Skip to main content

Fireworks Fun

For 29 years I worked for Zambelli Bros. every 4th of July, my team and I putting on the best fireworks displays we could do for the budgeted explosives/insurance allotment for each town on the east coast we were assigned to entertain. And I will admit that hand loading the mortars and running around with a road flair to set them off was quite exciting, even if they did require computer controlled ignition if you exceeded a given shell size or for certain environments. And I am very proud of my crews safety record; at no point on any display was any member of the audience injured, and all of those of us on the shoot crew retain all of our limbs, eyeballs, etc. There may have been a few non-human damages inflicted, like the loss of the foliage on the 4th hole green at the Congressional Country Club golf course (they TOLD us it was OK to set up the finale racks there, but apparently they didn’t realize that things that exploded to launch themselves into the air would shower down some expended but still burning detritus), or the loss of some trees at the Antietam display in Sharpsburg the year the rain got to the launch charges (the wet launch charges threw them 100 ft. in the air, so the 400 foot blast radius for the larger shells made life a bit more exciting than we were expecting. But we moved all the cars out from under the trees before any of the gas tanks exploded, and it was fun watching the fire departments guy’s eyes bug out while he shouted “Is it SUPPOSED to do that??”).

I want to thank National Geographic for helping me relive that experience by putting together their excellent Naked Science episode, The Secret World of Fireworks. I came in part way through the first airing of the program on Thursday night, and will be re-watching it every time it airs this weekend; I encourage you to do the same. I especially liked that they devoted a noticeable segment of it to a display at Baltimore’s Inner Harbor, where I did my very last show in July of 2007. Happy 4th of July!

Something to Watch: DVDs

For silly action fun we have Drive Angry, in which Nick Cage escapes from hell and goes on a road trip. There is one interesting classic collection being released as a box set this week: the Stanley Kubrick: Essential Collection. It has nine films, including genre favorites Dr. Strangelove, 2001: A Space Odyssey, A Clockwork Orange, and The Shining. Of course, you can pick up the individual programs for 7 to 9 dollars each, but if you don’t have any of them this could be a cost effective way to go, especially since the non-genre films have the same high quality.

There is a miniseries I absolutely had to mention, Phil Plait’s Bad Universe. Phil has been blogging for years under the heading Bad Astronomy, which he started to post corrections to the bad physics and astronomy he saw in the science fiction TV shows and movies he otherwise loved to watch. He was somewhat qualified for this, being an astronomer with ten years working on the Hubble Space Telescope, an astronomy educator, and on the side wrote some books on the topic as well. The Discovery Channel brought his blog on board and put the programs together, but you can still see the original Bad Astronomy here.

There are two good entries in the TV series category this time around, starting with season three of True Blood. This gives you plenty of time to catch up or review the season before season 4 kicks off on June 26th. Or you can re-watch all three seasons with HBO GO, which allows HBO subscribers to watch a vast library of their series and movies on your computer, ipad, ipod, or android phone or tablet any time you like (and anywhere you have a connection). The best bit is if you have HBO with your cable or dish service it just comes with it for no additional charge, yet another VAR (Value Added Resource) all the media services are adding to their arsenals to keep their subscribers happy. And did I mention, the George R.R. Martin series, Game of Thrones, has exclusive interactive features with every episode you can’t get from your TV set? Trust me, if you are paying for HBO anyways, you really want to add this functionality. Unless you have it already from your cable or satellite provider, since they are also in the category of media services madly implementing portable viewing with Apps and websites for no additional charge to make their product more appealing and keep you as a customer.

The other TV series is SG-U: Stargate Universe: The Complete Final Season, which is a bit sad when you realize the entire cast found out the show was cancelled when they received tweets about it. You can, of course, also watch episodes online.

There are likewise two Anime choices worth noting. Guin Saga – Part 2 continues the story for the final 13 episodes as the leopard-headed gladiator and his two young royal charges continue to unravel the mystery that has plunged their original land and this new sorcery-infested local into war. Mazinkaiser Skl is an old school mecha combat series OVA that was an offshoot of the Mazinger series. It has that whole Go Nagai 1970s early Saturday morning cartoon thing going for it, so I don’t expect to see it racking up any amazing sales records (it won’t be coming home with me, as an example). But it was a major entry into the evolution of the Giant Robo genre, and is worth watching just for its historic value.

More Yuri’s Night

Besides the Yuri’s Night App I mentioned yesterday, another great way to track all your best Space buddies on tonight’s 50th anniversary of man in space is using NASA Connect. On that link you will find all the best Social Media interfaces to them, including Twitter, Facebook, UStream, Foursquare, and MySpace. There are also links to their YouTube, Flickr, and Gowalla sites you should bookmark and visit. They have some in house communication resources like NASA Tweetup and NASA Chat where you can sometimes find entire gatherings of people during various events. And that is without mentioning NASA Apps, NASA Blogs, and NASA e-Books. Bottom line, this is the single place you need to be able to find to connect and collaborate with NASA.

Time Lapse Auroras

This amazing chunk of video is a set of time lapsed filming done of the skies over (and near) Kirkenes, Norway. They had an unusually active Aurora Borealis this past month, and it only promises to get better in the next few years, as solar activity peaks. This and many other similar incredible images can be found at the APoD, the Astronomy Picture of the Day at NASA.

The Aurora from Terje Sorgjerd on Vimeo.