Howdy, y’all! Welcome back.

A few weeks ago, Admiral Eo posted about a stage production of J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan coming to California. Beyond linking the promotional video and saying it looks “nothing short of amazing” twice, there wasn’t much else to the good Captain’s post. Which is a real shame for a variety of reasons.
So today I thought I’d take a closer look at the new show, and then take a look at the history of the play. Peter Pan always has a special place in my memory, it’s the first book I can remember reading by myself.

The very first mention of Peter Pan is in Barrie’s 1902 novel The Little White Bird. The book is a fictional diary of the fantastical adventures of Captain W___ and a young boy named David. The book was inspired by the Davies family and the friendship Barrie gave them, which you can watch in the fictional and fantastic film Finding Neverland (2004).

The middle chapters of The Little White Bird are set in Kensington Gardens, and were extracted in 1906 to form the children’s novel Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens. Prior to that, in 1904, Barrie wrote the stage play Peter Pan, or The Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up. He wrote a novel version of the story in 1911, titled Peter and Wendy. For the production, actress Nina Boucicault played the title role, with subsequent productions featuring other famous actresses.

The novel was abridged with Barrie’s permission by Mary Byron in 1915 and released with the title Peter Pan and Wendy. In 1953, Disney released their popular animated feature, and in 1954 a musical version starring Mary Martin hit the stage (and filmed for television), becoming in the United States the most recognized version of the story.
I’m sure you all know the story, so a synopsis is unnecessary, though I suggest giving it a reread sometime because the story truly is a wonder. If you can, track down the original play with Barrie’s “An Afterthought” final scene. I wish I could have been in the Duke of York’s Theatre on December 27th, 1904 for the premier and felt the surprise and wonder of the audience the first time Peter sails through the Darling’s window.

The most recent version of the play, which Admiral Eo posted of, goes back to Barrie’s script, foregoing the decades of adaptations and musicals in favor of the original magic. And they offer magic of their own. In addition to smaller set pieces, much of the set is CGI projected onto a movie screen. What makes the idea truly marvelous is that it is a complete 360 degree projection, so the audience, quite literally, sits in the middle of Neverland. Here’s the ad for the show, with snippets from the production.

The play is running through November 21 at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, and looks to be worth seeing, if you got the extra $40 to $125 bucks (depending on dates and seating) to spend. Check out their website for more details.

Until next time,
Still paddlin’ the old knew…
_-Akatzen-_

Sgt. Angle Reporting for Duty!

Some of you out there might have a similar mantra to mine when it comes to burial: Please don’t do it while I’m alive. The rest of you who get off on suffocating…join a chat room.

This past weekend, a new movie entered limited release as an ultra-low budget Sundance 2010 darling with only one actor on screen for 99% of the movie. That movie is Buried, starring Ryan Reynolds. He plays Paul Conroy, a civilian truck driver contracted to work in Iraq who wakes up, from frame one, in a coffin buried under many feet of dirt.

(**WARNING: THERE ARE SOME POSSIBLE SPOILERS AHEAD. MINOR, BUT SPOILERS NONETHELESS. THIS IS YOUR WARNING.**)

One of the true thrills in this movie, aside from the obvious real-time ticking clock of as breathable air disappears and a cell phone battery fades away, is watching Reynolds perform. The dude could spend an hour painting his living room walls, and I’m sure the resulting movie would be a hit.

Screenwriter Chris Sparling originally wrote the script as a feature he would make himself. He’d planned on pulling together $5,000, would film digitally in a friend’s place over 7 days, and hoped it would play in a few festivals. Then, he sent the script to a friend in Hollywood who also happened to be a literary manager. Producer Peter Safran soon picked it up, intending to tell it “as is,” without asking Sparling to add flashbacks or other hokey plot devices that would otherwise make an original story told in an original way into something cliched and ordinary.

Sparling’s script, on the surface, is a suspenseful thriller with somewhat contrived plot points and great manipulation factors to push us to the limits of our own moviegoing experience (specifically a well-timed phone call during an invasion from a slithery friend). But underneath the top layer of basic story, there’s another set of ideas floating just underneath that can open our eyes to the type of story Sparling is trying to tell. However you interpret this tale is up to you.

