So you haven’t seen Flock of Dodos yet? It hasn’t been shown at a theater near you, and you don’t get Showtime? Well, finally, you can just get it on DVD and watch it at home.
Here you go, a few links with promises of interesting reading. Much more so than you’ll find here, where I’m buried beneath efforts to finish up my Seed column, prepare for a lecture tomorrow, get a lab organized for Wednesday, write an entry for an encyclopedia, and shovel through piles of administrative paperwork of various sorts…
Some good news for the upcoming Darwin Year of 2009 — Steve Jones will be publishing a new book, Darwin’s Garden, on time for the celebration. I have to say, though, that PR from publishers is a little disturbing: “Jones, who moved to Little, Brown from Transworld with c.e.o. Ursula Mackenzie” makes it sound like he’s had some very peculiar addresses and opens completely inappropriate speculation about his relationship with Ms. Mackenzie. It should be good anyway.
Other good fun can be had on the blog, Prehistoric Pulp. If you want to keep up with the latest books and games that involve primeval creatures, paleontology, and evolution, it’s a great source.
I was sent a link to Asimov’s The Last Question. I swear, I’ve got to have read a few dozen science fiction stories that have pretty much the same plot, and I suspect sf editors must get this one over and over. So now I’m wondering…was Asimov the first to unleash this cliche on us all (in which case, it wasn’t a cliche when he wrote it), or has it got antecedents?
With subjects from simians to coelacanths and titles like “Heaven must be boring” and “Think for yourself”, I may just have to pick up this George Hrab CD. Listen for yourself!
Hollywood is officially bankrupt. Free of all new ideas. Worthless recyclers without an imagination. Why?
They’re remaking The Day the Earth Stood Still, one of the best science fiction movies of all time.
And just to make it that much worse, who is the star? Keanu F. Reeves.
Fortunately, I still have my precious DVD of the original.
Ars Technica has an article on bad science in entertainment, with a list of items that were particularly annoying:
This should cheer everyone right up.
I sometimes say things that outrage people and get me volumes of angry mail. This will be one of those times.
It’s a wiki with the tagline, “It’s a fictional world purely imagined by its community”, and it isn’t Conservapædia! Galaxiki is a galaxy-building exercise that lets you create star systems and populate them with stories and details. One bummer is that they charge you for the right to create new stars — that doesn’t seem like a smart idea, since you’d think they’d want more contributions, at least early in the game — but you can edit somewhat freely, and there are swarms of randomly generated star systems to play with.
Cleanse your palate of the unpleasant aftertaste of that last video with this loud instrumental from Rush — it’s the “Malignant Narcissism” video at the top of the page. I like how it illustrates the advance of religion as a branching snake. If you don’t like wmv or mov formats, it seems to be popular among the guitar heroes of youtube, so you can at least listen to it, even if you don’t get to see the abrahamic viper.
This is excellent, but I have a request that I hope Roy grants someday — my personal favorite is “America” from his “Faulty Intelligence” CD. Trust me, it’s awesome.
Aww, heck, they’re all good. I also want to see him on The Daily Show, and playing on the White House lawn outside GW Bush’s window.
