Bryce Zabel's FOR WHAT IT'S WORTH

WGA Makes Deal - Gives Awards - We're Celebrating!

Talk about everything happening at once...

On the same night that the WGA leadership presented to the membership the details of a tentative deal that looks almost certain to end the strike this week, the Guild also announced the winners of the "Writers Guild Awards '08" and PANDEMIC, a screenplay I co-wrote with my wife, Jackie, actually won the "Long Form Original" category! 

This odd merging of events happened because, pre-strike, the Writers Guild Awards were scheduled for February 9.  Once the strike was on, all attention had to go to that, so the black-tie and gown festivities were sacrificed.  A simple posting of the winners on the web-site was substituted. Then, as fate would have it, the tentative deal came together this past week, and the membership meeting got scheduled for -- you guessed it -- February 9!

Who cares?  Jackie and I are thrilled that the long nightmare of a strike is almost over and with a deal that seems to be reasonable, if not everything we'd want.

"Pandemic" was a Hallmark miniseries, four hours, that was, as the award states, "original," meaning that it was not based on any pre-existing material. It's a number of interlocking stories about an unexpected strain of Avian flu and how an outbreak in Los Angeles leads the military quarantine of the entire area. In its struture, it's a bit like "Crash" with microbes.

On a personal level, Jackie and I are so honored because this award comes from a panel of writers who actually read the scripts instead of watch the movies.  We think it's humbling to be among the honored screenwriters who demonstrate why the work of writers is valuable and worth fighting for at this critical moment in the WGA's history.  Here's to everyone going back to work in the days ahead!

WGA coverage
Daily Variety coverage
Los Angeles Times coverage

Download a PDF of the PANDEMIC screenplay - Click Here

Snakes in the Grass (and Other Locations)

I've just spent a couple of hours in my backyard with the "Hollywood Rattlesnake Wrangler" -- a great guy, Bo Slypapich. Bo is a one-of-a-kind who has hunted down rattlers for everybody from Arnold Schwarzenegger to Brad Garrett and today he came to my house after working for Sally Field.

We had started our morning with what we thought was the discovery by our gardener of two baby rattlesnakes in the back yard. We were referred to Bo and he showed up looking like a cross between Indiana Jones and the male version of Tomb Raider Lara Croft. He had gizmos, belts slung around his waist to hold the gizmos and an enthusiasm for his business that was, honestly, very re-assuring.

Bo started catching snakes over forty years ago with his neighborhood friends in Malibu Canyon. He kept his passion for snakes and built a business in the entertainment industry by clearing locations prior to the arrival of the crew, and securing locations while filming.

"One day I got a call from a local doctor who knew me, and was aware of my business. He asked if he could recommend me to another doctor whose daughter was bit while playing in their backyard by a rattlesnake, and then had crawled under the house. They had been unable to find anyone willing to search their property to find the snake or any possible dens."

Bo has been called to hunt for, track down, and remove snakes who have bitten children, dogs, and adults. Unlike others, Bo will crawl under houses, bushes and porches to find and relocate the snake or snakes.

What's great about Bo, however, is his passion to educate. Rather than a standard service call, he asked me to join him (at a safe distance) as we went throughout the backyard and he did a show-and-tell about what we were doing right and what could use some improvement. He also spoke to my gardener and my wife.

Bo had about ten snakes in the back of his pick-up truck in sealed plastic containers and, for the first time in my life, I got a truly authentic close-up look at rattlers of all sizes. He also had the harmless snakes for comparison. Now, I can actually tell them apart. Rattlesnakes have larger heads and thin necks and, well, rattles for tails. Every other snake you find in southern California has necks the size of their bodies and tails that end in a point.

As it turned out, ours were not baby rattlers which was good because it means there's probably not a nest with mom and other kids. We have, however, been tasked with some garden reconstruction and our rattlesnake fence appears to have been breached by the elements in a few key places that needs repair.

By the way, Bo has never been bitten in all his years. He does not kill rattlesnakes unless he has to. When he goes underneath houses, he has a full body armor outfit.

My friend, Michael Nadlman, also had a Bo and rattlesnake encounter only his was written up in the local paper and you can read that article here. That article, by the way, got linked to by the Drudge Report which gave it a global warming related headline and, as a result, the article got 40,000+ hits in just three hours.

