Because I Require Stimulation

If you’ll check above you’ll notice that the words Distant Early Warning no longer loom over the blog. I’ve been thinking about changing the name of the blog for quite a while now. I started calling my blog Distant Early Warning after a Rush song and it stuck with me for years and years. Thing is, I wanted something fresh and new that could go on for another for years until I need something else that’s fresh and new.

Which kind of explains the title, doesn’t it?

I consider myself a citizen of the Internet. One of the reasons I don’t watch a lot of television anymore is because I’ve got this issue. I’ve had it since I was a baby. See, I’d lay on my back with my bottle on my chest while my hands fiddled with some toy and my feet kicked the wall or fiddled with some other toy. It’s sort of an ADD thing where I crave stimulation.

I’m better than I used to be. Back in high school I’d listen to music while watching TV and reading a book. Or I’d play the Sega Genesis while different music played in the background. I can still do all of these things, but I try not to.

Still, thanks to the Internet, I can do all these things at the same time and not look like I am. I scare fewer people that way and it works out for everyone. So it’s not unusual to find me sitting in a coffee shop, hooked up to WiFi; and I’ll be drinking coffee, listening to Winamp, occasionally pausing the music to watch something on YouTube, and the reason I’m watching something on YouTube is because I found it while checking something out while writing a post for my blog.

Look, I never said I was normal.

So the stuff you’re finding lately on this blog and in my gallery is running a helluva gamut because, quite frankly, almost everything interests me. Fashion, sex, comics, art, music… you’re finding all that here and more, so I think it’s time for a name change.

Oh, and since you’re here, and reading this… perhaps you require stimulation too?

PS: I swear to god I’m not making this up: I wrote this post while cooking dinner, watching House Hunters on the telly, listening in and occasionally commenting upon my wife’s telephone conversation, and chatting with a lovely archivist friend on Gtalk.

This is my theme song. Everyone should have a theme song. Seriously, it’s like pro wrestling. What if, just what if you had a song that played for you every time you walk into a room? If life had a soundtrack, and I think it should, then every time you see me appear on the screen, this is the song that should be playing.

In other words, anything you want to know about me can be learned from this one song.

Ladies and gentlemen, Frank Turner.

A few days back, I posted a picture of me as my Twitter avatar. There’s nothing so weird about that except for the fact that I don’t recall ever using a picture of myself for Twitter. I’ve always used an image of some faceless entity. So an image of the real me (all be it a weird image of me) caused a minor sensation amongst my Twitter followers (as minor and minor sensations can be).

I got into a conversation with a couple of them about facelessness and my affinity for it. She asked if that could be a blog post because, quite frankly, I can’t explain it in 140 characters or less. So here goes.

The truth is, you encounter facelessness every day. Do you have a favourite radio station you listen to on the way to work? Maybe it’s one of those morning shows or something where the DJs are supposed to be funny but so rarely are. At the very least, you might have a station you just listen to regardless of the time of day. It may even be NPR, who knows? So that station has a staff of on air personalities, from the weirdo morning DJ to the chipper and cheery female DJ who is on in the afternoons.

What do they look like?

Seriously, would know them if you bumped into them on the street?

Been to a movie recently? You ever notice how there only seems to be three or four guys who provide voice over work for trailers? If you’ve been to the movies at all recently, say the last 20 years, you’ve heard them. If you go to the cinema often, you’ve heard them a lot.

What do they look like?

I watch a lot of documentaries, especially historical and science documentaries. I’m a big fan of Mythbusters and How It’s Made. Both of those shows have a narrator to explain what’s going on when something is just happening without any explanation from anyone else. This is especially true on Mythbusters where the narrator is just as much part of the show as Adam and Jamie. He chimes in when the two guys are doing awesome stuff, but they’re not explaining it because they are, after all, busy.

Have any idea what he looks like?

You probably don’t. They’re real people, but utterly faceless. They’re not devoid of identity at all, but they lack the one quality we, as humans so readily equate with identity and that quality is a face.

