Helium Party Balloons

Or in our case, is the robot even started? As of today we can officially say that it is started. We spent the evening removing the basket and intake from last season’s robot and dismantling, sorting, and inventorying parts. Looks like we’ll have everything we need, at least until the design changes.

Our first competition is this Saturday at the UT Dallas. If you are in the Dallas area and would like to see some kids crazy about engineering, stop by. Admission is free, and inexpensive concessions may be available throughout the day. Details and contact info are available on RobotEvents.com.

The kids and I have spent a lot of time going over YouTubes, forum posts and photos from the WOC Invitational to get an idea how the different designs are working. We’ve narrowed it down to a simple gripper that can grab one, or a stack of tubes and place them on the goals. I’ll have some pictures in a day or two as we get started on the build.

Check in after the jump for a great video by team 394 from Mililani, Hawaii. They are competing in the driver skills challenge which pits just one robot against the field. The object is to score as many points as possible in 60 seconds. Color of the game elements do not matter in this event. While their score of 107 points has been beat by a mere 2 points, they were the first to set a high bar on the drive skills challenge, and I expect we’ll see this pushed even higher in the coming months.

Image: Starwars.wikia.com

There’s no shortage of reasons why The Empire Strikes Back still stands as the best thing ever to come out of the Star Wars saga, but for all the things that make that 1980 movie great, a ton of credit has to go to director Irvin Kershner for making the whole greater than the sum of its parts.

Kershner died today at the age of 87, three decades after Empire hit the big screen, and it’s hard to understate his efforts in taking a summer blockbuster premise and mixing it with story and character depth and complexity and a darkly hopeful tone that hasn’t been seen in the saga since.

He’d already been making movies for two decades – The Return of A Man Called Horse and Eyes of Laura Mars were among his directing credits – when George Lucas asked him to direct the Star Wars sequel.

Some of the best insight into Kershner’s influence on the saga can be found in Alan Arnold’s 1980 book Once Upon A Galaxy: A Journal of The Making of The Empire Strikes Back.

“The thing you learn in directing is that no matter how complex the shooting, you have to remain sensitive to the people around you or the machine will ultimately take over,” Arnold quotes Kershner as saying. “If you don’t keep in mind the essential humanity of it all, technique will dominate. Then, suddenly, all you’ve got are technically fine shots, technically fine performances, a story being told but with something lacking, something that is mysterious and indefinable.”

The book also offers some nice, though brief, peeks into Kershner as a dad who took his then ten-year-old son to see Star Wars, and in a bit of good fortune that couldn’t have been more appropriately timed, the author persuaded Kershner to wear a cordless mike for a day, which just happened to be the day they wrestled with one of the film’s most gut-wrenching and tone-defining sequences: Han Solo’s carbon freeze. (Arnold’s audio tapes, in fact, helped shape this year’s epic tome The Making of Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back.)

Kershner worked post-Empire, of course, most notably directing Robocop 2 and Sean Connery’s return to the James Bond role in Never Say Never Again, but he never returned to that galaxy far, far away – though an unsourced note on Wookieepedia claims he declined the director’s chair on The Phantom Menace. (Aw, man.)

From a first-generation Star Wars fan’s point of view, The Empire Strikes Back era was a Golden Age: The Best Movie Ever was getting a sequel, and the dark, emotional, and chills-inducing result turned out to be the high-water mark of a saga that’s still celebrated across generations.

Clear skies, Mr. Kershner. Thanks for the awesome ride.

Related: 30 Reasons The Empire Still Rules; The Empire Strikes Back Reworked Into A Silent Movie.

Photo: Lego

If you’re like me and try to decorate the house for Christmas on the weekend after Thanksgiving, perhaps one of your many festive decorations is one or a slew of Advent calendars. Advent obviously has religious origins, but for me, the month of December is nothing but a few weeks of giddy anticipation of the Christmas holiday.

It’s especially important for me to get decorations up before the start of December because one of the big parts of our holiday decor is Advent calendars. As long as I can remember, I’ve had Advent calendar windows to open throughout the month of December. When I was a kid, we had only two or three calendars at a time. Now that I’m grown up and am in charge of the holiday, we have many. Some just have little window flaps to open. Some have doors that open to compartments that I can fill with an ornament or candy. And some create entire winter or holiday scenes, in Lego or Playmobil. In addition, the kids usually each end up with one whose windows open to a piece of chocolate each day. Those are their favorites.

Photo: Playmobil

I wouldn’t say I have a collection of these calendars, per se, I just accumulate them. Depending on how much room we have to set them out on any given year, occasionally I leave a few in the holiday tubs. But this year I hope to get out as many as possible.

One of the nice things about most Advent calendars (but not the chocolate kind) is that you can reuse them each year. As long as the windows and doors don’t wear out, you can just close it all back up awaiting the next year’s decorating.

If you want to participate in this fun yearly tradition, it’s not too late. You can make your own Advent calendar, or get any number of calendars available. Places like Trader Joe’s and World Market tend to have the chocolate ones, and others are sold in stores and online. The catalog site Bas Bleu has some particularly gorgeous calendars.

Whether you celebrate this season in a secular or a religious way, have a wonderful December. Happy Advent!