The Giant Mechanical Man was shown at the 2012 Tribeca (which stands for “Triangle Below Canal”, btw, if you’re not a New Yorker) and features a pair of disconnected city folk trying to figure it all out against despite the distracting noise of advice offered by people who have made their peace with the usual lives.

Janis, adopted and transplanted from Wyoming, which she didn’t get to see much of, is struggling as a temp in NYC, and due to her inability to connect, she’s failing pretty spectacularly. Her suburban sister doesn’t get her, and keeps trying to fix her life, which, to be fair, does need fixing pretty badly, if only in terms of survival.

Tim, on the other hand, is a performance artist who paints himself silver, puts on stilts and a silver business suit, and mimes out the soulessnes of modern times.

His girlfriend, who pretty clearly works in the financial sector, may have gotten him once, but now realizes he’s a liability in the shark infested waters she lives in.

After each of them get ejected from the marginally workable shells they’ve created for themselves, they wind up working at the bottom rungs of a zoo, where they slowly find each other amid the monkeys and their own personal baggage.

Since the action takes place occasionally at an art house cinema showing silent films, a tip of the hat to Charlie Chaplin’s “Modern Times,” which focused on much the same themes as Tim’s Giant Mechanical Man, would have been nice, but unless I missed it, they didn’t go there. The Giant Mechanical Man was shown at the 2012 Tribeca (which stands for “Triangle Below Canal”, btw, if you’re not a New Yorker) and features a pair of disconnected city folk trying to figure it all out against despite the distracting noise of advice offered by people who have made their peace with the usual lives.

Ultimately, of course the two find and heal each other, but Tim’s alter ego in silver blue paint acts as an interesting third person in the evolution of their relationship, completely separate from Tim himself, and ironically the most emotionally available person in the whole affair, even though he never talks and generally refuses to acknowledge people standing in front of him.

I liked it, even if there weren’t any real robots (except for the soulless business types, Tim mocks) around.

Links:

• IMDB: The Giant Mechanical Man : http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1769363/
• Amazon.com Instant Video : http://www.amazon.com/The-Giant-Mechanical-Jenna-Fischer/dp/B0086900OS/

The eight finalists for the 2012 WSFA Small Press Award are now available at: http://wsfasmallpressaward.org/content/

Image of what Earth may look like 5-7 billion years from now, when the Sun swells and becomes a Red Giant. by Fsgregs

After the sun puffed up into a red giant a few billion years ahead of schedule, making a cinder out of the Earth, a glowing red wasteland of Mars, turning Jupiter into a cloud of methane and ammonia gasses making all the bovine flatulence ever emitted insignificant in a way usually reserved for comparisons involving astronomical distances and national debts, stripped the rings off Saturn faster than a Estonian mail order bride after the inevitable divorce, and turned Neptune in a giant toasted marshmallow (the less said abut the fate of Uranus, the better), suddenly  the most habitable place in the solar system was poor deplaneted Pluto.

So humankind hunkerd down on its no longer quite so frozen surface and settled in for a long winters night.

The new Plutonians, seeded from a pitiful few science types who’d been out in the black too long, loved geeky irony, so nothing would do but to name the settlement, which eventually became a fair sized metropolis, after the man who had dismissed Pluto from the planetary ranks in the first place. Old wounds and memories fade though, and by the time the generations born on Earth had gone to feed the worms in the city’s central park and gone from worms to soil, and thence to pushing up daisies, visitors had quite forgotten why it was the custom to kneel in the grass of Tyson.

Actually, there’s a fairly stiff fine for explaining it.

Note: I spared no effort in not researching any of the astronomical points here, despite that, I came across an interesting piece in Astrobiology magazine titled, “Delayed Gratification Zones” which points out that during the Sun’s red giant phase, due i about 5 billion years,  the solar system’s habitable zone will move out to beyond Pluto. Go figure.

Caspar David Friedrich, Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog, the classic romantic loaner. Don't tell him there's no I in Win.

Just now a piece of very well meaning email, as if that’s even possible, reminded me that:

There is no “i ” in Team.

As if that actually lent credibility to and argument about cooperation versus individual effort.

I’ve always wanted a coach to actually pull that chestnut out of the fire and hold it, smoking and reeking of brimstone, under my nose. Because I’ve always wanted the chance to point out that:

There may not be an “I” in Team, but with a little work you can spell “Me,” and besides, if you’re looking for an “I,” there’s a big fat on right in the middle of win.

And remember, Heinlein said in “Starship Troopers,”

… for the man working alone, moves that take advantage of his own mobility and of the superior co-ordination of one man as compared with two — Sergeant Zim says (correctly) that any group is weaker than a man alone unless they are perfectly trained to work together...

Of course, I’m no one to talk, having spent my entire professional life trying to get people to work in teams.

And though they may be messier more poorly coordinated than Sergeant Zim on his own, with just a little organizing, you’ll find they can have some pretty good “mates” in them, which is certainly worth something. Something even a thick headed dwarf could accept.

Gimli: Never thought I’d die fighting side by side with an Elf.
Legolas: What about side by side with a friend?
Gimli: Aye. I could do that.

 And that takes teamwork.