The Mysterious Article

[krpalmer]

I was passing by a magazine rack today when I saw, on the front cover of "Harper's Magazine," a promotional line about "The Archaeology of Star Wars." Peeking into the magazine, I saw that it seemed to be an article about something I believe I've heard about before, about someone travelling to Tunisia to find the props abandoned after the location shooting of the original Star Wars. Unfortunately, my general impression is that "Harper's" articles are written with a "house style" of world-weary pessimism, so it was just too easy to imagine the article using the expedition as a springboard to negativity about Star Wars in general, and I didn't read it. It did, though, at least manage to remind me of the tiny scene in Arthur C. Clarke's book version of 2010 where, in the midst of an "UFO flap" sparked by goings-on at Jupiter, an unlucky amateur archaeologist digs up some artifacts in Tunisia... that, though, leads to contemplations of how we're almost at 2010 ourselves, and things don't seem to have worked out the way that bit of speculation from the early 1980s forecast.