Far beyond the world I've known

Though I watched eagerly the late 70s Buck Rogers TV series, that was because there wasn't a whole lot on in that era if you liked space stuff. I'd never seen the 1939 Universal serial starring Buster Crabbe because when would it have ever aired, and after all it was pop culture from a half-decade before my father was born. (I admit this is a weak excuse considering my old-time radio fandom, and ability to follow the contemporary and highly dated references this requires.) Plus it was a 1930s serial and my impression of 1930s serials is they're all grey men in hats having sluggish fist fights and getting into car crashes at the end of each installment that they're revealed next week to have jumped out of in a scene we didn't see before. This is perhaps a not perfectly fair prejudgement, but Turner Classic Movies started showing the 1939 serial recently and I can watch, two episodes a week, and see where I was right and wrong. (Overlooked: spaceship engine sounds in these things sound like someone breathing into an electric fan.)

( I'm going to take this one episode at a time, giving me a nicely thematically unified week. )

Trivia: On 14 May 1815 the Boston Manufacturing Company's first load of cotton cloth travelled by wagon from Waltham toward Boston Bay. Source: The King's Best Highway: The Lost History Of The Boston Post Road, The Route That Made America, Eric Jaffe.

Currently Reading: Kon-Tiki, Thor Heyerdahl.