Two nice blossoms to brighten up a winter day.
Paphiopedilum venestum
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Paphiopedilum ‘Impulse’
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The ‘studio’.
Author Archives: dr.hypercube
Enormous lacuna
How in the world did I not know about this? Trains, model making and everything shitty about the 70’s – SUPERTRAIN!
The series took place on the “Supertrain”, an imagined nuclear-powered bullet train that was equipped with amenities more appropriate to a cruise ship than a train, such as swimming pools and shopping centers. It was so big it had to run on very broad gauge track (not two sets of tracks as depicted in some advertising). The train took 36 hours to go from New York City to Los Angeles. Much like its contemporary The Love Boat, the plots concerned the passengers’ social lives, usually with multiple intertwining storylines, and most of the cast was composed of guest stars. The production was elaborate, with huge sets and a high-tech model train for outside shots.
At the time, Supertrain was the most expensive series ever aired in the United States. The production was beset by problems, including a model train that crashed, and while it was heavily advertised during the 1978-1979 season, it suffered from bad reviews and low viewership; despite attempts to salvage the show by reworking the cast, it never took off and left the air after only three months. *
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Special guest stars: Dandy Don Meredith, Vickie Lawrence, and George Hamilton. It’s got success smeared all over it!
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The only other atomic locomotive that I can think of offhand is the mighty Dreadnought in Harry Harrison’s A Transatlantic Tunnel, Hurrah! ATTH is both a good piece of alt history (as I’ve said before, a genre prone to “what if the Spartans had a nuke?” crapola) and a bit of proto-steampunk (I guess by IDing it as steampunk, the alt history is a given).
Googling ‘atomic train locomotive’ turns up a late-50s ‘how I stopped worrying and learned to love the bomb’ train set – the Kusan KF-100 Atomic Train. A youtube clip of the train in action (sorry, pas de mushroom clouds):
Fish wish list
There are many fish I’d like to chase, but three keep turning up in my fantasies. For some reason, they’re all (at least in part) gold – go figure. Today, the first – the majestic mahseer. Saying you want to catch a mahseer is kind of like saying you want to catch a trout – there’s more than one kind. The one I’m thinking of is the Himalayan or golden mahseer – Tor putitora. Westerners have been angling for golden mahseer since the mid 1800s – large fish, swift water, incredible setting, fabled history – I’m in.
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A note on the painting above – a week or so ago Steve clued me to a Walton Ford calendar – while messing around on Amazon, I stumbled across a date book as well. This is for the week of June 29. The painting is titled Baba B. G. and I’m pretty sure the fish are mahseer (they are big cyprinids of some sort for sure).
Several of the paintings are quite specific in their references. One (also at Long Beach) responds to Microsoft chief Bill Gates’ visit to India in 1997, when Ford and his family were spending an extended time there. It shows “Baba B.G.” as a North American kingfisher holding court to eight other brilliantly plumed birds sitting lower down on the same branch. A large fish, skewered by the branch where it meets the trunk, hangs nearby, spilling smaller fish from its slit gut. Some of those tumbling from its belly are shown in the process of eating even smaller fish. Such is the law of economic imperialism. *
Oh, and I couldn’t resist the calendar either… A hint as to the identities of the other two species – they have the same name in Spanish and one is freshwater, the other salt.
Transient (I hope) twitter issue
You may see a request pop up from ‘Twitter API’ asking for an ID and password when you first visit DoaMNH. It’s an issue with the twitter badge (halfway down the right margin). The twitter folks are working on it – if it’s not resolved soon, I’ll comment out the badge. In the meantime, just click cancel and press on. Sorry ’bout that…