posted                   

quote:

---

Inky black space, sparkling with gemstone stars, fills your mind to overflowing. The sheer, unfathomable enormity of it threatens to burst open your brain like a child's balloon. Here and there bright marbles sparkle in the distant sunlight but they remain marbles, easily lost or discarded. Below you is the marble that keeps you alive. Earth is wrapped in a frigid embrace, streaked with blue and green and wreathed in fluffy white fluffiness, but from up here it is chillingly apparent that almost anything -- natural disaster, particularly viral pathogen, sufficiently violent political upheaval, asteroid strike, planetary temperature rising a mere 10 degrees -- could take that paper-thin ecosystem keeping humanity alive and rip it away, leaving billions of souls gasping and boiling where they fell, even as--

Actually, spaceflight only affects you that way if you stick with classical music. That's why early spaceflight pilots were awoken with peppy tunes piped in from ground control; enough replays of "Thus Spake Zarathustra" could make anyone want to set their controls for the heart of dowtown Houston and fire all thrusters. And the song chosen for inclusion in humanity's letter-in-the-bottle Voyager launch was The Rolling Stones "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction," which should have served to warn any approaching aliens of both our race's general crankiness and our love of the double negative.

Judging from the pounding bass line that was just barely audible through the thin air of the stratosphere, the captain of the small two-man Orbhopper ship currently blasting over the horizon preferred to vanquish the terrifying insignificance that space bestows by cranking up "Exhaust Port Woman, You're a Shot in a Million" by The Walloping Pandroids. Also a good choice.

But music aside, what really helps you ignore the vastness of eternity is to be really, really pissed off.

Move past the ship. Sink down through the clouds. (Try not to scream, this is a literary device.) Zip over and approach the western seaboard of the United States. Circle around, observing the regulated flight patterns, until you are silently drifting over San Mateo, California. Head for the coast. There, nestled in what was once a bayland marsh protected by the government to preserve endangered species, lies the magnificent Hill Institute, a rambling collection of gleaming white buildings and relaxing parks. Founded in 2027 by Gene Hill, futurian and biologist, in its first 10 years the Hill Institute was responsible for 341 distinct patents, each one a miraculous innovation that would help mankind. Which, frankly, was more than the Salt Marsh Harvest Mouse ever did.

---

Posts: 7790 | Registered: Aug 2000  |  IP: Logged | 

posted                   

quote:

---

I'm starting to think there's something special about this Hiatus show that I failed to *get* at first.

---

Posts: 3516 | Registered: Sep 2002  |  IP: Logged | 

posted                   

quote:

---

You mean that it's only the BEST sci-fi show to have ever been produced in the history of television?

---

Isn't your sentence is missing an 'n'?

I feel stupid about not understanding at first. I must have read two or three posts here on Hatrack and glanced at the savehiatus.com site every time, and I *didn't understand*.



Evidently I'm not supposed to be explicit about what I didn't understand because you people are all acting a certain way and that's what fooled me.

Posts: 4287 | Registered: Mar 2005  |  IP: Logged |