Read all about Bo at his website, www.rattlesnakewrangler.com and, yes, somebody is actually developing a reality TV show for him. I'd definitely watch.

Pandemic: Aftermath

Last night, after a barbeque, my wife Jackie and I sat down with our friends to watch "Pandemic," the three-hour Hallmark Channel "special event" film that we co-wrote together last year. I've already written a lot about it: you can catch up to that by clicking here or clicking here. We even got a good review in Daily Variety.

I gave my friends my standard disclaimer on projects that I've only been the writer on: I didn't cast it, direct it, edit it or produce it. Don't give me credit for those choices but don't blame me either. It was also fun because we'd used a number of our friend's names in the production. One of them, Hendler, could have been turned into a drinking contest there were so many mentions. Another friend who watched with us, Steve Friedlander, was the character played by Bruce Boxleitner. Other friends, Scott and Andie, watched as a character named after their daughter got sick, but rallied and recovered. Two other friends, Don and Morgan, had their character cut from the film, in just another cruel Hollywood reality.

One thing that was interesting is that the simplest thing in a review is to dismiss the science behind the whole thing as improbable and/or stupid (and a few reviews did try to make that point). Today, though, Doctor Joan Bushwell (if I'm not mistaken, this is a name she uses in order to keep her privacy, taken from The Simpsons) has come to our defense! She has a blog, along with other science enthusiasts, where she talks about her two passions: pop culture and science. Today on her blog, Doctor Joan Bushwell's Chimpanzee Refugee, she writes:

As a scientist, I thought "Pandemic" had its redeeming moments. In terms of attention to scientific detail, it far surpassed my favorite guilty pleasure, Outbreak, a film that is campy-bad and injected with an Ebola-virulent bolus of laughable "science." That, and Dustin Hoffman's chewing up of the scenery are what makes "Outbreak" such a noteworthy sci-fi film for Mystery Science Theater 3000 style viewing.

As an example of "Pandemic's" details, one of the CDC-Atlanta scientists nicely explained the concept of antigenic shift that resulted in the virulence of the Riptide virus. To the writers' credit, they did not take the clichéd H5N1 route, but instead opted for a fictional (I think) strain called H3N7. The hemagglutinin piece is not fictional, and is the variant of the Hong Kong 'flu virus of the 1968 pandemic. I'm not sure about the neuramidase variant, but I liked this touch. The writers used part of a strain that already infects people readily, and applied the antigenic shift to it. This is at least consistent with a "stuck-on-the-tarmac-make-small-talk-with-your-neighbor" conversation I had a couple of years ago with a virologist from Childrens Hospital in Philadelphia when we were stuck at the PHL airport. He noted that nasty flu strains often result from antigenic shifts from those that are already transmissible among humans. He allowed as how H5N1 deserved close vigilance, but that other strains could readily be the next big thing.

Anyway, she actually writes more and you can read the whole thing by clicking on that link before the break-out quote.

Other reaction. San Diego film critic Fred Saxon (and former CNN film critic) wrote me an e-mail:

Thank you for scaring the bejesus out of me and certainly everybody who saw the TV version of your “Pandemic” script.  Well done! Having said that, let me say this: I know you’re the writers and not the directors, but please allow me to comment on the experience. It wasn’t long before I wondered if you wrote another Faye Dunaway face lift (or two) into the script. Hmmmm? If she has one more she’ll have a goatee.  And Eric Roberts, did you write that he should be so old?  Another thing, the blood looked totally fake on the plane.  Hey, what’s up with that music?  It’s going non-stop, like in “Who Wants to Be A Millionaire”, but more annoying. Could have been much more effective had it not been continuous.  I’m just sayin’...

Fred, by the way, is also a recovered stand-up comedian, if you hadn't guessed. I won't take a cheap shot at Faye, other than to say she was originally written to be an Arnold Schwarzenneger-type governor, but the music comment was interesting. About a month ago, Jackie and I got a copy of the locked cut, but without music. Completely sweetened for dialogue and background sound, though, and it actually was more compelling. Usually, I think music really takes a piece to the next level, so this was an odd experience for me.

