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About twenty-five people had a great time watching “The Thing” next to the frozen Brandywine river on Saturday night. For a screen, we ended up stretching a 4’x15′ tarp across two six-foot pieces of angle iron, bolted together to make one span, then clamped to some tent poles (thanks, Chris!)

The whole range of human emotions was represented, including “being very cold”, and “being worried that everyone would have to go home early” when the speaker fuse blew. But we were able to fix it using card parts that my neighbor Sam brought. Thanks, Sam! And thanks to Harold, Eric, and Wayne, who actually fixed the projector. I mostly just kind of stood there, got in the way, and poked at the wrong end of things.

Mary Bigham from WC Dish came, lit a fire, and cooked hot dogs, which is JUST what you’re hungry for when you’re watching a slavering pile of alien tentacles getting incinerated by a flamethrower. No, I’m serious: thanks, Mary! Also, Mary brought her dogs, which added immensely to the scariness of the early Norwegians-shooting-at-a-preternaturally-intense-Husky scenes.

Did I mention being really cold? I had a LOT of fun, but I think we’re definitely going to wait for warm weather before showing another film.

This Friday night, we’re going to be showing John Carpenter’s “The Thing” out in the snow, which of course is the best place to see a movie about a horrific alien shapeshifter trying to outwit and absorb a team of antarctic scientists (scientists with flamethrowers, naturally — “The Thing” is one of the canonical “kill it with fire” trope movies.

I’m pretty sure that I can get the Commando Projector started: after about 18 hours on a 2-amp charge, I figured out the sweet spot on the choke, and I got it up and running. Here’s a picture of the rig (this will be relevant further down):

We’re going to be down on the banks of the Brandywine. There’ll be power, a fire pit, and even a bathroom, so we’ll be as comfortable as you possibly can be when sitting still for ninety minutes watching scientists deal with sled dogs that… no, I won’t describe it here. It’s TOO DAMN SCARY. If you really want to know, you can go over to the Guerilla Drive-In site and read all about it.

The part that I’m scratching my head about right now is how to get a screen the right shape for the image thrown by the anamorphic “scope” lens. 16MM “scope” is the widest ratio, says the Internet: the image is 2.74 times as wide as it is tall. That means that if the image is four feet tall, it’s going to be just shy of eleven feet wide. I diagrammed it in OmniGraffle:

I’ve been thinking: the polyester curtain we used for Meatballs? Probably not wide enough. The awesome aluminum-framed screen that Tom L. brought for Cannonball Run II? That’s six feet wide, which means the image would be only two feet tall. I don’t like inflatable movie screens — they seem like they’d be both fragile and noisy.

I figure that I can carry a stack of quarter-inch plywood pieces on the sidecar — maybe I could bring six pieces each 22″ wide by 48″ tall, and then assemble them into a pretty sizeable widescreen. As an added bonus, I could use only three sections for a “regular” movie, which would be 66″ wide.

The problem I’m struggling with is how to hang them all in a straight row. A few months ago, Kate took me to an outdoor quilt show where I saw a really ingenious system to hang the quilts — they were using standard sawhorse brackets with long 2x4s to make, essentially, eight-foot tall, twelve-foot-wide sawhorses. They disassembled down to not much more than the lumber and a couple of brackets. But I can’t carry 2x4s over six feet long on the sidecar. Rabbeted 2x4s and wingnuts? Seems wobbly, especialy since eleven feet of quarter-inch plywood will get pretty heavy.

Right now, I’m wondering if maybe instead of using quarter-inch plywood, I could use quarter-inch insulation board, held together with lightweight plastic channel. That way, the whole thing would be light enough to rig easily, but stiff enough not to flap in the breeze like fabric would.

Any suggestions, O Internet? It seems a shame to waste the bright, w-i-i-i-ide image we’re going to get from the scope lens this Friday. I’d welcome your suggestions! How could we do this without 200 pounds of steel and carriage bolts?

PS. I figured we’d paint the screen just good ol’ white to begin with, and then if it seems worth it, get a gallon of that glass-bead paint on eBay or something.

PPS. Full directions to Friday’s showing are at the Guerilla Drive-In site. See you there!

Kate went to a kniting party yesterday afternoon, and Lydia and I headed into the basement to screw the new anamorphic lens onto the Commando Projector. I had gone to eBay to buy the cheapest piece of “scope”-print film I could find, to test with. That turned out to be an eight-minute dance scene cut from a (deservedly) forgotten 1965 rock-and-roll flick: “Every Day is a Holiday.”

