Ping OM

OM? Are you there?

I haven't had luck with the email address at your blog, so I'll try
this route. I'd like permission to use and expand on several points
you made in a 2004 posting in this group in a work of my own. You
would, of course, receive proper attribution. Please contact me here
or at my work email address if you can discuss this. Time is somewhat
of the essence, since I am about to leave on an extended vacation and
would very much like to get some work done.

Here's my work address, in case the header doesn't make it plain:
mfunke AT cellularspecialties DOT com

Thanks for your time.

On 7 Aug 2006 06:22:00 -0700, "addams013"
wrote:

OM? Are you there?

....Not really. Blame it on the fact that I had a major tooth
extraction today, and things didn't go as smoothly as possible.

I haven't had luck with the email address at your blog, so I'll try
this route. I'd like permission to use and expand on several points
you made in a 2004 posting in this group in a work of my own. You
would, of course, receive proper attribution. Please contact me here
or at my work email address if you can discuss this. Time is somewhat
of the essence, since I am about to leave on an extended vacation and
would very much like to get some work done.

....Never got the e-mail. What post are we talking about?


OM
--
]=====================================[
] OMBlog - http://www.io.com/~o_m/omworld [
] Let's face it: Sometimes you *need* [
] an obnoxious opinion in your day! [
]=====================================[

On 8 Aug 2006 05:20:57 -0700, "addams013"
wrote:

If you're feeling gracious, I would very much appreciate the
opportunity to try to turn the plot points you described into a novel
over the next year or two. I'd attribute you properly, of course.
(There would be some added elements as well, such as political tension
when the USSR gets the idea that Apollo 18 is going to try to be a
rescue mission, but I want to recognize the creative work you have
already put in.)

....Oh man, let me see if I can call this up from memory. In a
nutshell, the basic plot went something like this: Everything goes in
OTL as it did except that for some reason Kohoutek winds up altering
course and manages to skid into the Moon at just enough of an angle
that it lands sufficiently intact so that there's a really LARGE chunk
of it just sitting there waiting to be investigated. However, thanks
to the cutbacks in the program, NASA can't afford to send *any* sort
of probe to investigate, but the Soviets manage to land another
Lunokhod. Thanks to the low quality of the onboard cameras, it's
obvious that there's *something* imbedded in the cometary mass that's
left over that's not supposed to be there, but nobody can tell what it
is.

....The whole series of events following that wasn't ever really
fleshed out, and has more plot holes than your average Znkfba book.
However, the steps towards the end went like this:

* Nixon is embarassed by Gordo when he nails the Trickster on a major
logic point in favor of keeping the program far more active than
Congress wants. This occurs at a PR function "celebrating" the end of
the Apollo program that Gordo attends.

* Nixon is further embarassed when Cronkite denounces the program
cutbacks on the evening news, and Jules Bergman does the same while
discussing why we can't go and get any of the Kohoutek material. He
even gets further up **** creek in the polls when the Soviets make a
big public deal about sending a man there themselves.

* In an odd "deja vu" meeting on what the US can do to "catch up"
again, Nixon is briefed on a secret "Manhattan-style" project that LBJ
authorized, but Nixon was somehow never briefed on. The project is
basically the Pilgrim Project, but differes in that the basic hardware
behind the survival shelter was actually built by Grumman and put into
storage "just in case" shortly before SWIP was put into effect. NASA
proposes that a mission be put together where the last two Saturn V's
- the ones that make up the pieces of the three lawn ornaments we see
today - are used to launch a shelter and a manned mission, with a
mission duration of one week on the surface.

* Since putting Nixon in his place, Gordo has become a major media
celebrity again, appearing on everything from the Carson show, to the
final episode of "Laugh-In", to appearances on "Face the Nation" and
"Meet the Press" - the latter of which wind up airing the same day
because of a preemption rescheduling! Nixon winds up getting slammed
pretty hard by Gordo, and to cut the story short he winds up going on
the mission to recover a piece of Kohoutek after Nixon orders NASA to
assign him as part of a "put up or shut up" situation.