For me, Sparling’s script is the story of himself, as a writer, trying to get his own scripts made the way he wants them to be made. For a writer in Hollywood, you are often forced to work within strict confines (walls) of the producers and the business executives who run the show. You can’t deviate or climb out from these walls, and your whole time within them is constricting, limiting, forcing you to find your own lights within these constraints. The phone constantly rings with annoying producers wasting your valuable time, (your air) with bad ideas, friends and loved ones are always distracting you from the central problem of your story. The agent you think is helping you and working on your side is only lying to you to keep you happy, so he gets paid. It’s only when the movie is done and in the can when he finally admits that he’s been lying to you the entire time.

In Buried, Ryan Reynolds is clearly playing the role of writer, a heavy weight on his shoulders, an enormous amount of pressure on top of him that will come crumbling down unless he delivers what he’s been paid to do. When the dirt starts to slowly trickle in, it’s because he’s made some decisions he shouldn’t have — he films himself and sends a video that’s picked up and watched on Youtube. He’s tried to make his own movie, and it’s failed, bringing him only another pile (literally) of bad luck.

When our writer then tries to call the FBI, he is left only with an answering machine and has to hope someone hears his message. And honestly, how many times have you tried to call one of the people in charge only to be left waiting for their call? How often does something become urgent for you, and not so for anyone else?

He is left with a lighter, which eats his oxygen but serves as a source of light. His inspiration. He flicks it on when an idea strikes him, and leaves it on all the time because the matter is that pressing. When he finds the note to read for the ransom video, Conroy has trouble deciphering it and doesn’t want to read it — fights against it — and then winds up giving in, recording himself reading it. This is much akin to lousy notes given by the studio to an inexperienced writer who doesn’t have the heart or the guile, under immense pressure, to follow through until he thinks he has no other option.

Then, there is the hostage specialist, Brenner, who is basically the director of your movie. He reassures you, tells you to be calm, that he’s doing everything in his power to rescue you (to make your film the way you intended). In the end, he fails to come through in a big way, but he’s lead you on the entire time, so why not trust him while the world is crashing down on you? Dirt pours into your mouth and you’ve promised your wife, your personal life, your dignity, that you’re coming home (making your movie the way you intended) but you don’t know it’s a lie because you can’t see beyond the confines you’ve been set in until it’s too late. Your dignity has buried you, just like the lies and the pressures have buried you, all because you were taken by surprise when your convoy was attacked (when you sold your first spec script).

This interpretation is a little muddy in parts (what does the snake represent? The green light sticks?), but the point of this piece you’re reading is that I’ve interpreted Buried to mean something to me based on my personality and what I’ve been through. What does Buried mean to you?

This all stems from an original interpretation of Inception I read a while back by Devin Faraci, formerly of chud.com, and it’s a good one so check it out if you can here. Devin’s thesis is much more layered and goes into more depth than your faithful Sergeant, and he also points to specific interviews that DiCaprio and Nolan made prior to Inception’s release. But, I will still contend that it’s possible and healthy to interpret films however you can, to think deeper about a film and take something away from it that is on a layer separate from the plot by itself. In the case of Buried, I placed it in the context of a screenwriter trying to get a movie made in his own vision.

Have you ever felt pressure that you would associate with burial under mounds of dirt with seemingly no escape? How would you then interpret Buried?

Report in below!

You are dismissed!

Sgt. Angle

This week, with the occurrence of the harvest moon, I thought I’d take a look at that celestial object and the different interpretations, myths, and superstitions that accompany our sun’s nocturnal counterpart. If you’re wondering what a harvest moon is, then here is a definition: The moon which is full within a fortnight of the autumnal equinox (22 or 23 Sept.), and which rises for several nights nearly at the same hour, at points successively further north on the eastern horizon. (OED) Before I get into some of the more bizarre myths that surround the moon, I thought it would be appropriate to tackle some of the imagery and symbolism surrounding representations of the moon. For instance, we’ve all heard of the man on the moon. Typically, Americans associate the man on the moon with the face on the moon, but the origins of the man on the moon are a little more complicated than that.

