This post is for Capcom. Last Friday, I met Marty Mundt at the usual place, Clarke's on Belmont. It was raining. I had eggs and hash browns. Marty had a milk shake. Then we got down to business. He drove me up to Andersonville so I could riffle through his books and I left with a lot of swag. Got a ton of James Blish Star Trek pbs from the early 70s, a few hardbacks, one of which only interests me because it contains Larry Niven's "All The Myriad Ways," which I have only read in illustrated form, either in OMNI COMIX or Marvel's UNKNOWN WORLDS OF SCIENCE FICTION.
The coolest thing, and as out of place as an accordion map of Istanbul (which I took in case I could learn something from it for when I email my friend Gulnar Ozturk), was this totally fantastic three-fold of the Telstar project. You guys might remember me posting the YouTube of the eponymous song by The Tornadoes about seven or eight months back. I waved it at Marty, asking him if he was absolutely certain. He nodded and then showed me his wife's Hallowe'en room. Marty also showed me the two vials of my blood and bursa fluid that I gave him and Andrea as a wedding gift. I thought they might have started cloning me already, but the apartment was pretty cramped. Marty then drove me to the Western stop on the Brown Line and I zigzagged along with a total of fifteen books. (Included was a volume of Grant Morrison's run on DOOM PATROL and the first hardback volume of Brian K. Vaughn's Y: THE LAST MAN.) Still hard to believe it was 70 and dropping all that day and then it hit 90 while I was on my way to the Comic-Con 15 hours later. Well, there's the story behind the Telstar phamplet. Of course, the first words reflected from the satellite back into our atmosphere was William Shatner screaming "Spock...Must Die!"
5 comments:
I just read Spock must Die about a month ago. Weird.
Oooh, synchronicity...
Mmmmm, eggs and hash browns. :-) Would you believe that I have not yet found a decent diner around Knoxville? Except for the Waffle House, but everything that Jim Gaffigan says about that nasty place in his skit is true. :-p I'm so spoiled being from NY where there were Greek diners everywhere!
Wow, that is a serious piece of space ephemera you have there with that Telstar pamphlet! Sweet. Thanks so much for scanning it for us to see.
The cover of that Spock book is a nice retro collectible as well.
In Montreal, at the Worldcon, I was on a panel that was supposed to be fun (and it was) where the participants shared their 10-song playlists. As you can guess, the finale of my playlist was "Telstar," and you can't believe how good it sounded even on the little sound system in the convention center function room. Even audience members too young to remember much about Telstar -- either the satellite or the song -- were rather thrilled by it. Two of the more mature audience members thanked me for choosing it.
I knew there was a reason for my going to the worldcon. It sure wasn't for the poutine.
I used to buy old NASA pamphlets all the time in shops when I was a kid. I also had a really cool 6th-grade teacher named Mr. Robertson who would give me tons of old NASA booklets that he'd picked up over the years. My favorite one was of a NASA project called Dyna-Soar that was an early percursor of the Space Shuttle...but back in the early 60s.
I once listened to an old NASA technician talk about how they had almost unlimited funds in them thar days. He said senators would visit their projects, be impressed and say, "How much do you need?" and subsequently a disbursement in excess of that amount would appear.
Alas.
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