Tag: Them

Giant Ant Suspension of Disbelief

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War Pig mentioned the rumor that there is a studio remaking “THEM!.”  My reaction is an unqualified, Yeah!  But I immediately thought to myself, “Hey wait a minute.  This isn’t 1954, it’s 2026!  What about the illogic of an insect fifteen feet long weighing thousands of pounds, breathing by passive diffusion of oxygen through spiracles?  And how about the other unscalable aspects of its anatomy and physiology like weight and strength of exoskeleton vs. the thick bones found in large land animals like rhinos and elephants.”

Sure, I’m being a spoil sport.  If we want giant ants living in the sewers of Los Angles we should get them.  And look how timely it would be.  Imagine a nighttime forage of giant ants finding it’s way to a homeless encampment just by smell alone.  Now, there is the danger that this could be considered cruelty to animals.  And most homeless could be considered poisoned bait.  After all, if an ant ate one of these denizens of the City of Angels might it not die from a fentanyl overdose?  I mean, that’s not really fair, is it?  The ant is just doing what millions of years of evolution (plus a century of radioactive fallout) has taught him.  It’s not his fault that Mayor Bass and Governor Newsom have put these temptations in his way.  To him they’re just appetizers.

So, maybe there should be some hand-waving and exposition to provide an infodump to explain how rapid evolution adapted the giant ants so that they now have an internal skeleton and an efficient circulatory system but somehow have preserved the external appearance of an ant.  And here’s where AI can come in handy.  In order to have the necessary gravitas to sell the audience on this cockamamie science of giant ant biology we will need Santa Claus.  We will need an electronic avatar of Edmund Gwenn to play Dr. Harold Medford.  He alone can walk us through super 8 film clips of ants.  However, we can recast the part of Dr. Patricia Medford.  For this part I would recommend Sydney Sweeney as she possesses unique personal assets which will not lend her scientific gravitas but which will boost the movie’s financial bottom line significantly.

All in all, I think a remake of ‘Them!” could be an enormous hit.  I think to make it more topical; it would make sense to recruit Donald Trump to play himself as the President who employs all the massive resources of the US military to combat these deadly and terrifying creatures.  Perhaps we can shift the anti-nuclear message of the movie if we show how nuclear weapons can be used for good.  Perhaps the outbreak in Los Angeles proves too far advanced and a decision must be made by Trump to nuke LA.  It can be stressed that almost all of the human population escapes (maybe only Bass and Newsom are being held hostage by the ants).  And so nuclear weapons become not only the cause of the problem but also the solution!  Then we can have Santa Claus and the hot chick give that speech where they talk about opening a door into a new world where anything is possible, even giant crickets in the inevitable sequel.

Living with Them – Part 2

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There was a little additional discussion of the hunt but Bob’s prognosis on the end date seemed to have depressed his comrades and so they departed one at a time after a few minutes.  Dave headed home and reached his front door just as the dusk warning siren sounded.  He felt a little shudder of fear pass through his body at the sound.  Maybe tonight’s talk had depressed him more than he thought.  He opened the outer door and closed it behind him and then the scanner activated and after twenty seconds the inner door opened, he stepped inside, the inner door closed behind him and the safety bolts shot home with a loud and comforting bang.  And based on that sequence he knew that everyone was home for the night.  They were locked up tight and could live and sleep secure for the night.  Walking through the entry hall he reached the dining room where the cheerful yellow light revealed his younger brothers and sisters sitting around the table working on their school assignments.  They looked up as he entered but it was his father who smiled with a relieved expression that the last of the family was home, “Busy day Dave?”  He shook his head, “No Dad, I just spent some time with the boys to blow off some steam.  Nothing too busy,” he lied, not wishing to upset his family about the hive found so close by.  His father nodded his head and went back to working on some chore at his work station.  He walked through to the kitchen and found his mother cleaning up from dinner.  She smiled at him and handed him a warm plate of meat, mashed potatoes and some kind of vegetable hash of some sort.  He smiled at this mystery course but thanked her and sat down at the kitchen table to eat.  “Gina stopped by today and asked if you were going to the social this weekend,” she mentioned in what she hoped sounded like an off-hand way.

