countdown clock

A few photos of the famous countdown clock at the Kennedy Space Center press site. The clock and the nearby flagpole date back to the Apollo days (and it shows, as you can see in some of the close up photos), and they're listed on the National Register of Historic Places. I'm sure they kept the original clock around in part because it's such a distinctive, iconic object, and I'd be curious to know who designed it. If the NRHP file for the clock had been digitized that info would be easy to discover, but unfortunately it's yet not available online. If/when I find out I'll come back and update this post with more info about the clock, its origins, and hopefully info on other stuff by the same designer or design team, because that's always interesting, or at least it is to me.

Vida y Esperanza

A few photos of the cute squirrel sculpture at Mt. Talbert's main parking lot, which is titled "Vida y Esperanza", by Portland artist Mauricio Saldaña. If you saw my post about the park a few months ago, and had the patience to watch the full Flickr photo slideshow, you've seen these photos before.

The cute bear sculpture at Jamison Square and some public artworks and benches near the Kenton MAX station are his too. Apparently he also had a role in creating the series of "Urban Hydrology" diatom sculptures near Portland State University.

The Incredibly Strange Creatures...

The second half of tonight's craptacular movie double feature is "The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies" (IMDB), a 1964 film about... um, I'm not entirely sure. Supposedly it's a zombie flick, but if you're looking for gory braineating living dead action you're going to be bitterly disappointed. Some brave Wikipedian tried to summarize the plot thusly:

Jerry (Steckler as "Flagg"), his girlfriend Angela (Sharon Walsh), and his buddy Harold (Atlas King) head out for a day at the carnival. In one venue, a dance number is performed by Marge (Carolyn Brandt), an alcoholic who drinks before and between shows, and her partner, Bill Ward, for a small audience. There Jerry sees stripper Carmelita (Erino Enyo) who hypnotizes him with her icy stare and he is compelled to see her act. Carmelita is the young sister of powerful fortune-teller Estrella (Brett O'Hara), and Estrella turns Jerry into a zombie by hypnotizing him with a spiraling wheel. He then goes on a rampage, killing Marge and fatally wounding Bill. Later, Jerry attempts to strangle his girlfriend Angela as well. It develops that Estrella, with her henchman Ortega (Jack Brady), has been busy turning various patrons into zombies, apparently by throwing acid on their faces.


Interspersed through the film are several song-and-dance production numbers in the carnival's nightclub, with songs like "Choo Choo Ch'Boogie" and "Shook out of Shape". The titular zombies only make an appearance in the final act, where they escape and immediately kill Estrella, Carmelita, Ortega and several performers before being shot by police. Jerry, himself partially disfigured but not a zombie, escapes the carnival and is pursued to the shoreline, where the police shoot him dead in front of Angela and Harold.

If anything, the movie makes even less sense than the summary does. The one actual scary bit is that our hapless punk-kid protagonist (who's also the film's director) bears an uncanny resemblance to Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber. Not sure how they pulled that one off, to be honest. Everyone else in the movie comes off as bored or drunk. Maybe it's just the lighting, or the soundtrack, or the cast just didn't grasp the director's singular vision, or something.

It turns out that (so sayeth IMDB) this movie used the same sound stage as The Creeping Terror, which is the thin thread I'm using to tie this double feature together. Makes more sense than either of the movies, if you ask me.

The Creeping Terror

Tonight's crappy movie is "The Creeping Terror", an alien-monster-on-the-loose pic from 1964 (IMDB). The Creeping Terror is widely considered one of the worst movies ever made, and it's famous for two things that make it stand out from the crowd of low budget creature features:

• The creature is basically just a giant shag carpet with a few people shuffling around under it, and you can usually see their feet. Same basic idea as a Chinese festival dragon, but less convincing. It has no obvious way to eat people, so its victims have to crawl into the creature's sorta-mouth under their own power while trying to act like they're struggling.
• Instead of normal movie dialogue, the film relies heavily on a narrator who explains what the people on screen are saying to each other. Stories and recollections vary as to why the movie turned out this way. One colorful version claims that voice work was done but the recordings were lost, possibly dropped into Lake Tahoe by accident.
  

Wikipedia summarizes the plot, such as it is:

A newlywed deputy, Martin Gordon (Vic Savage), encounters an alien spacecraft that has crash landed in fictional Angel County in California. A large, hairy, slug-like, omnivorous monster emerges from the side of an impacted spaceship. A second one, still tethered inside, kills a forest ranger and the sheriff (Byrd Holland) when they independently enter the craft to investigate.

