After a particularly dire late night choice of Friday films on TV, the best of which was 1992's The Unforgiven with Clint, Morgan and Gene, I went to bed pondering - is there anything else that looks like a Project SWORD Moonbase LEM as shown above?
..........and hey presto, out of that wacky dream machine called sleep we have PANETTONE LEM!
Bravo bravo! The box is a definite contender for the main body I reckon! The right size (phew!), cheap AND the contents are edible!
A second normal box for the base and some K'nex legs and voila, off we go! Its common knowledge that small astronauts love Panettone bread and butter pudding too!
I do enjoy looking for LP astronauts on the web. They have really taken to the medium and small populations continue to break out all over.
Here's a few more recent spottings all on auctions past around the globe.
A posse of greys.
A gang of aliens and the less common three legged flying saucer.
A pair of Goldens.
My personal favourite today, a medley of cake toppers including LP white spacemen, rocket and aliens together with the small candle-holder train I used to stock boxed on my own toy fair stall.
Last but not least, a couple of White Silvers on a small cake topper.
This is an early'ish internet reference to a relative of Project SWORD toys, the Hoover Space Glider.
Auctioned on the net in France in 2001 along with a Tomy Space Climbing Mobile, its one of the few instances of a SWORD-like toy online that I can find from the early Noughties.
The housing module - below left: its legs are painted and the body is ready for finishing touches like sword decals!
I just have to decide if the top clear half needs some space 'furniture' or illuminating.
The rader dish array - right - is finished and the pedestal is painted. Not sure what to use for the boxy base. Might just use a box!
It was always going to be difficult and it has been - the Light Module below. I have painted up an old tin as the base section.
The lamp itself is an old mini table lamp again painted in space cream - bottom pic. K'nex rods and old storage wheels make up the legs.
Old model sprues make up the V's, which were really tricky to stick onto the tin but my trusty super glue came good.
Finally I have painted up an old plastic crane - bottom pic - to use on the top of the 'garage' unit. I've got the crane but no unit yet! I need to be able to cut a 'door/ramp' into it so I'm leaning towards a plastic paint 'tin', which more or less has the right cylindrical shape. Progress!
However, I foresee my biggest problem already - the LEM. There's just no way I can make one from scratch!
Made some progress on the 'dish housing'. Quite chuffed as I picked up a cheap Hawker Hunter Aircraft Reflector dish on Ebay from Jet Art. Fits the bill I reckon.
Added a paintbrush handle and a few other bits and its getting there. I even mounted the dish on a small mini desk fan so that it might rotate but it just got too fiddley so I ditched the idea!
The tin with the V attached to it is the start of the 'light' module, the V being the first leg mounting. The tea is real and I even forgot to take the bag out! Scruff!
Just returned from a very emotional hospital visit to see our Grandson. He's premature by nine weeks and very very small. Its quite simply heartbreaking to see such a tiny and vulnerable human to whom you are related but can't really help except for speaking to him through the side of his plastic box.
His young parents are true super heroes. They face a difficult journey ahead for sure but I will be there along with Missus Moonbase to lend a hand whenever needed.
So, feeling somewhat drained and angry I am going to do some blog writing, which usually helps to calm me down.
Today's topic for discussion is artificial intelligence or AI for short, with robots thrown in for good measure.
Last night I saw a TV programme about the greatest watch ever made, the Marie Antoinette. A beautiful see-through pocket watch, every conceivable Eighteenth Century innovation the maker Breguet could muster was included in his masterpiece, known as the Grand Complication and commissioned for the French Queen Marie Antoinette.
The phrase Grand Complication is beautifully apt for AI as well, as is the very concept of clockwork. Early attempts at making things human-like relied on clockwork mechanisms. Just think of those creepy automata kept under bell jars that play harpsichords.
AI has always fascinated us. We seem to have an innate desire to recreate human life in other materials, which is odd given the miracle that is the birth of a human child itself. Is that not enough? I suppose having copies of ourselves and our stuff makes us understand our world a bit better, makes us more at home somehow.
Just think of toys, especially our beloved space ones. Many are simply miniatures of real rockets and spacecraft. Why do that? Do miniatures of the adult things around us help us develop as children?
Alchemists wanted to go the whole hog and thought they could summon entirely new beings by mixing blood with semen. They called these creatures Homonculus and believed they would help them turn base metals into gold.
Imbuing inanimate or inhuman objects with human qualities has been a feature of popular culture for hundreds of years. Frankenstein, Dracula, Wolfman and the Mummy are all anthropomorphs as are the more recent David boy doll in Kubrick's seminal AI and the synthetic people populating the TV series Humans [series 2 starting soon].
In the 1972 portmanteau movie Asylum by Amicus, Herbert Lom creates a humanised robot from toy parts and some yukky squidgey bits. Never a good idea in a horror film, the silver robot with a miniature Herbert Lom head does his creator's dark bidding and I don't mean on Ebay! Here's the fellow - anyone recognise the toy robot?
Doing our bidding seems to be at the heart of AI and robotics, the two being often connected. In fact I can't think about AI without envisioning a robot, but this could be as a result of spending my childhood with too many Zeroids.
You Tube is awash with clips about clever robots, each one trying to be outhuman the last. Like the sad Pino I have boxed up in my attic and the tamagotchi's gathering dust across the globe, we love to get our robots to entertain us, whether they are toys or not. ASIMO was and perhaps still is the most pleasing of all the synthetic humans thus far but he does have some competition.
Check out a few new contenders in this short clip offa You Tube.
Is it really the purpose of AI and robots to simply entertain us, to dance for us and bring us juice? The advancement of the science brings the ethical quagmire ever closer. Could a robot have enough AI to ever be classed as human? If so does that 'human' enjoy the same rights as us and is it bound by the same laws?
Yes, its the very essence of Science Fiction but one day soon .... who knows?
What do you think readers? Will synthetics walk among us?