Also, in a few places, Jackie and I ended up getting confused by our own movie. That's because we were hired to write it as a four-hour mini-series to air in two two-hour parts. That four-hour has already been seen internationally and will make up the DVD release, but the Hallmark Channel wanted one three-hour. Take away the 45 minutes of commericals and last night's airing was about 150 pages worth of film from a script that we turned in (at producer's request) at about 250 pages.

Although he may be biased, Movie Smackdown! critic Mark Sanchez sent us this e-mail this morning:

No space aliens, costumed oddballs or special effects overload. Distinct characters, a plausible story arc and a satisfying conclusion. It's a fine, attractive project because it's not like the blockbusters clogging the multiplexes these days. At the risk of sounding ridiculous, "Pandemic" offers an accessible big story that is still human-scale in its dimensions.

Well, at least it was produced. In a world where everyone has a spec script in their desk drawer, this is a very good thing.

Love Is Eternal: Neolithic Italian Lovers

While the world ponders the fate of spaced-out lover Lisa Nowak, I was drawn today to an enormously touching view of love from the ages.

This comes straight from Mantua, Italy, south of Verona, where archaeologists have found the intertwined skeletons of two lovers from the Neolithic period. As you can see from this phenomenal  photograph, the two bodies, which cuddle closely while facing each other on their sides, were found together locked in an embrace. What's better is that the place where they were found in the area where Shakespeare set "Romeo and Juliet." Have we found some even older and more real star-crossed lovers?

The scientists say that these two probably died young, based on the fact that they had all their teeth back in a time when dentistry, charitably, was probably even worse than that scene in "Castaway" where Tom Hanks has to whack out a tooth with a rock.

Here's what the Associated Press had to say, starting with Luca  Bondioli, an anthropologist at Rome's National Prehistoric and Ethnographic Museum when he said the find has:

...''more of an emotional than a scientific value.'' But it does highlight how the relationship people have with each other and with death has not changed much from the period in which humanity first settled in villages, learning to farm the land and tame animals, he said. ''The Neolithic is a very formative period for our society,'' he said. ''It was when the roots of our religious sentiment were formed.''

Here's another point of view from that article (and another photo, taken with flat lighting, over to the left here), quoting from Elena Menotti who led the dig:

Experts might never determine the exact nature of the pair's relationship, according to Menotti, but there is little doubt it was born of a deep sentiment. ''It was a very emotional discovery,'' she said. ''From thousands of years ago we feel the strength of this love. Yes, we must call it love.''

How great is that? A reminder of love going back five or six thousand years. It's almost certain that these two were buried at the same time. That could be an indication of a possible sudden and tragic death. DNA testing will be able to test whether the two were related.

Whatever the facts turn out to be, as opposed to the sick obsession of Lisa Nowak, here is a profound example of something that looks like it might even be noble. If it's a message from the past, it's well-timed.

I wouldn't be surprised at all if somehow this image becomes a famous poster someday. Certainly it will be in textbooks forever. It should be. And that's my opinion, for what it's worth...

Energy Crisis: Sense & Nonsense

All these feelings have been building for a long time. Usually I keep my mouth shut because, frankly, a lot of my friends are still invested in a lot of ideas that are just silly when it comes to actually fixing the problem. But I guess I'm finally just so pissed off at our reluctance to really grapple with our dependence on foreign oil and our inability to really talk about the real issues that, well, I've actually stopped caring what they're going to think. I guess I'm just more fed up with politicians of both parties who would rather point fingers than get down to business. And I'm upset with all of us who have let them get away with it including myself.

Here's the main clue, folks, the fact that nobody really wants to talk about.

You can't conserve your way out of this coming gas shortage, and you can't drill your way out either.

You have to do both. And that's just in the short run so we can stretch out the supplies long enough that maybe, just maybe, we can successfully transition to the post-oil world before it transitions without us.

And here's the fact that almost nobody says out loud, most especially politicians.

Gas is too cheap. This is particularly true if we want to use less of it. Keeping the price low just means that we use as much of it as we can get our hands on.