“Oh really.  And I suppose you told her I could” he shot back.  She looked offended and said, “I did nothing of the sort.  I told her I’d tell you to call her.  And you should.  She’s the nicest girl you’ve ever brought around here and she’s very pretty too and if you’re not careful someone else will speak up and win her away from you.  Girls like that don’t wait around forever you know.”  Dave laughed to hear her vehemence but he promised to call her that night.  Finishing his plate, which was quite good even to the unrecognizable goulash, he put his plate in the dishwasher and patted his mother’s shoulder and thanked her as he headed for the living room.  His father had migrated there too and was watching a video about a new surveillance system that incorporated lasers and advanced machine intelligence.  Seeing this brought back Dave’s gloom as he reflected on how life always came back to the hunt and the lock down.

His father must have sensed his black mood and turned off the video and said, “Sorry Dave I needed that video for a work meeting I have tomorrow.  I should have had it on the small screen where you couldn’t see it.”  Dave smiled halfheartedly and said, “Nah, it’s nothing Dad.  Just one of those days, you know?”  Then he said less cheerily, “We found a nest pretty close by today and I guess I let it get me down.  Then Mom starts telling me that I better scoop up Gina before she marries someone else.  It just feels like we’re living in a nightmare and I can’t see how it goes on.”  His father looked down and sighed then looked up, “Yes, I know exactly what you mean.  When I was about your age, I met your mother and she wanted to get married right away but I couldn’t imagine bringing children into the world with danger and horror all around us.  Back then it was considerably worse than it is now.  We had lost two of my brothers to the beasts when I was a teenager.  They were older than I and had been part of the hunt.  A communication snafu had them unprotected practically on top of a hive in their sector.  I was devastated.  I couldn’t see the sense in living that way, always one mistake away from losing friends or family to these awful creatures.  I despaired.

But my father told me something that has stayed with me ever since.  He said, ‘Hal, remember that you come from the smartest, toughest animal to ever appear on this green Earth.  Your ancestors had to fight off saber-tooth tigers and cave bears with flint spear-heads and bone clubs.  And their only protection were caves and maybe a campfire.  But over the course of a million years, they killed off all those predators and made the Earth a garden.  And by God, you and your descendants are going to rid this Earth of these giant vermin, take my word for it.’  So, I thought about what he had said and I understood.  There is within us all of the cunning, courage and tenacity of our ape-men ancestors and we should look at this crisis as a challenge that we must accept and overcome.  We’re men and our enemy is just a stupid bug that needs exterminating.  It’s just a part of life.  A problem no different than cancer or earthquake.  Something we use our brains to figure out and eventually eradicate.  Just like the saber-tooth.”  His father looked off into the air for a second and then said, “You know your mother is right about Gina.  A girl that pretty is going to be snatched up pretty quickly if you don’t wake up.  Why don’t you give her a call.”  Then he walked away toward the kitchen.

Dave sat there for a few minutes thinking about everything his father had said.  Then he called up Gina and asked her out to the social.

Living with Them – Part 1

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Dave watched the flying drone’s video output on a twenty-four-inch screen that he perched on a shoulder height outcropping of rock in front of him.  It was flying at about three hundred feet of elevation over the landscape in front of him.  It was typical Northeastern US second growth forest; a mixture of conifers and deciduous trees breaking out into overgrown fields, swamps and rocky hills.  But in one of those fields, he could see the tell-tale earthen cone.  It was a hundred feet in diameter. Twenty feet high with a ten-foot round hole in the center.  And sure enough, there were five specimens of Camponotus vicinus gigas.  They ranged from nine to fifteen feet in length and were carrying the remains of some dairy cattle that they must have torn apart.  Sending the drone in for a closer look he saw that one of the ants was transporting what looked like human remains.

