Incredibly big tornado slamming Birmingham, Alabama right now. Here’s some footage I found on YouTube:
Instapundit reports his area (Knoxville, TN) is also under a tornado warning. There seems to be a huge belt of severe weather for several hundred miles.
If you’re in the area, you might want to get to the storm cellar, basement, or center of your house.
A few more bits of new on Sendai tsunami/earthquake aftermath:
And speaking of Ofunato City, here is footage of the tsunami coming in there:
Someone has put up a series of videos called “people trying to escape from the tsunami,” some of which I’ve never seen before, and all of which look entirely too close for comfort.
Here’s entirely-too-close footage of the tsunami coming in, including large tugboats and a van trying to escape, right before the cameraman decided he really needed to get to higher ground:
A video from Kamaishi in Iwate:
Tagajo City:
Finally, some much-needed happy news:
(This and all previous posts on the Sendai earthquake and tsunami can be found here.)
As someone who has bookshelves custom-built to my own specifications (8-high, adjustable shelves, etc.), I appreciate fine carpentry work. But this just takes it to a whole new level:
That’s the tool chest of 19th century piano maker H.O. Studley. I originally saw this linked from Fark, and knew I had to put up a video of it, if only to show Howard Waldrop (a man deeply appreciative of fine woodwork) the next time he’s somewhere near a computer.
I’m sure this is very old news to some people, as there have been many articles written about it in woodworking magazines. I think my jaw actually dropped open when they showed how the individual fastening drawers slid back and forth.
One more brief update on the aftermath of the Sendai earthquake/tsunami:
Tsunami video from Miyako City in Iwate Prefecture:
This and all previous posts on the Sendai earthquake and tsunami can be found here.
A few tidbits of news on the Sendai earthquake/tsunami aftermath in Japan:
Another gallery of aftermath photos.
I’m not seeing too many new videos worth putting up. You’ve probably seen a lot of this video before, but here’s one long, continuous aerial take of the tsunami coming in:
More volcano erruption footage:
To end on an encouraging note, here’s a video of two dogs who survived the earthquake and tsunami:
This and all previous posts on the Sendai earthquake and tsunami can be found here.
A few more quick updates on the aftermath of the Sendai earthquake/tsunami:
More dramatic footage of the tsunami coming in. There’s one building that the water goes up against, and then through, and then, in a matter of about 10 seconds since the wave hit, the building is gone.
Includes some of the above, and a lot more besides, off Japanese TV:
Before and After aerial footage:
Helicopter rescue footage:
The tsunami even caught the Japanese Air Force unaware, which a number of (I think) F-16s picked up and carried into buildings or soaked with mud:
Interesting video from 2010 explaining Japanese preparation for earthquakes and tsunamis:
Some quick Sendai earthquake/tsunami updates:
Up-close footage of the tsunami coming into the city I haven’t seen before:
Close footage of the tsunami surge moving into a city:
More close tsunami footage:
More Sendai aftermath footage:
Some cognitive dissonance in this Russia Today video: The footage is mainly the burning natural gas plant, while the voiceover discusses the nuclear plant failsafe issues:
More burning natural gas footage, along with a discussion of other nation’s tsunami preparations:
For other videos I’ve put up from the earthquake/tsunami, start here or just go scrolling back through the videos I’ve put up the last couple of days.
Howard Waldrop and I have to review Battle: Los Angeles for Locus Online, so between that and my usual Saturday obligations, I’m not sure if I’ll have time to do too many more updates today.
A few more videos. Not a lot of context for some of these, so I can’t tell if they’re from Sendai or someplace else.
This provides a scary, up-close demonstration of how fast the tsunami came in:
Japanese office workers run as bits of building start falling around them:
There’s a reason they call it the Ring of Fire: The quake has activated several regional volcanos:
It’s almost like playing Sim City, where you inflict all the disasters (earthquake, flood, volcano, monster) on the city at once…
If you’re of a certain age, you probably remember the Rankin Bass production of A Year Without a Santa Claus. Like all the other warhorse Christmas specials of my youth, it got trotted out pretty much every year.
All the works of Rankin Bass are hard to evaluate separate from the nostalgia factor they invoked. On a level of technical proficiency, they weren’t particularly proficient. At it’s very best, their animation was of the quality of Hanna-Barbera, which is to say it sucked, and their stop motion work was more stop than motion. (I have not seen their animated film version of Peter S. Beagle’s The Last Unicorn, which I am given to understand is better.)
