Two VFX Examples From The Bourne Identity (2002)

This post will showcase two very elegant visual effects shots/sequences in the movie The Bourne Identity (2002).

Sadly none of the case studies today feature giant robots or things that explode loudly.   This is because of the filmmakers' failure to understand that giant robots and exploding things seasoned with an occasional space battle or cute furry aliens are the most important elements when crafting a significant visual effects project.  Instead what we have here is an odd little film with a few likable characters and a lot of violence, but very few explosions.  Even so, we can use this project as a modest example of how visual effects can improve a film or lower the cost of shooting something without an explosion per se.

There is a well-known aphorism from film editing that goes something like "Good film editing should not be noticed by the audience."  The editing should be subliminal, you should not (consciously) notice it.  In a similar way, if the audience thinks "wow, what a great visual effect!" that is not the desired result. They should think it is real.  Of course there has to be some level of suspension of disbelief for that to work in many cases when, for example, one is showing a giant robot eating an alien world or some other subject not drawn from day-to-day experience.

But in the case of a film that takes place in a contemporary setting and in which there are not overtly fantastical elements, then hopefully the viewer will just be involved in watching the film and not think that he or she has just witnessed a visual effect. There are some surprisingly effective and useful visual effects that are completely unnoticable unless someone points them out to you.

To illustrate this, I am going to showcase, as best I can, two shots/sequences from the first Bourne movie: The Bourne Identity (2002). I think that both of these sequences work very well and both of them are implemented in a remarkably simple manner.   In both cases, digital technology made the shots easier to execute.  In the second case, the shot could not have been done without a digital technique.

Sequence 1: The train at night

In this sequence, Jason Bourne, who is suffering from amnesia and does not know who he is, has very little money, is travelling on a train from France to Switzerland.

The shots break down as follows (times are approximate):

1. A five second shot of a modern train going into a tunnel,

2. A twelve second shot with a slowly moving camera of Bourne looking out a window of a train, either looking at the tunnel moving outside the window or at his own reflection,

3. A three second shot of Bourne's hand fiddling with a plot device,

4. A thirteen second shot of Bourne at his destination outside the train looking lost.

One of the unusual things about this sequence is that it moves very slowly.  In general, we do not like people to have the time to study the effect, as they can usually see through it if we give them more than a few seconds.  But in this case, we stare right at the effect for 12 seconds and it works fine.

In the second shot, the one with the moving camera, the original element was shot in a train that was not moving, with the window blacked out (the reflection of his face and seat are there, but it is black otherwise with no sensation of movement). There is a light on the set illuminating Bourne's face intermittantly to simulate the idea that the train is passing something that is giving off light, such as a signal, but there was nothing beyond the window but black in the principle photography.  The camera was tracked in 3D using some early tracking software and a 3D element of some abstract, dark, tunnel-like textures rendered moving past the camera at high speed (e.g. with a lot of motion blur) and rendered with the tracking camera move. This was then composited against the original shot using a simple hold out matte generated of the outline of the window. The element was basically just overlayed on top of the shot in the area of the window, you did not mind that the textures were visible "under" the reflection of Bourne.

The end result of this is that you completely buy that Bourne is on a train moving at night. One 3D track, one simple 3D element, one travelling hold out matte, and a simple additive composite within the hold out area. I think it works perfectly and it was very inexpensive to execute.  Without it, I don't think the sequence would have been as believable (in other words, had Bourne been looking at his reflection against a black background without any sensation of motion). Had it been shot in reality, e.g. a train moving at night, it would have been much more expensive.

Alternatively, one could have used rear projection to do a similar shot, but you would not have been able to move the camera that far off axis in a rear projection situation.   One could have done a similar shot with a moving camera and traditional techniques, I think, but it would have been more difficult.  Using traditional techniques, I would have shot the principle photography using a motion control or motion tracked camera and then reused that move to control a motion control camera to shoot additional elements, in particular to  rephotograph rear projection art work which had previously been created with a suitable blur of movement (for the movement of the train past the window, not the movement of the camera).   Either I would have shot blue/green screen outside the window of the train in the principle photography, or if I was using motion control to shoot the plate, repeated the movement with a green screen in order to get a hold out of the window.  Then I would have optically composited and it all would have worked.  Here the digital techniques really do make this shot straightforward, however, and less costly to execute.