Dave geolocated the nest and then released two projectiles that plummeted from the drone directly into the entrance.  They were black and spherical, about six inches in diameter and they popped upon impact and released a cloud of red colored dust that thoroughly coated the entire entrance area.  Dave typed in a report on his actions and attached the geolocated video.  He also recommended that all human habitations within fifty miles be contacted and warned of the nest.  He specifically mentioned the dairy cattle and human predation.  Then he said a short prayer for the poor victim.

The rest of the day was uneventful.  The drone had covered the rest of the area in his portion of the grid and nothing else was found.  When the drone returned, he packed it up and waited for the transport to pick him up.  The transport landed in the clearing where he was set up.  Dave looked admiringly at the huge machine.  It was a two-hundred-foot square hovercraft with armor extending completely around a central deck.  There were guns located on all four sides and powered hoists on booms located in the center of the craft.  One of these booms was lowered toward his drone package and snagged it and hoisted it into the craft.  When it was clear Dave walked over to the closest door on the perimeter and waved his ID in front of the scanner and walked through the opening door.

Once inside he walked across the open deck to the control room and checked in with the supervisor.  The pilot was already starting the engines in order to head to home base.  The supervisor was already reading Dave’s report and said, “That hive is a disappointment.  We thought we cleared this whole sector three years ago.  Maybe the current virus isn’t 100% effective anymore.”  Dave nodded his head wearily, “Yeah, same old story.  Nothing works forever.  Eventually munitions and poison gas are what make the job thorough.  Anything less is just too dangerous.  We can’t have people getting torn to pieces by these monsters.  It’s not right.”

The supervisor gave him an angry look, “Look, we’re making progress.  The safe zone in this area of the grid used to be fifty miles square.  Now it’s five hundred.  We’re winning.  There are bound to be failures.  Stop getting so emotional.  Just do your job and be part of the solution.”  Dave grimaced but inside he knew the man was right.  Mankind had been dealing with the ants for over seventy years and for the last twenty years the tide had turned against the creatures.  Starting at the poles and working toward the equator the ants were being driven toward the tropics.  No one believed they could ever be extirpated from the amazon or equatorial Africa or Southern Asia but it was hoped that the temperate zones could be completely cleared and an effective barrier strategy established.

When Dave exited the transport in Fort Peterson in the White Mountains he headed for the local watering hole and joined up with his friends.  Half of them were miners in the local quarries and half were like him bug hunters for the government.  All being in the twenty- to thirty-year-old age group most of the talk was about where the best-looking women could be found.  But after they were finished lying about their weekends some of the miners were curious to know how the bug hunt was going.

The senior hunter at the table was Craig and at twenty-eight his vast knowledge of the project didn’t impress anyone too much but he attempted to give an authoritative lecture on the theory and practice of bug hunting, “What we’re seeing is a steady and comprehensive rolling back of the infested area throughout North America.  All of what was the Canadian territory except for British Columbia is already cleared.  In the former United States, New England, the Great Lakes region and the Mountain West is clear all the way to Eastern Washington and Oregon, down as far south as Colorado.  Projections indicate ten years will bring us down to the old Mexican border.”

Dave looked bleakly toward Craig and said, “We found a nest two hundred miles south of here that had just finished off the human and bovine residents of a dairy farm right before we got there.  I’m guessing ten years might be a little optimistic.  What have the university researchers published this year, Bob?”  Bob was a former academic who had joined the hunt after he lost his family to an infestation a few years earlier.  Biological modelling had been his field of research and he still had contacts within the bug modelling project.  The small bespectacled young man looked up at Dave and quietly began to talk, “Well Craig is right that we have turned a corner.  In the first twenty years of the war humanity lost essentially the entire human population of the tropical zone that was forty percent of the 2.69 billion people living, about a billion people.  We lost another billion people everywhere else.  After that we only lost another two hundred million over the course of fifty more years.  And this year was the first net population gain.

As far as the bugs.  Initially their population increase was asymptotic.  In the last twenty years it’s levelled off.  We don’t have any hard numbers but we have reduced their territory substantially in the last ten years.  The modelling I saw showed a hundred-year estimate to clear the temperate zones but that’s a low confidence study.  The problems with resistance to the viral agents we’ve been using makes it almost impossible to extrapolate the curves for anything more than a year with high confidence.”

