On my way to where the air is sweet

[austin_dern]

I found the location of a new hobby shop -- or, well, a new branch of an existing hobby shop -- today, and I was glad for that even if they didn't have anything that particularly interested me. They had the Bandai starship Voyager kit, one of those pre-painted things ready to be fitted together, but I just like Original Series stuff better. At what the Bandai kit costs I won't be buying that for a whim.

They did have room for about 24 billion different car models. I've never understood building model cars, not even slightly; even the most interesting is, to me, just a car, and the variations between (say) a 2005 Saturn and a 1996 Taurus just don't intrigue me even as trivia. I don't care for the endless Gundam kits or battleships of the second World War either, but at least I understand what might be fun about building them.

They also had those collectible random-content boxes, some were for anime things. Some were miniature board game sets -- I'm curious if they're actually playable travel-size games, or if they're moulded in place to represent games partly completed. And there was a line of Sesame Street figures, although I didn't pick one up due to the ever-present risk of getting an Elmo by mistake.

Outside, in the storm, a guy playing guitar on the streets did turn to singing ``Raindrops keep falling on my head.'' An extremely long edition of the song. And a bookstore there was advertising for new hires, with the notes that they weren't hiring students, and that it was a ``Female work environment.'' I'm curious what that would even mean, but I don't suppose I could find out.

Trivia: The Apollo 14 Lunar Module descent engine had about 68 more seconds of firing time available when it touched down. Source: Apollo By The Numbers, Richard W Orloff, NASA SP-4029.

Currently Reading: Space Skimmer, David Gerrold. Squat tough guy goes looking up what happened to the interstellar empire that just vanished 400 years earlier, and discovers a super-starship, then gathers an oddball bunch of people to determine the problem is a shortage of love. Very Gerrold, very early 1970s.

Comments

[bunny-hugger.livejournal.com]

Female work environment? Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?! And why would a bookstore be especially "female" anyway? The bookstore which is my occasional employer has a pretty equal distribution of male and female employees.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

I can't imagine what would be particularly female about a bookstore; I'm just as baffled as you are. Apart from being smaller and from having a large section for Chinese-language books they're pretty comparable to your normal used book store in the United States, though without so much older material.

[orv.livejournal.com]

I could maybe see having a model of a car I owned. That might be kind of cool.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

You at least have the decency to get cars that have some personality, like old Vanagons and the like. But every car I've ever owned, and most of the cars in my family, are a desperate striving for absolute genericity while still providing transportation. I mean, I went from a Celebrity to a Saturn, for crying out loud. You can't build a model of them, all you can do is get a blank white box with the label ``CAR'' on it.

If love is the answer, what is the question? Giant robots!

[lexomatic.livejournal.com]

...Squat tough guy goes looking up what happened to the interstellar empire that just vanished 400 years earlier, and discovers a super-starship, then gathers an oddball bunch of people to determine the problem is a shortage of love. Very Gerrold, very early 1970s.

Hah. You've just described the plot of I don't know how many SF anime. And by "I don't know how many" I mean it might be a lot, or maybe a few, but it's definitely nonzero. Although the parts might not all be in the same plot, and the squat tough guys aren't usually the protagonists, and the empires usually vanish more than 400 years ago. But the "shortage of the love" is very anime -- In the lyric "If love is the answer, what is the question?", the answer is, everything.

Also, Japanese pop stars have been known to promote their latest releases by licensing them as anime theme songs. This may explain why 90% of anime theme songs, in mood and content, have no discernable relation to the premises of the shows to which they are attached.

For an index to SF novel cover arts styles of the 1970s-80s, see the anime film "Space Adventure Cobra." Better yet, find someone else who's already seen it and is willing to make screengrabs for you.

Re: If love is the answer, what is the question? Giant robots!

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Well, now, the book does read like it's the setup for a series, possibly a TV series; most of it is spent jaunting about the galaxy and assembling a crew, who in the climax (that's not precisely a pun) endure an experience which binds them into a team. It's an engaging starship, too, with a sensible application of the notion that once you have transporters or replicators, the design of your spaceship is entirely a matter of style, no harder or more rarely changed than the desktop pattern on your computer screen would be. While a few leads on the disappearance of the Empire are given, it's really not resolved.

Given the book's copyright -- 1972 -- I wonder if it wasn't something Gerrold turned into a novel in the hopes of promoting it as a TV series; shortly after this, he was diverted into turning Land of the Lost from a set of concept sketches Sid and Marty Krofft had sold into the Star Trek Original Series of children's television.

[chefmongoose.livejournal.com]

I'm not much of a model person, but I could see the intruige with certain cars, most notably expensive european brands like Ferrari, Porsche, etc. Mind, I'd rather have my scaled-down cars come preassembled and transform into robots, for the most part.

I'd gather the bookstore was trying to say "Female-friendly work environment", as in, the manager looked around at the staff of ten and saw ten males, and figured they weren't doing well on balance. I'm surprised they'd not only not hire students, but go forth and note it- one would figure students being ideal of potentially temporary employees for a bookstore.

--Chiaroscuro

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

I would think students a pretty great source of employees for bookstores, but perhaps they're trying to fill vacancies during the weekdays or some other time when students would be unavoidably unsuited.