Here is the sequence online.
http://youtu.be/qyAcJEU4xco

Sequence 2: The incident in the park

After Bourne arrives in Zurich, we have one establishing shot of him alone, at night, in Zurich with snow falling which is about 7 seconds long. We cut to Bourne sleeping in the snow on a bench. Two police officers wake him up, ask to see his ID, and tell him he can not sleep there. One of them gestures with his nightstick, and Jason grabs it. The two police officers are standing above him, he is sitting on the bench, unarmed.

The next six or seven shots (depending on how you count) are each very short and appear almost continuous, even though they are not.   In these shots,  Jason disarms both men and knocks them both unconscious as well as taking one of the police officers revolver.  When he is done, Bourne stands puzzled over the two unconscious men and seems to wonder what happened.

It looks completely natural and Jason does not even appear to be working very hard.

It reminded me, as it was intended to, of when I have watched a dancer or gymnast perform: it looks as if what they are doing is easy even though you realize that what they are doing is impossible.

What they did is as follows. First, a martial artist working for the production choreographed the actions of Bourne and the two officers moving very slowly. As shot, the actors moved at a comfortable speed and did not try to maintain a constant rate.  The camera changes position during the shot so presumably it was shot several times from different positions.   You will also notice that Jason appears to move in what seems like clean, deliberate motions with brief pauses between them. The speed of the performers was not constant, to get the effect of the police officer on the right being knocked to the ground, for example, the (presumably) stand in had to basically throw himself onto the snow so it would react properly.  

Then the effects supervisor, Peter Donen,  took the shot(s) and digitally retimed them, varying the apparent speed continuously through the shot(s). There is also some very good film editing going on.  The sequence that results looks flawless to me, and as I have mentioned, almost appears continuous, even though in actuality there are several cuts.  In this case, digital retiming which makes use of a variety of image processing technologies involving motion analysis (image flow) between frames enabled this approach.  Previous to this digital technique, the traditional techniques could do retiming but only in specific increments of the frame rate, e.g. one could skip frames and double the speed of the shot, but that would not have been sufficiently flexible and continuous (e.g. moving at fractional speeds).  Keep in mind also that this retiming technique could only work in this situation as long as one keeps to very short cuts because we have snow falling.  Assuming that this is real snow (and it very well might be, or practical snow on the set) then it will appear to change speed if we do retiming on longer sequences and just allow that to be viewed.  So this technique has to be used in very short segments or elements like the snow have to be added later.

Here is the sequence online.
http://youtu.be/kl1uGvPAJEQ

So here we have two examples of visual effects used to serve the story that were both elegant and inexpensive to do. The second sequence is an example of making something that is inherently fantastical look natural and realistic.  We can forgive the lack of a cute furry alien or a giant robot since the filmmakers have executed their inferior robot-less vision with such skill. 

The effects supervisor and my friend, Peter Donen, passed away about four years after these sequences were done, tragically of a heart attack in his mid-50s. What was especially sad was that his career was just taking off after decades of struggle. He had the misfortune of being the son of a very famous man, the director Stanley Donen.

Transcript of a talk given by Dr. Richard Hamming

Since I am stuck out here in the middle of nowhere in this perfect republican hell, I am not in a position to hear talks by interesting people without huge effort. Unless it happens to be on the Internet, of course. Even so, finding something actually rewarding on the Internet instead of merely interesting is hit and miss. So when I come across something I think is valuable there is likely (in this new world) to be a post about it, so I can find it again.

Here is a transciption of a talk given by Dr. Richard Hamming at Bell Core in Murray Hill, NJ in 1986 on the topic of "You and Your Research". A better title might be, "How to do great work" or it might even be, "How I, Richard Hamming, did great work".

Be that as it may be, its a quick read and I found it entertaining and possibly even useful.

http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~dsb/Inspiration/hamming.pdf

If you don't know what a Hamming code is, you should, and you can read about it here.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamming_code

The Strange Case of the Bye Bye Birdie (1963) Blue Screen Photography

[This post should be rewritten, there are two different  topics.  The first topic is how digital has increased the volume of visual effects by increasing the range within which the effects can be used, and a second post about what happens when things dont work and a classic example of using the shot anyway.]

