Comfort Break

I loved this visual gag in 2001, A SPACE ODYSSEY (I took this photograph the last time I watched it, a decade after the time-frame in which it is set, and almost four and a half decades after it first appeared!).

It's a film of such vision and such perfection of the cinematic art that surprisingly I cannot watch it that often. It moves me too much and also, I don't want to inure myself to its magic.

It saddened me in 2011 that it was a decade since the events imagined in the film and how little progress we've actually made. No bases on the Moon, no manned flight to Jupiter, no Arthur C Clarke, no Stanley Kubrick (both great artists and fallible human beings)... It still saddens me now, in 2012.

But on the up-side: no mad AI computer, no Pan-Am, no more Cold War...

[and no location on the map, because it doesn't extend to cis-lunar space. Raise a glass to the [b]first Blip on the Moon[/b]...]