Peter Hoflich

Today I worked from home. That means that I walked Zen to school at 7:15 AM, did some work in the morning, picked him up at 12:30, had a family lunch, and did some work in the afternoon. When I took my afternoon break, it was with Zen – we threw the softball around, and practiced soccer. Then we had a great dinner of Naoko’s superb hamburgers. In the evening we had a great laugh talking about “Fantastic Mister Fox”, then we played the monkey game, Uno, Black Peter, and the train game. We had major big laughs when we talked about which was our favourite scene from Fantastic Mister Fox (Naoko’s is the scene in Ash’s room with the train set, Zen’s is when Ash had his jacket tucked into his pants, and mine is when Bean throws a fit in his trailer and knocks everything onto the floor). Such great fun.

Zen and I are having a lot of fun these days watching episodes of Space: 1999, the old BBC TV series. At the time that it was filmed, 1975-1977, it was the most expensive TV series ever created, and in some ways it shows with the really great costumes, sets, and special effects. The stories are a bit ponderous, some of them are scary, all of them are mysterious, and the dialogue is terrible:

-To be haunted by your own host, even before you die-what’s that all about?
- Life and death – still the big questions, the greatest mysteries.

- Survivors of the Uranus (Your-anus) expedition of 1986.

- I am Jack, the commander of the Uranus (Your-anus) probe.

- Ah – supernatural, yes; paranormal… no!”

Zen loves the old stories, and isn’t turned off by the long passages that have lots of dialogue, which often deals with scientific concepts (or maybe pseudo-scientific concepts). Today we were watching “Alpha Child”, and I stopped it every now and then when I thought that he might not understand what was happening, and I explained it to him. At the end of the story, he said “wow, ‘Alpha Child’ was so interesting.” It really unleashed his imagination. He was still talking about it the next morning. The other day he watched one episode on his own, without me there to explain it to him. The series was filmed in 1976, 25 years before he was born, but he still likes it, which is quite a gap.

The series stars Martin Landau, who went on to critical acclaim in films by Francis Ford Coppola (Tucker: A Man And His Dream, where he got an Academy Award nomination), Tim Burton (Ed Wood – his portrayal of Bela Lugosi won him the Academy Award for best supporting actor) and Woody Allen (Crimes and Misdemeanors). Barbara Bain didn’t go on to that kind of fame, but she was looking pretty good in the series even though she was over 45 at the time. They were married from 1957 to 1993, 36 years (not bad for a Hollywood couple), and they were together in two colon:ized series (“Mission: Impossible” and “Space: 1999″).

Zen is quite interested in astronomy. Today we talked about the planets of the solar system, which ones have atmospheres and which ones don’t, which ones have a solid crust, and which ones blend the atmosphere with the mantle, and all sorts of groovy space stuff like that. It was really great fun. Recently we gave him a book on the universe and the solar system, it seems like he enjoys it a lot.

Here are a few photos of the series:

Here’s the intro to Season 1:

Here’s the intro/outro to Season 2:

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