[As an addendum to this little note, I want to remind my readers that we are talking about 1963 here, or more likely, 1962.   When I talk about blonde hair and moving cameras and pulling mattes, please recall that there is no tracking technology at the time (that I am aware of) and none of the work that has been done since then to electronically or digitally pull a matte from blonde hair.  I will do a later post on this topic,]

The coming of digital visual effects and the use of computer animation at the expense of the traditional arts may not have eliminated poverty or improved society dramatically, but it has had a notable impact on the filmmaking production process. It has done so in a number of ways, but mostly by greatly increasing the volume of work that can be done with these techniques by lowering the skill level required to execute them. Ironically, using computers has not reduced the cost of these techniques, using computers always increases costs, but it did dramatically increase the volume of shots that could use these techniques and in many cases eased the restrictions with which these techniques had to be used.

When First Secretary Joseph Stalin spoke at SIGGRAPH he said, "Quantity has a quality all its own" referring not to tank production, as some believe, but to volume production of digital visual effects. 

In the bad old days, a film was greatly restricted in its use of special optical technologies and other techniques in their production process. All films would use optical techniques for opening titles, end credits, and fades and dissolves. It used to be that the film editor acted as the visual effects supervisor, in a certain way, for a film, or most films. On top of these seemingly mundane but actually extremely important uses, a few films would make use of exotic technologies such as optical compositing, rear screen projection, and paintings on glass and other such special processes if the story and the studio permitted. A very few films and even fewer filmmakers would make these technologies part of their oeuvre, and then we might have a Hitchcock or a Disney, and films like North by Northwest, 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea, Forbidden Planet or Mary Poppins.

Just wanted to say goodbye !

If you examine these films I suspect you will be surprised by the very small number of visual effects shots that are actually in those films. You may also be surprised by the way the limitations of the art and craft of visual effects informed some of the creative decisions. We will showcase some of these brilliant uses of this technology back in the day when you had to know something to use them successfully and couldn't just do whatever the fuck all you wanted and expect someone to fix it later.

Here are two examples of the kinds of restrictions that I am referring to: (a) the camera should not move during certain kinds of shots, or should move only in a very constrained way, because you are going to have to create other elements and those elements will also have to track with the camera and that will be annoying, difficult and expensive and (b) do not put someone with blonde or red hair in front of a blue screen because it is extremely hard, and often impossible, to pull a good, partial density (e.g. the matte is semi transparent) matte for it using the chemical blue screen process.

But whatever you do, do not put a blonde or red head in front of a blue screen while moving the camera. That would be a really crazy thing to do.

So what happened when someone ignored these guidelines and the shot didn't work?

There are three approaches and only three as far as I know: (1) cut the shot from the movie, (2) spend a lot of money trying to fix it and edit as best you can around it, or (3) use it anyway and pretend you always meant to do that.

It was in reference to this third approach that Georges Danton advised the Assemblee Legislative in 1792 saying "Il nous faut de l'audace, encore de l'audace, toujours de l'audace!", which means something like "What we need is audacity, then more audacity, always audacity!"

Consider by way of example of this third approach the fascinating and not completely understood case of the opening of Bye Bye Birdie (1963).

This film is an early 60s repurposing of a Broadway musical that fictionally transforms the real-life draft of Elvis Presley into the US Army into a parable about how one can spin any adversity into a cheap publicity stunt. The film has a number of entertaining songs and a spectacular performance by the 22 year old Ann-Margret as the teenage love interest and ingenue.

The film opens with Ann-Margret in classic 1950s High School drag attacking the camera and belting out the title song with all the energy and enthusiasm you could ask for.  She sings those immortal words:

         Bye bye Birdie! I'm gonna miss you so.
         Bye bye Birdie. Why'd you have to go?
         No more sunshine! Its followed you away.
         I'll cry, Birdie, till you're home to stay!

        I'll miss the way you smile, as always just for me
        And each and every night, I'll write you faithfully!
        Bye bye Birdie, its awful hard to bear,
        Bye bye Birdie! Guess I'll always care!

        Guess I'll always care !
        Guess I'll always care !