Dave nodded his head, “That’s what I heard from someone in the headquarters this week.  Not particularly cheering.”

Burn It!  Burn It All!

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Ah, the heady days of our civilizational maelstrom.  As the world we knew is ripped to shreds and flung around us in centripetal chaos I can recognize fragments of familiar things flying by.  Sort of like the images that Dorothy sees in the scene where she is riding in the tornado and sees her friends and relatives float by in a rocking chair or a row boat.

You recognize some normal American ritual or an icon of a former day.  There’s a flash of recognition and it triggers some reflexive emotion or thought.  And then it flies by and is gone and the reality of being spun around in a howling cyclone of fragmented bits of the former reality returns.

But when we’re not fighting for our lives, human beings have to search for the interesting and enjoyable things around them.  Even in hell there must be a coffee break where people gather around the water cooler (or battery acid cooler) and shoot the breeze.  It’s just the nature of the beast.

You know I really enjoyed thinking about the minutia in the giant ant movie yesterday.  Thinking about the characterizations and the movie conventions that they employed back then was the most fun thing that I have thought about in weeks.  And it occurred to me that here is so much substance, so much American-ness in these old silly things from sixty, seventy years ago.  And not because there’s great art on display.  This is a story about giant ants.  Nothing more absurd is imaginable.  Nothing less important exists.  And yet the people who wrote the script and acted the scenes managed to do a good job of creating this ridiculous world that they were employed to create.  The guy who played the booze-soaked hobo in the hospital ward was highly entertaining.  The general working with the cop to operate the bazooka for the phosphorus bombardment of the ant nest was amusing in his portrayal of upper management trying his hand at a front-line task.

Maybe that is what the future looks like.  We’ll be like the medieval monks copying and illuminating fragments of the classical world to preserve something for when the rampaging vandals have run out of places to sack and burn and whoever is left sets about the hard work of rebuilding civilization from what’s left of the wreckage.  So, I’ve found new direction in celebrating whatever fragments and shards of the old order strike my fancy and even any worthwhile new shoots as they present themselves.  Certainly, it’s an uphill battle while the orcs are still busy burning and pillaging all around us.  And from time to time, we’ll have to put down our quills and cap our inkwells and pick up a battle axe and shield to fend off the latest incursion of rampaging savages.

But there is absolutely more sense in celebrating the things that give meaning to life and to enjoy art; high or low, than there is in just bemoaning the destruction and dwelling on how low we have fallen.  After all, no one threw a switch one day and ended the dark ages and began the renaissance.  The knowledge was always there.  It needed people who were willing to apply that knowledge.  It needed human ingenuity and imagination and a little breathing space between them and the nearest barbarians.

So don’t be surprised if I sound a little happier.  Sure, the orcs may win this war.  Our whole civilization may come crashing down in an orgy of death and darkness.  We may be on the cusp of a millennium of ignorance and misery.  But as Hurin said in the Silmarillion, “ Aurë entuluva!”, “Day shall come again.”  It seems inevitable that human intelligence will persevere over entropy and stupidity.  There is in life that which strives against chaos.  I’ll bet on us.

Now, let’s take another look at that giant ant movie.  Have you ever noticed how annoying the girl scientist gets when she’s down in the ant nursery in New Mexico?  She starts yelling at her colleagues, “Burn it!  Burn it all!”

I mean who the hell is she?  Especially since Ben and Bob are going to have to haul her fat butt up several steep inclines by rope to get her out of that cyanide laden death trap.  It’s not like she has the upper body strength to get herself out.  She could at least act a little more polite.  An incipient girl-boss even back then.  Ah well.

Don’t Panic.  Pick Up the Flamethrower

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Facebook crashes and burns, Musk guts the Twitter mafia, the Fetterman debate, Biden continues to spin his tale of a bizzarro world where inflation is low and he’s the most popular man in the world, the State Department muses about nuclear first strike over Ukraine, Chuck Schumer tells Biden the bad news about the Georgia senate race, Oregonians might elect a Republican governor.  And on and on and on.

