The End of an Opus

As an old-time fan of the comic strip Bloom County, I have followed the later incarnations of the strip (Outland and Opus) with decidedly mixed feelings. I love the old characters, but they were mostly gone. And Opus wasn’t quite what he once was, though he certainly had his moments.

It’s been clear for a while that the strip was coming to an end, and creator Berkely Breathed was taking what seemed to me a depressing route toward the conclusion, with Opus locked away in a dog pound. (I imagine it is hard to bring something like that to a close.) Last Sunday, the final strip ran in the paper, and it…told us we had to go online to see the last panel! It also gave the wrong web address.

But here it is, the final shot of Opus (at least for now). It’s too big to show here: take a look for yourself. It’s really quite touching, and redeemed all of the darkness of the leadup. Bye for now, Opus. And sweet dreams!

National Novel Writing Month…

…is upon us again! (As reader Marco pointed out in a comment below.) This would be a hard one for me to miss, because my daughter is giving it a shot, along with several friends. Ticka-ticka-ticka-ticka… Different people have different feelings about this project, but my own feeling is, if it gets people writing and having fun writing, it’s a good thing! Check it out at NaNoWriMo.org.

“I admire anybody who has the guts to write anything at all.” —E.B. White

Old Time Radio Shows

For the last couple of days, I’ve been laid up with a nasty cold, and haven’t been in shape to do much of anything. Couldn’t sleep, couldn’t read, couldn’t work. But one thing I could do was close my eyes and listen to my iPod. And luckily, I had something new to listen to: some old radio drama from the Old Time Radio Show Catalog. I’d only just learned of this site, and had just downloaded some sample tracks. I was glad I had.

They’ve got all the great old science fiction shows: Dimension X, Beyond Tomorrow, Buck Rogers, Tom Corbett, Superman, Space Patrol, and more. They’ve also got mystery shows (Mercury Theater, CBS Radio Workshop, and tons more), westerns, war, comedy, British…the list is long. They sell CD collections (in mp3 format, so you get a lot on a disc) for only $5 per CD. I listened to dramatizations of Heinlein’s “Requiem,” and Bradbury’s “Marionettes, Inc.,” and if you have any taste at all for the classic old work, it’s great stuff. Take a listen. You can grab a free download, it would seem, from every CD—so sample before you buy.

Highly recommended!

Spring Is Here!

Spring has sprung here in Massachusetts! And most welcome it is! I don’t know why, but this last winter felt like the longest I’ve ever known. I’ve been counting the interesting species of wildlife I’ve been seeing right around our house here in the Boston ‘burbs: cardinals, bluejays, black-capped chickadee (I think), mockingbirds, crows (making a comeback after nearly being decimated by the Nile virus), a cute little rabbit, a toad, and—just a few days ago—a wild turkey. (It practically cut me off as I was coming up on my moped; it was flying up the street at an altitude of about six feet, then landed in a neighbor’s driveway.) Oh and, yeah—termites.

Blasted termites ate a piece of wood paneling in our downstairs rental apartment. So now I’ve got to hire a Terminator. Jeez, that’s an expensive proposition! And it’s not just a matter of getting estimates and picking a terminator; I have to decide which approach I want to take—pesticide injection into the ground (the tried and true method), or bait trapping (much less pesticide, but newer, less tested, and more expensive).

Which reminds me that my wife and I have become big fans of the new show, Sarah Connor Chronicles. I just read that it’s been renewed for next season. Yesss! And BSG has started up again. We’ve only watched one episode so far, but clearly they’re going to be messing with our minds for the rest of the series. And I mean that in a good way, of course.

I haven’t had as much time to pursue my Roomba hobby as I’d hoped, but I did bring an ailing Scooba back to life! Turned out have some defective soldering inside. I never would have found it if someone on Roombareview.com hadn’t suggested that I solder a couple of leads for a voltmeter in there, so that I could see what was happening. Lo and behold, the act of doing that solved the problem. And I just got a very nice note from someone in Italy, telling me that my method worked for him, too! (No, he didn’t put leads in, but he did remelt the solder on the crucial connection—and that fixed his Scooba, too.)

In keeping with the theme of BSG and Roombas, I present here a couple of funny videos I stumbled across on youtube. The links will open new windows in your browser.

And I, Roomba, a Roomba love story, of sorts (a little long, but cute):

(I tried embedding the videos, but they played erratically for some reason.)