(See the sequence on youtube.  You want the first 1:15 seconds only.   The rest is from the end of the movie. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1t3cBTb3xPc)

It may not be Shakespeare but Ann-Margret is so completely drop dead gorgeous and talented and wonderful and I think the sequence is very entertaining.  I can just imagine the director filled with enthusiasm saying: "Oh I have an idea, while we are doing this shot, how about adding a fan offstage to blow her hair around a little, and lets make sure she turns around facing away from the camera to show her hair off, oh yes, and Ann?  Could you shake your head around a lot so we can see your fabulous hair?  Thanks thats great!"

Just try to pull a matte for this hair, you idiots!

Do you notice something odd about this shot?  Something about the background color?  Its rather blue, don't you think?

The story that is reported is that the director, George Sidney, was so taken by Ann-Margret, who was not at the time a well-known star, that he proposed to the studio that they write a song for her and use it at the front and end of the movie. The studio declined so Sidney paid for the shoot himself, spending a reported 60,000 $US. When the movie opened and Ann-Margret was famous, the studio reimbursed Sidney. The song used the music of another song from the play that was not used in the movie version, with new lyrics written for the purpose of opening and closing the movie. 

The unconfirmed story is that Sidney planned to composite her against more newspaper / news footage of Birdie going into the army so he shot against blue screen.  But, so the story goes,  he gave up the idea of compositing the sequence since it would have been too expensive (and I doubt he would have been very happy with the results).   I have a vision in my mind of the effects people called in to review the scene and looking at it on the movieola and smiling grimly every time Ms. Margret shakes her head at the camera and her hair flies around, thinking to themselves, who is going to tell the director the bad news?

So I am guessing that the director said something like: "Fuck it, no one will be looking at the background anyway, they will be looking at Ann-Margret.   Just cut it in and no one will notice."

And I think that was the right decision. 

As far as I know, this is the only major bluescreen sequence in a movie that just uses the bluescreen photography as is as if they meant to shoot it that way.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bye_Bye_Birdie_(film)

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0056891/

___________
Revised 1-15-2013

SIGGRAPH 2012 Mini Trip Report

[This post will be regularly updated as I think about things to add.   I have put a comment in italics about a test that I saw that I was not supposed to see.  It was by far the best thing I saw at SIGGRAPH].

I always try to get my friends to write trip reports of conferences they attend so that we can all benefit from the experience.   Of course they never do, its too much trouble.

So, to lead by example, here is my micro trip report of SIGGRAPH 2012.

It was a plausible and useful addition to the long line of national SIGGRAPH conferences. It was a worthy addition to the "new SIGGRAPH" I might argue, one that does not demonstrate breakthroughs per se, but does let colleagues talk to each other and does have new ideas and some progress on some fronts if you concentrate on the technical program. The best part of SIGGRAPH was the individual conversations and relationships that occurred, as always. This is also often hit and miss.

The worst part of SIGGRAPH was that, as far as I can tell, there is no economic opportunity there. If you went to SIGGRAPH to get work you were going to be disappointed as there was none there worth speaking of. And none that anyone knew about either. A total zero.

I took the opportunity to try and get to know some people better that I had only seen over the years, particularly Copper Giloth and Jane Veeder. I had an opportunity to talk to the head of something at SIGGRAPH, possibly the national conference, Jeff Jortner.

At the Pioneer's event, I ran into Rodney Stock. Rodney has apparently become fabulously wealthy by creating (with some partners) a device which cuts paper to designs. Something about a partnership with China. I was delighted and thought it was also very funny. He claims that their major customers are in the "Red" states, e.g. he is referring top republican women who cut little paper ornaments for parties, or something.

Technically, the two best parts were the Lytro camera and the MIT work on taking pictures of photons and showing global illumination through a coca cola bottle.

The best animation that I saw was something I can not talk much about.  Through my friend Josh Pines I met someone who had been at ILM and we talked about a number of things, and it happened to come up that I am a giant fan of "tests", which I think are a misunderstood and underrated art form.   He showed me a test for a project that is now cancelled.  He just happened to have it on his laptop.  I can not say what it was.  It did involve motion capture and human figure animation in a non-realistic usage (e.g. animated characters was the goal, not Benjamin Button reality).  It was about 5 minutes long.  It was done at a production company that no longer exists.   