In older days (the time periods fluctuate and some people today still see the archaic representation of a person on the moon) the man on the moon was a full sized man that was complete with accessories. In the case of most of Eurpoe, the man on the moon was carrying a bundle of sticks on his back, carrying a lantern in front of him, and walking a dog. In this tradition, the man is usually being sent to the moon as a form of punishment. In some way, the man has committed a crime (sometimes legislative, but oftentimes ecclesiastical) and his punishment is to spend eternity in the moon. One version of this story (from Germany, I believe) has the man banished to the moon because he is working on the Sabbath day. Another rendition (popular among certain Protestant circles) is that the man in the moon is Cain who has been punished to forever circle the Earth. In many places throughout South America, there is no man in the moon; instead, there is a rabbit. The reason for the rabbit varies, but in Aztec legend, one of their creation stories for the moon revolves around people who had to sacrifice themselves in a pyre in order to become celestial bodies. One of the two to throw themselves into the fire had moments of doubt and fear. For this, he was punished to have his light reduced; to accomplish this, a rabbit was thrown at the face of the sacrifice who became the moon. So what are the myths that dominate our ideas of the moon today?

The greatest myth revolving around the moon is the advent of the werewolf. The werewolf is a tricky mythology that seems to have ambiguous origins. Some, like to place the origin of the werewolf to an ancient Greek king, Lycaon, who was rumored to be so cruel as to be compared to a wolf. The story in that case goes something along the line that Lycaon had tempted Zeus with an offering of an infant. Zeus, being outraged by this gift, condemned Lycaon to forever travel the world as a wolf. In Europe (speaking incredibly generally) during the middle ages, there was a great amount of superstition and wolf myths. People who were thought to be able to wield dark magic (bad juju, bad voodoo, whatever you want to call it) typically were associated with animal imagery that was associated with Satan. So, wolves, bears, tigers, lions, bats, and more are all possible for people to turn into if they have Satan in their heart. The interesting addition of the regulation of the moon is a rather modern addition to the story. During Medieval ages, the concept that the full moon sparked the transformation was but one part of the story. Modern storytellers have leaped upon the idea, and our modern culture has a clear connection between the full moon and the appearance of werewolves. Ultimately, I rather enjoy the original concept of the werewolf as someone who can turn into a wolf at will; not only does it seem more practical, it also establishes the connection of having an animal inside of a human at all times, a symbol that is particularly prevalent in Christian ideology. Clearly, the moon has captivated people for years. I’ll continue this thread next week, where I’ll look at some of the more exotic stories that feature the moon.

Good Morning Semantinkists!

Today I want to take a look at a massively under-rated part of the comic book creative process: Coloring. For most of the last century, coloring was a tedious process whereby the colorist would use dyes or inks to color over photocopies of inked pages. These pages would be used as a guide for printers to wonk with as they then printed the books. This old technique got the job done as well as anything available at the time, but the end result was very flat. Take a look at the cover to Marvel Comics SECRET WARS (pencilled by the awesome Mick Zeck):

While the piece above was great for the time, the coloring process was really only that, coloring. All of the texture and mood was left to the pencil and ink team. This began to change in the late 1980s, when computer coloring came into the mix, something that Image comics really helped to push the industry into. Nowadays, the colorist is just as important a part of the storytelling process as the penciller, inker or writer. Here’s an example from DC comic FLASH: REBIRTH (pencils by Ethan Van Scriver):

At first look you might not catch a whole lot of difference between old coloring and new except for a larger color palette, but look a little closer: the subtle glow of the computer monitor on Robin, the gradients on the stone walls, the lighting interacting with Star-Spangled Kid’s hair. The coloring process has become a huge part of comic book creation. With that in mind I would like to share with you all a few of my favorite colorists working in comics today.

Laura Martin

Where have I seen her work? PLANETARY, THE AUTHORITY, ASTONISHING X-MEN, RUSE, THE NEW AVENGERS, THE ROCKETEER

Why is she so awesome? Martin was one of the first colorists that actually got me to stand up and take note of coloring as an art form unto itself. A multiple recipient of the Eisner award for best colorist (2000, 2002), Martin has a versatility that few others possess. While she can have a superbly bombastic palette for superhero-type fare, she can also become far more subtle when it is required. She has an amazing hold on lighting and how it interacts with environments. In short, Martin is the gold standard.

Alex Sinclair

Where have I seen his work? ASTRO CITY, WILDCATS, BLACKEST NIGHT, FLASH:REBIRTH

Why is he so awesome? Sinclair is the creme-de-la-creme of action/adventure coloring. When Sinclair colors a book, you can tell right away, as the colors almost jump off the page at you. Theres a shine and a polish to Sinclair’s work that shows how long he has been doing this.