“Times are bad. Children no longer obey their parents, and everyone is writing a book.” —Cicero

If This is Tuesday, It Must Be…No, No, That Can’t Be Right

So I don’t know what day it is, anymore. What else is new? Last weekend, I was at Boskone, which is an always-enjoyable Boston SF convention. In the art show, I was startled to see the cover painting to one of my older books, The Rapture Effect! Beautiful painting by David Mattingly. Besides that, it was good to catch up with people I haven’t seen in a while, and devote yet more time to the question of how to make a living at this racket. (The writing racket.) More and more, it seems, writers have to look for other gigs to bring in income—even writers who are well established, and who you might think have it made. (There’s a good chance that they don’t, that they do something else to pay the mortgage.)

This isn’t going to pay the mortgage, but I’ve started a new business-hobby: Roomba resurrection. It started with my fixing my own Roomba when it seemed dead, then thinking, well, if I could get some people to give me their old, dead Roombas, it would be a great home school project to take them apart with my daughter and her home-school buddies. But it turned out nobody wanted to give me their old Roombas, so I started looking for some cheap on Ebay. Turns out there’s a constant stream of them being sold there, and it started to seem like a good idea to buy a few as cheaply as I could, fix them up, and see if I could resell them for a profit. I’ll let you know how that works out. (I still want to do the home-school project, though. If you have an old Roomba you want to lend to the cause….)

Interesting news notes:

From the Washington Post comes this: Scientists “have created a paper-thin material that absorbs 99.955 percent of the light that hits it, making it by far the darkest substance ever made—about 30 times as dark as the government’s current standard for blackest black. The material, made of hollow fibers, is a Roach Motel for photons—light checks in, but it never checks out.” It involves carbon nanotubes (what else?) and has got people thinking ever deeper thoughts about invisibility cloaks.

Meanwhile, U.S. plans to shoot down a defective and falling satellite have the rest of the world wondering what else those military tech-types might be thinking about. I take no position on that question—sure, they could be viewing this as a great practice opportunity, and probably are—but does that mean they shouldn’t do it if it might reduce the risk of an accident on the ground? I don’t have enough information to form an educated opinion. But I do like what space.com has offered us—a chance to consider the question: “What Cosmic Duo Would You Trust to Destroy a Wayward Spy Satellite?” Look through the list. It’ll amuse you, and bring back some fond memories!

“A man who had to be punctually at a certain place at five o’clock has the whole afternoon from one to five ruined for him already.” —Lin Yutang

Chameleons of the Deep

Whatever I was planning to write about next—probably Slicing Open Golf Balls for Fun and Profit, or something equally edifying—got knocked right out of my head when I encountered the web site, Talking Squids in Outer Space. That site by itself is pretty cool; I had no idea there were that many SF stories with squids in them. But even better, I followed their link to this video, which is real footage of cephalopods doing amazing things in the ocean. Watch it; it’s worth your time. If it doesn’t display properly in this page, go to http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/206.

Tell me these critters aren’t amazing.

“Imagination is the eye of the soul.” —Joseph Joubert

Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, and All That

It’s been a busy time here, as I’m sure it has been for many of you. This will probably be my last entry for 2007, because my family and I are in the throes of getting ready not just for the holidays, but for a two-week trip to London! It’s been about twenty years since I was last in England, and it’ll be very interesting to go back. It’s in some ways a crazy time to go—the exchange rate and costs are insane, and we’re all absurdly busy—but we have a place to stay with family, and that really is what’s making it possible. Plus, as my wife points out, chances to take this kind of trip as a family are rapidly vanishing: one daughter in college and the other headed that way soon enough. I’m sure it’ll be a fine and memorable time. (But there’s no internet access where we’re staying, so chances are I won’t be posting during the trip.)

Writing update: For the last couple of months I’ve been wrestling with the storyline I’m trying to unfold in The Reefs of Time. My old outline didn’t really hold up, and I’ve been rethinking the direction of my story following the end of Sunborn (which of course you haven’t read, because it hasn’t been published yet). Looks like the plot is taking some unexpected turns—unexpected to me, that is. Figuring out what it means is taking some time. Still, I like the new direction, and it’s sparked a new interest in the story on my part. While that’s been going on, I just wrapped up the SF writing workshop I taught with Craig Gardner. We both thought we had a terrific group again, and were excited to see so much promise in their work.

As always, there are many things I’ve been intending to write about but haven’t gotten to. So I’m going to sign off with just this news item:

Young chimps beat college students in memory tests! How can you not love this story? In short-term memory tests on a computer, some young chimpanzees bested their young adult human competition. Go monkeys! You read it here first. (Actually, you probably didn’t. But if I’d written this sooner, you might have.)