For some reason, this kind of thing fascinates me. The Question, from DC Comics, is my favourite superhero for a lot of reasons. However, the biggest reasons I dig on him is his secret identity. DC and other comic characters have a long history of stupid secret identities. Superman puts on glasses and no one recognizes him. Oliver Queen puts on a small, barely there, green mask and suddenly everyone thinks that Ollie is gone and the Green Arrow is here. Diana Prince lets her hair down, takes off her glasses (what is it with glasses), and takes off some of her clothes and suddenly she’s Wonder Woman!

We all recognize that as bogus because they didn’t change their appearance at all. For a mild mannered reporter, Clark Kent happens to be built like a fucking train yard. No one ever seems to question the fact that Ollie Queen and the Green Arrow look exactly alike. Diana Prince is a beautiful, Amazon type woman who’s tall, has black hair, and wears these weird bracelets. And very few people in DC ever put two and two together to get Wonder Woman out of this.

Meanwhile The Question doesn’t wear a weird costume. Hell, the man is wearing a suit. He doesn’t have any strange headgear like Batman. Indeed that’s just a regular fedora on his head. And he doesn’t wear a colourful mask like Green Arrow or take off his glasses like Superman and Wonder Woman. Instead, he takes off his face. His disguise is the ultimate disguise. You can’t recognize him not because he’s wearing a costume, not because he’s sporting a cape and cowl. No, you can’t recognize because he doesn’t have a face. In the real world, and thankfully in comics too, if there’s no face, we’re pretty much clueless about who a person is.

In art, the concept of facelessness is there to remove not only identity, but also personality. It can be dehumanizing, or it might not. It could possibly be liberation. Either way, we always see the absence of a face as something radical, something far removed from the norm.

When I created the Faceless Historian character, I used ideas I’d developed from watching late night History Channel documentaries. Most of them revolved around World War II as subject matter and almost none of them had a visible narrator. He was just someone in the background, voicing over stock footage of dogfights, Hitler speeches, and scenes of infantrymen assaulting, well, something. I thought about the work that went into one of these things, especially since I was kicking around the idea of doing a documentary series myself. A lot of people work on a documentary, and the one person you might see when it’s all done is whoever is going to speak during the production.

Nope, that person remains faceless. Although the Faceless Historian doesn’t, it’s hard for some people to believe that I’m the only guy working that show. I think it’s obvious, but some people have been very surprised to find out that I have no research support, no camera man. no editor, no sound man, no editor, and no director. I do the whole thing from the research and writing to setting up the cameras to shooting it to editing and postproduction. Hell, that opening and closing song? I wrote it and recorded it using my electronic keyboard and Adobe Audition.

Perhaps the historian may not be so faceless this time around, but the writer, musician, editor, producer, webmaster and sound guy are.

In my odd love for all things faceless, how could I have ever forgotten another hero of yesteryear? A man who was faceless and caffeinated by my favourite beverage. Damned right I’m talkin’ ‘bout PEPSIMAN!

(You have to shout it. It’s one of those names that you can’t just speak. It must be shouted.)

Witness the holy hell Jesus H. Christ awesomeness that is PEPSIMAN!

So you see, I have this thing with facelessness. It comes from many factors and many thoughts and many different sides of my personality. I will freely admit that my personality and my psyche aren’t your average things, which also contributes to the insanity.

Recently I found out that they’ll soon be releasing a large action figure of my favourite superhero, The Question. He’s a character that damn near defines facelessness.

Oh yes, dear readers, I will have one of these and, if I can, I will have two.

I’m a child of the 80s and, like a lot of people my age, I look back on that decade with a sense of nostalgia. I see a happier time with Atari, Transformers, Masters of the Universe, GI Joe, Nintendo, Punky Brewster, Silver Spoons, Ferris Bueller, and The Breakfast Club. It was a happier time and things were simple, right?

Well, yes and no. See, unfortunately I grew up and became a historian. So looking back the 80s I can’t help but see the Iran/Contra Scandal, the assassination of John Lennon, Reaganomics, the attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan, the rise of AIDS, the Tylenol scare, the Challenger disaster, the creation of infomercials, Pan Am Flight 103, and Tiananmen Square. In other words, no decade, no matter how magical it seems later on, is without its blemishes.

