Confirmed: The Clock Tower is Gone

Truly a sad day for film fans... for the clock tower has burned down.

I took that picture in the spring of 2005, when I was still relatively new to Los Angeles. At the time, I didn't think much of our visit to Universal Studios, but looking back, I consider myself lucky. I had a chance to see not just the Hill Valley Square set, but also the New York City sets I've seen in dozens of classic films, and go through the chesseball King Kong portion of the set. And now they're gone.

The LA Times has a report on what exactly burned; given how large the studios are, this was a fairly small fire. Check out the "Map" popup to get a sense for the layout, and where the fire was. According to another article, it looks like low water pressure stymied early efforts to get the fire out. Universal Studios is built on unincorporated land, so it's part of LA county, but not the city, so has less stringent regulations. I'll bet they're reconsidering those regulations after today.

To be fair, several of these sets have burned before, and been rebuilt; this story lists a few of the more spectacular studio fires, the overwhelming majority of which have taken place at Universal. Seriously, they should take a look at that water pressure.

I bet a "Save the Clock Tower" drive/website is set up in a matter of days. And when it shows up, I'm there.

Here are some fire photos I took today – my lens has a few spots, so forgive the smudges, but there was one hell of a smoke cloud. All were taken from the Herzog & Company office building. Click on any photo to see some more.

Shipwreck Photos

Nice collection of beautiful photographs featuring wrecked ships; reminded me of the D.T. Sheridan, the iron tug that sits to this day on the southern coast of Monhegan Island, Maine. I lived on Monhegan for about five months after graduating from Wesleyan, and visited the wreck several times. I have some Flickr pictures here, for those interested.

Productive Saturday

No real update today, despite yesterday's silence. I've been busy cleaning house, getting a haircut, finally sorting my DVD collection with the recent influx of HD titles, building that speaker cabinet, and other chores, along with getting ready to cook some dinner and have some folks over.

So a good day, but not much for the readership. My apologies. To fill the void, check out this fantastic macro-photograph of an insect (c/o kottke). I've never seen water droplets so small.

Stop by Sunday for a post or two.

Bon week-end!

Star Trek: The Tour

I've got a new Flickr photoset up; it's got all of the photos I took this past Saturday during my visit to Star Trek: The Tour.

This was something that regular readers will remember I brought up in December; as a lifelong Star Trek fan, I couldn't pass this up. Lucky for me, Josh at work is an equal (or greater?) Trek geek, so I knew I could count on him for company.

Josh and I managed to convince our girlfriends to come to Long Beach with us while we engaged in geekery of the highest order. Lots of costumes, faux-sets, and props were scattered throughout. Some nice information displays... but with the advent of the Interwebs, and sites like Memory Alpha, the "Timeline of the Future" is less impressive. The myriad TV screens through the "tour" had pretty cool behind-the-scenes pieces, based on B-roll and interviews with various designers and craftsmen. A DVD is available with all of these specials, and Josh and I both liked them quite a bit. We agreed that we could have done better, of course, but hey, what can you do.

The annoying thing was the manner of display for these videos. The screens were predominantly HD 16x9 monitors... but the content was SD 4x3 letterboxed material. There is a way to set up HDTVS to display this footage correctly: either "4x3 mode" to "pillarbox" the content with black bars on the sides, or "Zoom Mode" to zoom in and crop off the letterbox bars to fill the screen.

Star Trek: The Tour did neither, but stretched the material, distorting the image to fill the screen. This is one of my pet peeves, check it out:

Squashed!

Aside from bad video formatting, I enjoyed the exhibit. It didn't blow me away, but it offered a unique experience, being able to see so many actual costumes up close. I tell you, Khan's corset/shirt looks soft and comfortable in person, like a velvet sweatshirt.

It's safe to say we all had a damn good time... Michelle and Tracy were excellent sports, and we're all glad we went.

Check out the photos if you dare, but be warned: there are a lot of them.

Also on Kottke

Goddamn, if Jason Kottke doesn't find the best stuff.

Here're a few highlights from the same post I got the previous Star Wars link from:

• Minority Kart. Oh hell yes.


• In light of my recent conversation with Will re: Kanye, holy shit this is wonderful.


• Kottke's into photography, and finds amazing stuff, as seen here and here.


• Here's something my whole family would find interesting.


• Justice is served.

At the end of the day, though, I'm just ripping Kottke off as I rattle off his finds, so please, go check out this post, then check out the rest.

Hawaii Photos

I finally got some of my photographs from our Hawaii trip up on Flickr. These are the ones from my Canon point-and-shoot... I haven't finished developing any of my Nikon DSLR shots yet. But for the time being, here's a bunch for everyone to enjoy.

[UPDATED: Functional link posted.]

Waimalano Sunrise 1, originally uploaded by Hutson.

Paint Archaeology

This is one of the greatest photographs I have ever seen.

Not only is the subject matter fascinating, it's gorgeous. Excellent composition and color... and one hell of a found object.

I found it linked to over at kottke.org; it's a photo by Cassidy Curtis, which he explains better than I could back at the first link. Take a look at Kottke's second example for another cool application of paint-in-action.