Cylons Three

 

Fixing a Die Cast Eagle Freighter

 

A Cylon Points the Way

 

Sean's Birthday 2024

It's Sean's birthday! Here we are in Leaf Rapids. He's older now, and no longer wears jumpers. Happy Birthday, younger brother!  
 

70s TV for 7TV

Here's another 28mm scale television set. This looks a lot like a couple of the televisions the Woods family had in the 70s and 80s. Ah, the old days of clicking through three or four channels with one dial and wondering what the other was for. (UHF, but we never had UHF channels in any of the places I grew up.) 
 

New Soviet Minicam

In games of 7TV, you're not just playing out a skirmish; you're creating an episode of a television show. Accordingly, Crooked Dice has helpfully provided miniatures for the metagame, including this cameraman with camera. I'm starting to get the hang of how to approach the super-fine details: brace your arms to minimize shaky hands, use your magnifying glass, provide plenty of light, and use the finest brush possible with barely any paint. That's how I managed to paint this guy's sunglasses and headphone straps. 
 

Second Comes Right after First

Somehow I wound up with an extra moon buggy pilot, but I have nothing for him to drive. He's decided to visit The Village for  a spell. 

I tried to add a moon dust grime effect here, and it seems to have worked reasonably well. 
 

Gordon Lightfoot: A Legend Passes

Gordon Lightfoot, one of my favourite musicians and a genuine national treasure, has passed on. 

When I was a kid growing up in northern Manitoba in the 70s, I played Mom and Dad's 8-track of Lightfoot's Don Quixote over and over. I wouldn't consider myself a huge fan of folk or country music in general, but Lightfoot transcended genre with music and lyrics of great sensitivity, grace, and power. His songs told stories that rang true and evoked powerful emotion. 

Regarding Don Quixote itself, the title track is exquisite, and I love "Alberta Bound," and especially "Brave Mountaineers," but "Looking at the Rain," linked above, is just...transcendently sad and mournful, soulful and gorgeous, and I can't help but sing along and cry every time I hear it. It's the song I hope survives civilization for aliens to find so that someone out there knows that humans were capable of creating something so timeless and magical.

And of course there are all those other magnificent works from his other albums..."Sundown," "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald," "Carefree Highway," "The Canadian Railroad Trilogy," "If You Could Read My Mind," and, most especially, "Early Morning Rain..."

He was a gift to the world. Thank you, Gordon Lightfoot, forever timeless. 

Happiness Expressed as Abstract Covers of 1970s Science Fiction Novels

 

The Mystery of the Arctic Cat

For a few years in the 1970s, during our time in Leaf Rapids, we had an Arctic Cat snowmobile. I don't have any photos of our Arctic Cat, but I do remember it having some purple highlights, so perhaps it was a model much like the one above. 

Leaf Rapids was a great place for snowmobiling. There was plenty of snow for nine or ten months per year, and exploring the dense forest on the back of a snowmobile gave me a great sense of adventure, even if I was just a passenger. 


 

The Other Side of the Theatre

For most of the 1970s, I lived in northern Manitoba. My paternal grandmother lived in Cranberry Portage, so sometimes we drove a little further, to about 10 km south of Flin Flon, to the Big Island Drive-In. Because the summer days in northern Manitoba are so long, the shows tend to start pretty late. On a clear night, the stars were amazing; light pollution was, and is, pretty low up there. These days you listen to the movie's audio via your FM tuner, but back then we had to attach giant metal speakers to the window, and boy, were they heavy, at least for a small child like me. There was something really special about sitting in the front seat between Mom and Dad, sharing popcorn, a small soda clutched in one hand. 

I believe I saw at least three movies at Big Island, but I only remember two for certain: Heroes, starring Henry Winkler as a suffering veteran of the Vietnam War, and The Other Side of the Mountain, a drama based on the true story of skier Jill Kinmont. All I remember of the third film is a woman in a small brown room sitting at a piano while composing a song. 

