Ray tracing

Earlier today a friend said, somewhat jokingly, that Sean Penn’s best performance was as Jeff Spicoli in Fast Times at Ridgemont High, which got me thinking about Ray Walston, who played his history teacher, nemesis, and in an odd way his truest friend, Mr. Hand. When Ray Walston passed away in 2001 he had been most recently known for having starred as judge Henry Bone in the TV series Picket Fences. But when he passed away, some young colleagues of mine sent out a tribute email saying “Goodbye Mr. Hand”.

I was indignant, and was fully planning to send a rebuttal email. Now don’t get me wrong – Fast Times at Ridgemont High was a fine film, and the interplay between Spicoli and Mr. Hand was the best thing about it.

Well, except of course for a certain short scene involving Phoebe Cates, which was in a category all by itself. As some may recall, in about five brilliant seconds of screen time Ms. Cates managed to grab the collective American male libido by the short hairs, lift it high into the air, slam it effortlessly against the nearest wall, and leave it cowering and sobbing in abject wonder and gratitude. The American male libido was never again the same. I know mine wasn’t.

But I digress…

My issue was that if you were going to honor Ray Walston for greatness in something before Picket Fences, Mr. Hand was not the role to choose. I guess I was feeling protective of Mr. Walston, and resentful that these young whippersnappers were ignoring the true genius of the man, by ignoring the role that had originally catupulted him to television superstardom.

I speak of course of Martin the Martian, in My Favorite Martian. This show, which my brother and I slavishly watched in re-runs, was the perfect kid-friendly science fiction show – the TV equivalent of all those boxes of junk sci-fi paperbacks that my uncle Lou used to bring us, which we would avidly devour as soon as we got our hands on them. To a small kid, Martin was the fun and romance of all those stories brought to vivid life – an actual Martian who lived in the garage behind your house, with a real flying saucer and everything. Watching the show when I was little, I always found myself half expecting to see that flying saucer turn up in my parents garage. And Ray Walston was the living embodiment of those sublime expectations.

Full of righteous indignation, I mentioned to my mother that I planned to defend the honor or Ray Walston by sending out this corrective email. “Ray Walston?” she asked, a strange smile playing on her face. “You mean the guy who played the Devil in Damn Yankees in the 1950’s? I love him!”

And that’s when I realized that my younger colleagues’ Ray Walston, the man whom they had claimed was not Judge Bone but Mr. Hand, the man whom I had thought was actually my Ray Walston, was also just as much my Mom’s Ray Walston. For half a century he had been creating a succession of indelible characters, and at least four distinct generations of audiences had fallen in love with different personalities that the same man had brought to life, each generation believing that Ray Walson belonged to them alone, that they were the unique audience for his genius.

But of course his true genius was precisely this: That he could create such great romance, time after time, in a serial monogomy of fictional fantasies that stretched over fifty years. All at once I realized the majesty of the man’s achievement, and I was humbled.

I never sent the email.

4 thoughts on “Ray tracing”

  1. Ken,

    Ray Tracing makes me think of Perlin Noise. Perlin Noise makes me think of “How to make good fake Perlin Noise in Pixel Shaders”. Any tricks for making good 4D noise in pixel shaders?

    JD

  2. Hash the 16 neighboring integer-valued hypervertices to pseudo-random 4D gradient vectors, then interpolate in each of the four dimensions via a smooth dropoff, such as t*t*t*(t*(6*t-15)+10). It’s just like 3D noise, but in a hypercubic lattice rather than a cubic lattice. If you know enough to ask the question, you probably know enough to implement that in a GLSL shader.

    I’m not sure if that’s what Mr. Hand would do, but I’m pretty confident that uncle Martin could do it in his sleep. 🙂

  3. But Walston-as-Devil would have sent Lola in, just before you got to the fourth dimension…and who cares about noise anyway? Off you’d go dancing!

    I wonder if Lola was the Phoebe Cates of the previous generation? Or maybe Phoebe Cates was sent by the devil? The mind reels…

  4. Thanks! Though I must admit, I’m clueless on the Mr. Hand and uncle Martin part.

    BTW, whatever happened to Simplex noise? Does it have any drawback? Or is it just harder to explain, so most articles use the traditional trilinear etc. with a better smoothstep?

    This is such a great time to be alive. Perlin noise with massive multiprocessors – realtime 4d noise – the future really is just beginning. It’s gonna be beautiful.

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