Something occurred to me yesterday while I was listening to some music at work. It wasn’t anything profound, but it had everything to do with how I was listening to music. As I wandered around the staff area of the library, I had my new iPod Touch tucked into a pouch on my belt. (I haven’t gotten a proper case for it yet.) I was listening to one of my stations on Pandora via the wireless internet in the library.

Let me rephrase that in a different way so the meaning is crystal clear. I was walking around with a magic device that pulls the kind of music I want from computers in a far away location and it brings it to me in lovely clarity on mysterious waves of electromagnetism. If I like a song, I can tag it and then purchase it later via another magic box connected to a vast network of information using a simple numerical code which allows instant access to the funds in my bank account. While I do that I can send a message to a friend who lives over 1,500 miles away and they will get it within a few seconds of my sending it. Meanwhile I’m watching Monty Python’s Flying Circus on a big screen, high definition television. I don’t own a copy of the show I’m watching, I’m getting it over those same magical waves and pumping them through a state of the art video game system which delivers gameplay and graphics so real, certain games have actually frightened me.

After that show is over I’ll take my magical device and go for a walk and listen to music or pre-recorded talk shows about technology and cyberculture. It’s a smaller capacity magic device so I only have a selection of around 1,700 songs to choose from, which is 85 times the number of songs I could carry with me back in the 80s. If I don’t like a song, I can instantly skip to another one, or search for one I will like.

When I get back home, I’ll work on a documentary show that I’m writing and shooting using a high definition camera which is only slightly bigger than a pack of cigarettes. I can edit it together using the very same magical box I used to send that message to my far flung friend and purchased the song I heard earlier in the day. Oh! But I got interrupted by a “phone call” from another friend who lives even farther away that the first. I put the words phone call in quotes because that call came to me over the very same network I used to purchase the song, watch Monty Python, send the message, and listen to music. I talk to them for a while and ring off. I put the finishing touches on my show and upload it to the network so anyone, anywhere, with a similar magical box and a connection to the network can view it.

Thing is, I wouldn’t want to live in another time than the one I’m currently living in. We do strange and wonderful things every day and we do them so often that we begin to take them for granted. Indeed we forget about them for a while as we look about on the past and think how much better life supposedly was then. Sure, now isn’t perfect, but neither was then and later on isn’t going to be perfect either. But you know what, I bet it’s going to be enjoyable; if you allow it to be so.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m gonna go play Ninja Gaiden on my NES emulator. It lives on the same magic box I used to send the message to a friend, talk to another, edit my movie…

I read the news that Netflix would soon be available on the PlayStation 3 with some interest and by “some interest” I mean I was pumping my fist in the air and shouting “Oh hell yeah, motherfuckers!”. Some people complained about the method, which, unlike the Xbox 360, requires a disc be inserted into the PS3 to access Netflix. I don’t see any problem with this since it’s not like I’m going to be playing a game while viddying some Netflix.

So I popped the disc in the PS3, went through a quick and easy activation phase that took all of ten seconds, and then started browsing through my queue. It was that simple.

What this means is that, in the last two days, I’ve watched more telly than I have in the last year. Because Netflix has a bunch of television shows available, along with several documentaries I’m into, I can kick back whenever I want and catch them on my big screen instead of my computer monitor. What this means is that I’ve been watching Columbo, Monty Python’s Flying Circus, Sherlock Holmes, and other stuff that really brings out the nerd in me. Even as I type this I’m watching Jeremy Brett as Sherlock Holmes and the case of the Norwood builder.

My issue with television is that I prefer older shows or foreign shows over most of what’s on now. I’m an Anglophile, so I watch a lot of British shows. Indeed, the only American TV programme I will make an effort to watch is House, MD. Why? Because it’s well written, funny, and oh yeah, stars Hugh Laurie, one of my favourite British actors.

Even the kids looked at me strangely today. Daddy was watching TV? Daddy never sits down in front of the TV unless there’s a video game controller in his hands. Yes, dear, Daddy is watching TV. Now be quiet, I’m firing up the next episode of Quincy, ME.

A few days ago my iPod starting acting up. I started it up one morning and it immediately demanded that I hook it to a computer running iTunes so it could be restored. Weird, I thought, but I hooked it up and it did its dance and a few minutes later I had a working iPod. No worries.