Martin, now temporary sheriff, joins his wife Brett (Shannon O'Neil); Dr. Bradford (William Thourlby, the original Marlboro Man), a renowned scientist; and Col. James Caldwell, a military commander and his men to fight the creature. Meanwhile the monster stalks the countryside, devouring a girl in a bikini, picnickers at a "hootenanny", Grandpa Brown (Jack King) and his grandson while fishing, a housewife hanging the laundry, the patrons at a community dance hall, and couples in their cars at lovers' lane.

The protagonists ultimately deduce that the monsters are mindless biological-sample eaters. The bio-analysis data is microwaved back to the probe's home planet through the spaceship.

Caldwell decides that the creatures must be killed, despite Bradford's objections. He orders his men to fire at the creature, which they do while standing close to one another as it moves towards them. Their gunfire proves ineffective, and all of the troops are devoured. Paradoxically, Caldwell decides a moment later to throw a grenade, and the creature dies instantly.

At the end of the film, both creatures are destroyed, but not before the signal is sent. The dying Bradford suggests that this bodes ill for the human race, but observes that since the galaxy to which the transmission was aimed is a million light years away, the threat may not manifest for millennia.

In modern terms this ending would be an obvious setup for a sequel. Which never happened, or at least hasn't happened yet. I could see the SciFi Channel going for something like this, I mean, you'd have a badly CG'd carpet monster, a crack military team of 40-something washed-up actors, and a woman in the inevitable white tank top, and it would be filmed in Canada, or maybe Romania, and most of the movie would just be our heroes standing around arguing in a room full of computer screens. But hey.

Cottonwood Bay expedition

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Today's thrilling adventure takes us to tiny Cottonwood Bay Park, on the Willamette River a bit south of the South Waterfront area. It's a tiny nature area along the Willamette Greenway Trail, right next to the swanky Avalon Hotel. In fact, according to a KATU story about the park, the place was spruced up and made into a formal city park in 1995 when the hotel went in.

Prior to that, as a city ecologist describes it, "...the area wasn't a park but was instead one of those forgotten tax lots that just kind of fade into the background without anyone noticing". The article isn't clear about who owned it then, but it doesn't mention anything about the city buying the land, so I suspect it was yet another chunk of land the city owned for years and had completely forgotten about. I've run across so many of those over time that it's easy to imagine that's what was going on.

I would kind of take issue with the "without anyone noticing" bit. I notice this stuff all the time; it's just that nobody notices me. But I digress.

The city's 2009 vegetation unit survey for the place (map, detail pdf) describes the park as "Unit consists of a bank above a rocky and debris laden beach of the Willamette River." It explains the park is indeed dominated by cottonwood trees, and invasive blackberry removal has been very successful.

The survey also notes, perplexingly, that "There is a luxury homeless camp on the north part of the unit on the beach." I have no idea what a "luxury homeless camp" could possibly be. These are archive photos from back in 2007 and I didn't see anything like that at the time, but it's true the economy was in better shape back then. I haven't gone back to check, but my guess is it's a regular old homeless camp, plus a lazy proofreader at City Hall. If they can lose track of a chunk of valuable riverfront land for years, they can probably write nonsensical descriptions of it too.

pelican, cocoa beach pier

MSL Atlas V at Launch Complex 41

Oh nothing, just a few photos of the Curiosity rover's Atlas V rocket sitting on its launch pad. I'm kind of amazed we were able to get this close to it. I mean, it wasn't actually full of rocket fuel yet, and we weren't right next to it, and there was a serious security fence to make sure nobody got any closer, but still.



Besides the lastest Mars rover, a number of fairly significant things have been launched from this spot over the years. The Voyager probes that fascinated me as a kid were launched here back in the 1970s, as were the Viking Mars landers. A fair number of recent interplanetary probes have been launched here as well: Heavy ones like MSL, and light ones that need to go really fast, like New Horizons. Granted they were designed elsewhere, and operated from elsewhere, and only the actual launches happened here, but it's still kind of cool to think about. To me, at least.

Vehicle Assembly Building

A few photos of the enormous Vehicle Assembly Building at Kennedy Space Center. This is the building where Saturn V rockets were assembled and Space Shuttles were mated to their external tanks & boosters. The building may be used again someday for whatever flavor of Ares V / SLS / generic huge rocket ends up flying, assuming that it gets funded & nobody cancels it, which remains to be seen.



I used an ultrawide lens to try to capture just how huge the building is, but I'm not sure even that does it justice. There aren't a lot of visual cues to help you grasp the scale of the thing. If it helps, the yellow bridge crane you see in a few of the photos is used to pick Space Shuttles up and carry them around. It's not small crane.