For an example of both good and bad, take a look at the classic “Snow Miser/Heat Miser” songs from A Year Without a Santa Claus:
I don’t think the lyrics of that songs are going to be taught in songwriting classes (it takes a special type of lyricist to rhyme “degrees” with “degrees”), but damned if that song doesn’t stick in your head. Go up to just about anyone from my generation and sing “He’s Mr. Heat Miser,” and you’re virtually guaranteed to have them sing back “He’s Mr. Sun.” (Who was it that said “Memory is a crazy beggar woman that hordes bright bits of tinfoil and throws away food”?)
Whatever their flaws, Rankin Bass productions usually had a few bits of cleverness and interest scattered throughout.
The same can not necessarily be said of the cheap spinoffs done of their work. Did you know that they did a live action remake of A Year Without a Santa Claus? If you think to yourself, “Wow, that sounds like a really, really bad idea,” you’re not the only one.
As proof, take a look at this:
Well, Snow Miser can certainly sing, and Heat Miser…uh, goes a long way toward making Snow Miser’s singing sound that much better.
And this…this is Just. Freaking. WRONG:
It’s like if Ralphie from A Christmas Story came back at age 35 to do an infomercial for winterizing your home. Yes, it’s from the sequel to the original A Year Without a Santa Claus, A Miser Brothers Christmas, and, if this clip is any indication, it looks to be as fondly remembered as The Christmas That Totally Ruled and KISS Saves Santa.
Stop. Just stop.
I leave you with one other Rankin Bass piece of music, the high point of their otherwise-not-even-remotely-fondly-remembered version of The Return of the King:
Back in my ill-spent youth, before we had any video games other than Pong, I watched a lot of TV. Along with the classics (I Love Lucy, Star Trek), I watched a good bit of the same primetime fare everyone else watched back in the days of three broadcast networks and no cable. In particular, I would watch pretty much any prime time science fiction show in the 1970s, no matter how bad. Some, like Kolchak: The Night Stalker, hold up much better than I would expect them to.
I’m pretty sure The Fantastic Journey does not, mainly because I remember thinking that it sucked even while I was watching it. I even remember thinking it sucked more than The Man From Atlantis, which, I assure you, sucked pretty hard. (After all, that was a show with an episode that had Kareem Abdul-Jabbar as an alien on another planet panning for gold in invisible water. And no, it didn’t make any more sense in context.)
Anyway, I thought I’d do this post on The Fantastic Journey not because it was good, but because once every six months or so I found myself discussing the TV shows of the 1970s and being unable to recall the name of the show. It could also be seen as some sort of weird precursor to Lost, but with a smaller cast and a refreshing lack of tedious flashbacks. So this page is more or less something for people to find on the Internet searching for the same half-remembered plot elements just so they can prove to their friends that no, they didn’t imagine it. (Keywords: The Fantastic Journey, island, Bermuda Triangle, zone, portal, TV show, 1970s, bad, suck)
The setup, as I remember it, was some modern Americans (including an annoying kid, which was the style at the time) being marooned on an uncharted island somewhere in the Bermuda Triangle, and every week they’d go through some sort of zone or barrier that would transport them to another time period where they ran into pirates, aliens, future civilizations, or any other thing 70s TV writers on deadline could think of to keep them in cocaine for another month. According to this far more informative writeup on the show, they were stranded there by some weird green cloud enveloping their boat. And it went downhill from there.
Here’s the opening credits, which I seem to have mercifully forgotten:
Wow, that cheesy disco synth theme is everything that was wrong with music in the 1970s rolled into one excruciatingly painful package. I’m sure that right now, it’s being played on an infinite loop to torments the souls of the damned at Hell’s own disco.
And here’s the opening of one episode, which makes it seem even worse than I remember:
Roddy McDowell adds that touch of class to remind you that, yes, he was in an awful lot of horrid crap. (See also: Laserblast.)
That’s pretty bad. Thanks you sir, may I have another?
What that scene really needs is the Monty Python knight to limp up and whack Mongol Riddle Guy upside the head with a rubber chicken. There also seemed to be a contractual requirement for several minutes of running in every show. (Cheap! Pointless! Eats up screen time!) And nothing says “It’s the future!” like green unitards and shiny, asymmetrical skirts.
And there’s plenty more where that came from on YouTube, for those with an unquenchable thirst for cheesy 70s science fiction TV shows. But everything about the show gives you the distinct impression people involved knew it was doomed and were only in it for the paycheck.
Here’s the IMDB link for the show.
Let’s face it: The Fantastic Journey was just a big slab of suck, and I only post this here as a warning to others and to prove that, yes, it actually existed.
Tune in next week when I channel my vague memories of John Saxon blowing up mutants with a photon bazooka (or some damn thing).
