Welcome to the exciting world of The Future! I’m your host, Dave Lartigue, and each Wednesday I’ll be taking you on an exciting and educational journey into the time to come! Sit back, pull up a cosmo chair, pour a space drink, and enjoy!

Silver Age audiences loved them some war. And they loved monkeys. In today’s story, a guy with a war bumps into a guy with a monkey and the result is pure magic!

We begin in orbit around earth, where some maniac pilots a small spaceship recklessly into the space-lanes. Earth defense forces force the ship to land, and are startled when this guy emerges from it:

The baboon grabs a stylopen from one of the soldiers and begins writing — with superb penmanship — on the actual runway. He reveals that he is actually ex-captain Gordon Walters, and he has a warning that in three days Earth will be destroyed! Nobody bothers to get him any paper, so he continues his story on the runway.

The baboon reveals that fifteen years ago he, Gordon Walters — a human, not a baboon — was a Battle Fleet Captain in the war against a race called the Chall. Naturally, he was one of the bestest soldiers of the whole war!

The war over, Walters resigns his commission and heads back into space, but this time as an envoy of peace and progress. He grabs a bunch of seeds and heads out to the starts to plant vegetation in the ground instead of Challs. (He claims Johnny Appleseed is an ancestor of his.)

During one of his seed-spilling missions, he comes across something interesting.

This “transoptikon” allows Walters to swap minds with other creatures, which he uses to stay out of danger on the savage planets he often visits.

On one of those planets he comes across a healthy baboon. An oddity, since there doesn’t seem to be enough vegetation to support life. He decides to investigate and picks up a radio broadcast in the Chall language…and it’s addressing Ektinor!

This is peculiar because remember, Ektinor was put behind bars — no, wait, Walters says “disintegrated” — at the end of the war. I guess they kind of lost track of him? Anyway, he’s here on a planet around the star-sun “Asterope” and what’s worse, he’s got a Hyperometer, whatever that is!

What it is, according to the transoptikon, is a device that can teleport matter from one point in space to another! And that’s a serious problem!

At that point the Challs find Walters’ spacecraft and post guards around it. How can he leave to warn Earth of this threat? Thankfully, he’s got this device that allows him to switch minds! He’s used it before when attacked by wild beasts to make one beast chase the others away! So with these armed soldiers all around, his best bet for a mind swap is…well, it’s the baboon, of course.

The guards laugh as Koko climbs aboard Walters’ ship, amused at the thought of the simian piloting such an advanced craft. But the joke’s on them when he actually does take off, having “accidentally” hit the right controls!

Captain Baboon takes the ship to Earth, which is where we started. His story finished, he uses the last bit of runway to describe his plan. They can’t just blast the enemy, because the Challs might send the bomb to Earth ahead of schedule! Walters orders them to make up sleep-gas bombs that look like seeds.

Once he has these, he flies his ship back to Asterope and crash-lands so as not to arouse suspicion that he’s anything more than a merely adequate baboon space pilot. The Challs gather round and laugh at his merry antics.

Captain Baboon solves the problem of the remaining guard by…well, he gets called over to join the fun by his pals, and then the moment is right! He throws the fake seeds to the ground, releasing the sleeping gas, and also sends up a miniature, seed-shaped flare. Soon all the Challs (and Captain Baboon) are dozing peacefully on the ground as the Earth space fleet, seeing the signal, comes in for the capture.

And that, dear readers, is how a baboon saved the planet Earth! The baboon personally disintegrates Ektinor once and for all. Incidentally, no Trytanium bomb or Hyperometer is ever found, but the important thing here is that we rid the universe of this threat. The final panel takes place in the Chall capitol, where a statue of Ektinor is being pulled down.

By the way, this story was sort of reused several years later as a Lois Lane one entitled “I Am Curious (Baboon)”.

“Captain Baboon’s Space-War!”
Mystery in Space #68 (DC Comics, June 1961)
Writer: Gardner Fox
Penciler: Mike Sekowsky
Inker: Bernard Sachs
Editor: Julius Schwartz

Next: Analog Gaming: It Takes a Very Steady Hand

Next: This Used to Be the Future: Captain Baboon’s Space-War!

For years, Cathy Forbush has had to listen to her late brother being disparaged and insulted. She would respond with the truth of the matter, but the source of the slander is the radio.

Her younger brother, Francis “Flattop” Forbush, who died in 1981, is the source of the Beatles’ song, “Come Together”, Cathy maintains. She also insists that the lyrics paint an unflattering and incorrect portrait of a gentle soul with serious troubles.

“It’s true that Francis had a drug problem. He struggled with addiction all his life. But to claim he was a joker who just did what he please? That’s simply wrong.”

Cathy has a photo of Francis later in his short life, seeming to have overcome his demons. His hair, no longer down to his knees, is trimmed conservatively and he is wearing shoeshine. But one can still see, behind his good looks and pained smile, that he is still a bit of a mojo filter.

