Beam Me Up episode 292 online

Wow talk about a show that got away from me it was this one - episode 292.  The hour just screams by!   I start the hour off with a song from James Struthers called “You Me and Optimus Prime...”  It is from Struthers’ official YouTube video and the video is every bit as much fun as the song.  

Next the first story of the evening, I reenter the world of Clockwork by Erin Bassett.  This week is episode 2.  Ester returns to the academy  only to again come in contact with the mysterious Holland .   At the bottom of the hour is the conclusion of Thief of Futures by D. Thomas Minton.   Eshram has been pulled reluctantly out of retirement for a theft he finds for all intents, abhorrent, but the further he delves the more complex becomes the project and less clear as to the why and even more so the who.  When clarity finally comes it may be too late!

I didn’t have much time today for news other than the Dawn orbiter completed its’ maneuver to its’ new lower altitude of 130 miles.  The pics from the framing camera aboard the craft is already taking stunning photos.   And finally - the creator of Captain America - Joe Simon - has passed away at 98.

BMU #290 Thief of Futures pt1 D. Thomas Minton

While I start this week's program by playing Karma by Kokia which I have not played for a while. This song was of course one of the opening titles used in the anime series Gunslinger Girls.

My first story this week is a flash fiction piece from down under. From the pages of Antipodean is Jason Butterfied’s excellent flash fiction story called “Out of Time” . At the bottom of the hour is part one of Thomas Minton ‘Thief of Futures’. Where in the not so distant future a person’s “Future” becomes a commodity, if it proves to be of exceptional quality. And a X futures thief trying hard to protect what is most important to him, his daughter.

From the Blog: Russia’s failed Mars exploratory rover mission failure mean that scientists and engineers behind the Phobos-Grunt mission could face criminal prosecution. In an update however: The European Space Agency (ESA) announced that they will attempt to contact the stranded Russian Phobos-Grunt spacecraft that became stuck at a low-Earth orbit due to engine failure that followed its launch on November 9. Back in 2010, an out-of-character Stephen Colbert sat down with astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson at Montclair Kimberly Academy to talk for 90 minutes about science, society and the universe. I have the video embedded on the blog. Comic book character Booster Gold is heading towards a meeting with the SyFy channel with a live action series in the offing. The Navy is phasing out its steam based catapult aircraft launching system and will be replacing it with an electromagnetic catapult launching system. Plans are to install the new system on the USS Gerald R. Ford carrier now in production. Intel is hard at work in hopes of bringing augmented reality technology into its’ chips. The Terminator tech of the future….today huh? NASA’s Deep Impact spacecraft is hoping for a third extension of it’s mission. Controllers fired the spacecrafts engines to keep all mission possibilities open. From the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory is a short over-flight of the proto planet Vesta. This 3-D video incorporates images from the framing camera instrument aboard NASA’s Dawn spacecraft from July to August 2011. There is a lot more on the blog, I just didn’t get a chance to get to it all.