“We’ve all heard that a million monkeys banging on a million typewriters will eventually reproduce the entire works of Shakespeare. Now, thanks to the Internet, we know this is not true.” —Robert Wilensky

Flying Saucers in Saturnian Orbit!

Yes! From no less a source than Space.com and NASA comes news of weirdo flying saucers in orbit around the planet Saturn! In fact, they’ve even got computer-generated pictures, which are almost as good as real ones. Here’s the one they’re calling the moon Atlas, as generated by computer, based on findings from the Cassini probe:


You can also look at a nice big blowup.

Now, those scientists are such jokers, they expect us to believe that those are natural moon formations, caused by ring material building up on the equators of the moons. But I say, fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me. So, nuthin’ doin. I believed them when they said the Face of Mars wasn’t made by aliens. And what did they do? They sent those rovers, Opportunity and Spirit, out to roll back and forth over the face until they’d obliterated the image! (But here, you can look at some other cool shots.)

You all remember the hex socket on Saturn’s pole, right?

You think it’s a COINCIDENCE that this same planet has flying saucers going around it???!!! I think NOT!

Write your Congress persons and demand that they send a mission to investigate aliens in our solar system!

So say we all.

“You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.” —Ray Bradbury

Update on the Weirdness

Well, first I’ll update on the copyright infringement weirdness, just by repeating what I already said in the comments section to the last post: The guy never answered my email, forwarded through his domain-name service, but he did take my story down. And not just my story; he took the whole blog down! And recreated it, under a new name (but same URL). Odd. But life is odd.

And speaking of odd, it’s time for another roundup of links to the stupid, the strange, the weird and fun:

New Scientist has a couple of interesting columns, starting with a roundup of strange products. The first comes under the heading of, as they put it, fruitloopiness: bottled water that has had music played to it, so that it might better calm your inner feng shui. That would be H2Om, the world’s first “vibrationally charged, interactive water.” You gotta see it to believe it.

On a more down-to-earth note, also from New Scientist: Do fish get thirsty? Maybe…maybe not… It all depends on the kind of fish.

Now, I’m not a Mac lover and I’m not a Mac hater. I simply note that the Mac user in the family seems to gripe about poor performance and annoying quirks from her machine at about the same rate as the PC users. I personally find the Mac incomprehensible. But I intend no political or religious statement with the link to this video; it’s just too funny not to point to: Why Macs suck.

If you have friends, and lots of them, and you like to bike together, you gotta have a Conference bike. Don’t worry, it’s only a little over $12,000! Isn’t that worth it for a tricycle made for seven? They even have a video, if you’re interested. (Turn the sound down, though, unless you want the music to drive you mad.)

But seriously now, the gift-giving season is nearly upon us. And you should not go into it without being armed with Dave Barry’s Holiday Gift Guide. I’m eyeing the Flying Alarm Clock, myself.

And saving the best for last. Be Rocky the Flying Squirrel! (But wait until your kids are grown up and able to support themselves, in case you, er…well, you know.) This looks like so much fun, I have to do it someday. Fly like a bird! Or at least like a flying squirrel.

My writing quote of the day definitely applies to me:

“Very few writers really know what they are doing until they’ve done it.” —Anne Lamott

Three Thoughts for Halloween

posted in: quirky, science, technology 0

No, not spooky thoughts, or even deep thoughts. Just…weird, funny, unexpected.

I’m sure you all know what CAPTCHAs are. No? I didn’t, either, until I read the article I’m about to refer you to. But you’ve dealt with them. CAPTCHAs are those little boxes where you have to decipher squiggly or morphed letters of the alphabet and type them into another box before you can proceed (for example, to add a comment to this blog). Their purpose is to ensure that a real human, and not a robot, is leaving a post or opening an email account.

The evil spammers have come up with a new way around these: a sexy picture of a scantily clad blonde, and an invitation to entice her to take off her clothes by…yes, deciphering a CAPTCHA and entering the code. But when you do this, you’re performing a service for the spammers: enabling them to get past these protective devices. Read about it on the Washington Post Security Fix column, where I saw it.

To veer wildly in the direction of the physics of life, ponder the possibility that life may evolve in the form of plasma or ionized dust creatures (in space). Invasion of the Plasmozoids! Or whatever you might like to call them. The New Scientist magazine has asked for ideas of what to call these hypothetical beings.

And for one final twist into oddity, watch this brief video of a train in Bangkok. Be sure to watch all the way to the end.

Happy Halloween!

“We tend to think things are new because we’ve just discovered them.” —Madeleine L’Engle

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