The weirdness has metastasized.  Even Democrat voters have stopped claiming that “things are alright.”  We’ve reached the Howard Beale stage of things where almost everyone is confused, scared and angry all at the same time.  And I’m really happy about that.  I’ve been waiting for years for the rest of the idiots to catch up to where I’ve been for a decade.  And I count myself as one of the idiots.  Maybe I’m just a little less stupid than the rest of them.  Or maybe I was just a little more involved in what was playing out on the national stage.

The real reason is because I’m extremely vindictive.  I’ve taken personally all the lies I was fed twenty some odd years ago during the War on Terror and I want pay back.  I’m just as interested in seeing Mitch McConnell lose his job as I am in seeing Joe Biden go to jail.

So, it’s a great relief to see so many catatonic Americans open their eyes for the first time in their lives and realize that they’ve entrusted their country to incompetent ideologues who believe in things that don’t exist.

It’s good to see that America is getting a sense of what abandoning petroleum feels like.  It feels like poverty.  That’s a valuable lesson to learn.

So, this week I’m soaking in all of the rage, fear and panic that the Democrats are radiating around them and the confusion and lies that the media is pumping out.  I’m floating on my back in a warm ocean of schadenfreude and it’s wonderful.  There was a great video of a doofus from MSNBC interviewing Republican voters from Western Pennsylvania.  She’s trying to get them to say that January 6th is a terrible thing and any politicians who were there should be shunned.  And they’ll have none of it.  They scoff at her and compare it to the larger riots during the “George Floyd summer of love.”  The expression on the face of the woman interviewing them was a deer in the headlights look.  She couldn’t believe that they wouldn’t let themselves be shamed into condemning the protestors.  It was glorious.

I’m trying not to get too charged up by the good news that seems to come out of every poll I read.  There’s nothing worse than the let down after being subjected to a fraudulent election.  Especially when it’s brutally obvious that massive fraud is slowly being unrolled before your eyes.

But there’s no reason not to enjoy this run up to the election.  Listening to the excuses and bitterness as everything goes wrong for the Left is deeply soothing.  It puts a bounce in my step and a smile in my heart.  Just hearing Liz Cheney talk about how noble and honorable it is for her to sell her party out and support the Democrats makes me feel all the better about her failure to get re-elected and the bigger failure of her January 6th Hearings.  Very soon she’ll be carrying her box of stolen office supplies home from her cushy former office in the Capitol building.  And once the new Republican majority is in charge of the House no one will ever remember who Liz Cheney was.  And the receptionists will let her know that whichever Congressman or Senator she wants to speak to is not available but they’ll be sure to send her a fund-raiser envelope in the mail, have a nice day.

Tonight, I watched my favorite giant radioactive insect movie, Them!  Unsurprisingly James Whitmire (as Sgt. Ben Peterson) is, once again, killed by the powerful mandibles of a giant carpenter ant.  No matter how many times I yell out, “No Ben don’t try to get in the pipe.  Pick up the flame thrower, dammit man pick up the flame thrower!”  But he was too cocky.  When he heard the stridulations of the giant ant, he first lifted the second little boy into the exit pipe and then tried to exit that way himself.  Obviously, he should not have picked up the child but calmly and efficiently picked up the flame thrower that was nearby, pointed it at the murderous mega-insect and charbroiled the wretched invertebrate.  Then he could have exited with the kid at his leisure.

What is it about giant insects that makes otherwise rational public servants so erratic?  C’est la vie.

Them! – A Science Fiction Movie Review

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You may be asking yourself, is photog becoming demented?  Didn’t he already write a review of Them!?  The answers to those questions are yes and no.  I have referenced Them in several posts about cheesy 1950s science fiction movies.  But it has never gotten its own exclusive treatment.  Well, I mean to remedy that situation, pronto.

