Weekend Assignment #200: When Are You Going?

Here we are at a milestone: the 200th-ever Weekend Assignment. John Scalzi assigned the first 196 of them, which makes me very much the new kid still in that respect. I've been participating since Weekend Assignment #7, though. In honor of the 200th in the series, I'm going with a topic that's been on my mind since high school, over 30 years ago.

Weekend Assignment #200: You've recently become friends with someone who unexpectedly reveals that he or she has a time machine, all tested out and ready for adventures. Your friend offers you one round trip to anywhere, anywhen, backwards or forwards in time. What's your destination? Or would you rather just stay home?

Extra Credit: The first trip is so wildly successful that your friend offers you one more trip, this time in the opposite direction. When are you going this time?

Okay, so it's not the most original topic evah. Scalzi actually wrote a time travel assignment, back on February 24, 2005; but its focus was a bit different, limited as it was to witnessing an historical event. Also, for Weekend Assignment #100, he asked for future facts about yourself. And I gave time travel-related answers to a few topics that weren't really designed for that, including the first Weekend Assignment I ever wrote about. Nevertheless, I think there's enough play here for some fun entries, especially from the science fiction fans among you.

As for me, if I only get one trip, I'm going for the sure thing, something I know I can see on a specific day, and that will have emotional resonance. That all boils down to one key word for me:

Beatles.

We know what the Beatles were up to, day by day in 1962.

Thanks to Beatles historian Mark Lewisohn and others, we know where the Beatles were and roughly what they were doing pretty much every day from 1961 on, and a lot of days before that. With my friend's help I could arrange to visit the Garden Fete at St. Peter's Church, Woolton on Saturday, 6 July, 1957, just in time to see John Lennon meet Paul McCartney for the first time. Skipping over the Quarry Men and Silver Beatles eras, and their Hamburg gigs at the Indra Club and the Kaiserkeller in 1960, I could zero in on Thursday, 9 February, 1961 at lunchtime, when John, Paul, George and Pete, unadvertised, played the Cavern Club for the first time as Beatles.

But I think I'd have to go for Sunday, 19 August, 1962, their first Cavern appearance with Ringo instead of Pete Best. The following Wednesday, the 22nd, Beatles were again at the Cavern Club, appearing before television cameras for the first time as they performed Some Other Guy. Maybe my friend would let me stick around for that session, too.

For a trip to the future, of course, I can't look up the most likely date and place in advance. I would skip the next fifty years or so, on the grounds that there's a good chance I'll see that chunk of the future in the normal course of events. Too far forward, though, there's a chance the planet isn't there any more, or is uninhabitable. Assuming my friend has already done some exploring, I think I'd simply ask him (or her, but I think it's him) to surprise me.

So how about it? Travel in time in your mind, or, at least plan the trip! Write it up in your blog or journal, and come back here and leave a link to your entry in the comments. (A link to this entry in your blog would also be appreciated.) Then stop back in a week to see what everyone else came up with.

Karen

Weekend Assignment #197: Missing Words

Ok, we're going to try this. John Scalzi left off with Weekend Assignment #196, so with his permission and encouragement, let's try to keep it going. Here then is Weekend Assignment #197 (numbering corrected Saturday at 4:38 AM):

There's not a lot on tv these days.

Weekend Assignment #197: Now that the WGA strike has had lots of time to affect the prime time television schedules, how is it affecting you as a viewer? What show do you miss most, aside from reruns? Do you miss your weekly appointment with that ill-behaved doctor, or your visits to Wisteria Lane? Does it bother you not to laugh at fresh jokes on your favorite sitcom? Or are you just as happy watching reality shows, or new episodes of shows that have been held back until now? We want to know!

Extra Credit: how are you spending the time instead?

To be honest, I don't watch much broadcast TV myself. Most of the time I watch DVDs instead, if anything. But even I am missing the few shows I normally do watch. Three of them are--or were--on NBC's Monday night sf lineup: Chuck, followed by Heroes, followed by Journeyman. I kind of lost track of Chuck after he fought with his beautiful C.I.A. minder once too often, but I watched the other two every week.

And much as I like Hiro and Peter and Claire, I have to say the show I miss the most that night is Journeyman. I'm a sucker for time travel shows anyway, and this one does it well. Sure, it's essentially a Quantum Leap ripoff, but there are worse things to rip off--much worse. And the character dynamics are interesting, as the wife struggles to cope with her frequently time-lost husband, their young son starts to catch on to what is happening, and the traveler's brother struggles to make sense of what's happening with more mundane explanations. Good stuff!

Then there's Tuesday night. And yes, Julie, I do miss House MD, probably more than Journeyman. I think.

And what do I do on Monday and Tuesday nights? Why, I spend it at the computer, of course, with a DVD running on one laptop and ten tabs of Firefox open on the other!

Your turn: write up what you miss (or don't miss) on tv these days, and come back here and leave a link in comments. If for some reason you have trouble commenting (although it should work for everyone, one way or another), feel free to email your link to mavarin at aol.com. To give time for word to spread and everyone to play, I'll do the roundup of your links in one week, next Thursday night. Got it? Good! Thanks, folks! I know I'm no John Scalzi, but we don't have to lose his legacy, as long as some of us care enough to keep it going!

Edit: I have been taken to task for not explaining what the WGA is and why it matters. I don't want to get into the politics of it (let's just say I'm pro-WGA and leave it at that), but here's what it's about:

WGA is the Writer's Guild of America, the folks who write the TV shows. As has been widely reported over the last few months, they're on strike, so networks and production companies are running out of new episodes of comedies and dramas. Why it matters, aside from inconvenience to the viewer and economic impact on the entertainment industry and the New York and California economies, is that it's a battle over writers being compensated for their work in new media such as Internet downloads. The result will set a precedent in determining the extent to which new tech is made part of the royalty pie.

Karen

The Inevitable Fireworks Pics...and a Surprise

I've had a few posts in the past week with lots of text and no photos at all. Let's even things out with a handful of pictures and not much text. Ready?


I only saw one of the three main Tucson fireworks shows from the house this year. Unlike last year, though, most of the explosions were not behind a tree.


I took over a hundred photos, almost all of them with my camera resting on the roof of John's car.


The camera doesn't have a fireworks setting, as far as I know, and I probably went for the wrong setting. Still, I did okay, I think. For some of these I've boosted the saturation and sharpened lightly, and on all of them I've done some severe cropping and adjusting the tone values. They're still kind of fuzzy, but overall I think they came out better than last year.

And now for the surprise:


Early this afternoon we went to see the Brad Bird Pixar film Ratatouille over at Park Place Mall. (I liked it, but not as much as The Incredibles.) When we were at the theater a month ago for Pirates 3, we saw a Simpsons couch gag display, but I didn't have my camera with me. This time I did. Enjoy!

Funny how Homer holds the candy as if it were a remote. Mmmm...tasty remote.

The women of the family seem happy today.

And of course Bart has to be different.

The one thing that bothers me about life-sized, 3-D Simpsons is that the yellow skin tone looks much weirder and more disturbing than in a cartoon.

(I'm adding the blogplugs tag because people might want to see the Simpsons shots, Joe. Hope you don't mind!)

Karen

P.S. Carly mades it down to the temporary "Kwik-E-Mart" in Mountain View, CA, and came back with some fun pics. See them here.