Gaming, Science Fiction, Culture, and Such
Google’s searchable archive of LIFE magazine images provides a few images of board, or paper, wargames, as opposed to field exercises:
Dated 1915, the image is captioned:
Group of English gentlemen and soldiers of the 25th London Cyclist Regiment playing the newest form of wargame strategy simulation called “Bellum” at the regimental HQ.
One battalion of the 25th shipped off to India during World War I and later served in the 3rd Afghan War—though sadly, without their bicycles.
If ever a city had its Boswell, Bill Lyon serves that role for Philadelphia, encapsulating something of that city’s soul in print. The retired Inquirer columnist tends to re-appear at junctions of great moment in the city’s emotional life, and after the Phillies captured the World Series title last night, ending Philadelphia’s 25 years without a major sports title, he returns to help us make sense of it all:
And thus ended one of the most bizarre and controversial games ever played in the World Series, complete with a 46-hour wait between innings, and how fitting that was, for this is Philadelphia, after all, cradle of liberty, acid reflux, angst, anxiety and the sure and certain belief that we are doomed forever to walk along the Boulevard of Busted Dreams.
But not now. Not this time. No, you can go ice skating in Hades now. The Phillies have broken the Hundred Season Drought. The franchise of 10,000 losses is a winner.
The air already smells cleaner. The women are beautiful. Food tastes better. The shroud of dread has been pulled away.
To be on Broad Street tomorrow for the parade will be magical, an event that might not happen again for a long time, the fates being what they are. If you’re there, savor it.
The boos will start again soon enough, this being Philadelphia and we being Philadelphia fans, and we’ll bemoan the Flyers’ goaltending and the Eagles’ offensive line and the Sixers’ poor rebounding and, eventually, the lack of a winger with pace on the new soccer team, but for now, we’re happy, in our own way, just like Bill Lyon said.
(Image courtesy of melingo wagamama, via a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial License.)
After forty-odd years of being on television and in popular culture, Dr. Who still requires an introduction, it seems.
In the July 21, 2008, issue of The New Yorker (the one with all the cover fracas, in fact), Benjamin Wallace-Wells pens an article about Garrett Lisi’s quest for a Theory of Everything, noting that the good Doctor can be a soothing respite for an introverted physicist and his partner:
The weekend I visited, Lisi and Baranyk were getting ready for a party in Reno, forty minutes away, to which they’d been invited by someone Lisi met on a ski lift, and for which they were dressing up as giant rabbits. But most nights they stayed in and cooked. They sometimes watched videotapes of the British science-fiction show “Doctor Who,” but they preferred board games.
Has the Doctor not penetrated sufficiently into public consciousness that the show can be introduced simply as Doctor Who, with the expectation that it will be understood? Or will it always require an appositive to provide needed context for those who might otherwise think some obscure medical drama were being watched?
Perhaps these are just the grumbles of a niche fan who cannot understand his favorite show being relegated to late-night PBS airings. After all, one doesn’t bother to explain Star Wars as “the American science-fiction film based loosely on Joseph Campbell’s work” or Harry Potter as “the British children’s series, loved by adults, about a boy wizard.” Or perhaps it’s just good journalism to provide explanations for anything that might be unclear to your widest possible audience. Let’s go with that.
I’ll have to make a more thorough search of The New Yorker’s archives to see how the show is mentioned, if ever before, in its pages. The online archive is less-than-full-featured, and I despair of installing the kludgy, proprietary interface for the complete DVD set (which I treasure nonetheless), but we all make sacrifices for the Doctor.
(Image courtesy of recurrence, via a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike License.)
Bill Lyon returns to print with another column for the Philadelphia Inquirer today, reminiscing about the Spectrum, which is scheduled to be demolished in 2009.
There’s something sad about losing the Spectrum, as iconic as any featureless, parking-lot-bound arena could be, and with his usual grace, Bill Lyon captures the emotions involved with this significant piece of Philadelphia’s psychic architecture. The “boo birds” might have roosted in the Vet (and now perch in the Linc), but Flyers fans had their own ways of celebrating, and berating, their heroes at the Spectrum:
When a Philadelphia team was playing, you could stand out in the parking lot and the crowd noise would tell you how the home team was faring—if they were winning, the passion was as raw and bone-deep as a January night, an unrelenting, urging surge of support.
And if they were losing . . . ah, well, then it was a mournful wail, so haunting that wolf packs a thousand miles away lifted their muzzles to the heavens and bayed at the moon in sympathetic reply.
In the end, I guess it is just an old building lacking in amenities sitting on valuable land, but they can’t raze the memories.
(Image courtesy of Cavalier92 via a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-No Derivatives License.)
Today’s Philadelphia Inquirer plays host to a great column by the retired Bill Lyon on the current second round NHL playoff series between the Philadelphia Flyers and the Montreal Canadiens.
It’s not excessively objective, but neither is it a “homer” screed; it’s just a very good piece of hockey journalism that manages to recap last night’s game with style:
Goalies are not fair game, no matter how far they roam. But Downie cannot resist. He aims for the goalie’s legs and, using his stick like an oversized spatula, he flips Price. The Canadiens take outraged exception, and the Flyers must retaliate, of course, so soon the ice is littered with gloves and sticks, and unkind things are being said about ancestry. The population of the penalty box goes up by four.
Perhaps I’d like the column less if I were a fan of Les Habitants, but I hope not. It’s simply good sports writing, so rare these days and rarer still since Lyon’s retirement a few years back.
(Image courtesy of MattP33 via a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike License.)