Them! is the grand-daddy of all atomic energy fear films.  Instead of fearing cancer and radiation sickness we are provided with a much more rational fear, giant ants.  It is 1954 and nine years after the first atomic bomb was tested at White Sands, New Mexico.  During those nine years ants have been traipsing around the New Mexico desert ignorant of their future as future contenders for mankind’s crown as King of the Earth.  But the wait is over.  A small prop plane is inexplicably cruising over the desert and spots a little girl holding a doll aimlessly walking in the hot sun.  The pilot alerts a nearby police cruiser which intercepts the little girl and finds that she’s catatonic.  With the help of the pilot they trace her point of origin to a recreational vehicle parked in the desert.  On closer inspection the officers discover that one side of the RV has been ripped to shreds.  But being crack forensic experts and logical linguists, they proclaim that the RV wall, “wasn’t caved in, it was caved out.”  Whoever wrote the deathless prose of this dialog is partly responsible for the sad position we currently find ourselves in, vis-à-vis cultural and actual illiteracy.  Later on, the policeman redeems himself when at a general store that has been similarly destroyed, he declares, “this wasn’t pushed in, it was pulled out.”  Okay, stupid rant over.

Based on blood found in the RV the officers determine that the girl is the only survivor of an attack.  On the way back from finding the girl and the trailer they stop off at a local general store and find it similarly damaged and the store owner brutally killed.  One of the police officers, Ed Blackburn is left at the store to guard the remains.  His partner, Sgt. Ben Peterson played by James Whitmore, drives off and shortly afterward, Blackburn is heard off camera firing his revolver at some thing and then screaming as he suffers horrible death.

Evidence found at the site of the RV, a foot print, is sent to the FBI for identification and so the story moves on to its next logical step, Santa Claus is called in.  Or more precisely Edmund Gwenn who played Santa Claus in Miracle on 34th Street.  Gwenn plays Dr. Harold Medford a world-renowned myrmecologist who with his myrmecologist daughter have come to lead the effort to save the world from the giant ants.  Representing the government is FBI agent Robert Graham played by James Arness.  Arness who later found fame as Marshall Dillon on TV’s Gunsmoke is the brave, competent hero of the movie and the love interest for the myrmecologist daughter.  And to provide local color Ben Peterson is always on hand to provide the comic relief.

With the help of the scientists, the army locates the giant ant nest and destroy it with cyanide gas.  But after inspecting the inside of the nest the scientists break the bad news.  New queen ants have escaped the nest and will be forming new nests elsewhere.  Now a war room is set up and armed forces from all the services mobilize to battle the giant ants on land, on sea and in the air.  Dunt, dunt, daaaah!!!

The final showdown takes place where it must, in the storm drains of Los Angeles.  And in fitting fashion, the ants capture two little boys who wander into their nest and are rescued by the US Army.  Unfortunately, Ben Peterson dies saving the boys but dies the good death of a hero.  And when the ants are finally finished off Dr. Medford gives a speech and tells us that the atomic age is fraught with danger and giant insects.

Despite how thoroughly I’ve mocked this movie, I actually enjoy it immensely.  Other than the laughably fake animatronic ants the production values for the movie are quite good and the actors are actually very effective for the most part, including the character actors performing the bit parts as police, military and civilian participants.  My favorite scenes are where the scientific expertise of the Medfords is showcased for the benefit of the poor ignorant soldiers and police.  While under attack from their first giant ant Dr. Medford makes sure he uses the Latin singular and plural versions of the word antenna when instructing the police to shoot at the ant. “Shoot the antennae, shoot the antennae,” he yells and once one of these has been shot off he continues “now shoot the other antenna.”  In another scene Dr. Medford is attempting to convince the Pentagon that the giant ants are an existential threat to humanity and he uses an ant film clip that looks like it could have been made by my high school biology teacher.

Them! is a wonderful time capsule of the 1950s.  Americans are the good guys and giant ants are definitely bad.  What could be simpler?

