listen to the new radio swordcast whenever you want on celtica radio

Of Quatermass

Of X The Unknown

Of the Trollemberg Terror

Of Jack Hargreaves

Of Susan Stranks

Of Sifu Joseph Cheng

You will hear of them all

on the new

SWORDcast

On Celtica Radio.

Listen anytime

click here.

thunderbirds cigar paper mystery

As a kid I remember having some Thunderbirds cigar papers.

They were small rings of paper shaped like a wrestlers belt and featured portraits of the Tracy family on each one.

I can clearly see them but not what they came off.

Where they children's cigars of some sort? Maybe plastic?

Or where they off adults' cigars?

Do you know what I'm talking about readers?

a gallery of star trek scratchbiulds by kevin D

Hi, with the recent mentions on the blog about Star Trek, I thought I'd send you some pictures of what little Trek stuff I've got.

I have been a huge fan of original Star Trek for as long as I can remember. It was always there right along with Anderson shows when I was a kid. It is odd that I've not done that many models from it. I have done the type1 & type2 phasers and the communicator, seen here with my old flip phone, showing how Trek influences the world!

Being a fan of machines that are characters, I have made a replica of Nomad, the probe from the episode The Changeling, where it believes its job is to destroy things that aren't perfect and that Kirk is its dad! Mine is seen here at the Leicester Space Centre!

I don't even have a great model of the ships. I've got the Corgi Enterprise, the Hallmark christmas tree shuttlecraft decoration and a Franklin Mint pewter desktop model, which was given to me! I really must make a good Enterprise one day.

Finally, just for a laugh, here is me about 27 years ago, dressed as Kirk! (It was for Children in Need!)

Take care,

Kevin

the ethics of space, the final frontier

Listening to a radio programme the other day about future-proofing the human race it would seem that our destiny is in the stars.

The future of humanity lies in the colonisation of other planets.

In the programme there were two schools of thought about these other planets.

The first was that everything around us in space is a natural wonder and should be treated as such. We should do our utmost not to contaminate other worlds with our own Earth's ecology, biology and so on. Only when we are certain that our germs, bacteria and microbes are safely contained within a sealed enclosure on another planet should we attempt to colonise it. Terra-forming was a definite no-no and we should embrace and safeguard the newness of virgin worlds.

The second school of thought put forward was that everything outside of the Earth: all the planets and their natural resources are there for the taking, rather like industrial processes on our own world at the moment. This form of space colonisation is linked to the idea of ownership and exploitation. The argument ran something like: there is so much out there that there is enough to go round and rules of demarcation are irrelevant. All the space-travelling nations of our future Earth will find sufficient resources out there to keep them happy and away from any other nations' claims. A bit like the Wild West I suppose [and Heaven forbid, maybe even Project SWORD!]

Reflecting on the programme and the current limited state of space travel I began to think of another virgin space that has been colonised, the World Wide Web.

If the analogy holds water then we know that after the initial euphoria of a democratised web, given to us by an altruistic inventor free of charge and free to use, the creep of commercialisation began with the first flush of pay-for ISP's and email companies, which has inexorably led to the emergence of internet giants like Google and Facebook straddling it like Fiefdoms growing ever fatter and more controlling!

Maybe I've just had a tiring week and I'm in need of a cold beer. What would Captain Kirk and Spock made of it all?

What do you think readers?

napping moonbaby sprinkled with faerie dust

Well, after milk, fruit tea and melon the moonbaby is napping on his poddle.

Missus Moonbase and me are well and truly kaput already and we've only been on baby detail since noon. We've got another 24 hours to go!

To help baby sleep I showed him pictures from a  book on my daughter's shelf I knew well: Faerie by Brian Froud.

This was a book I adored as a young hippy in the mid Seventies and I was pleased to see this was a later re-print for a new generation.

Froud captured the essence of Faeriedom like no other illustrator probably since Richard Dadd's The Fairy Feller's Master Stroke in the mid-1800's and Arthur Rackham in the early 1900's.

It was as if he had dipped directly into the magic kingdom with his brush and begun to paint what he saw there.

For me it merged with Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, BB's Little Grey Men, Watkin's Ley Hunters Manual and Peake's Gormenghast to form a single realm spread across the mid-to-late Nineteen Seventies like King Arthur's Camelot and the knights of patchouli.

I wasn't alone. Many people 'dug' this stuff and the music of day, namely hard and prog rock, reflected it too: Rush's Rivendell and By Tor and the Snow Dog, Zep's Misty Mountain Hop and Wishbone's Ash's album Argus, the quintessence of the Arthurian-Faerie-Middle Earth zeitgeist at the time, to name just a few.

Returning to Brian Froud I can still smile at those long lost days of my jos-sticked youth every day for hanging on my bedroom wall is the centre spread of the book, a beautiful painting of the little people, which I had framed at great expense in 1979.

Right, Moonbase baby is awake again so over and out for now.

baby Moonbase mission is go!

Currently babysitting our Moonbase Grandson for the weekend at Daughter Base Station. She's got some well earned shore leave. For me and Missus Moonbase it's a whole two days of milk, puréed veg and wet nappies!

I've brought my laptop in the slim hope that I get chance to relax. I'm having that slim chance right now!

I've also brought along my ALIEN novel but Kane's chestburster may have to wait till bedtime.

Looking after baby makes me realise how hard it will be for families of the future to bring up children in space.

First of all they will need to be delivered on a spacecraft if the human race has any chance of deep space colonisation. Families will have to be created en route to other planets. All that triumph and tragedy packed into a tin can perhaps over generations.

It's going to be very hard.

Maybe a first step would be a family on the International Space Station?

But who would volunteer their children to go up there with them?

One day a couple or a family will have to be heroic enough to take the first step.

Alas I'm not heroic at all but more importantly I'm just too ancient to be raising kids in space.

So for now this particular Grandad is happy to be on Terra Firma with baby Moonbase watching Peppa Pig!

What do you think readers? Would you volunteer?

like a century 21 toy shop

There's something wonderful about a stack of the same vintage toys and Gerry Anderson toys are no exception.

This bundle of JR21 Thunderbirds 3D Painting Sets caught my eye on Ebay [seller: retro classic]. What a gorgeous sight. Like being in a shop in the mid-Sixties!

Here's a group of my own UFO rubber baggies.

and not quite the same, a shelf full of my boxed plastic toy shop style!

Have you any bundles of boxes you would like to share?

tears in the rain

Perhaps the most poignant of all short elegies in Sci-Fi cinema, Roy Batty's rain-soaked swansong is a favourite of mine and Arto's. His replicant sadness makes his cessation above the silent Deckard all the more profound.

Rutger Hauer did such a fine job playing the role of Roy the new Blade Runner will be hard pressed to follow it.

Which Sci-Fi speeches do you like?

Wotan Wades in (again)

Sorry Woodsy, this is becoming a habit! The Illustrated Blade Runner compresses this wonderful speech into a single brief para, but also elaborates slightly with more detail.