I feel as though I also went to a drive-in theatre in Edmonton once, but I can't say for certain; I certainly don't remember what film I might have seen. 

The Big Island Drive-In remains open to to this day, so if I ever head back to Flin Flon, I won't let the opportunity to see a movie there pass me by. And wow, check out the concession offerings! 
 

Stable Trek Animated: Season Two

"The Pirates of Orion"

"Bem"

"The Practical Joker"

"Albatross" 

"How Sharper Than a Serpent's Tooth"

"The Counter-Clock Incident" 

Stable Trek Animated: Season One

 

"Beyond the Farthest Star"

"Yesteryear"

"One of Our Planets Is Missing"

"The Lorelei Signal"

"More Tribbles, More Troubles"

"The Survivor"

"The Infinite Vulcan"

"The Magicks of Megas-tu"

"Once Upon a Planet"

"Mudd's Passion"

"The Terratin Incident"

"The Time Trap"

"The Ambergris Element"

"The Slaver Weapon"

"The Eye of the Beholder"

"The Jihad" (This was the least racist result Stable Diffusion provided...)

Forgotten Sunrise

Golden light forces its way through the forest's defences

To paint a brave, solitary ray across the foaming surf

Of an undiscovered river with no source and no delta
What the hell kind of river has no source and no delta? 
Metaphorical rivers bubbling briskly through bad poems
 

The Further Adventures of the Adventure People

 

Over ten years ago, I wrote about the Wilderness Patrol Adventure People set I received as a Christmas gift way back in 1976. To my flabbergasted surprise and utter delight, on Saturday Sean gave me a virtually complete, mint-condition Wilderness Patrol set he found on Ebay. They're all here: the forest ranger, the collie, Red, the pilot, the sleeping bags, the pontoon boat, the plain, and the ATV. The only thing missing is the tow rope, which is pretty insignificant. The toys and figures are all in outstanding shape considering their age, and they brought a whole raft of memories flooding back. These guys really lived up to their name, both in Leaf Rapids and Leduc--exploring the "desert sands" of Leaf Rapids (the beautiful beach sand ground so finely by the retreating glaciers thousands of years ago) and the "dense jungles" of Leduc (the lawn and plants of our back yard). 

Sean, this was an incredibly thoughtful and impactful gift, and I'll find these guys a place of honour when the library is transformed into the game room. 

Legion of Super-Thrones

When Dave Cockrum redesigned Duo Damsel's costume in the early 1970s, one-half the outfit was purple and the other orange, divided down the middle. When Duo Damsel split into her two selves, one wound up wearing an all-purple costume, while the other was all in orange.

 Chameleon Boy quipped "Very clever...one of you is dressed in orange, the royal colour of the days...while the other wears purple, the colour of the nights!" 

Inspired by that comic, I painted these thrones in purple and orange. 
 

I've watched the video for ABBA's new single "I Still Have Faith in You" dozens of times now, but only today did I notice that at about 3:07 in the video there's a ticket stub for ABBA's 1979 concert at Northlands Coliseum in Edmonton. Thanks to Sean for providing the link above to a cool CBC story about the concert. 

And here's the music video itself. 

 

Six Million Dollar Mag

Many years ago, almost certainly in Leaf Rapids, I bought this issue of Charlton's The Six Million Dollar Man magazine. Published in black and white, the magazine included comic stories and photo essays. 

The story descriptions on the table of contents provide a decent preview of the writing style used for the scripts. It's a very strange style; dry, with sudden jolts of emphasis. The art inside is quite decent, although the male gaze was definitely heavily in play when it comes to the women characters. 

If I still had the cover, I might have considered keeping this. But I lost it so many years ago I honestly don't remember what the cover looked like. And so the one and only issue of this magazine I ever read slipped into the recycling yesterday as part of my merciless quest to create space. 

Na Noo Na Noo

Last night I painted this cheerful visitor from another world. Not bad, if I do say so myself. 
 

Clothes Make the Han

Today I discovered Han Solo looks a bit dorky without his signature vest.