Scientists Real and Imagined – Part 1

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Re-posted from 2017 in honor of Halloween

 

On Saturday afternoons when I was a kid I used to watch Million Dollar Movie on Channel 11 and was able to enjoy such science fiction classics as “Attack of the Crab Monsters” and “Attack of the 50 Foot Woman.”  Right away I figured out that really big creatures that had been exposed to atomic radiation really liked to attack.  But as I became more sophisticated in my sci-fi viewing I eschewed such childish cinematic offerings in favor of more cerebral tales.  No more ridiculous giant crab stories.  I graduated to “Them” which is the realistic depiction of an attack by giant ants exposed to atomic radiation.  In this classic of the fifties I learned that scientists were old and wore glasses and looked like Santa Claus (except for the girl scientists who were young and didn’t even look like Mrs. Claus and tended to end up with the FBI agent who starred in the film, who in this case was James Arness of Gunsmoke fame).  And the best ones had British accents (or at worst New England accents).  Also, no matter what their area of specialization (e.g., physics, botany or myrmecology) they were all equally adept at battling giant creatures exposed to atomic radiation.  And they were full of esoteric and valuable information.  I found out that the plural of antenna wasn’t antennas but rather antennae!  This inspired in me a life-long love of the classical Greek and Latin languages.  And the most important characteristic of scientists was their love of knowledge.  Because of this thirst for knowledge, they were willing to venture into tunnels and basements where even the ubiquitous soldiers in their WWII vintage uniforms were afraid to go.  It also meant the scientists were very likely to be munched on by the mutant du jour of the story.  But you know, science.  So that is how I came to admire scientists.  They were cool and smart too.  And they always, always, always figured out how to kill the monsters.

But one Saturday, Million Dollar Movie was playing another sci-fi film, “The Thing from Another World.”  I was suspicious at first.  If it was from another world how did it get here?  Had it been exposed to atomic radiation?  Would there be enough scientists?  These doubts plagued me.  But I decided to give it a whirl.  Encouraging signs emerged quickly.  The creature was indeed radioactive and there was a whole passel of scientists assigned to this movie.  One of them even had a New England accent so things seemed to check out.  And reassuringly the US military was available for monster eradication duty once the scientists had done the heavy lifting of analysis.  Early on a problem arose.  This creature was man shaped.  He was bald and had strange hands with hypodermic finger nails.  But he was no more than eight feet tall.  This was highly irregular and seemed to throw into doubt his qualifications for his own movie.  Also the scientists in this movie were extremely assertive and gave the military officers a lot of lip.  And it seemed they didn’t know their primary function, figure out how to kill the monster.  This was very confusing.  The leader of the scientists kept saying that regardless of how many humans the creature killed, science demanded that no force should be used against it.  He kept saying (in a really annoying intonation) that the creature “is wiser than we are” and that “it’s our duty to die to preserve the knowledge this creature possesses.”  Even as a youngster I intuited that this head scientist was what we called back then “a loser.”  How could this be?  He was a scientist!  He had the answers.  I found this very puzzling and dispiriting.  I searched for some reason for this failure on the scientist’s part to want to kill the monster.  Eventually I developed an hypothesis based on a detailed comparison of “Them” and “The Thing from Another World.”  At first glance nothing jumped out.  But once I checked the cast members it all became clear.  As mentioned above, in “Them” the part of the FBI Agent and eventual boyfriend of the scientist’s daughter is played by James Arness of “Gunsmoke” fame.  It turned out that the part of the Thing was played by none other than James Arness!  Well obviously if Arness was the prospective son-in-law of one scientist, then it stood to reason that a fellow scientist would not turn on him.  What was at work here was the kind of professional courtesy that, for instance, police confer on each other’s family members.  Now it made perfect sense.  Crisis averted.  I could become a scientist without becoming a loser.  But I was troubled by all that talk of monsters being wiser than us.  And not killing them but instead letting them kill us.  It was very strange.

Fast forward forty years.  I work as an engineer.  I am surrounded by R&D PhDs.  They all look and sound like the head scientist in “The Thing from Another World.”  They drive Priuses and have Tolerance and Coexist, Bernie and Free Tibet bumper stickers on their cars.  And suddenly it all makes sense.

Scientists Real and Imagined – Part 2