This test was fantastic.  It was a really, really good job.   Of the four main characters, I completely bought the realization of three of them.  The fourth was problematic, but they knew that, and if the project had been continued it would of course have been worked on.   

I saw one thing at Emerging Technologies that was great.   Unfortunately, I am at a loss of how to describe it.  It basically was an exhibit that showed the influence of vision on the sense of touch.   When I find the references and a picture or two, I will do a post about it.

The trade show was about the right size for me. I did not get a chance to do more than about 1/4 of it. I was particularly fascinated by the presence of ESRI which is a major company in the Geospatial world. They were there with their software CityEngine.

I had essentially no contact with anyone from Autodesk.

Other than the Disney party that had no Disney people at it, there were no parties of note that I was invited to. At that party I ran into a fabulous entrepreneur who I will write up in a later post.

I had lunch with Tom Duff, Keith Goldfarb, and Ken Perlin. I talked to Pat Hanrahan, Jim Kajiya, Glenn Entis, Carl Rosendahl, Maija Beeton, Paul Debevec and Ed Catmull. I ran into Peggy Weil and Perry Hoberman. The 80s party was pleasant and among other people, I ran into Liz Ralston, Jane Stefan, Anne Marie and even Brad deGraf from dWi. Also Kerry Colonna who denied ever meeting his famous Roman relatives.  Also Jeff Kleiser, Allen Battino, Joan Collins and Phillip Bergeron of course.

I had a nice conversation with Greg Turk while trying to get him to his train on time.

I was able to track down Mark Levoy who told me that he was no longer working with the Forma Urbis Romae.

Michael Kass was very generous with his time and tried to generate new ideas for me, in terms of what it is I am supposed to do next.

For the first time in many years, I did not see Nick England or Mary Whitton at SIGGRAPH.

They tell me that Jim Blinn did not attend this year.

I tried to attend the awards thing this year, but found it impossible to sit through.  I did not attend the Keynote speech as it did not seem very relevant or interesting.   It may have been, but there was no way I could guess that from how they presented it.   I did not attend the Electronic Theatre, that event has been dead for over 15 years.

As always, the Job Fair was completely useless for me. I did have a very pleasant encounter with someone who tried to couch me on style and approach.

I ran into Bob Lambert briefly at SIGGRAPH. He looked a little thin to me, and he was tragically dead a few weeks later.

Special thanks to Michael Deering and David Coons who helped sponsor me at SIGGRAPH. Without their help, I could not have attended.

20th Color Imaging Conference Nov 12-16 2012 Doubletree Hotel in LA

The 20th Color Imaging Conference is in LA this year from November 12 - 16 at the Doubletree Hotel in Downtown LA.  In spite of a major dose of Hollywood glamour, it looks very good.

It looks as though they are repeating the Academy Tech Council presentation on color in the history of the motion picture industry.  This is a fabulous presentation (if indeed that is what they are doing) and if you haven't seen it you should.  I plan to write about the original presentation in this blog eventually.

One year, many years ago now, I took a course on color from Dr. Hunt.  It was great, although I am not sure he is teaching it any more.

This is a really great conference, for what it is worth.  It is not inexpensive.

http://www.imaging.org/ist/conferences/cic/CIC20%20Preliminary%20Program.pdf

Fromkin on British Diplomatic History and its Role in Understanding Lawrence of Arabia

From time to time, this blog is going to recommend some book or books on a topic.   The goal is to help my readers be so much better informed on important issues that we face every day: from the Indo European language "problem", to deciphering Linear B, from the name of R.E. Lee's horse:  these are topics which we all need to know well in order to live in our modern world.

The recommended book is basically background for the Israel/Palestinian dispute.  It amazes me how many people I know who have strong opinions on this topic and yet do not know much, if anything, about the history of the region and its people.

So since this topic is considered to be one of the top threats to world peace, it seems to me that my well-informed readers would be better off to know a little more about the history, and one particular period is especially relevant, and that is the period right around WWI when the Ottoman Empire was collapsing and the League of Nations assigned Great Britain to partition that region between the different competing groups in a way that could be perceived as "fair".   This is the period when, among other things, the Balfour Declaration happened, when Allenby took Jerusalem, when Jordan was created, Syria was created, Lebanon was created, etc.   What you think is the "always been there" configuration of countries in that part of the middle east was created, out of whole cloth, by the British with a little "help", thats sarcasm by the way, of the French and a few other countries.

