Legend of the Chevette
I bought my Chevette used in the 1980's, when I was still a teenager. It came in Chevrolet's standard, boring metallic light blue: a nondescript hatchback assembled from unremarkable lights, handles and grilles. It didn't last a year. Connecticut's the sort of place where you'll drive fifteen miles to the next town for a shop. I'd found my tribe on a local computer forum so I was doing that all the time. I'd got the car as a last-minute replacement for a station wagon I never put oil in. I was a busy VHS filmmaker and my social network was a dial-up BBS so ya gotta forgive my ignorance of auto maintenance. Our online crew had magnificently blossomed into pizza parties in Orange, and the Chevette got me there from Cheshire one Saturday without incident. It was almost dark later, when I stepped down from Jim's farmhouse on Grassy Hill and climbed into the chilly car. I turned the key in the ignition and was greeted with dead silence. I tried again. Nothing. Half an hour later I had a tow truck lashed up to the battery but it made no difference. Soon I was riding shotgun in the dark, smelling machine oil in upholstery and trundling back to a garage in Cheshire. The next morning I got the call to pick up the car, and they'd charged me nothing. It had simply started up when they turned the key and no one knew why it had failed. With only moderate worry I got back to my life and got back to Orange and was promptly stranded again. I felt like the boy who cried 'wolf'. The car was always dead enough to tow but repeatedly live enough to drive home from the garage. I was filled with dread: I could never leave home in the car knowing if I'd get back the same way. After three or four of these disasters, at last a mechanic cracked it. When a twentieth century car key is turned, electric current flows from the battery and a motor momentarily spins: copper wire, spooled tightly round chunky metal magnets. The starter motor on the Chevette had a bad spot, and every time it spun I played a kind of Russian Roulette. If the motor came to rest with the bad spot facing the electrode, current just wouldn't flow next time the key was turned. Worse still, the starter motor hovered lightly in its magnetic field and shifted slightly while the car was being towed, so the car would start up on arrival. After repairs, I made my peace with that boring Chevette until one fateful day, when I taught my sister to drive. It wasn't an especially legal thing for me to have done and sure enough, she smashed up the front end at an intersection. I quickly swapped places with her before the cops turned up but later, in a wash of emotion, I confessed the deception to the authorities. The damage to the car wasn't obviously dramatic but nevertheless the Chevette had been totalled – and I was glad to see the back of it.Test Post Prose
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Spoilers
Somebody's gotta go first; culture rarely consumes itself. Maybe this time you binge watched that series, or were first through a novel, or perhaps you're the early bird having listened to an audio drama. That took some doing and it's an act of passion to have run ahead of the pack. Why wouldn't you sing that joy?
Skylab
4 July 2009 | beeblePete
Houston, we have a party! It was extra opening hours for Independence Day at Johnson Space Center when my sister Amy and I visited the NASA facility. I was intrigued most of all by their full-size, cutaway Skylab exhibit.
There was no distinct up or down direction in the space station, so the walls round the doorways doubled as floors. Triangular cleats in the boots of an astronaut are shown below, matched to triangular recesses in the 'floors' which allowed personnel to anchor themselves in their almost gravity-free environment. As ingenious as the Skylab walls were I had in fact seen them before, in episodes of Doctor Who...
Skylab was orbiting in 1972 when Doctor Who and the Mutants was made for BBC television. That serial's Skybase space station is shown below, with the shimmering life form Ky flying past and knocking the bad guys to the floor with his amazing alien energy. I'd seen the episodes before and on reflection, I noticed TV designer Jeremy Bear interpreted the hexagonal Skylab pattern a bit larger for the Skybase scenery flats.
The Skylab exhibit had as much suspended above as placed level with the pedestrian flow. NASA's Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral Florida is larger by several degrees and I'd been there in the late 1970's. But perhaps because I was older, I found this famous site of shuttle landings as fascinating as the base for blast-offs.
And what's Houston without a Mission Control to talk to? It was a treat to see up close the consoles where so much space programme drama was experienced. Inspecting the famously-used but long since retired control desks, I mused that the Space Control set in 1976's Doctor Who and the Android Invasion did a pretty good job of re-creating the real thing.
Having lived in the United States when I was younger, I admit to some pride that my taxes paid for at least a little bit of the wonderful, international space exploration projects of NASA...
... and here's a souvenir from the amazing time Amy and I had in Houston 😎
Epilogue
The vacu-form shapes made for Doctor Who later became stock for hire. At the premiere for the Doctor Who spinoff Sil and the Devil Seeds of Arodor, I met the film's designer Phil Newman and was delighted to discover he'd used the Skybase moulds for his spaceport set, shown below.
As mentioned, the 'Skylab walls' were used a few times in Doctor Who but they also turned up in many other TV programmes, which are still being spotted. Fellow fan Paul Arthur has been cataloguing this strange, hexagonal design odyssey on his blog, Doctor Who Prop Hunt.
The BeebleBrox Company
- Abstract:
- The oldest recorded work of English literature is fan fiction. Stories and their audiences have always formed an intermingled community.
Beowulf and the BeebleBrox Company
- Abstract:
- The oldest recorded work of English literature is fan fiction. Stories and their audiences have always formed an intermingled community.
The Ambassadors of Death
Dudley Simpson - Ambassadors of Death
Dudley Simpson - UNIT Theme