Then it did it again a day or so later.

Well, damn.

So I’ve been restoring it every other day or so and that’s starting to get really old. I started looking at replacements and settled on the iPod Touch. I can’t buy it right away, but I’m going to do so just as soon as I get the chance.

Then a flier arrived in the mail yesterday that made me pause for a few minutes and reconsider. Apparently I’m due for an early upgrade from Verizon and they’d really think it keen if I bought one of their new Droid phones. I gave it some thought because, hey, the Droid looks crazy cool and I dig the Android OS. In the end, I decided against it for two reasons.

One, I can only afford to buy an iPod Touch or the Droid, but not both.

Two, I use my phone roughly half an hour per day, and that includes any texting or browser use. Meanwhile, my iPod is used anywhere from two to six hours per day. I listen to a lot of music, several podcasts, a few video podcasts, and so on. Fact is, there are times I have my iPod on me when I’ve completely forgotten my phone.

So while the Google phone from Verizon is a tempting geek toy, my phone isn’t broken and my iPod is. Besides, for the price, I’d get far more use from the Touch.

I’m a huge geek and computer nerd. I think that surprises no one. And if it does, well, please form a line to the left and we’ll get acquainted.

So I’m active online and I’m active in many places online. I have this blog, my adult blog, my Twitter stream, and on and on and on. Recently I’ve been looking for a way to put those into one place using a method that all the cool kids call “lifestreaming.” Basically a lifestream is a snapshot of everything you’re doing online, or almost everything. It’s a place where a person can go and see what you’ve been up to in a very compact way. In other words, one could go there and see my tweets on Twitter, my photo uploads on Flickr and Twitpic, my posts from all my blogs, the latest episodes of my show, the latest videos of the library band I’m a part of, and whatever else.

So with a little WordPress magic, a couple plug-ins, some RSS feeding, and only a tiny amount of swearing, I set up a lifestream project. I call it Faceless Lifestreaming and it captures almost everything I do online. If there’s something I’ve forgotten, I’ll add it in later, but right now it’s got a lotta stuff there just from the initial importation of the RSS feeds from the various sites I use. I’ll never post anything there by hand, or if I do, it’ll be incredibly rare. The entire point is that it’ll maintain itself, doing what it does to capture my life online.

Feel free to check it out and see what a perverted library nerd with a healthy interest in science and history gets up to in his online time. Over the next couple days I may do some tweaking with it, but other than that, I should be able to leave it alone and have it do its job.

I have a knack for strange medical conditions. I am, after all, an asthmatic hemophiliac with hepatitis C. I also have a weirdly curved back along with some interesting hip degeneration on my left side.

So last week I came down with hiccups. Now, like most people, I’ll get hiccups and they usually go away in about half an hour, tops. Not this time. No this time the hiccups lasted for three days.

That’s 72 fucking hours of pure hell.

I don’t know if the Gentle Reader has ever suffered the horror of hiccuping for a prolonged period of time, but it’s not fun. And these were hiccups that came from the very depths of my diaphragm that would force me to inhale sharply before the hiccup and that resulted in a hiccup followed by a loud belch. It stops being funny after the third time.

So I took a trip to the doctor to procure some pills.

Let me repeat that in a slightly different way.

I had to go to the DOCTOR to get DRUGS for HICCUPING. What… the FUCK?

Turns out there’s a drug called Baclofen that’s specifically for the treatment of prolonged hiccups. I’m to stop taking it this evening and see if they come back. If not, life is grand. If they do, I’ll have to go back to the doctor to find out why.

Here’s hopin’.

There’s nothing like coming down with a flu bug to put a crimp in your blogging. On Monday, I started to get sick and came home from work early with chills and the shakes. I took a nice hot bath which sent the chills away and cured my shakes. Then I got out of the tub, toweled off, and proceeded to throw up. By Monday evening I had a high fever and nausea.

Tuesday was even worse in that department. I always felt cold no matter what the conditions were. In the middle of August, in Arizona, I laid in bed wearing a sweat suit. Occasionally I’d get up to heave and one time was particularly magical because the muscles in my throat tightened hard enough to squeeze my carotid artery and shut off the flow of oxygenated blood to my brain which led to cerebral ischemia.

