JAPANESE SCI-FI KITS GALLERY!

This is a gallery of Japanese model kits guaranteed to get you drooling! There's so many superb vehicles in here its untrue ! What do you like?

http://usi.kir.jp/Musium/Pramodel/USI_Musium_Maker.html

Rise of the Robots

 In University today, the Computer Science department are doing a show and tell with their latest toys, a concierge style robot named 'Pepper'. Pepper employs object recognition and LIDAR imaging to map a specific environment and interact with a wide range if queries. Designed for use as a 'meet and greet' service in hotels or large businesses, the robot can track movement and respond to custom queries from public.

Robbie has nothing to fear just yet, but watching its interactions and complex hand movements is quite eerie.

A Lot of Balls

 Further to Woodsy's 'Ships and Mortar' post, here's a shot of the 'Golfballs' at Fylingdale I took out of the car window, this year on the way to Richmond in Yorkshire. Hard to see amongst the hedges, but there are lots of them. It seems to have been renamed too.

Also an English Electric Lightning outside BAE Warton too!

Next to the Lightning is a newly installed 'model' of an F22 Raptor too. The Lightning is an original decommissioned craft and has been there that long it has sparrows nesting in the intakes!

Addendum - It seems I have my balls mixed up - RAF Fylingdales is a different site and has had the geodesic golf balls removed. Just the main array is visible now. Pic courtesy of Wikipedia.

THE CABINET OF SHAKESPEARE'S SISTER

I saw Martika from Shakespeare's Sister on an old Top of the Pops t'other night. I couldn't help but notice her distinctive curtains haircut.

I immediately thought of the classic German expressionist actor Conrad Veidt and his startling look in the 1920 silent film The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari.

I know Shakespeare's Sister were goth rockers. Did their overall look come from Conrad Veidt generally?

Here's the Sister's belting out the gothic in Stay.

and here's the original trailer for the Cabinet of Dr. Caligari starring Conrad Veidt as Cesare.

Do you like Conrad and Shakespeare's Sister? 

THIS FRIDAY NIGHT

This Friday from 8pm Talking Pictures TV in the UK is showing another weekly episode of brilliant The Outer Limits.

Its followed by the fabulous flick The Pit and the Pendulum by one Roger Corman as introduced by the lustrous Caroline Munro in her Cellar Club.

All you need is beer.

SUPER KINGS RESCUE

I picked up this Super Kings fire rescue copter the other week.

It was a bit battered after all its many missions.

I spruced it up for its retirement in my cabinet.

Before.

 After.

DESTINATION SEDNA

Our solar system is vast.

It would be wonderful to cruise its outer edges.

In the meantime one of the residents of the outer edge, the secretive world of Sedna, is cruising towards us!

Flinging itself a mighty 11,000 years to get round the system, Sedna will be closest to Earth in the year 2074.

I'll be 104 years old and my Grandson, Moonbase Junior, will be 69.

This is the only chance NASA has to send anything to Sedna in the next 11,000 years!

To get anything there they'll have to plan ahead though.

A lot ahead as it happens.

The journey will take around 30 years so a probe would have to launch sometime between 2030 and 2040 to reach Sedna as it nears.

Even then its a long shot. Sedna at its closest point to the Sun will still be a massive 79 au. That's 74 x the distance from the Earth to the Sun.

 In other words, 11 billion kilometres from us!

Our old pal Pluto is half that!

So Sedna on its best day will be twice as far as Pluto.

If a probe reached the planetoid, the most NASA can hope for is a slowish flyby to photograph the lost world and take a few tests.

Its a shame I won't be around to see the pics but it's exciting to know that my Grandson should be.

Do you think NASA should go to Sedna readers?

Fine Art America

SHIPS AND MORTAR

 Yesterday I watched a towering thin chimney being demolished. I'd always liked it as I went about my work and was sad to see it go. The huge white tube reminded me of the Saturn V!

I've always enjoyed seeing the space race in architecture, whether it be real or imagined like the chimney rocket.

With a childhood diet of space missions and cosmic mysteries it was inevitable I would be drawn to the New Age as a teenager. I read Daniken's Chariots of the Gods with gusto [did you?] and Hitching's World Atlas of Mysteries, which I adored and still have in the bookshelf.

Like many of you my passion for outer space and its mysteries spilled over into magazines, TV and records. One album I loved was featured in Roger Dean's Views, the amazing rocket steeple on the cover of Rameses' Space Hymns. 

I must have stared at that painting for hours and even now I can't look at a church without thinking that the steeple's a rocket! Somehow it seems fitting that they should be cosmic vessels, perhaps even space arcs heading for a new Earth!

As a kid the Corgi Rockets Skypark always gave me a thrill, one of those iconic towering toys from the dawn of the Seventies. It always reminded me of the vast buildings in Gerry Anderson's TV shows and a teetering needle space age car cark design by Mike Trim I think, the name of which I forget. Do you know it?

One modernist tower near where I grew up is still there on the M6 motorway. Its the Forton Services and is a Grade II Listed building! As a kid I was convinced it was a parked flying saucer!

[The Twentieth Century Society]

A couple more sites that I really like are the rocket testing battery on the Needles, Isle of Wight, where the old Black Arrow was fired up. We visited it a few years back.

Perhaps though, the most iconic of all space-age buildings I've ever seen were the 'golfballs' of RAF Fylingdales perched on top of the moors near Whitby on the Yorkshire coast.

Here's a remarkable image of them being constructed in the Sixties as part of the Cold War [seen on Corridor 8]. Truly arresting, the futuristic spheres were removed in 2006 and replaced with a small pyramid. Did you get chance to see the balls?

Have you a favourite space age building or bit of space building art readers?