October 26, 2010 9:48PM So here's the third and final installment of my tribute to the 25th anniversary of Back to the Future. I went to see it in the theater this past weekend and today I went and bought the blu-ray. It's geeky, I know, but it's one of those childhood things that you can't (and don't want) to outgrow.
It all started one day back in kindergarten. My friend Anthony noticed my very rough drawing of a car and asked me if it was a time machine. The thing hardly looked like a car, but the square in the middle with the words flux capacitor beneath a big Y gave it away. He told me that it was his favorite movie and we decided to build a time machine together. First, we decided that we needed to watch the movie a few more times and write down the stuff that Doc Brown said during the scene at the mall parking lot. You gotta love five year old logic: Knowing a movie line for line would somehow grant us advanced scientific knowledge.
As the year went on, I eventually came to know the movie line for line and my interest in building a time machine fueled a passion for everything science related. This continued long after kindergarten and actually up through high school. Throughout my elementary school years, I immersed myself in anything that seemed smart: reading the encyclopedia cover to cover, learning meaningless facts and watching a lot of PBS. It didn't make me a lot of friends, but, on the flip side, it kept me out of trouble...well, that kind of trouble.
I've electrocuted myself about ten times. I've blown out the power to the house at least three times and my grandmother had to rescue me from being struck by lightning more times than I can count. Back then there were no warnings at the beginning of movies and tv shows, not that it would've deterred the scientist in me. I way too many stories that I can share in one post, but I'll give you one example.
You know those stands that musicians use to hold their sheet music? I once got a hold of one. I ripped the part that holds the book off. I took a hammer to an old lamp shade and hammered it to the point where it would fit perfectly (upside down--think satellite dish) atop the music stand. I then took a broken television and stripped the rubber shielding off the power cord. I wrapped the wires around the metal music stand...Then I took it outside right before a thunderstorm and placed it in the yard. My goal was to see if I could get lightning to strike the stand, power the tv and blow the glass out of the screen. I was seven.
That was insanely dangerous and stupid (albeit kinda cool), but if only you knew how many books I read on lightning, electricity and conduction before I had that bright idea. It's a wonder that I'm still alive. Still, all silly ideas aside, you have to appreciate a movie that can make an inner city second grader hike to the library by himself and check out science fair project books when his school didn't even have science fairs.
Last week my family got together and out of the blue my aunt asked, Do you remember when you were little and used to quote movies by heart? What was that thing that you used to say that I thought was so cute? Being 28, I don't particularly enjoy entertaining old people with my childish wonder anymore so I told her that I didn't remember. Secretly though I wanted to stand in the middle of the living room and say,
No this sucker's electrical, but I need a nuclear reaction to generate the 1.21 jiggawatts of electricity I need. Doc, you don't just walk into a store and buy plutonium, did you rip this off? Of course, from a group of Libian nationalists. They wanted me to build them a bomb, so I took their plutonium and gave them a shiny bomb casing full of old pinball machine parts. Come here, I'll show you how it works...
No comments:
Post a Comment