But, of course, cheap gas is a political war cry. When prices rise, we demand investigations of oil companies and politicians say they'll do everything they can to get the price down and the news media covers the whole thing like it's World War III. It's insane. We want it for the lowest possible price and, unless there's a problem with that, we don't really care where it comes from.

Probably half the people reading this blog weren't even alive when the 1973-1974 Arab oil embargo hit. I'd just gone off to college where I was thrilled to have my used 1965 Ford Mustang to get around in, and pretty scared when it turned out that in order to drive it I had to wait five or six hours in a gas line to get not even a full tank of gas. Trust me, we don't want to go there again, but we could... and a lot faster than anybody wants to believe.

Think about this. Back in 1973, when that oil crisis just clobbered us, we imported a whopping 34.8 percent of our oil. Thank God we've wised up, right? Not so fast. Today we import 60.3 percent.

When I was waiting in line in 1973, if someone had told me that past the turn of the century, we'd have gotten that much worse, I never would have believed them. Back then we all thought to ourselves, "Never again." If I'd have pictured the world of 2007, it would have been one of mass transit, small cars, and a conservation ethic in full bloom.

Instead we are more exposed than ever and our dependence simply gives more and more power to the least stable part of the planet. A lot of people who hate Americans are in charge of selling us the gas that keeps our cars and our economy running. Who let this happen?

The answer, of course, is everybody. People didn't hold their representatives accountable, and the politicians hardly wanted to propose anything that would actually hurt to implement. And before you make snide remarks about President Bush and his friends in Big Oil,  just stop. This isn't one that can be blamed on him. I wish he was interested in doing more, but Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush I, and Clinton all failed to bite the bullet on this one. And so did each and every congress over the past three decades. Because, hey, if gas ever gets as expensive as it deserves to be, given what a precious resource it is, governments will fall. People are willing to pay more per ounce for bottled water than they are for refined gasoline. Where's the sense in this?

The Washington Post's columnist Charles Krauthammer really nails the nonsense factor in a column today. He makes the point that I feel so acutely today: that we are, even now, just talking more bullshit to each other. The very things we should do, if we truly want to get started, well, we aren't even thinking about them. They're all off-the-table. The only things on the table either won't work period, or are too long term to help us move quickly.

We can argue all we want about Iraq and whether getting out or staying in is the right thing for our nation's security. I simply argue that the far bigger issue right now is to stop doing what we're doing, grow a set of political balls, and make some tough decisions. But, of course, we won't. We only deal with things when they become a crisis -- like an Energy Crisis, yes?

At least when the next one hits, we'll all have our i-Pods and satellite radio to listen to in our cars as we sit idling in line, wasting more gas.

Here is the full-text of the Krauthammer column. I'm not saying the man's perfect, but at least he's willing to take a shot at it which is more than the president or the congress seem willing to do...

ENERGY NONSENSE
Charles Krauthammer, Washington Post

Is there anything more depressing than yet another promise of energy independence in yet another State of the Union address? By my count, 24 of the 34 State of the Union addresses since the 1973 oil embargo have proposed solutions to our energy problem.

The result? In 1973 we imported 34.8 percent of our oil. Today we import 60.3 percent.

And what does this president propose? Another great technological fix. For Jimmy Carter, it was the magic of synfuels. For George Bush, it's the wonders of ethanol. Our fuel will grow on trees. Well, stalks, with even fancier higher-tech variants to come from cellulose and other (literal) rubbish.

It is very American to believe that chemists are going to discover the cure for geopolitical weakness. It is even more American to imagine that it can be done painlessly. Ethanol for everyone. Farmers get a huge cash crop. Consumers get more supply. And the country ends up more secure.

This is nonsense. As my colleague Robert Samuelson demonstrates, biofuels will barely keep up with the increase in gasoline demand over time. They are a huge government bet with goals and mandates and subsidies that will not cure our oil dependence or even make a significant dent in it.

Even worse, the happy talk displaces any discussion about here-and-now measures that would have a rapid and revolutionary effect on oil consumption and dependence. No one talks about them because they have unhidden costs. Politicians hate unhidden costs.

There are three serious things we can do now: Tax gas. Drill in the Arctic. Go nuclear.

