Let’s see if the traitors fleeing the pirate ship run by Bush and Cheney have as many tricks as my personal hero, Felix the Cat. Hopefully not! They deserve whatever is coming to them! Meanwhile,
Isn’t it about time we moved beyond the idiotic “central heating” concept and kicked our energy habit? But how, you might ask, do we get this 100 quadrillion BTU monkey off our back? The answer, as
On this snowbound Solstice weekend in New England, I happened to be reading reviews of The Day The Earth Stood Still remake, and pondering the ways in which humans have envisioned our first contact with alien life forms. Without going too heavily into the subject, I pondered the range of human-alien frission typically presented in SF, from the over-hyped assumption of instant warfare, or the however improbable love at first site, to the more nuanced anthropological approaches of Chad Oliver and the intensely portrayed psychological gestalts of Theodore Sturgeon. At that point Sturgeon’s amazing story To Marry Medusa (aka _The Cosmic Rape_) popped into my mind, and in particular the lush red cover image for the 1968 paperback by Paul Lehr. This image, so typical of Lehr (with a mountainous half-organic construction looming in the center, while miniscule beings flit around it like so many fleas,) represents the contact between human and alien minds in the realm of abstraction and metaphor. In that sense it fascinates more than the familiar image of some athletic dork with a ray gun zapping the tentacles off of a bug-eyed wierdo.
An interesting problem: illustrate a cover for the fiction of Stanislaw Lem. How would you do it? Here is a nice little gallery of rarely seen Lem covers, collected by one of the very best tribu
Went to the opening of an exhibit called Arts of Subversion, Nonconformist Art from the Soviet Union, which is a very nicely curated show that explores the lives of artists under the opressive fist o
Interesting images captured by Cassini show us the sky over Saturn’s north pole, spanned by a hexagon of clouds in fixed rotation with the gas giant. The scientists at NASA aren’t quite sure what is
Yes, Virginia, we have visuals of extra-solar planets! Of course, this is nothing new to astronomers… Since Gallileo first spotted the moons of Jupiter we knew they were out there, spinning in the
Along with the landslide victory for Obama, mystery waves were thrashing the shore of southeastern Maine on Tuesday afternoon. The Boston Globe reports that the water level suddenly rose 12 feet i
After a terrible ordeal of being stuck in some sort of collective nightmare, Americans have somehow managed to bring themselves to back to planet Earth: we have elected Barack Obama to be President
Another legend is lost! Only days after Studs Terkel, the mysterious singer Yma Sumac, self-described descendent of an Inca emperor, has passed away. As described by Los Angeles Times music critic