2015: favorite new stuff

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 2015: The Best & Worst! This is the time of the year when writers coast. They dream up their totally subjective best and worse lists for the year that's rapidly coming to a close. Why? So they can focus on the important things...the holidays. So with that in mind:

You reach a point in your life when you just have too much stuff. All of your rooms and closets are simply stuffed with stuff.

George Carlin had an entire routine on stuff, click: stuff.

I'm in the process of de-stuffing—I refuse to rent a storage unit to hold my excess stuff—yet in September a new wonderful item came into my life that I had to find a place for. 

My friend and coworker Dr. Louise Conrad brought me back a signed photograph from Dragon Con in Atlanta. It had been autographed by both Gary Lockwood and Keir Dullea from the movie, 2001: A Space Odyssey by director Stanley Kubrick.

Lunar Crater Tycho with site of monolith in the center

It's a movie you either love or hate. Having a scientific bent, I was in the camp of the former. 2001 is/was mind- blowing. It changed my life and I stopped everything I was doing to book future passage to the moon on PanAm. 

I wanted to see the Tycho Magnetic Anomaly #2, i.e. tall black monolith—stuff stored off-site on our Moon by super supreme beings (SSBs). The good folks on the other end of the wormhole had stashed their stuff millions of years ago, 40-feet deep in the lunar crater Tycho. 

SPOILER: The SSBs did the same thing to our early bipedal hominid ancestors at Olduvai Gorge. It caused a panic and the proto-humans picked up bones and started beating each other to death, each blaming the other for the monolithic litter.

Unfortunately for me, in 1991 PanAm folded, so I had to switch to plan B, i.e. start a blog. But since that hadn't been invented yet, (first online diary, or blog came in 1994), I had time to kill, so I acquired stuff to fill my life.

Since the autographed photo arrived, we've watched the 1968 film twice on the big screen as it was meant to be, and it's still quite wonderful/hallucinogenic. Although, we are now a full 14 years past the events predicted in the movie.

"Open the pod bay doors, please Hal!" 

I need a place for my oh-so-cool new stuff. 

Thank you, Louise!  

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