First, tax gas. The president ostentatiously rolled out his 20-in-10 plan: reducing gasoline consumption by 20 percent in 10 years. This with Rube Goldberg regulation — fuel-efficiency standards, artificially mandated levels of "renewable and alternative fuels in 2017" and various bribes (er, incentives) for government-favored technologies — of the kind we have been trying for three decades.

Good grief. I can give you a 20-in-2: tax gas to $4 a gallon. With oil prices having fallen to $55 a barrel, now is the time. The effect of a gas-tax hike will be seen in less than two years, and you don't even have to go back to the 1970s and the subsequent radical reduction in consumption to see how. Just look at last summer. Gas prices spike to $3 — with the premium going to Vladimir Putin, Hugo Chavez and assorted sheiks, rather than the U.S. Treasury — and, presto, SUV sales plunge, the Prius is cool and car ads once again begin featuring miles per gallon ratings.

No regulator, no fuel-efficiency standards, no presidential exhortations, no grand experiments with switchgrass. Raise the price and people change their habits. It's the essence of capitalism.

Second, immediate drilling to recover oil that is under U.S. control, namely in the Arctic and on the Outer Continental Shelf. No one pretends that this fixes everything. But a million barrels a day from the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is 5 percent of our consumption. In tight markets, that makes a crucial difference.

We will always need some oil. And the more of it that is ours, the better. It is tautological that nothing more directly reduces dependence on foreign oil than substituting domestic for foreign production. Yet ANWR is now so politically dead that the president did not even mention it in the State of the Union, or his energy address the next day.

He did bring up, to enthusiastic congressional applause, global warming. No one has a remotely good idea about how to make any difference in global warming without enlisting China and India, and without destroying the carbon-based Western economy. The obvious first step, however, is an extremely powerful source of energy that produces not an ounce of carbon dioxide: nuclear.

What about nuclear waste? Well, coal produces toxic pollutants, as does oil. Both produce carbon dioxide that we are told is going to end civilization as we know it. These wastes are widely dispersed and almost impossible to recover once they get thrown into the atmosphere.

Nukes produce waste as well, but it comes out concentrated — very toxic and lasting nearly forever, but because it is packed into a small manageable volume, it is more controllable. And it doesn't pollute the atmosphere. At all.

There is no free lunch. Producing energy is going to produce waste. You pick your poison and you find a way to manage it. Want to do something about global warming? How many global warming activists are willing to say the word nuclear?

So much easier to say ethanol. That it will do farcically little is beside the point. Our debates about oil consumption, energy dependence and global warming are not meant to be serious. They are meant for show.

Krauthammer's won the Pulitzer Prize, which doesn't make him infallible, but it does make him smart. Maybe you have a better idea and we'd all love to hear that, too. Meantime, catch you in the gas lines!

Let's Get Small: Plutonian Edition

Now that international astronomers have everyone thinking about the cosmos for at least a day by throwing Pluto out of the Solar System, let's give a passing thought to our place in the universe. We know that Pluto got tossed out of the planetary club for being a shrimp, a "dwarf planet" that is so small it can't even control its own neighborhood. Okay, then, size matters, so think about this...

Back when Steve Martin was a stand-up comic, he made a splash in 1977 with his debut album "Let's Get Small". My friend, Thomas Skala, sent me something by e-mail a couple of weeks ago that has absolutely nothing to do with that other than by the time you get through this photo journey you will feel even smaller than Steve Martin felt at his smallest. Ready? Here's picture number one.

Now this should make you feel pretty good. There's our home planet Earth looking like the biggest baddest mother on the block. Mars, which is our closest cousin in the solar system they say, looks like a puny runt compared to us. Now let's roll in the outer planets in the solar system.

Whoa! Suddenly we're looking pretty damn tiny. I mean, if Jupiter is a basketball, then we're a marble, barely. Mars has turned into a BB. Now let's pop in our own sun, Old Sol.

Suddenly our scale is, well, underwhelming. We need the arrow to see the Earth because, at its current size, we'd miss it. We're getting seriously small. But at least we can agree that it's all relative because the sun is immense, right?

There's our sun next to a few of the other suns our astronomers have discovered out there in the galaxy. This is pretty shocking because our sun has become the BB and Earth doesn't even compute. At least we can console ourselves that that other gassy giant Arcturus must be huge beyond all belief. Not so fast.