* NASA gets the shelter within 100 yards of the Kohoutek fragment, and
is sending back lots of great pictures. Then, the day before the
manned launch, the Soviets manage to get an N-1 off the ground, and a
Zond with a lander into orbit. While the Apollo is en route, all
signals with the Zond are lost. The Soviets then clam up, and refuse
to answer any US requests for information. The problem being that the
Zond is going to be on the same orbital path as the Apollo, and
there's the road hazard concerns.

* As it turns out, the Zond winds up having hit one of its own orbital
probes they sent up to scan the impact site. One Cosmonaut is killed,
but the lander pilot - yep, I had it as Leonov - managed to escape
injury thanks to the impact having happened after the Zond and the LK
detached. However, nobody realizes this until one of the Apollo crew
sees the lander on the ground next to the shelter.

* From there, it becomes a tale of survival, dealing with how to adapt
Soviet suits to US air hoses, getting three men back up into orbit,
then four men back to Earth. All the while, there's this subplot
dealing with how NASA manages to get the Soviets to open up about what
happened, and to help with the info they need to save Leonov. Of
course, none of this comes about until after Gordo violates orders and
performs a "seat-of-the-pants" rendevouz with the LM ascent stage,
which ends up having an early engine shutoff and doesn't get up as
high as it needs to be.

....Anyway, this is from memory, and there's a LOT of plot holes there.
Which is why I've never really finished it, because filling in those
holes would probably render the story boring as hell. It's right up
there with the "Space Cowboy" mythos, and would have given Gordo his
due - or, at least, the due he's deserved once you forget how he went
nuts in his latter years. In any case, do with this what you wish.

OM
--
]=====================================[
] OMBlog - http://www.io.com/~o_m/omworld [
] Let's face it: Sometimes you *need* [
] an obnoxious opinion in your day! [
]=====================================[

OM wrote:

...Oh man, let me see if I can call this up from memory.



COMRADE! Google newsgroup search!

Pat

OM wrote:
...Anyway, this is from memory, and there's a LOT of plot holes there.

If I ever had any doubt that Uncle Duke was your role model, I have none
now! (Bravo!)

--
Dave Michelson

Dave Michelson wrote:


...Anyway, this is from memory, and there's a LOT of plot holes there.


If I ever had any doubt that Uncle Duke was your role model, I have
none now! (Bravo!)


Yeah? Will when was the last time he blew himself up with a homemade
siege mortar?
Huh? Huh? :-)

Hunter Flannery

OM wrote:

snip details for space
...Anyway, this is from memory, and there's a LOT of plot holes there.
Which is why I've never really finished it, because filling in those
holes would probably render the story boring as hell. It's right up
there with the "Space Cowboy" mythos, and would have given Gordo his
due - or, at least, the due he's deserved once you forget how he went
nuts in his latter years. In any case, do with this what you wish.

Sure. I enjoyed the story idea because it promised to be larger than
life and be somewhat related to my fascination with the Moon race as
well (even if it strains credibility more than a little bit).

I had also planned to gloss over and ignore the whole UFO nonsense that
Cooper seemed to get wrapped up in later on. I can justify these
things in real life by saying that (a) pilots like to embellish their
stories to captivate their audience, and (b) he probably understood
that he could give the people who failed to recognize his talent a
headache by pointing the MUFON foilhats at them. Regardless of whether
or not he *actually* stripped some of his mental gears, the story is
obviously fiction; I can keep him sane if I want to.

Thank you for your permission and the time you've taken to explain some
more than you had several years ago; the extra information has given me
some more to think about.

addams013 wrote:

OM wrote:


I had also planned to gloss over and ignore the whole UFO nonsense that
Cooper seemed to get wrapped up in later on.



BTW.. I'm not going into detail here due to the right of privacy, but I
had a little heart-to-heart discussion via E-mail with someone who knew
Valerie Ransone (the "Space Kid") when she was back in college prior to
meeting Gordo.
She thoroughly enjoyed pulling the wool over people's eyes and seeing
what exactly she could get away with in regards to bull****ing them. The
person who I communicated with thought this all was very funny; I don't
think think this was funny at all, but rather malicious and sadistic.
The question that still needs to be answered is how Cooper fell for all
this. It doesn't reflect at all well on him that he'd naïvely buy a line
of bull**** foisted on him by some gleeful little manipulator.

Pat