Right – this has nothing to do with RedBubble. / I’m working on a[nother] new story, set in the future this time. It’s based around the al…
Right – this has nothing to do with RedBubble. / I’m working on a[nother] new story, set in the future this time. It’s based around the alignment of all nine planets [Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto]. Yes in my opinion Pluto is still a planet :P / I HAVE A QUESTION / When will the next alignment of all nine planets be including Pluto? I need to know this for in my story… obviously it’s in the future and I don’t need the date or anything, just the year. I have posted on WikiAnswers and everything but no-one has replied. Can ANYONE help me out here, please???
It was March 2005, somewhere near St Kilda....
It was March 2005, somewhere near St Kilda. I was sitting in a room, on a sofa propped on milk crates, staring at the ceiling. Around my neck was a Philadelphia collar and in my hand was a bottle of gin. The collar was the only sign that I had recently broken my C1, 2 & T1 the gin was to stop me thinking about it. I was staring at the ceiling because it was reasonably tricky to stare anywhere else. I sat quietly contemplating my future. Next to me was a chap called Christopher Lansell, Crispy to his comrades, whom I’d known about 8 minutes. He started talking about some things, wild, imaginative things, I started to reply, and back he came with more, this went on quite successfully for a while. One of these crazy things was an idea he’d been playing with to install a 1:1 billion scale model of the Solar System somewhere in Melbourne. It seemed quite a good idea to me. Almost without any warning at all it was 9am on December 10 of that year, my return ticket to the UK forgotten in the back of a drawer somewhere, and 6 months out of date, my neck visible to all who cared to glance. I’m crouched at the door to our St Kilda studio, attempting to drill a hole into Pluto, except this Pluto is only 2mm in diametre, which makes it very tricky. And in half an hour it’s meant to be on a plinth somewhere near Port Melbourne. / / / / Building the Sun Having drummed up some media interest through an interview on ABC radio and an article in The Age and spent a few months constructing the Sun and nine planets by hand we were actually within minutes of taking our disjointed conversation live. / / / / / Painting the Planets / Planet bases Pluto / Mars / Neptune / Saturn / Jupiter / Having finally secured Pluto to it’s stand, we threw all the models in the back of a trailer and hightailed it to the beach, as we roared along the approach to the marina there was a sudden, and slightly sickening crunch. Crispy braked, we looked at each other in silent fear, then out through the back window of the Toyota. Rolling down the road in the vague direction of Acland Street was a 1.39m golden ball of plywood and satin. Hmmm. We exited the car at speed and, to the amusement of the residents, sprinted off after the star. It was not entirely unscathed, but it was still presentable, and anyway, we were out of time. The weekend was long and disgustingly hot, but the model was a success, large numbers of families turned up on their bikes, with their children, The Age article folded in their pockets, planning to ride the full 6km route to Pluto. And being mid summer the beach and passing traffic was plentiful. Seeing kids stand under the 1.28cm hand painted sphere that was Earth (I even managed to dust the Himalayas with some snow) and point out Australia before running 150m to the Sun and smacking it with their ice cream stained hands was quite rewarding. / Earth, a man with a beard & the Moon, which is as far as Man has ever actually travelled, allegedly. (But not the man with the beard, he may have been no further than Geelong, I don’t know) Mars / The Sun / / / By Sunday night we were knackered but content. Then things started getting interesting. Tony Wheeler, co-founder of Lonely Planet rang us up, said he’d heard about the project but had been out of the country and wondered if he could come and see the models, we, unsurprisingly said yes. Then the council rang us up and said they’d had a lot of calls from the general public asking when they were going to do the project again. They said they hadn’t done it in the first place. It was about this point that words like ‘permanent’ began to appear in conversations. We found a sculptor, Cameron Robbins, an eccentric and extremely talented man based in Collingwood, and commenced talks with the council. It was estimated at costing around $70,000, and so the tedious process of money raising became the focus, Tony pledged a large sum of his personal finances, as did some universities. Things looked good. Then the university pulled out, and we experienced our first wedge of bureaucratic council red tape. Things look bad. And that high and low was a microcosm of how it progressed for the next two years. With a hefty focus on the ‘This is just never going to happen’ line of thought. But now, three years and six months after a conversation on a sofa in St Kilda, there are some people down at the foreshore tidying up the metre high bluestone plinths the planets rest on, and no doubt someone polishing the 360kg of bronze that makes up the Sun, in preparation for the opening on September 21. And I’m going to miss it, because I’m in London, so if you have nothing better to do please pop down to the reserve north of the Marina at 4.45, take some photos, get yourself an epic sense of how fragile and unique Earth really is and give Crispy some support for the endless phone calls and meetings and rolls and rolls of tape he’s deftly sliced through. Pouring the bronze Planets / Saturn, Jupiter, Neptune, Uranus cooling off / Half of the Sun / All of the Sun / Polishing the Sun / The sculptor Cameron Robbins next to polished Sun / Saturn / Venus, Mars, Earth, Mercury & Pluto (yeah it’s not a planet anymore, but it was then) / Pouring concrete base for the Sun / Diamond saw cutting bluestone plinths for the planets / Plinths being lifted into place / / The Sun being moved into place / / / / Model Location / And if you ever see anyone chasing an enormous shining sphere down a road, go and give them a hand.