Yep, that's Arcturus down there, looking like a speck compared to Betelgeuse and Antares.

FYI, Antares is the 15th brightest star in the sky. It is more than 1000 light years away. There are 14 brighter stars that we know about.

Definitely feeling small now?

BTW, I don't know the source of these photos. I'm sure that thanks to the reach of the Internet someone will soon tell me so I can post the credit and if any of you scientists out there want to toss in your own analysis, fire away. Or if this is all one of those demented hoaxes that would be fine to know, too. It might be a relief to think we are bigger than this makes us out to be, but I doubt it. Maybe they're right, though, maybe size isn't everything when it comes to sex or significance.

Me? I'm gonna give Steve Martin another listen and try to stay psyched up enough to get out of bed tomorrow...

Spaced Out: Re-Booting Star Trek

Admittedly, it takes a lot of nerve to offer to resurrect the "Star Trek" franchise when nobody has asked you to do that, but that's just what prolific writer/producer J. Michael Straczynski and I did back in 2004. We were working together on a network pitch for a limited series, "Cult", and we started talking about the state of the Trek universe and, before we could stop ourselves, we'd banged out a 14-page treatment called "Star Trek: Re-Boot the Universe."

Chutzpah on a Cosmic Level
{Art by Nancy Tokos, Tokos Design Associates}

I know, I know. If you read the papers, you already know that the "Star Trek" flame has been passed, if you will, to an incalculably larger solar giant, J.J. Abrams ("Lost", "MI3"). You can read all about it in Daily Variety, but the bottom line is that Abrams and his writing posse appear to be going back in time to prequel status.

Project, to be penned by Abrams and "MI3" scribes Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci, will center on the early days of seminal "Trek" characters James T. Kirk and Mr. Spock, including their first meeting at Starfleet Academy and first outer space mission.

What with this stellar creative team at work, there doesn't seem to be any upside in sitting on our own Trek fever-dream anymore. Might as well let the fans who'd heard about it and wanted to see it, see it, so you'll find the download link later in this post. There's no big agenda since it really was just a "Hail Mary" and we've long since moved on. These days, JMS is on fire, having just sold "The Changeling" to Imagine Films for Ron Howard to direct while also writing "Spider-Man" and "Fantastic Four" and several other titles over at Marvel Comics.

Our brush with this "Star Trek" story, though, starts back in 1999, I think, when Straczynski (I call him "Joe") and I met in the first class section of a flight between Los Angeles and Vancouver.

Back then, I was executive producing the TV series, "The Crow: Stairway to Heaven" and he was wrapping up a very successful run as the creator of "Babylon 5." Running a series between Canada and the U.S. can be a pretty grueling pace and the first class tickets are one of the few perks to look forward to. Except that as a writer/producer, you are usually writing next week's episode on a laptop only with more leg-room than you get when you're traveling for vacation.

Anyway, at that moment, we had a lot in common, both producing sci-fi series and, in particular, a devotion to five-year plans. JMS had crafted one for "Babylon 5" and Brent Friedman and I had done the same for our NBC alien invasion series "Dark Skies." By the time JMS and I reached our destination we'd traded contact info and said we'd get in touch.

That's what led to us agreeing to develop the "Cult" mini-series together, years later. I seem to recall having lunch at Art's Deli and our conversation veering off into the Trek situation. I  have no real clue why we felt compelled to write what we wrote but, looking back, I think it's because we had all these ideas and being writers it just felt more natural to write them down than to let them go. Then, once that happened, we felt compelled to share them. Like buying lottery tickets, I guess.

Joe and I had something that everyone in Hollywood seems to pay lip service to and that's passion. We both love sci-fi, have worked different ends of the spectrum, and thought maybe, given the chance, we might combine briefly to spark a creative debate that could be useful.

Anyway, the take that JMS and I came up with included using the original characters as the new film will do, apparently, but not as young officers at Starfleet Academy. We wanted to do what they do in the world of comics, create a separate universe ("Universe A") for all the past TV and film Trek continuity in order to free ourselves creatively so we could embrace the good stuff, banish the bad, and try some new things. In our re-boot ("Universe B"), we wanted to start over, use Kirk, Spock and McCoy and others in a powerful new origin story about what it was that bonded them in such strong friendship, and show them off as you'd never seen them before. It was, admittedly, pretty audacious but here it is if you want to take a look...