If you squint at the picture on the right — or if you click through to Flickr — you can see the tape marks on the wall showing how much wider the scope lens is than “vanilla” 16MM. Put simply: IT IS FANTASTIC, and it made me feel for the first time that using a 16MM projector for the Guerilla Drive-In is more than just a kooky Luddite stunt. The image is bright and colorful and w-i-i-i-i-de.

Watching “The Thing” out in the snow is going to be fantastic.

Kate and I were curious about the band that does such a terrible job of dancing in the “Crazy High Noon” saloon scene, so I looked up Freddie and the Dreamers. And I found this on YouTube. Holy cow, I know every generation thinks it invented sex, but the combination of black suits with rump-shakin’ go-go dancers in fuzzy sweaters, fringe miniskirts, and some kind of stripey sixties fishnets? Maybe every generation thinks it invented the “booty and car wax” video, too. But this is clear proof to the contrary:

I was really happy with how the PodPost Patch came out. A design at that small size was easy and fast to stitch, a nice break from stitching endless background on the boxcar alligator. And it was fun to send as a present!

So I thought I’d stitch up Kenn Munk’s “Two griffins, rampant, with a barcode” design, that you can see in the header of his blog. This one started out promising, as you can see from the pattern:

…but then things started going badly. I stitched the banner above the barcode too wide, and had to rip out lots of stitches. Then I ran out of pearl cotton, only to discover that size three pearl cotton is hard to find. So I started over again on a fresh canvas, this time with wool. The griffins stitched up really fast, and I decided to try a checkerboard background, to avoid flat-background boredom.

Unfortunately, I think the background was a big mistake:

The end result is… eye-catching. And it has a certain something that I can’t quite define. Well, actually, yes I can define it. It looks like an industrial explosion in a lederhosen factory. Or if an energy-drink manufacturer gave their package designer a creative brief consisting only only of a sheaf of barley, a tour guide of Transylvania, and a massive ceramic beer stein. Maybe the name would be in a heavy Fraktur font, with extra diareses: “Get your umlaut on with SCHLÄMMIN’ SCHNÄPPS!”

I’m sorry for this, Kenn. I kind of feel like the scene in the book where the messenger boy gets mistaken for the absent barber, and the customer falls asleep in the barber’s chair, and the messenger keeps botching the job, getting progressively worse and worse, until the customer wakes up to find that half of his head is completely shaved bald. Except in this case the customer in the chair is Kenn’s art, which is perfectly good art and did not deserve to have its head shaved like this. I think I’ll wait until its hair grows out, and then try again.

Randy and I want to make and sell merit badges for nerds. There’ll be a merit badge for knowing regular expressions. A merit badge for open-source committing. Merit badges for knowing COBOL, and maybe for knowing what command-G does on line printers. There will merit badges for reading Tengwar, speaking Klingon, and rolling twenties.

I want these badges to be exactly the same as “real” merit badges — an inch and a half in diameter, 100% covered in embroidery. I want them to be small, so you can fit a bunch of them on your sleeve. They’ll be velcro-backed, so you can stick a square of velcro on the back of your MacBook Pro and show off your Ruby Core and Textmate Bundle Author merit badges at Starbucks!

Here’s a sample patch of the Tikaro Interactive “gearxel” that American Patch and Emblem stitched up for us as a test. We wanted to know how much resolution we can get in an inch (a lot, as it turns out!)

The Scouts call these “spoof” merit badges, and there’s already a lot of them made. Kate’s knitting friend Susan (check out her girl-scout merit-badge sash!) told my about the awesome Mama Merit Badges, too. (My favorites: the “breastfeeding” badge, and the “cross country travel with infant” merit badge.)

However, the undisputed leaders of the merit-badgers out there are Carolee and Jennie Pod, from Pod Post in San Francisco. Pod Post does mail art — they make cool things, put them in envelopes with awesome stamps and stickers all over them. Plus, they make books, and zines, and crafts, and generally it seems to be “Swallows and Amazons” except with paper, staplers, and library paste. For a craft convention in San Francisco, they made a TRULY AWESOME set of “printmaking”, “zinemaking”, and “correspondence” merit badges, then they SEWED THEM TO SASHES:

First of all, those merit badges are great (you can see them all and buy them here.) Second, the execution with the sashes is fantastic. And that LOGO! That London-in-wartime logo, with all the letterbox cues and the fact that UPON FURTHER INSPECTION, IT’S A PEN NIB!? Come on, people, I’m not made of stone.

