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ventaNow, if you're me "Ealing Civic Society" sounds depressingly worthy and best avoided. However, on the way to a BBQ the other day we passed a poster. And when we got to the BBQ ChrisC relayed to the assembled company the information from the poster:
Professor Heinz Wolff is (courtesy of the ECS) giving a lecture entitled "How Soviet Cosmonauts Landed In Ealing".
Now, that's the kind of thing that makes you either go "yayayyy!" or "eh?". I was briefly in the "eh?" camp until someone said you know, Heinz Wolff, the Great Egg Race man, at which point I crossed the floor to "yayayyy!".
For those not quite keeping up with the plot, The Great Egg Race was a BBC programme of the early 80s which was the bastard offspring of Blue Peter and Scrapheap Challenge. Except, of course, it massively pre-dated Scrapheap Challenge, so that's a bit of a Nell-is-her-mother's-own-mother sort of situation. Like Scrapheap Challenge, people made contraptions to solve problems, only with less arc-welding and more toilet-roll middles. It was inspiring in the way Scrapheap isn't - as a kid, I frequently thought "hey, I could do that! now! let's start!" in a way that you don't when the people on the telly are wrestling with internal combustion engines.
Of course, this memory of watching TGER with my dad is filtered through 30 years of haze; anything I've just said may be rubbish.
Anyway, Prof. Heinz Wolff is a cartoonish German mad scientist - he's got the hair and everything. He invented bioengineering, and has spent a lot of time sitting on European Space Agency committees and inventing experiments to be done in space.
To be honest, having attended this free lecture which the ECS provided on my doorstep, I'm still not actually entirely sure what the Soviet cosmonauts were doing in Ealing. Prof. Wolff was working on Juno, the Anglo-Soviet joint space mission, and he and some Russians ended up at a very alcoholic party in Ealing. That was pretty much it. Apparently the Russians refused to touch vodka, but sank a significant amount of whisky.
However, Prof. Wolff did talk for an hour and was highly entertaining on the subjects of preparing for space travel, the effects of space travel, space toilets, government funding, cosmonaut selection processes, dragons' Bar Mitzvahs, and what he calls "constructive waste". The last one is his theory that any sufficiently stable government will enter into projects of constructive waste to use up spare resources: to qualify a project must be, among other things, massively expensive and considered by a high proportion of citizens to be completely useless - examples being the Pyramids, cathedrals, Stonehenge and the Cold War. If you are near somewhere he's speaking, go along; it probably won't be high-powered science, but it will be very amusing.
On a first impression Ealing Civic Society appear to be a bunch of reactionaries who will protest against anything. However, they are nice enough to lay on childhood heroes for my entertainment, so they may get a second chance.
Professor Heinz Wolff is (courtesy of the ECS) giving a lecture entitled "How Soviet Cosmonauts Landed In Ealing".
Now, that's the kind of thing that makes you either go "yayayyy!" or "eh?". I was briefly in the "eh?" camp until someone said you know, Heinz Wolff, the Great Egg Race man, at which point I crossed the floor to "yayayyy!".
For those not quite keeping up with the plot, The Great Egg Race was a BBC programme of the early 80s which was the bastard offspring of Blue Peter and Scrapheap Challenge. Except, of course, it massively pre-dated Scrapheap Challenge, so that's a bit of a Nell-is-her-mother's-own-mother sort of situation. Like Scrapheap Challenge, people made contraptions to solve problems, only with less arc-welding and more toilet-roll middles. It was inspiring in the way Scrapheap isn't - as a kid, I frequently thought "hey, I could do that! now! let's start!" in a way that you don't when the people on the telly are wrestling with internal combustion engines.
Of course, this memory of watching TGER with my dad is filtered through 30 years of haze; anything I've just said may be rubbish.
Anyway, Prof. Heinz Wolff is a cartoonish German mad scientist - he's got the hair and everything. He invented bioengineering, and has spent a lot of time sitting on European Space Agency committees and inventing experiments to be done in space.
To be honest, having attended this free lecture which the ECS provided on my doorstep, I'm still not actually entirely sure what the Soviet cosmonauts were doing in Ealing. Prof. Wolff was working on Juno, the Anglo-Soviet joint space mission, and he and some Russians ended up at a very alcoholic party in Ealing. That was pretty much it. Apparently the Russians refused to touch vodka, but sank a significant amount of whisky.
However, Prof. Wolff did talk for an hour and was highly entertaining on the subjects of preparing for space travel, the effects of space travel, space toilets, government funding, cosmonaut selection processes, dragons' Bar Mitzvahs, and what he calls "constructive waste". The last one is his theory that any sufficiently stable government will enter into projects of constructive waste to use up spare resources: to qualify a project must be, among other things, massively expensive and considered by a high proportion of citizens to be completely useless - examples being the Pyramids, cathedrals, Stonehenge and the Cold War. If you are near somewhere he's speaking, go along; it probably won't be high-powered science, but it will be very amusing.
On a first impression Ealing Civic Society appear to be a bunch of reactionaries who will protest against anything. However, they are nice enough to lay on childhood heroes for my entertainment, so they may get a second chance.
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no subject
Date: 2010-06-18 08:20 am (UTC)I loved that programme! Often seemed to me to involve a lot more ingenuity than scrapheap challenge.
Did you ever see the one where one of the teams tried to build a calibrated ballista to throw the eggs into the target net? That was so funny I had to leave the room for a bit so I could breathe again.
no subject
Date: 2010-06-18 09:15 am (UTC)I wonder... no, apparently you can't get any of it on DVD. Or not on a quick search. Shame.
no subject
Date: 2010-06-18 09:00 am (UTC)Well, it matches my memory of it. I'd have been in the "yayayyy!" camp from the outset.
no subject
Date: 2010-06-18 09:53 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-06-18 02:53 pm (UTC)Um... what?
no subject
Date: 2010-06-18 07:09 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-06-18 07:44 pm (UTC)Nell marries a
"Jolly Jack tar,He had eyes of blue,he was 62,but you know what sailors are.
He had a son called John who was 21 and strange as I'm going to say
He fell in love with Nell's mother,and married her straight away.
Now Nell is her mother's own mother,
Her father becomes her own son
Her mother's first child is her daughter-in-law
And her granny's the son of a gun!"
As receited by Stu MacFarlane & Wor Jacky!
no subject
Date: 2010-06-19 03:29 pm (UTC)I bet his shoes were perfectly in line with the tape as well.