“He never had Ono sideboard,” Cathy continues. “Or toe-jam football. And even in his worst times he probably only roller-coastered once, maybe twice.”

In that case, how is Cathy so sure the song is about her late brother? She says he was generally known to his friends as “Flattop” or “That Guy With the Feet Below His Knees”. And, she says, there are other tell-tale details in the lyrics. “Francis had a lot of problems, problems which contributed to his drug habit. Even as a child he was teased for his joo-joo eyeball, and his monkey finger made it difficult for him to find work.”

“But he was good at maths, and one of the sweetest people you could ever know. I always looked forward to him grooving slowly up my front walk. Lennon’s song makes him sound like a creep, a spinal cracker who was constantly shooting coca-cola. That simply isn’t true. It’s terrible for him to be immortalized this way.”

Of course, with both Lennon and Francis dead, it seems that there is no longer any one who can apologize and no one for them to apologize to. Cathy and other friends and relations of Francis have only their memories of the man to carry them on.

“Even though the song is about my brother, I have to turn it off if it comes on the radio,” Cathy says. “It’s too hurtful.”

Francis died of an overdose only a few months after Lennon was murdered. It was Cathy who found his body in his bathroom, having to come in through the window as he had locked the door. Would his brief, tragic life have been any different if he had not been notoriously featured in a Beatles song? As she sits by the banks of a lagoon, Cathy can only suck her thumb and wonder.

Next: The Dark Knight Operates

Pages 309-310: For purposes of determining turn radius (and only this purpose), there are five different classes of flying objects. Class one contains the most nimble fliers, while class five has the slowest. Here are some items from each class (italics indicate a spell or ability).

Class 1: Winged Warriors, Spheres of Bedevilment, Hadrathus power armor, Hyperflight

Class 2: Antigravity belts, Helicopters, Acoustic Levitation, Dragons

Class 3: Flying craft under 10 tons, Larged winged creatures over 10 tons, Drakes, Hoananarr (one of the Shaman Beast spell song options)

Class 4: Hydras, Extra small and small-sized starships, Missiles up to 50 feet in length, Magic Kite

Class 5: Dirigibles, Medium-sized starships and up, Juggernaut armor, Sun Song

Near as I can figure, a Flying Elk (page 377) is Class 2.

Next: Family of “Old Flattop” Finds Song Hurtful

• BBC News – Belgian Catholic offices raided in sex abuse probe
  This is a good start.
  Tagged as: [religion crime]
• Catalog Living
  Within three postings I subscribed to the feed.
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• New Film Investigates ‘Fracking’ For Natural Gas : NPR
  A possibly serious threat that will be ignored in favor of Battlestar Galactica jokes.
  Tagged as: [environment law]
• La. Police Doing BP’s Dirty Work [Video] | Mother Jones
  Granted, it’s off-duty cops taking in extra pay, but still, BP is not the authorities.
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• Minor earthquake tremors felt in Western Massachusetts | masslive.com
  I felt this! My first (very small) taste of an earthquake!
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• Poynter Online – Al’s Morning Meeting
  Who is tasked with the responsibility of monitoring those individuals whose job is to supervise the behaviors of others?
  Tagged as: [law video]
• The Anosognosicâs Dilemma: Somethingâs Wrong but Youâll Never Know What It Is (Part 1) – Opinionator Blog – NYTimes.com
  This is maybe the number one problem in America.
  Tagged as: [mind health culture]

Next: Synnibarr Sunday: Turning and Turning in the Widening Gyre

You may have noticed that I haven’t talked much about politics lately. The reason for that can be briefly summarized.

I give up.

For years I just didn’t care. When Bush stumbled his way into office, hoo-boy did I care. And then Obama came along and for a moment it looked like maybe we as a country were going to grow the hell up.

But we didn’t. And we still don’t want to.

I simply can’t continue beating my head against this wall. I can’t keep on wanting to engage with intelligence with others (on both sides) are content to simply bleat talking points. It frustrates me to no end to see issues that will greatly affect peoples’ actual lives treated as mere points to be scored in some game where nobody ever wins.

I’m tired of being told that I have to choose between a center-right guy or a right-of-center guy. I’m tired of every single grassroots left activist group being ignored or ridiculed while the idiotic Tea Party is taken seriously. Of seeing people who I know aren’t evil or stupid “liking” Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck on Facebook and having to wonder why.

In short, I’ve tried giving a shit for a decade now and gotten nothing different from when I didn’t, except for more frustration.

And furthermore, there seems to be no end in sight. Even as the catastrophic result of an oil company’s desire to save money over being safe flood the Gulf of Mexico and destroy the environment, as well as lives, we still want to let corporations run wild. We had to fight tooth and nail to get even a tiny health care reform in place, and its minuscule provisions are decried as rampant socialism. The same Wall Street we wanted to hand Social Security over to has fucked up the economy royally and in return we gave it cash and shook its hand and are terrified of asking it if it would mind a little bit of regulation. And the Supreme Court decides corporations can throw all kinds of money into elections.