He was a truly inspirational figure. One of those last big personas of the 21st century. A visionary. He / was also an amazingly humane…
He was a truly inspirational figure. One of those last big personas of the 21st century. A visionary. He / was also an amazingly humane person. He was Arthur C. Clarke I met him a few times in the last decade or two . He’d chosen my / country Sri Lanka – an erstwhile paradise as his home. / Scuba diving , blue waters and lifelong friendships was an allure / that took him away from his place of birth in Somerset England. Each time I went to him it was to exploit his name to help show this / land, my country, as more than some barbaric hell hole of war and / conflict. I even wanted to create a global centre of excellence in / communication technologies to cluster around a technology park in / Morotuwa (Sri Lanka). We would use his name and personal contacts to / try invite some of the biggest tech players in the world to come help restore confidence in the country.( Remember those beautiful lines from Yeats ‘Meditations in Time of Civil War’ ? / “My wall is loosening; honey-bees, / Come build in the empty house of the stare.’..) He was after all the father of concepts like the communication / satellite and to a certain extent the Internet. (‘He published his / pioneering paper in 1945 on the technical potential of geosynchronous / satellite orbits in global and interplanetary communications. ) Time was running out I said. The then Government of Sri Lanka / allocated some land and gave me a team of beurocrats to study it and / that as you know is the slow death of ideas. He however was totally available to help spread the message of / diversity, peace and opportunity for his adopted home. Any time or / day. Each visit left me invigorated, recharged and always conscious that / people like him are rare. He is gone now but I will meet him one day / maybe ” See you in Pluto’ as he scribbled shortly before his death on a fly leaf of a new book he sent to Russian Astronaut Alexei Leonov …… His clarity of thought ,his simplification of science backed by the / rigour of existing knowledge, his ability to transcend the present and / explore the ‘what ifs’ , his abundant humour and his sense of theatre, / steeped in a childlike ability to engage in the world was like a / genetic mix of Homer and Columbus and Gallileo charged with the task / of unraveling time present and time past, that is contained in time / future.And this he did by embracing it’s amazing potentiality. Stanley Kubrick is reputed to have said . “He has the kind of mind of / which the world can never have enough, a composite of imagination, / intelligence and knowledge that is driven by great energy and a / quirkish and unceasing curiosity’ ……………………………. I first came across him as a child watching ‘2001 A Space Odyssey’ at the / Lionel Wendt Theatre in Colombo . It must have been a special film / society screening. Dad was a science fiction buff and I grew up amidst / an avalanche of science fiction books that wallpapered an entire room / but nothing fired my imagination the way Kubrick’s movie on Sir / Clarke’s book the Sentinel did. Time travel, extra-terrestrial / life,artificial intelligence .. it had it all. I was a Clarke devotee / ever since. I last met Clarke a victim of polio, playing table tennis from his / wheel chair and talking about commercial space travel / A pet cheewahwah nibbled nearby. Another pet robot scampered around..all / peripheral mood settings to his larger theme. ‘We’ll be doing it for less than twenty quid soon as the Space / escalator is almost here –they’ve got the right material which is / cheap enough now to make it now and it will have a cycle of renewable / energy .So the energy used to take it up, will be used it to bring it / down.” He said. ‘Twenty quid ? and I spent 70 to get from London to Newcastle last / fall’ I said. / ‘Yes’ he said. ‘It’s here in the realm of the possible. Its no / longer fiction ‘ …The BBC reporter with me was in her element. She told me it was a / highlight of her career of reportage. Like me she was smitten. / ........................................................... Arthur C Clarke leaves a legacy that has touched the imagination of / many. Stanley Kubrick, George Lucas, Carl Sagon, JB Priestley to name / but a few. But my story is of a young man. A relative nonentity (sadly so many / years on I cant even recall his name), who had a lifelong dream that / Sir Arthur ignited and in a strange quirk of fate brought him to me as / he clutched at his dream and the straws in the wind. At that time I was some maverick corporate banker with NDB in Sri / Lanka doing my bit for a CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility)programme called “Developing Young Minds.” We were wrapping some Internet access computers around the local / planetarium. The Japs had put in some great new equipment and a new / sound and light show on space and Sir Clarke was to make the key note / address. Somewhere inbetween entered the young man.