Dave Stewart

Where have I seen his work? HELLBOY, B.P.R.D., CONAN, TOM STRONG, LUNA PARK

Why is he so awesome? Stewart is a multiple Eisner award winner for coloring, and while Laura Martin has won the award a few times, Stewart has won the thing 6 times. Where Sinclair is bright and brash and shiny, Dave stewart is subtle and complex. He can do the bright and loud coloring when the time calls for it, but his best work is when he is able to bring life to a page with a moody and muted array of colors. HELLBOY has long been praised from an artistic standpoint for being able to have such a beautifully gothic tone, and Dave Stewart is a big reason why.

Morry Hollowell

Where have I seen his work?  CIVIL WAR, SPIDER-MAN, WOLVERINE, THE AVENGERS

Why is he so awesome? Hollowell broke into the industry with Crossgen a few years ago, but his pairings with penciller Steve McNiven have really gotten my attention. Mc Niven (and inker Dexter Vines) fills the page with scads of line work, which another colorist might become overwhelmed by, but not Hollowell. He is definitely a colorist who is entering their prime.

If I didn’t mention your favorite colorist, please let me know. Now, we have some big news coming up next week, so stay tuned, excitement is about for Semantink. Thanks for stopping in folks, have a great Thursday.

Welcome back to The Book Report, folks.

Today, I want to talk about High Fantasy as a genre, for two reasons. The first is because last week I examined pulp fantasy, and the second is because I bought a Playstation3 over the weekend and have been playing Final Fantasy XIII.

Modern fantasy was birthed out of the fairy tale tradition of the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Anderson. The first fantasy story written for adults was Phantastes, written by George MacDonald in 1858. His other works include The Princess and The Goblin, Lilith, and The Lost Princess. MacDonald, who once wrote “I write not for children but for the child-like, whether they be five, or fifty, or seventy-five,” was friends with Mark Twain and a mentor to Charles Dodgson (encouraging him to publish his Alice stories as Lewis Carroll). His works inspired J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis to form a writers group called The Inklings.
In addition to MacDonald, the other “founding father” of fantasy was William Morris, who in 1898 wrote The Well at the World’s End. For the first time, a fiction author was writing not of an extension of our world, or of a dream world, or of the future or past, but of a completely invented fictional realm. He also was an influence on Tolkien and Lewis.
The Inklings group would read MacDonald and Morris and others, and they would also present their own works in progress. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings and Lewis’ Out of the Silent Planet were presented here in early drafts. To amuse themselves, the Inklings would see who could read the famously bad prose of Amanda McKittrick Ros the longest while keeping a straight face.

Tolkien and Lewis would eventually grandfather the High Fantasy genre after their Inkling days, with the creation of their Middle-Earth and Narnia worlds, respectively. Though both series are considered high fantasy, there are distinct differences. The chief difference is that The Chronicles of Narnia is an episodic series, where each book has its own conflict and conclusion, while The Lord of the Rings is much more epic, with a direct line of storytelling being drawn from the top of page 1 to the bottom of the final page. Writers following in the footsteps of Tolkien and Lewis separate their stories into these camps as well.

Series in the Episodic Camp:

• Terry Pratchett’s Discworld
• Terry Goodenkind’s Sword of Truth novels
• Percy Jackson and The Olympians by Rich Riordan
• The Shannara series and Landover novels by Terry Brooks.
• L.E. Modessit, Jr.‘s Saga of Recluse
• Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea novels
• Steven Erikson’s Malazan Book of the Fallen
• The Incarnations of Immortality by Piers Anthony
• The Chronicles of Prydain by Lloyd Alexander

Series in the Epic Camp

• His Dark Materials by Phillip Pullman
• The Belgariad and The Malloreon by David Eddings
• Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn by Tad Williams
• The Dark Tower by Stephen King
• The Wheel of Time by Robert Jordan (and Brandon Sanderson)
• The Inheritance Cycle by Christopher Paolini
• Mordant’s Need and The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, the Unbeliever by Stephen R. Donaldson
• Raymond Feist’s Riftwar Saga
• Guardians of Ga’Hoole by Kathryn Lasky
• A Song of Ice and Fire by George R.R. Martin

There are some good reads in each camp, including many other series that I’ve forgotten or never read. I vacillated back and forth with Rowling’s Harry Potter series. I couldn’t decide which camp he belonged in. While Harry Potter does ultimately fulfill his destiny to (spoiler) destroy Voldemort, and the journey he takes is indeed epic, each book is an episode depicting one year at Hogwarts. There is a conclusion to the basic conflict introduced in each book at the end of the book it begins in. I’m still not sure where to place the series. Got any ideas?

