Going on the set of "The Soup"

Over the summer I was interning at a video production company called VideoLink Inc. in Boston. What that company did was all types of things involving satellite cameras. One of the weeks I was there I learned that we were going to go on a shoot for the Soup, a comedy show starring Joel McHale, who also stars on Community. Here's a Condensed Soup clip. I couldn't find the one from the week I was on, so here's a different one.

When we got there (at 8 in the morning I might add, made all the more intense by the fact that I drove from New Hampshire to get there), I was put to work right away with the other intern, learning how to set up the super cool cameras, get things for the producers, and a lot of standing around. The first day we were there was purely to set up the set, and the second day was for the actual shooting of the show. Both days were absolutely exhausting, but I had so much fun.

One of the coolest parts (other than seeing Joel) was being able to help set up the satellite truck. This guy Brad from my company showed me all the buttons to press, which I won't talk much about here because it was really complicated and I can't remember much! Basically you had to put in the coordinates for the satellite, and that pointed the dish on the top of the truck to the particular point in space. There were tons and tons of settings to put into the machines, which by the way cost $10,000 apiece! (I got to hold one of the machines, and it totally freaked me out.) Anyway, there was indeed a lot of standing around, waiting for someone to tell me to do something. One time the producer of the show asked me to find her a piece of cardboard for a bingo sheet, that was fun too!

So on the second day we arrived around 9. There was even more sitting around, until 10:30 when Joel arrived. When he entered at first I was super nervous, but then he almost tripped over a chair and I realized, hey, he's a normal person! (Only freakishly tall...dear god, he's a giant.) During the actual shooting of the show I was able to wear a headset that was connected to the Control Room in Los Angeles. And after the show was done, I got a take a picture with him, which was definitely the highlight of my entire summer!

Starman

. ________________ Sir Arthur___ (AP photo files.)

Linkage represents power, status, success of one sort or another. Of course this has always been the case, particularly in the animal world, but I suspect in the uni-verse at large as well.

That is how our brain becomes conscious, how memories evolve and how life flows in the eternal dance of chaos and order, the breathing that holds the secret of our own existence.

When I think about the present state of technology, in this world of social networking, global communication, interplanetary travel, WWW,VR, SL and all these some basic, some quite indispensable parts of the life on planet earth, I remember, from the billions of people, one, whose influence and vision, some would say aura, inspired the creation of all that now we take for granted.

A person that inspired, through his writings, a Tim Berners-Lee to invent the World Wide Web in 1989. Who in 1945, proposed the idea of communications satellites that could be based in geostationary orbits around our planet, an idea laughed about by the official science of the time. After all he was only a writer.

A writer for whom spacecraft, asteroids and even a dinosaur has been named. A writer whose ideas, that is, the ones that have not been realized yet, are still considered far fetched even today, the stuff of dreams or sci-fi.

His hundreds of books and thousands of short stories constitute a cloud, a cluster or galaxy of links, of neuronal connections, of firing synapses that influence the world and will continue to do so for perhaps millenia, since his ideas travel as we blog, beyond our solar system into the universe he so lucidly dreamed about.

Who is this great human, whose passing through has barely been noticed in obscure obituaries as if we had nothing lost ?

Perhaps we have not, since he gave us more than we can take in generations to come. Besides, as he himself, quoting Rudyard Kipling said:

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 that little, little span
The dead are borne in mind
Seek not to question other than
The books I leave behind.

._______________________ From The Appeal

Thank you Sir Arthur, the world can or could be a better place because of you.