Star Trek Re-Boot.pdf

You may feel like, as I do re-reading it, that it leaves you wanting more specifics. My best defense is that we held back from putting everything we were thinking into it because, if we did, what would be the point of hiring us? So we suggested and prodded and explained and held some of the point-by-point work back for a meeting or an opportunity that never came. We don't think it's perfect, and with the passage of time, I have a whole new set of thoughts, but it is a snapshot, and offered in that spirit.

This was, I'm pretty sure, before the Sci-Fi Channel had done their terrific job with "Battlestar Galactica" (which I just voted for on my Emmy ballot as Outstanding Drama for the second year in a row). If you're trying to imagine the changed tone that JMS and I were thinking about, this would be a good place to start.

As we take pains to point out in that treatment, however, JMS and I both have lots of respect for the writer/producers who brought "Star Trek" to TV in so many forms over the years, including the last on-shift at "Enterprise," Brannon Braga and Manny Coto, both of whom were wrapping up as we did this. Same admiration for J.J. Abrams and where he's likely to take the franchise. No snark intended. He's a great talent.

So, for what it's worth, please just consider this another artifact to be found somewhere in the alternate "Star Trek" universe that never was.

And thanks to Stephen Hawking for making us all respectable again. Let's get at least some of these ideas out of the movie theaters and back on the launch pads where they belong!

What if JFK got out of Dallas alive?

Spaced Out: Hawking Colonies

The world's most famous scientist, Stephen Hawking, says humans need to
move out into space in order to guarantee the survival of the species.

This, of course, is something that has always seemed inevitable to space buffs and sci-fi fans, but it's about time somebody of Hawking's intellectual throw-weight has given voice to it. Carl Sagan's been gone too long. According to USA Today:

"The British astrophysicist told a news conference in Hong Kong that humans could have a permanent base on the moon in 20 years and a colony on Mars in the next 40 years."

Hawking says that we are in increasing danger of wiping ourselves out through nuclear war, sudden global warming or even a genetically engineered virus.  Because of this growing threat, he believes it's time we get off our
asses and out of the cradle. We need to boldly go... wait a minute... that sounds familiar... {Art by Kimmo Isokoski}

Thinking about these things may seem like a waste of time to most people with a mortgage and bills to pay, but I've got one of those great jobs where I can actually let my mind wander and convince myself I'm working.

The idea of moving out into and then beyond our own solar system is something I've been thinking about all my writing career. Back in the late 80s, my first writing partner Brad Markowitz and I sold a sci-fi feature to Warner Brothers with Silver Pictures -- "The Face" -- about the first manned mission to Mars. Our version never got made, although "Mission to Mars" back in 2000 was so close to what we wrote (down to a stranded astronaut from a failed mission, a rescue mission and the face on Mars) that the only difference was we never got to spend any of the residual checks.

Actually, this space thing's been a passion all my life. I got fired from my first real job so that I could go home to see Neil Armstrong walk on the moon. Later, as a reporter, I covered the Viking Mars landings and the Voyager Saturn encounters for both PBS and CNN, plus I covered the launch and landing of multiple space shuttles, and even applied for the Journalist-in-Space program before it was jettisoned after the Columbia disaster.

Hope we do as Hawking suggests...

The Sleep Diet

I gotta lose ten pounds by Christmas. Maybe I'll turn in early tonight and instead of going for that run in the morning maybe I'll just sleep in.

Word now that getting too little sleep is the potential cause of all kinds of medical problems, notably obesity -- but also colon cancer, breast cancer, heart disease and diabetes. Don't take my word for it. The Washington Post says so:

"We're shifting to a 24-hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week society, and as a result we're increasingly not sleeping like we used to," said Najib T. Ayas of the University of British Columbia. "We're really only now starting to understand how that is affecting health, and it appears to be significant."