In other words, I damn near fainted while throwing up.

Thankfully, Cat brought home generic NyQuil and I was able to keep it down. So I slept and sweat and then sweat some more and woke up feeling half human Tuesday night.

Wednesday I was over it, but I was so damned weak from the sickness that walking around was a chore. I’d lost over five pounds in two days and still had issues staying hydrated.

The point is, I’m back and better now, and I’ve got things to write about. Sorry for the absence, guys!

(cross posted to my info science blog)

Some of you may remember that I created, write, and narrate a podcast called Hyperlinked History. It’s done pretty well, especially when one considers that it’s basically a radio show about history.

Well, when I first started out with this idea, I wanted to make Hyperlinked History a full show, like an online TV programme. At the time (a year ago) that just wasn’t feasible. I lacked equipment and I lacked skills. So I read up, studied, learned a few things, and now I think I’m ready to give this thing a shot. I have a new website specifically for the show and I’ve already uploaded the opening credits as a sort of teaser for the whole thing.

Episode 01 should go online sometime around the end of August, so stay tuned!

See this? S

That’s a capital S. Now, picture the base of that capital S as the top of my pelvis. The pelvis should be pretty level along the horizontal. Now, see how the curve of that S juts out the left?

Yeah, my spine does that.

I went to the chiro and he took x-rays. Then he read the x-rays and then he kind of threw up in his mouth. And then he told me that I’ve got some choices. I can do four months or so of adjustments and physical therapy or he knows a really good spinal surgeon he can refer me to.

Since I’m a hemophiliac, the surgery is right out. And by right out I mean it’d be better for me to end up in a wheelchair than have spinal surgery because I’d have a far better chance of surviving a wheelchair than I would back surgery. On the upside, he fixed the pain in my back and the sound coming from my lower spine was enough to make everyone in the office take notice.

So on the back side of things, I am well fucked and far from home. I have spinal curvature that would make a professional wrestler cringe. Thus, I’m kinda done with running for a little while. And you know what? That depresses me more than anything. I love running. Then again, I also love living, my family, my kids, my job, and I’m very partial to the whole “walking upright” thing as opposed to “I think I need to grease the wheels on this chair” idea.

FML, as they say. But really, it could be worse. We’ve caught it at a stage where something can still be done about it that doesn’t involve high grade anesthesia, scalpels, several units of whole blood, and enough clotting factor to fill a tanker truck.

As for the PT, I’m really thinking about supplementing it with Tai Chi or Yoga. Basically, I have to focus on the muscles on the right side of my spine because, well, apparently I barely have any muscle there at all.

Stay tuned for further developments along with complaining, bitching, whining, poor me, and perhaps even some crying when it really hits me that I’m not going to need running shoes for a good three months.

In other news, I can understand those governor’s aides misunderstanding him. He told them the truth about what he was doing. They just misheard him. After all, “I’m hiking the Appalachian Trail” does sound a lot like “I’m having some Argentinean tail.”

(rimshot)

When I was in my early teens, I suffered from the delusion that art was just something you looked at. You either thought a particular piece was beautiful, or you didn’t. Art was simple, you admired (or not) and then you moved on. The idea of spending an entire day at an art gallery made no sense to me. Surely you wouldn’t even have to break stride as you looked at the paintings and sculptures. You could just wander through and then go on to the next activity.

Now, I’m not a religious man at all. But I am eternally grateful for a mousy little Catholic nun named Sister Wendy Beckett.

She’s not an imposing person. Indeed, she’s a contemplative nun. In our parlance, she’d be classified as an honest to goodness hermit. So she lives a life of silence, poverty, and prayer. Oh yes, she also happens to be an expert on art and, on the rare occasions that she speaks, she’ll probably be talking about art. That’s when the magic happens.

I caught Sister Wendy’s documentaries one day while flipping through channels. It caught my eye because, after all, a nun talking about a Renaissance painting is something one doesn’t see everyday. After the first couple of minutes the novelty wore off because she was no longer a nun to me, she was an instructor. And I’m not talking about your stereotypical Catholic school teacher, I mean she became my art professor.

