A Dose of Reality

In my life, I’ve watched my fair share of movies.  Of those movies, almost none of them have had subtitles and few were made anywhere other than Hollywood.  I rarely go to movies that would be considered “artsy” and only twice have I been to my city’s “independent” movie theatre.  I do have a bit of snobbery in me when it comes to the arts, but almost none of it is applied to films.  In fact, calling them “films” is as uppity as I get about it.  I say all of this to inform you that I don’t consider myself a “film critic” in any capacity.  I tend to watch movies for entertainment value and not once have I walked out of a theatre thinking “the directing was sloppy.”  There is, however, one general criticism that I feel I must make, because I have recently noticed a disturbing trend coming out of Hollywood.  The people in charge of making movies seem to think that if aliens travel to earth and attempt to take over, we’ll be able to fight them off with our “advanced” technology and scrappy ingenuity. 

I know the trend of portraying humans as the ultimate underdogs didn’t start with movies…it was there in books and on radio dramas before the first movie was made.  But someone has to put a stop to this by speaking the plain, honest truth.  If aliens from the far reaches of the galaxy have the technology to travel to our planet and they are intent on taking over, they’re going to do it.  They’re going to alight somewhere in their spaceships, or maybe just appear out of thin air, and do whatever they came here to do.*  I’m not implying we would go down without a fight, and I’m certainly not discounting the amazing technology that has been developed by the human race. We might even manage to slow them down a little.  After all, we have put a man on the moon and sent research ships into distant space.  But we’re also the ones who lost a spacecraft on Mars because half the team was using English measurements and the other half was using metric.

I realize that a movie about the successful extermination of the human race wouldn’t have much of a box office draw, so I understand why alien invasion movies usually end with humans winning out.  You can make a great movie, and a lot of money, portraying humanity as unconquerable.  I myself, have very fond and vivid memories of seeing Independence Day for the first time in the theatre.  So why am I bothering to burst the metaphorical bubble?  The final straw was a movie preview I saw during this year’s Super Bowl. 

Really?  Come on, people.  If aliens are headed to earth, we’re not going to fend them off with horses and six-shooters.  A longer preview hints that one of the humans has some help, and trust me, they’re going to need it. 

Perhaps I’m making too big of a deal out of this, but someone has to!  These movies have a high entertainment value, but….AT WHAT COST?  These movies are encouraging a false sense of security while we should actually be developing a force field to surround the earth or some invisibility suits or laser guns.  I really hope someone at the pentagon is working on these sorts of things.  If I’m going to pay taxes, the money should at least be going toward something useful.

 

* I don’t, by the way, assume that aliens would only bother to come all this way if they had evil plans.  Maybe they would just come across our planet while trolling for new friends.  Maybe they’re trying to spread a peaceful message to all corners of the galaxy.  Maybe we have the best beaches.  Aliens might show up and be the absolute bee’s knees.  But they might also just be hungry.

A Semi-Accurate Historical Perspective on the Remote Control

I have always assumed that remote controls were a fairly recent technological development, which is based on me remembering a time when I didn't know that such a thing existed. This is how I tend to date historical events, by the way. Something either started happening since I've been alive (cell phones, home computers, and Justin Beiber) or else something has been around for my entire life (televisions, sweatpants, and microwave ovens). On this criteria, I labeled remote controls as "relatively new" because I distinctly remember seeing one for the first time and I distinctly remember being unimpressed.

The first remote I saw allowed you to change the channel without getting up off the couch, but it also had a wire running between the tv and the remote. This didn't exactly scream "groundbreaking technology" since this was at a time when people would sit through an entire program rather than switching channels at the slightest provocation. Under these circumstances, the remote saved, at best, a few seconds every half hour. Then and now, I don't think that level of convenience makes up for the risk of tripping over a wire every time I get up to use the bathroom or refresh my snack.

As is probably the case more often than I realize, my method of dating historical events based on my own personal experience is not very accurate. For one thing, it only puts things into the two categories of "less than 30 years old" or "more than 30 years old". When something falls into the "less than 30 years old", I can usually refine my estimate by remembering how old I was when something happened. This makes it easy to place New Kids On the Block before The Backstreet Boys, but doesn't do me any good if I'm trying to put Henry VIII in historical perspective. In a more relevant example, I can list all the presidents in order, but only if I start with Jimmy Carter. So while my method makes some refinement in chronology possible, it becomes increasingly inaccurate as the age of something approaches or exceeds 30. In the case of remote controls, I'm way off.

As it turns out, the first patent and demonstration of a remote control didn't require any wires, didn't use AA batteries, and it most certainly didn't occur in my lifetime. It was done by Tesla in 1898. He used radio frequency to control a boat during an exhibition at Madison Square Garden. I would like to think that the event looked like this:

But it was probably more along the lines of this:

I don't know a lot about history, but I did read that the U.S. Patent office was reluctant to recognize Tesla's patent until he had a working model because they were so incredulous about the claims he was making. If even the U.S. patent office couldn't imagine such a thing, how was the working model received by the locals? Perhaps it met with cries of "Witch, witch, burn the witch!" (This was the same time as the Salem witch trials, right? It's hard for me to know since they're both so old.) I'm pretty sure I would have read about Tesla had been burned at the stake though, so I guess everyone was pretty reasonable about the whole thing. They probably sat down over a grande half-caff caramel macchiato and dreamt of a day when people would be free to set off fart sounds remotely and change channels at an alarming speed without even the aid of wires.