable items to the serious collector, twelve cans of film were discovered in Nigeria in 2013, including the full six episodes of The Enemy of the World and five missing chapters of The Web of Fear from the fifth season of Doctor Who. Before they could be shipped to the BBC, Episode 3 of The Web of Fear vanished, presumably stolen and sold to the highest bidder.

Up until now, we've somehow avoided adding Britbox to our otherwise comprehensive collective of streaming services, but now that I'm aware of the classic episodes channel, I'm giving serious consideration to signing up, so as to have a replacement for my treasured but aging selections from the BBC's DVD releases of the Doctor's classic adventures.  Hmmm...let's take a look...it IS only $9.99 a month, but would it be worth it...okay, they've got Blake's 7, Red Dwarf, Eleventh Hour, The City & The City, the 1981 version of The Hitch-hikers Guide to the Galaxy and David Tennant in The Quatermass Experiment as well, right, I'm in.

- Sid

* Nor did I.  I did watch a couple of chapters while Karli was doing other things, but I would never have suggested that we spend the next three days watching TV, however tempting it might be.

** Yes, we're looking at you, The Ark in Space.

*** I kind of love the random nature of this solution.  Imagine that you're a Doctor Who fan in the pre-VHS era, and the only way that you can display your dedication to your beloved Time Lord is by recording audio versions of the show and imagining the visuals.

"Je ne regrette rien."

You Know You're a Geek When, Part 4.

Gimli: Legolas! Two already!

Legolas: I'm on seventeen!

Gimli: Huh? I'll have no pointy-ear outscoring me! [kills another one]

Legolas: [shoots two more arrows] Nineteen!

The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers 

My workplace is currently going through a process of reviewing and optimizing our procedures in hopes of improving efficiency and creating a more streamlined system.  This isn't an easy process - among other issues, we're ridiculously paper-based, considering that it's 2022.  And I do mean ridiculously, I personally print over a million* pages of training support material on an annual basis.

As part of the review process, everyone has been tasked with logging their productivity on a daily basis.  It's not as onerous as it sounds, but there have been some challenges in establishing appropriate scaling for metrics.  We were discussing this during one of our morning productivity meetings, and I raised the problem of measuring quantity rather than size in terms of productivity.  Sadly, it turned out to be a bit of a weregeek moment.

"It's like the second Lord of the Rings movie, where Legolas the Elf and Gimli the Dwarf are competing to see who has the higher kill count in their various battles, right?"

Silence and blank faces.  Undeterred (and obviously unwilling to read the room) I continued:

"And at one point, Legolas takes out a huge war elephant, this gigantic tusked monster.  He slides down the trunk of the fallen creature and hops off to stand nonchalantly in front of Gimli, who frowns at him and shouts, 'That still only counts as one!'  It's the same sort of problem - we have to look at scale rather than just counting events."

More silence followed - I think that the other attendees were either puzzled, confused, embarrassed for me, or all three, I've never had more people avoid eye contact. Well, too bad, I regret nothing, it was a perfect analogy for the problem, geek reference or not - muggles.

- Sid 

*Yes, ONE MILLION, to quote Doctor Evil.

"I create myself."

Rose: I am the Bad Wolf. I create myself. I take the words, I scatter them in time and space. A message to lead myself here.

The Parting of the Ways, Doctor Who

In the first season of the 2005 Doctor Who relaunch, writer and showrunner Russell T. Davies started the idea of introducing Easter Eggs for the show's finale that would appear throughout the season.  For that first season, it was the phrase "Bad Wolf", that appeared as a project development title*, in conversational references, on posters, as a TV channel, a corporate name, and several times as graffiti. 

In the final episode, Rose Tyler, the new Doctor's first companion, gazes into the Time Vortex and becomes temporarily omnipotent.  She names herself the Bad Wolf and then broadcasts those words into her own past as a signal to herself in the future.**

Yesterday I saw bad wolf painted on a brick wall in Gastown, and a small part of me asked, "Rose...were you here?"

- Sid

* Albeit in Welsh.

** Wibbley wobbley, timey wimey...

Bakka at 50: Memories

Bakka: In Fremen legend, the weeper who mourns for all mankind.

Frank Herbert, Dune 

It's been 50 years since the Bakka Science Fiction Book Shoppe first opened its doors in 1972 under the ownership of Charles McKee, a dedicated American science fiction and comic book fan who had originally moved to Canada in protest of the war in Vietnam. The store's name comes from an obscure reference in the glossary at the end of Frank Herbert's 1965 novel Dune - it's a bit of an inside joke, based on the fact that the term never actually makes an appearance in the novel.

The comic books section split off to its own store in 1976 as The Silver Snail, which has just recently returned to Queen Street.

My first visit to Bakka would have taken place only a couple of years later, when I was attending high school in Muskoka, Ontario's cottage country. A friend's father had some business to conduct in Toronto, and we went along for the ride, with the specific goal of making our way to Queen Street West and shopping at Bakka and the Silver Snail.  In those pre-internet days, I wouldn't have known that either store existed were it not for an article in the Toronto Star, and we looked up their addresses in a Toronto phone book at a booth on the corner of Queen and McCaul.

I did Saturday Greyhound bus shopping trips to Toronto every few months until 1983, when I moved to Toronto to attend university.  Other than a brief return to Muskoka (just long enough to buy a house, get a divorce, and sell the house) I lived in Toronto until 2005, when I relocated to Vancouver.     

That period of time saw the purchasing of the bulk of my science fiction and fantasy library.  I visited Bakka almost every weekend and bought a handful of used or new books on every visit, it would have been a rare event to have left empty handed. You could say that Bakka was my Cheers - everybody really does know your name if you shop in the same bookstore once a week for over 20 years. 

I think of the constants from that era as being John Rose (left) and Jack Brooks, generally seen shelving books in his distinctive coveralls.  John was originally hired to manage Bakka in 1979, but purchased the store a year later, and his thoughtful, knowledgeable and intelligent leadership was responsible for transitioning Bakka from something of an amateur business into a superb independent genre book store. 

After owning Bakka for over 22 years, John passed the baton to Ben Freiman in 2003, who added Phoenix to the store's name to indicate its reborn status.  Freiman moved the store to its current location on Harbord Street near the University of Toronto in 2010.
 

The cautionary truth of any sort of independent retail outlet is that it exists not only on the basis of its success in the marketplace, but as an expression of its ownership. The fact that Bakka has managed to survive for 50 years is a testament to the quality of its service, the loyalty of the science fiction and fantasy community, and most importantly to its great good fortune in the succession of dedicated and engaged owners who have kept the business going through recessions, relocations, megastore competition, digital books, and COVID-19. 

A very happy 50th birthday, Bakka - and best wishes for another 50.

- Sid