She spoke about art not as a thing, but as an entity. She pointed at paintings and told their stories as if she were telling you about her good friends and their lives. For the first time, I really started to care about the story and the meaning behind great works of art. Sure, I thought Saturn Devouring His Son by Francisco Goya was a work of fantastical horror, but when Sister Wendy explains something like that, it becomes something so much more. It could be related to Goya’s relationship with his son, or it could be a depiction of the horrors of war, or many other things.

In other words, it ceased to be a work of horror and became a story, just as much a story as that told in the pages of a book.

Sister Wendy opened my eyes to art. Now, when I enter an art museum or gallery, I plan on spending time there. I plan on coming back because, if it’s of any size at all, there’s no way I’m going to make it through the whole thing in one go. I’ll take some paper with me so I can make note of pictures and sculptures to come see again.

After all, it takes more than a few minutes to read a book just like it takes more than a few minutes to really appreciate a work of art.

Further Information and Reading:

Sister Wendy- The Complete DVD Collection (Amazon)

Sister Wendy’s Story of Painting (Amazon)

Sister Wendy Books and DVD (via Worldcat. Search your local library!)

So the WordPress directory that holds my blog? I, um, accidentally deleted it.

Yeah, I’m a fuckin’ idiot. I was using a graphical FTP programme (FireFTP actually. It’s one helluva plugin for Firefox and a really good FTP client. It works even better if you’re not a fuckin’ idiot.) and I meant to delete the directory listed above the WordPress directory.

Now, GoDaddy can restore it back to new… for a small fee of US$150.

Um, no thanks. I love my blog, but it ain’t with $50, let alone $150.

So for the next few days you might see some changes here and there, and a few old posts, as I work on rebuilding this sucker. Really, I don’t mind. The initial shock sucked, but this gives me a chance to do a few things I wanted to do anyway.

For those who do the blogging thing, might I recommend Windows Live Writer? See, this is an instance where Microsoft screwed up and made something good and useful. Live Writer is a blogging client that connects to Live Spaces, Blogger, WordPress, and other accounts. It fairly rocks but today’s saving grace is that it archives you old posts on your computer. So I didn’t have to rewrite anything. I did have to go fetch images again, but that wasn’t hard.

You know what I need? I need a new spine. The one I currently own is defective.

It seems like every few months or so it’s got to act up and be a prick, which is totally uncalled for since it’s supposed to be a spine and not a prick. I don’t even know what makes it hurt. Sometimes it’s running, sometimes I guess the sun is in the right house of the zodiac and Mars aligns with Ceres and thus the cosmos fucks my spine.

Since I’m unlikely to get a new spine, I do want to get one little invention that I saw in, of all things, a James Bond movie. In the movie Thunderball, Bond goes off to some kind of health spa for a little R&R and to have lots of sex with the female masseuse. There’s a machine in that health spa that was used to stretch the spine and literally sort of pull on it from both ends.

THAT IS TOTALLY WHAT I NEED.

I remember the masseuse character saying that some patrons of the spa called the machine “The Rack.” Fine. If it stretches my spine, that’s what I want.

So, does such a machine exist? I don’t know, but if it does, can someone let me know?

In the meantime, I’m on a cane for the next week or so. I freakin’ hate that because I can’t really run on a cane, but it does help me get around the library.

As I mentioned in my previous post, I didn’t become an astronomer even though I was well on the road to that after Carl Sagan’s documentary series Cosmos and his many books influenced my thinking and devotion to science.

My parents had a fairly good library in their basement and besides a couple books on space, there was a good amount on history. So I soon learned that I liked reading books about World War II and other historical stuff. So even though I had my sites set on science, history fascinated me as well.

It never dawned on me I could do both, combining one with the other. At least, not until I was a junior in high school. One afternoon, while sitting in an honours history class that netted me absolutely no honours at all, the teacher made the decision that he didn’t want to teach that day. So instead he was going to show us a movie. He fired up the VCR popped in a tape and I was treated to this grinding sound and then the activation of an arc light.

I actually knew what an arc light was because we used them in my theatre tech class.