The book is David Fromkin's book "A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East".

If nothing else, it will make Lawrence of Arabia all the more interesting when you see it again. And while we are on the subject of Lawrence of Arabia, check out the link below to a web site that goes over this movie in infinite detail.

Die!  Die!

The book:

http://www.amazon.com/Peace-End-All-20th-Anniversary/dp/0805088091

The analyis of the movie:

http://filmladd.com/?LawrenceOfArabia_05

Paperman Breakdown / Disney Project of Some Sort

Tom Brigham found this on youtube.

This is a Disney project called "Paperman".

This is the sort of project I would love to do if I am ever in a position to do a project.  It has, at first glance, some interesting technology and a noble goal, or at least, so it seems, which is to do 3D animation with some of the aesthetics of 2D animation.

3D animation is in many ways a step backwards from 2D.  I was shocked when 3D appeared to wipe out 2D: how unexpected, unfair, and undesirable!

Damn.  Where did I leave my keys?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OKl9mpGMCiA&feature=youtu.be

All copyrights in all ways owned by the Walt Disney Company.  I presume they do not mind us publicizing this work, but who knows, we will find out.

Tom Swift and His Amazing Underground Conspiracy Theory

When researching my posts on "Do Mysterious Booms Indicate a Secret Aerospace Project?" for this blog, I started to delve into the beliefs on the Internet regarding secret underground facilities, to broaden the piece beyond its limitation to secret aerospace projects. The origins of many of the recorded mysterious booms are almost certainly underground, not showing the signs of sonic booms, hence the research into subterranean construction. But I recoiled in horror and quickly turned away.

My impression was that the "underground conspiracy" theory people are really nutty. Of course, I must recognize that some of this perceived nuttiness is in the eyes of the beholder. How do we differentiate "wackiness" from "scary nutty"?  I will now compare and contrast a UFO theory with an underground theory by way of example.

Some of the UFO people believe that "the CIA is reverse engineering the alien anti-gravity drive from the spaceship that they recovered at the end of WWII from the Nazi secret laboratory where they had been working on it since the spaceship had crash-landed in the 1930s." This has a certain ring of fabulous imagination to me, for some reason, even if it is a little, just a little, unbelievable.

But many of the "underground" people believe (so I read on their web sites) that "Giant tunnels underneath the USA, from coast to coast, connecting secret and huge underground bases, built by atomic tunnel creation machines that can create a massive tunnel at a rate of 7 miles per day and leave absolutely no residue (the mass displaced is somehow coated onto the side of the tunnel making it perfectly smooth and robust, instantaneously). No radiation, no waste, just instant tunnels. And why is our govenment secretly building these tunnels? Why to destroy civil liberty of course. And they are all in it, all of them, all of those people building these secret tunnels to destroy liberty are keeping this dark secret and those who dare to talk about these tunnels, and the secret bases, and the vast conspiracy are silenced! Except of course those on the internet who talk about it, I guess they are not silenced. But they will be! Just you wait and see! And somehow this is all linked in with the Chemtrails conspiracy and some others that I did not completely follow, something about making us all impotent, I think.

For some reason, I find this much more disturbing than the theory that the CIA is reverse engineering the anti-gravity drive, but maybe it's just me.

Nevertheless, I want to propose to you a theory for where some of these arguably insane belief systems come from. To the best of my knowledge, this theory has not been presented before and so I am out on a limb here as my evidence is circumstantial at best. But maybe someone with more resources, time and credibility can take this idea and develop it sufficiently in the proper venues. If it is perceived to have merit, that is.

It occurred to me that in order to have many of these beliefs, one must be really disconnected from any sort of understanding of physical realities. Gravity is still gravity, even if you have an anti-gravity drive. Matter is still matter, and hot matter has to cool, even if you have a magical tunnel boring machine. Heat, you know, energy, neither created nor destroyed, you know? Just calling something atomic doesn't mean much in this day and age, and hasn't meant something all that special since the 1960s or so. Maybe even the early 1960s at that. Flying saucers from outer space will still make sonic booms in our atmosphere unless they can change their shape during the boom, perhaps, but they will have to do something. They are not exempt because they have a "mysterious" energy source.