The government of this country has consistently demonstrated that, since I’m not a billionaire, it doesn’t give a damn about me.

I guess I’m finally taking the hint.

Next: This Del.icio.us Week

Today I took some time out from being hot to update my horribly out of date blogroll. Did you not know I even had one? It’s up there in the menu, under “BLOGROLL“. These are folks I think you should check out on a regular basis. I pruned dead branches, renamed things, and provided useful categories instead of what I had before.

And as long as we’re talking about things that aren’t here, let me point you to some specifics.

First off, you already know that The Bureau Chiefs website features the finest boardgame-related content by yours truly. But that’s not all! We talk about movies there! And books! And comics! And music! And Andrew eats things! DO go check it out!

Adam WarRock and the Infinity Watch — I am not the world’s biggest rap fan, but I have really dug every single track I’ve heard here. “Starving Artist” is the hot single, but my favorite so far is “Bad Meaning Good“. “Ira Glass” is also worth your time.

High-Minded BS features the humorous writings of Matt Wilson, who was coerced into writing Hate You Forever: How to Channel Your Rage Into Effective Supervillainy. Matt is one funny guy and this stuff is gold.

Awesome Hospital is a webcomic by Chad Bowers, Chris Sims, Matt Digges, and Josh Krach. How awesome is this hospital? One of the staff is DR. BULLDOG ON A SKATEBOARD. Who is a bulldog. On a skateboard. You got it.

ComicPunx is Andrew Weiss’ guide to how comic books have dealt with punk rock (short answer: poorly). This is him in his native environment and even though it just started yesterday, I’m expecting big things here.

The Variants recently finished its first season, so this is a great time to either watch or re-watch it from the beginning.

And finally, if you like my Lego Diem tumblr blog, check out Lego Express, which rocks the same kind of vibe!

It’s too hot to go outdoors! Stay inside and look at things on the Internet!

Next: After All, We All Know What the Definition of Insanity Is

Welcome to the exciting world of The Future! I’m your host, Dave Lartigue, and each Wednesday I’ll be taking you on an exciting and educational journey into the time to come! Sit back, pull up a cosmo chair, pour a space drink, and enjoy!

In previous incarnations of this feature we’ve seen futuristic treatments of cab drivers and insurance agents. Today we look at the exciting life of a mailman in the 30th century!

The action starts on the planet Soria, which is surrounded by a host of moons and three suns (and probably four Jupiters and like a dozen Marses.) Right now on Soria, everyone has a single, unifying thought: where the hell is the mail?

What’s keeping the mail? It seems that Ed Cameron, the mail rider, has had a bit of a problem in getting to Soria. It all starts with a near-miss of a black hole.

Cameron narrowly avoids the space hazard, but according to his slide rule, the delay will never let him get to Soria in time. I guess all those suns and moons and Plutos mean he’s got to hit the Soria system just right or else wait months for the next opportunity.

The only way he can get there in time is to do what the manual expressly forbids: exceed the speed of light! This is something that should only be used in cases of extreme emergency, and Cameron figures that the response to some kid’s space school application letter is worth the risk! So, without even making the proper calculations, he grabs the speed control handle:

It doesn’t take long before Cameron sees the effects of his increased velocity. He is visited by three phantasmal beings. The ghosts of mail runs past, present, and yet to be all descend upon him in turn.

(The other two visions are a giant ape-man creature and a group of warriors in full plate mail with shields and maces that he describes as Huns.)

Still, Ed Cameron is made of pretty stern stuff, and he perseveres through these “weird ancestral hallucinations”. Soon he arrives at Soria, but his troubles aren’t yet over.

See, although Soria now contains wholesome white Earth-people, it was originally the home to some other folks who aren’t as civilized as we are, and who every now and then take out their irrational hatred on innocent Earth ships. This is one of those times.

Thankfully, the space torpedo turns out to be a dud (it hits the mail ship with a “BUNG”) and Cameron takes refuge from his attackers by actually flying IN to the network of orbiting moons. It takes expert piloting skills to navigate through them, and the inferior natives just aren’t up to the task!

Cameron successfully weaves through the maze of moons and soon:

Ed Cameron is clearly a master among space mailmen, but sadly, this was the only delivery he ever made. How awful must it feel to be told that your job isn’t as interesting as the guy who sells space insurance?

And just in case you thought I was joking about that reply to the kid:

“Mail Rider to the Stars!”
Mystery in Space #42 (DC Comics, February-March 1958)
Writer: John Broome
Penciler: Sid Greene
Inker: John Giunta
Editor: Julius Schwartz

Next: Across the Universe