Then this man with a lovely accent started talking about history and science and how seemingly unrelated things were actually connected. That made sense, since the man was James Burke and the show is called Connections. He ran through a series of events and demonstrated how the invention of the plow not only could save civilization but also created civilization. More than that, he discussed the history of science. Up to then, I didn’t even know that there was such a thing as science historians.

After that, we got to watch another episode later on. And he demonstrated how Mediterranean traders rubbing gold on touchstones led to the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.

James Burke not only makes history interesting, he makes it fun. This especially comes out in the next couple of Connections series where he starts doing the historical bit, while drinking.

My kind of historian there.

I was hooked and my academic direction was forever altered. Just as Carl Sagan put me on the path to science, James Burke threw a fork in the road and I immediately shifted my focus to history. Today I have a degree in history and a bi-weekly history podcast where I do something very like James Burke’s Connections series. The biggest difference is that Mr. Burke has a research team while I can only draw upon the historical talents of me, myself, and I.

Further Information and Reading:

Connections DVD set (from Amazon.com)

Connections (from Amazon.com)

Connections DVD set (via Worldcat. Search your local library!)

When I was about five years old, I watched a lot of PBS. There wasn’t any educational reason I did this. My parents weren’t the type who let me watch nothing but PBS. My reasons for watching PBS were very simple and kid-like. I was (and still am) a rabid fan of Sesame Street and I knew that, if I watched long enough, I’d see some Muppets. I had no idea how television schedules work. My parents never subscribed to the TV Guide. I just knew that PBS showed Muppets and thus I watched PBS. One night, sitting on the floor of my living room, I awaited Muppets. I was a little miffed at the animal programme that had just gone off and hoped that the next show would have Muppets.

It didn’t.

The next show started with some odd sound effect and orange lettering which spelled out WGBH. Then the most beautiful music I’d ever heard (at the age of five, mind you) started playing and stars floated on the screen. It was a show about space. I liked space shows so maybe I could watch this until Muppets came on. Besides, the music was nice.

Then a very passive, very soothing voice started to talk about space and the wonders of the cosmos. That voice belonged to Dr. Carl Sagan and the name of the show was Cosmos. My parents were more than a little amused that their kiddo was enraptured by a show about stars and planets. After it was over, I remember turning to my mom and dad and saying "I want to be an astronomer when I grow up!"

Cosmos changed my life in two very important ways. To this day, I am fascinated by space. I’ll read anything you give me about space whether it be a popular science article in a magazine or a scholarly paper in a prestigious scientific journal. It’s a testament to the effect Dr. Sagan had on my life that, even though I didn’t become an astronomer, I know enough about it that I can follow along with a serious scientific essay with little trouble. Usually I get lost in some of the math. I can do calculus, but not that well.

It’s no wonder why Cosmos won so many awards. After all, Sagan was able to explain incredibly complex astronomical concepts and make them understandable to a five year old boy.

I mentioned a second way that Cosmos changed my life. Well, the soundtrack for the documentary was done by the Greek new age composer, Vangelis. Soon after hearing that music, I wanted to try that piano sitting over against the wall. The first real song I learned was Chariots of Fire, by Vangelis.

I introduced my oldest kiddo to Cosmos a year ago. Every so often he still asks me “Daddy, can we watch that movie about space?”

Further Information and Reading:

Cosmos DVD Set (from Amazon.com)

Cosmos (from Amazon.com)

Cosmos DVD (via Worldcat. Search your local library!)

Cosmos (via Worldcat. Search your local library!)

Sometimes, all we need is a clear explanation. We need someone to take something complex and talk to us about it in a way that we can grow to understand it on some level. We may never achieve expertise, but we walk away more intelligent, and just a tad wiser, than we were before.

I want to talk about a few people who explained things in excellent ways. I don’t look up to many people as "heroes" in the classical sense, but in my book, these are the people who changed my life and, in a very real since, made my life. So over the next few days, I want to tell you about some of my seven favourite explainers and how they affected me. Perhaps, if you have some time, you could seek them out and learn from them too. If nothing else, I can guarantee you that they’re entertaining. So, at the very least, you won’t be bored.

Whether or not I bore you is a completely different matter.