Where could these crazy science magic ideas have come from?

Well I do know one potential source. As a child, I had read a series of fake-science adventure stories, where just calling something Atomic did mean that it had magical powers, and where a small number of "brilliant young scientists" could build devices in no time at all that could do amazing things, work the first time, never kill anyone, save the world from the Brungarians (1) and yet everyone could be home in time for dinner. Mom, I have to test the atomic rocketship! Tom, you just be home for dinner, I have been cooking all day! Oh, ok, Mom.

Yes, Tom Swift, Jr.

I read all 33 of these books and even then, 10 years old, I did not think they were plausible. Nothing in our world works the first time, but every one of their amazing inventions did. Never over budget. Never any problems that a good screwdriver and a wrench couldn't fix. And never any lack of money. No US government or local city government to come in and say what are you doing building rockets in your back yard? No problems at all.

So here is my theory. That somehow there are people out there who read Tom Swift Jr but did not realize that this is not the way the world works. They believe that people can actually build the Repelatron Skyway, the Ultrasonic Cycloplane, the G-Force Inverter, the Diving Seacopter, the Atomic Earth Blaster, and yes even the Giant Robot and the Flying Laboratory.

You and I might not be able to, but Tom Swift, Jr could.

And be home in time for his home-cooked, American dinner.   

So maybe these sad, conspiracy theorists are actually just manifesting reflections of a pulp fiction dream, the American inventor who can do anything, for whom no problem is too hard, for whom money is not a limitation, and where the family supports him. All gone wrong of course, and twisted into an evil conspiracy, but a reflection nevertheless of this dream, now long abandoned and never to return.

_____________________________________________________

1. In the Tom Swift world, the bad guys were almost always the "Brungarian", which seems to be some conflation of "Bulgarian" with "Hungarian", both of which were at the time these novels were written behind the Iron Curtain.

Anne McKenney ( - 2009)

[I just got email from Elizabeth/Beth McKenney and she had some corrections for me.]

I just got the word that Anne McKenney passed away several years ago in 2009. I had been out of touch with the McKenney family and just got back in touch and found out.

Anne was like a second mother to me. I was friends with her five children and spent a huge amount of time in their great three-story house in Richmond, Va. Anne's husband, "Speed" McKenney, was friends with my uncle Harry and the two of them famously built the Virginia power grid out to rural areas in the 1950s (I think).  Beth tells me that no one knows where "Speed"'s nickname came from.

The good news is that I am back in touch with the family again and maybe I will somehow figure out how to get enough money to visit them in Richmond, Va.

In the small world category, Anne was the Aunt, I think, of Glorianna Davenport of MIT.  In other words, according to Elizabeth, Glorianna is Anne's niece.  I always have trouble keeping these relationships straight, I admit.

This is a picture of Anne.  Yes, a bit older, but definitely looking like her and with the same smile that I remember.

This makes three friends that I hear have passed away in the last month. I certainly hope that this trend does not continue.

Thank God that this is not going to happen to us and that we are not going to get any older.

[Addendum: A friend heard how distraught I was that I had not visited Anne when she was still with us (because of poverty of course) and he is determined to visit an elderly friend of his, assuming he is still here, we can only hope.  So maybe some good can come from this.  Learn from my mistakes, you who are reading this.]

A Tree Falls in Los Angeles

The following story is mostly true, just slightly abbreviated for impact, so to speak.

A few years ago a person was killed while sitting in his car waiting for a street light to change. I didn't know him, I just read about it online. At the time, Los Angeles was having a particularly bad case of the Santa Ana winds, and things were being ripped apart all over the city, and one of the worst dangers is that an older tree or branch will be torn off and smash into something and that is what happened here. To avoid this sort of thing is the reason that the city and local communities send out units to trim older trees while everyone complains that their favorite tree is being mangled. The city tries to prune the trees before something breaks off in a storm and hurts someone and then they get sued. Obviously they missed one.

The man was sitting in his car waiting for the light to change near the Sepulveda dam, out in the valley, and BANG a tree dropped on him without warning and killed him.

So I told a friend in Los Angeles this story. "A man was waiting at a street light in his car," I said, "and a tree fell on him and killed him."

"Oh my god!", said my friend. "Thats terrible! What kind of car was it?"