( For want of a better name / and the absence of memory I shall call him Saman..) Saman claimed to have been the illustrator on one of the Sinhala / language translations of Childhoods End and Sir Clarke had / magnanimously given him a note of appreciation and the rights he / claimed to the Sinhala film version of the book. He clutched at the / paper that gave him this stairwell to fame and glory. He had spent the last several years on the script and the set / ..Strangely I guess being an illustrator he had been more engrossed in / creating his spaceship model and had crafted the most amazing rigi / foam model covering in entirety his small two / roomed house which was in some distant corner of a suburban part of town. Two years down the road ,he was in danger of losing his young wife / (they were both in their mid twenties at most .) / and his home and he owed his landlord a years back rent . He had been / finally given a month to pay his rent or be evicted, Rupee- less and / starving ,someone had suggested he meet me. “Let me make my dream he cried. My life has no meaning, if I now have / to destroy this set. Come see it .Please. “ I sat there in his home on a cement floor that had no furniture , his / waif like wife watched on with desperate anticipation and he walked me / through his dream like an inspired drunk. I had my moment of truth. This was not just a film that needed to get done .This was a tragedy / waiting to implode. A family and two lives at least was at stake. / Somewhere in my brain I saw a flash of Dostoevsky’s Prince Myshkin. / Was it the mere semantic of the Idiot I saw that was chasing moonbeams / or the perfectly good man driven by the pursuit of a unreachable dream? I had, I must confess, an early Myshkin fixation .Our mongrel at home / when I was a teen, had been named as’ Nastasia Filipovna,’ for no earthly / reason but that Ismene my half Goan/ childhood best friend and I were / going through a Russian rite of passage much like we felt Picasso / had his ‘blue ‘period…! A pseudo literary sense of place was grist for my childhood mill / -what with Ismene’s lineage (her dad Doric was a legendary prof of / English ) and my mum an actress of sorts, spent half the time / flouncing around in bits and bobs of stage and set kimonos .. some / sense of impending drama or consequence must have rung a bell in / my adult life. And so it was, that Prince Myshkin triggered my sense of destiny with / the first commissioned Sinhala film of Sir Clarke and I decided to / stretch a long arm of help and found some funds to set this youth / free. We commissioned it as an opening feature to the banks planetarium / project that Sir Clarke was due to launch. Convoluted but related I / felt and justified it off my launch promotional budget.! He had never done films so it was a true leap of faith. / The film was abysmally low budget. I arm twisted a top film cameraman / I had worked with many years back and got another friend of my youth / who I had known from his English theatre forays ,who was then making / in roads in Sinhala cinema- Peter Almeida to play the lead. for free. A painful journey of learning and film making ensued and I’l possibly / owe Peter for many moons more , but the end result through crude in / parts was as good as the better end of Sinhala feature films. And in / terms of some of its special effects and the spectacular set it was / truly a celebration of talent . We had given this man his dream. He produced his film based on Sir / Clarke’s book / Saman went on to destroy his model , regained his house and his family / and I hope lives a more complete life, some where in the rat race / making ends meet .. There are many ways in which great lives touch ordinary lives and / expand their sense of being . No doubt the story of my young man will / fit well within the annals of any fiction. But more importantly, / speaks volumes of the simplicity and accessibility that Sir Clarke had / with people around him. / ………………………………….................................... I trust in many ways there can be no better epitaph than the one he / wrote with great hindsight a few weeks before his death on his 90th / birthday .He sets the tone by speaking with fervor of the tribalism / and angst that besets our century and speaks of true globalization / where pervasive telecom today enables us to communicate and break / barriers and be ‘one true human family”.( His lifetime thoughts on this / theme were put together 1992 into a collection of ideas and scenarios / under the title’ How the World was One: Beyond the Global Village,” a / vision of how satellite communications would promote understanding and / worldwide peace.) Clarke then shows his vision and his commitment to this planet and / his adopted home with his last three wishes. / “As I complete 90 orbits, I have no regrets and no more personal / ambitions. But if I may be allowed just three wishes,’ They are in synopsis- / 1. – That the proof of extra terrestrial life will happen sooner than later. / 2. -That the world will stop baking with its dependency on Oil / and find cleaner energies , / and that / 3. -There would be “courage and persistence” to resolve the protracted / civil war of the last quarter century in Sri Lanka ‘Sir Clarkes final Birthday message ends and I quote verbatim now: “I’m sometimes asked how I would like to be remembered. I’ve had a / diverse career as a writer, underwater explorer, space promoter and / science populariser. Of all these, I want to be remembered most as a / writer – one who entertained readers, and, hopefully, stretched their / imagination as well. / I find that another English writer - who, coincidentally, also spent / most of his life in the East - has expressed it very well. So let me / end with these words of Rudyard Kipling: If I have given you delight / by aught that I have done. / Let me lie quiet in that night / which shall be yours anon; / And for the little, little span / the dead are borne in mind, / seek not to question other than, / the books I leave behind.” That was Arthur Clarke, saying Thank You and Goodbye from Colombo!” / ………………………………………. Thank you Arthur. I shall remember the books and the films ,the deep / sea diver ,the communicator and raconteur and also the little lives / you have touched. Maybe one day we shall meet in eternity or Pluto or somewhere else in our peaceful global village. Though right now from where I stand, / global peace seems to be the most improbable of all your fantasies… Shehara de Silva. / 2008.
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