I sent them a breathless note, since as far as I’m concerned the more I do computers the more I also enjoy doing things the old, hard, analog way, and I think “mail art” is right along the same lines. In return, they sent me an entire freaking MAIL ART CARE PACKAGE, including their zine, and a little hand-stitched notebook made with engineering graph paper and pages from old dictionaries. Kate thought this was really cool, particularly since she’s been cutting, folding, and assembling her own envelopes for Lydia to use. We think the Pod Pod Post folks are super-awesome.

And — did I mention? — I freaking love that logo. Yesterday I stitched up what Janet Perry calls a “Twinchy”, which is a two-inch-square piece of needlepoint. Two inches goes fast, even on eighteen-count canvas: I was able to do the art in Pixen in the morning and finish stitching up the background in the evening. Here it is, before I stick it into the envelope to go to San Francisco:

So, to recap: NERD MERIT BADGES! Small enough to fit on your sleeve or on your laptop. Amaze your friends, irritate your enemies, demonstrate to the world that the years you spent learning COBOL at that one bank job has actually resulted in a little, tiny trophy. And please, let me know your suggestions!

If you have suggestions for badges, leave a comment — or better yet, follow “Nerdmeritbadges” on Twitter, and send an @reply (which will make you eligible for the Twitter merit badge!)

UPDATE, April 2010: noticeably missing from this blog post is a mention of the Onder of the Science Scouts of Exemplary Repute and Above Average Physique, because they are the ones that made us think “hey, we should do something like those, except that actually exist! Their badges are hilarious and authentically science-y, and you should check them out!

The scariest movie ever made — and that’s just a fact — is John Carpenter’s The Thing, about a shape-shifting alien buried in Antarctic ice for thousands of years, until it’s dug up by a team of scientists. Carpenter’s aim was to create a horror movie with a group of competent, educated protagonists, rather than screaming co-eds. It’s tense, claustrophobic, and unbelievably, creatively gory. When cornered, Thing impostors erupt in a cloud of tentacles, teeth, and shapeshifting, spider-legged horror that would have killed me dead on the spot if I had been taken to see the movie in 1982. This movie makes 1979’s Alien look like My Pretty Pony. It’s one of the canonical “Kill It With Fire” trope movies.

It’s also required viewing, my friend Alejandro tells me, for recruits newly assigned to McMurdo Station in Antartica. Eesh!

Anyhow, I discovered that Swank Motion Pictures in Illinois does indeed have a 16MM print of The Thing. And not only a print, but a “Scope” print, which means that the widescreen image has been compressed into the square space on the film stock. You need a special “scope” lens to widen the image to the correct widescreen format — and now I own one! Thanks very much to Ted the Fiddler, projectionist from the Colonial Theater in Phoenixville, for getting me set up with a supplier. The lens arrived in an awesome pebbbled-vinyl case lined with red velveteen, and the number “2” hand-painted on the top.

So, what does this all mean? It means that the West Chester Guerilla Drive-In will be having its first ever winter showing. I’ll wait for a deep fall of snow. The first snowy Friday or Saturday night, we’ll be showing John Carpenter’s The Thing in glowing, rich, lifelike color; widescreen — somewhere in the middle of a remote snowfield, and you’ll need to walk across the snowy tundra to get there. JUST LIKE KURT RUSSELL.

For your trip across the snowfield, bring your fur-trimmed parka, a hand-warmer (or a flamethrower), and a petri dish. Guerilla Drive-In members will get a last-minute email with the date and location. For this showing, we can skip the formalities of the MacGuffin; send me an email if you’d like to come!

Here’s the trailer:

…and here’s a collection of the most intense parts from the movie. For god’s sake, don’t watch it unless you know what you’re doing! It’s bad enough in the safety of your own home. Imagine watching this thing in the exposed, arctic darkness. Anything could be out there in that darkness, and with the snow all around you’d probably hear it coming before you could see it…

See you there!

I don’t want to say much about where the Sterno craft project is heading, except that it’s evolving into something beautiful involving siphon coffee, a go-anywhere coffee roaster, propane wok burners, and of course motorcycle sidecars. And maybe, just maybe, a mini gas turbine (turn up your speakers and skip to 3:20). Watching this project come together makes me feel like Johannes Kepler must have felt watching the planets’ mystical alignment.

Words cannot really adequately express the way this project makes me feel. Fortunately, Beaker can easily express it:

NB: Work still proceeding on the viking-ship s’mores. Anyone interested in a trip to the Painted Plate?