Until next time,
Still paddlin’ the old knew…
_-Akatzen-_

Sgt. Angle Reporting For Duty!

The box office has spoken and Ben “the flea flicker” Affleck’s sophomore directorial effort has come away with the win. The Town rocketed to number one, beating analysts’ estimates and squashing Emma Stone’s Easy A like she was, well, a fragile young woman. That’s because Flick’s Flick is charged with testosterone and gripping gunfights, and is a great, well-made, well-placed end of Summer movie that satisfies the visual and aural senses.

‘Twas not always the case for young Ben Flicka’s status in Hollywoodland, as this issue of The High Low Country will recount for you below.

Ben Affelch hit his big break in the PBS series “Voyage of the Mimi”, a family show that involved a boat traversing the world, and served as a substitute for many geography lessons for substitute history teachers in elementary school during the late ‘80s and early ‘90s.

Grandmaster Flick then hit an early ‘90s low playing a porn star cool prep kid in School Ties alongside his best bud and future writing partner Matt “I’m Matt Damon” Damon.

After a string of supporting roles in Dazed and Confused and Mallrats, the Flickster 10,000 found a lead role to sink his straight-man lips into with Kevin Smith at the helm, Chasing Amy.

This was followed soon after by Good Will Hunting, the ultimate HIGH in Affleck’s career. Sick of getting lean roles or succeeding only on the festival circuit, Flick and Damon wrote their own piece with their own characters they could control, and won the Academy Award for Best Screenplay.

Oddly, having written a great script doesn’t mean you can read great scripts, as revealed by False-Flicka’s eventual LOW choices of film roles: Armageddon, Pearl Harbor, Reindeer Games, Bounce. The Sum of All Fears could’ve given Flickster a chance at his own franchise (the Jack Ryan series), but the movie was flawed more than successful, and the studio wasn’t happy with the results. Daredevil was just…you know.

Gigli easily became the ultimate LOW for the actor, after critics and audiences panned the film and its’ poor plot, and it also suffered the backlash of Hollywood’s brief “Bennifer” era (Lopez, not Garner). After this, there seemed like there would be no turning point for Mr. Aff — Leck.

Then, two interesting things happened. 1) Affleck took a smaller, stylized roll in Smokin’ Aces, and 2) he directed his first feature, Gone Baby Gone.

GBG starred his younger brother Casey Affleck, and was based on a Dennis Lehane novel. Ben also co-wrote the script, in my opinion the weakest part of the movie. As a debut it was considered nearly flawless, and the acting is first-rate. Affleck seemed to find for himself a new niche in Hollywood’s system: Take a bit part for some cash, then go off and spend a few years to make your pet project.

And that’s exactly what he is doing. He co-starred in one of nine supporting players in the ensemble He’s Just Not That Into You, and stole the show in Extract as the stoner best friend to Jason Bateman’s frustrated lead. Only in State of Play did Affleck play anything resembling a lead role — and even there he’d been overshadowed by the mammoth Russell Crowe.

Then he made The Town, played the lead, wrote the script, directed the thing. Affleck knows how to make a role strong in a script, and in this one he was unselfish, giving the juiciest bits to Jim, played by Jeremy Renner.

The best moments in Affleck’s acting career are the bit parts, the small roles, the supporting characters: Dazed and Confused, Mallrats. As Chuckie who almost fights Will in Good WIll Hunting to convince him he’s better than where they come from; as scene stealing actor Ned Alleyn in Shakespeare in Love; the exiled angel Bartleby in Dogma; or even reprising his Chasing Amy character Holden McNeil, and parodying himself, in Kevin Smith’s Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back.

Ben Affleck has proven to be more than a half of a Hollywood couple, and he’s done it best when taking a back seat to the spotlight. Do yourself a favor and check out The Town now that it’s out in theaters. Heist scenes abound, but so does a bit of romance and a hell of a lot of gunfire.

