Human Beings Will Become Immortal

I hear ya Mr.Gort..I hear ya well 

This was the British Lady's ,Tommi, favourite too..makes you want to be nowhere else but there..to share that moment...Battlestar and startrek shared a lot of shakespeares works..good evil triumph of good ..now..its all just a cacaphony of sound an eye candy..but empty of things that nourish the heart and soul.  I might add that you took sci fi  works and have brung them to reality , much like Hal took his metallurgical gifts and crafted real works and tinkered with free energy, and Dr Wu his gift with light and eyesight to create unique lens so people can see better..I really am envious..all I can do..is just read about people like yourselves! ...so books and movies can have a profound effect.  I was researching the Blue Max by Jack Hunter..to use as a comparison to Soleimani , which I'll do on another thread. But when I read Jacks semi auto bio in its making triggered immediate thoughts of you all

So, then, what am I doing here, explaining the why and how of my novel, The Blue Max?

First off, I’ve survived 77 years of a century that has laid on humanity in general — and me in particular — the extremes of triumph and tragedy. I’ve been almost everywhere and have experienced almost everything the world has to offer by way of kindness and cruelty. And now that my long road is nearing an end, I feel no further need to prove myself, or to submit to anybody else’s idea of how I should live what’s left of my life. In my personal twilight, I do what I wish, providing it’s legal and not too high in calories. So here I am, commenting on The Blue Max because it pleases me to do so — and because I don’t give a rat’s empennage what the “literati” might have to say about it.

Far more important, though, is the second reason: the editor’s gracious invitation to discuss The Blue Max requires me to revisit my author’s roots, and for all the poignant memories this might evoke, it should do me some good, like a five-mile jog, say, or a dose of sulphur and molasses. And it will, synergistically, compel me to sort out some inner, private things too long moldering in my mental attic

* * *

In the beginning was a movie.
www.jackhunter.com/BlueMaxOTFInfo.htm
For what it’s worth, and with emotions split on the subject (as a professional writer I’m devoted to the First Amendment, and as a grand-daddy I hate to think of my young’ns watching the director’s cut of Basic Instinct), I offer my life as proof-positive for those who argue that movies work a profound influence on the minds of innocents.

At the age of six, I was reasonably innocent.

One winter’s night in the late 1920s, when we were living in Kenmore, then an incorporated pip on Buffalo’s epaulette, Daddy, an engineer at American Radiator, had been asked to work late. Rather than face another lonely evening, Mother pulled on her cloche hat, draped her fake fox stole just-so over her flapper-style overcoat, bundled me into my snowsuit and galoshes, and loaded us both aboard a trolley bound for Niagara Square. Her “absolute favoritest fil-um stars,” Buddy Rogers and Clara Bow, were appearing in a new smash movie called Wings, and since a baby-sitter was not an affordable option, the only way she could “go to the picture-show” was to take me along

So off we went through the snowy streets, Mother to flee her loneliness, I to encounter the imp that would sit on my shoulder through the harrowing journey to Social Security, night cramps, thin hair, sullen prostate, and profound sympathy for all younger generations

Wings (for those who have just arrived from another planet) depicted the adventures of American fliers in World War I. In structure and plot it was the typical early silent: elementary, idealistic, and made ludicrous by the heavy-breathing, arm-waving, and eye-rolling pantomime required of actors who could be seen but not heard. Mother and I weren’t sufficiently sophisticated to be put off by the cornball acting, of course, nor were we savvy enough to appreciate the fact that, for all the film’s dramatic naivete, its aviation scenes and other production values were extraordinary in a day when lighting was delivered mainly by the sun and backgrounds tended to flutter in the breeze. But apparent even to me was our entrancement — Mother’s by Rogers and Bow, mine by Spad and Fokker. While she sat motionless and starry-eyed through the relentless and incomprehensible he-she stuff, I would writhe; while I sat motionless and starry-eyed through the dogfights and balloon-busting and plane crashes, she would concentrate on the popcorn.

I have no way of knowing what secret reward the dear woman won from that ancient motion picture, but I came away from the theater totaled by my first love affair, afire with a passion for flying machines and with a weirdly adult understanding that whatever was to come, wherever I was to go, whatever I would do in my life, airplanes would — as my determinedly Victorian Aunt Ida liked to say about things that mattered — rule in my heart

As a boy, I built all the models, read all the issues of G-8 and His Battle Aces, Daredevil Aces, Battle Birds, and Sky Fighters, sat through innumerable screenings of Hell’s Angels, Dawn Patrol, Ace of Aces, The Eagle and the Hawk, and Hell in the Heavens, visited the Smithsonian, and searched out and questioned every surviving World War I aviator within a day’s bike ride from home. In this interval, I ran into a frustration that set me up for the duty that was to be my lot in World War II.

A fifth-grade classmate at Washington School was the son of German immigrants. Knowing of my interest in World War I airplanes, he loaned me his father’s copy of Der Rote Kampfflieger, the purported autobiography of Manfred Freiherr von Richthofen, the ace of German aces and one of my “absolute favoritest pilots.” I spent hours over that book, trying to decipher the mysteries behind its incomprehensible German hieroglyphics. Finally, in total exasperation and vowing that I’d translate that durn thing if it was the last thing I did, I went to the public library and withdrew How to Speak, Read, and Write German.

Needless to say, the effort was less than a whiz-bang success. But it did reveal the fact that I had a gift for languages and moved me into taking four years of German in high school. These were followed by four years of heavy-duty conversationals at Penn State, taught by Professor Wurfl, a native German who threatened good-naturedly to flunk any student who spoke English while within his earshot. The result was that, by the time I was invited to attend World War II, I was somewhat of a rarity: an American-born recruit of American parentage who not only could speak, read, and write acceptable German but also was conversant with German military history

As a teen I’d had flight training on an OX-5 powered Travelaire biplane, but even that card was trumped by my familiarity with German and the Germans. There would be no flying cadet status for me. No pilot training, no tour as a navigator or bombardier or gunner. No way. It was off to OCS and then eventually to the War Department Intelligence Training Center at Camp Ritchie, in the Maryland hills, where Wehrmacht turncoats taught me how to become an All-American German — or what my Documents Interpretation instructor called, tongue in cheek, “a Dick von Tracy.”....continued at link

salute!