The way it works is that when you don't sleep enough you screw up your body's internal clock (which, I believe, is located just to the left of your aorta, but I could be wrong). Anyway, it disrupts your hormones that regulate appetite. Which means that not only are you bleary-eyed and falling asleep during meetings but you're also hungry. When you don't sleep, your body goes into high alert, increases the production of stress hormones and revs up your blood pressure -- which is a recipe for heart attacks and strokes. Sigh...

Honestly, I'd guess I get an average of six hours a day, some days even less, but more on only a few days. Based on those insurance charts, I'm also overweight and on high blood pressure medicine. I'd like to get more sleep but it would probably mean giving up my TiVO and bulking the hard drives on my computers. When would I answer e-mail?

I remember having no body fat in college and managing to sleep twelve hours a day. My parents thought I had narcolepsy but it turns out I was a health nut.

G'night... gotta catch some zzzzz's...

Heavy Wind Advisory: The 1962 Columbus Day Storm

Mostly, I remember the green walnuts. That's my most vivid memory of the 1962 Columbus Day Storm that slammed Oregon during my childhood. Kids don't think in terms of damage to infrastructure. For me, it was wondering how I was ever going to get the green hulls off the walnuts which had been prematurely blown off our trees. The buyers wouldn't take them if they didn't look right and the spare change I made off those walnuts supplemented my meager allowance. I wasn't old enough to get a real paper-route and start making the serious bread.

Natural disasters are on everybody's minds these days. We argue about whether we had enough notice and whether people did the right thing once they had it. Well, we had practically no notice about this one and what notice we got vastly understated the danger and once the danger hit there was no FEMA to come to the rescue or blame for botching it.

Columbus Day Storm / October 12, 1962

It was a Friday and as the day started the air was unusually calm so when the Weather Service started talking about some wind gusts coming off the tail of Typhoon Freda out in the Pacific -- gusts up to 60 mph -- nobody really believed them. This was 43 years ago, mind you, and we trust the weather forecasts a great deal more today than we did then. So while people had warnings about Katrina and had the ability to act on or ignore them, we really had nothing.

I was in grade school -- Peter Boscow Elementary School -- and every day I walked the four or five blocks there and back. I remember on the way home that a wind gust came out of nowhere and blew me off my feet. Literally. We got a lot of rain in Hillsboro, Oregon back then, but winds like this I had never experienced.

As finally recorded, the gusts of the Columbus Day Storm reached 160 mph in some places and the entire coast was slammed by hurricane force winds. I've seen this storm called the "Biggest Extratropical Cyclone of the 20th Century." In less than 12 hours, up to 15 billion board feet of timber was blown down in California, Oregon and Washington combined. Let me put that in perspective. That number exceeds the annual timber harvest for Oregon and Washington at the time.

There's a wonderful web page where people who remember the storm have their memories posted. Reading some of their stories certainly evoked a lot of thoughts of my own. In the Willamette Valley, where I lived, it's said that the undamaged home was the exception and the damaged home was the rule. That was certainly true of our home.

I remember watching our front yard tree fall down before my very eyes as I stared out the window. It hit our roof and, at that point, I think my dad hustled everybody into the basement. I remember the power being out for several days. Mostly I remember walking out the next morning and being shocked. Most of our roof tiles had blown off. The tree was in a bedroom. Several other trees in the backyard had blown down.

And, of course, the walnuts were everywhere. An entire fall season's worth of walnuts were on the ground in a single day and it was my job (and my brother's) to salvage as many as we could. I remember crying about how my favorite tree, the one I would always climb when we were playing outside, had blown down and was being cut up for firewood. The back yard never looked the same after.

You go to Hillsboro today and there really isn't much evidence that the Columbus Day Storm ever happened. Probably most of the barns you'll see in the area were built after 1962 because the older ones were all destroyed. The biggest storm to hit after, though, was the economic one that happened when all the hi-tech companies like Intel and Hewlett-Packard moved offices into the area decades later, turning that little town of 6,000 that I grew up in into a city ten times as large.

Every year at this time, my mind always turns to the Columbus Day Storm. These days we debate whether we should even celebrate Columbus Day, of course, and the actual date shifts to fit federal calendars. Six years after the storm, in fact, President Johnson shifted from a firm date to the second Monday in October. But I remember the exact day. It was October 12. If you lived in Oregon back then, you'll never forget.