His next part is the lead role in The Company Men, which focuses on corporate downsizing, alongside Tommy Lee Jones, Chris Cooper, and Kevin Costner. Then he’s part of the ensemble that will make up the next Terrence Malick flick.

You are dismissed!

Sgt. Angle

As you all know we have been talking about the Spider-man Musical for sometime now, but recently in an interview on ABC news Julie Taymore had so much more to talk about.

This is what Julie Taymor had to say:

We do have the origin story…In writing with Glen Berger, the playwright, we’ve tried to craft something that’s a little different than what you’re used to…Our Doctor Osborn is more of a conglomerate of Doc Ock [and] of Osborn — he’s not a businessman…He’s a real scientist, who’s a real southerner — he believes he’s going to help combat the world as it is, environmental disasters…He believes that he has to prepare people, so he’s creating through DNA transfers and this and that, the ability for humans to protect themselves when the tides rise and global warming. It’s very current. It’s very very now, even though we do blend periods.

Spider-man the Musical is the most anticipated Broadway Musical of the year. I think that they could have something very special on their hands with this production. What do you guys think?

–Admiral Eo

This week, I thought I would tackle an interesting event that occurred in our humbling universe. As most of you know, there has been a vested interest in the general population to explore the reaches of space. The common tool for doing deep space exploration has been the mighty probe. In particular, the Pioneer 10 and 11 space probes caused massive excitement in the early ‘70s when they were planned. What makes the two probes special is that they were designed to be the first objects that had the potential to leave our own solar system. They were outfitted with all of the complicated sensors they would need to begin performing observations on solar radiation and the magnetosphere of planets. Among its numerous devices are: a Geiger tube telescope, an ultraviolet photometer, a helium vector magnetometer, a plasma analyzer, a trapped radiation detector, a radioisotope thermoelectric generator, and a few other doohickeys that help in the analysis of our planets and the force of our star. Pioneer also had one feature that everyone remembers because of the controversy that it ignited during its planning: Pioneer 10 has an engraving that represents humankind. Here is a copy of the engraving that appears on the furthest object humans have built:

Many anthropologists and other scholars that deal in cultural representations have argued that this engraving is from a completely anthropocentric point of view, and that it would take the same civilization that produced it to fully understand the implications of the message that it is attempting to convey. If you have never seen this piece before, then I should tell you that this engraving was made in the case that alien lifeforms would make contact with the probe and could get an idea of not only where humans are from, but what they would look like (hence the two naked people up there). My favorite part of the drawing is that the man has his hand raised in a friendly gesture, but I’m not sure that an alien culture would recognize the symbol or whether they would have their own interpretation of the sign. But rather than having a discussion on the nature of the probe itself, I want to go the piece of exciting news that has been reported by several sources: the probe that has now reached the very edge of the solar system is finding itself pulled back toward the sun by a mysterious force. THat’s right, the scientific community has actually referred to a mysterious cosmic force.

So what is the force? How did the effect become noticeable? Are there any possible issues that could cause the same effect through a malfunctioning of the probe? If these are some of the questions that you may have had, so have lots of scientists. It turns out that the scientific community (upon first hearing about the reported force) began to study the possibility that the probe is leaking in some ways that could cause a push-back force. However, after checking several other probes, such as the Cassini and Galileo probes, the same general force (which is comparably minute but still should not exist there) was found to be effecting their progress as well. The force is slight, but it is a constant. What the issue is with our current understanding of gravity is that the force that gravity can pull on an object should diminish with distance. It is possible that our perception of the effects of gravity over a large area may be incorrect. In other words, there may be a relationship between an incredibly large distance and the ways that gravity could manifest. Another theory is that there are particles out past the solar system (these would be labeled dark matter until someone sheds some light on them) that react differently than anything we have encountered in our solar system. There are many questions and at the moment, there are no answers.

But there may be some answers that will be coming up shortly. A council is being convened to discuss the preparation and launching of another probe (armed with much better sensor equipment) that will follow the Pioneer 10 probe out into space to try and determine the origin of the force. What this affirms for us on Earth today is that we are far from comprehending even the most basic and fundamental mechanisms that control the motion of the universe. Most of the online sources for this event are either refer to the article that was published in the Telegraph or The Guardian. Here are the links to the original site:

Telegraph Article

The Guardian Article