(no subject)

Well, as I live, breathe and defecate...The Historical Illuminatus Series by Robert Anton Wilson is about to be reprinted. Hopefully by the time that they get around to Volume III, Mr. RAW will have finished the long-missing Volume IV. Hopefully, as I've never had a belly for reading an unfinished series.

For folks without the luck to have read these books, they are historical fiction set during the mid-1700's-early 1800's which chart the course by which the Illuminati seized control of the American and French Revolutions. They deal with all the major historical figures of the time and are Wilson's best work, bar none. Unlike much of his other writing, these books are totally and completely accessible to the newcomer and you don't have to be licking toads to 'get' them.

Random Scotto factoid - I'm gaga for cranberry juice, and the more sissified mixed cranberry drinks. Cran-apple and cran-raspberry are tasty and remind me of being a kid up north.

( forecasted weather for the next week.... )

From the Hulk's Email -

> YOU LINKED TO HULK.
>
> Hulk down with that.
>
> Hulk just showed you a "dope gang sign" but you did not see it.

Finished watching Neverwhere, and I highly recommend it. Nice collection of characters, and has the "not quite right" vibe of 80s British TV, even though it aired in the mid 90s. Classic Gaiman.

I had to fix the links to the pictures in a few of my old entries today, but the doodles and photos should be working now. Hopefully they'll stay put for a year or two, this time. My host is being problematic with my cgi-bin. For some reason, the permissions keep getting locked. If I want to write to a log or a high score file, half the time it goes read-only as a "security measure". That doesn't do me much good.

( Classic food from a bygone era... )

one year ago Spanish TV, broken links, new he-man cartoon, mark quits FMM before he's caught stealing, puppy pictures and palm doodles

two years ago Soylent Green Tea Ice Cream at the Frieze in Miami, after seeing Kiss of the Dragon with my bro, cavort, first exp w/ Samurai Jack, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird

three years ago saw the hollow man movie, and played Everway.

Rambling childhood memories

Circa '74-75... I was between 5 and 6.

When my dad would pack my school lunch, he'd boil hot dogs, and put them in a thermos filled with hot chicken soup, and then put buns or bread in the dry side for later eating. He packed his own lunches the same way. Oftentimes, he'd put a note and some sort of goody in there too, like a comic book digest. I think that's where I picked up my "reading at the table" habit.

I brown-bagged it a lot, but when I did have a few lunchboxes. I remember having a speed buggy (Vroom-a-zoom-zoom! Everything is more entertaining in Portuguese!) one in first grade, and it was my third-most treasured possession that I could take to school after my St. Christopher medal (which shared a chain with a lime green teardrop-shaped peace symbol charm) and Pencil box with the built-in sharpener. (That contained about 10 army men, cleverly hidden inside a Ziploc bag at the bottom.

( Speed buggy lunchbox photo )

Mine was a lot more banged-up... When I was a little kid I could be pretty rough on stuff that I perceived as "invulnerable", and that was one of the few metal Items I had, short of a Tonka truck. As far as I was concerned, that aluminum food-holder was also a wonderful steel maul, designed to be spun around on my windmilling arms. The clip on the box must've been really stout, because it only ever flew open once, sending the thermos and whatever else was left over in there into the stratosphere, arcing nicely overhead and landing across the street, in the bushes. On reflection, the first time I ever jaywalked may've been to retrieve it. Since I was in Brockton, (near Holbrook) at the time, St. Christopher must've been keeping an eye on me after all.

( Tonka Dump truck pic )

Recalling that old Tonka Toy... it was originally the bright Tonka Yellow, but as time went by, it got a little rusty and sharp. Rather than let his kid play with a little tetanus trap like that, the old man sanded off the rust, sealed it, and spray-painted it with the colors he had in the garage. Since there was no canary yellow, he went with a reflective orange, which I thought was just awesome as a kid. (Later, He'd give it another treatment with silver, which wasn't as cool, but I liked it at the time.) That truck was a part of my toy box until I was at least 10 or 11. It was more than a dirt-dumper... it also served as a troop-superhero carrier, and a "hot wheels" caddy. It wasn't my all-time favorite vehicle, but it was certainly the most durable and in my top 5. If the Hulk or Spider-man toys were going to get run over by a large vehicle, that's was the one to call. It also showed up to any "flaming building" scenarios, despite having no hose, a good fist on the back could lob pinecones or dirt at any offending fires.

Something not readily visible is the fact that the driver's compartment was walled in with clear plastic. It was probably an hour before I'd popped out one of the windows, so an army man or other-sized toy could be allowed to drive.

I think that truck ended up with my cousin Russell (the one who was married recently) with a load of our old toys when Uncle Bob and Val moved into the place they had in Hypoluxo. It wouldn't surprise me if there was some kid in Florida still playing with that truck, fifth-hand, maybe painted olive green, or recolored to its original Tonka hue.

(no subject)

Pearson's specialized in proto-science fiction and tales of derring do (publishing, for example, the work of H.G.Wells on a regular basis). The previous year, 1900, Herbert C.Fyfe's gloomy "How Will the World End" proposed a number of doomsday scenarios; the earth's oxygen might soon be exhausted (within 340 years), or giant beasts would suddenly evolve to superiority over man:

Fossil remains of crabs, 6ft. in length, have been discovered, and such enormous creatures might - owing to some cause or other - multiply exceedingly. If we imagine a shark that could raid out upon the land, or a tiger that could take refuge in the sea, we should have a fair suggestion of what a terrible monster a large predatory crab might prove. And, so far as zoological science goes, we must, at least, admit that such a creation is an evolutionary possibility.

Fyfe even mentioned the possibility of a stray comet wiping out the planet. "In 1832," he claimed, "our planet is known to have actually passed through the tails of comets, hut nothing came of it. What would happen if we unfortunately encountered the actual nucleus of one is a question more easily asked than answered." This was Biela's Comet, which contemporary witnesses observed as having split in two after passing so close to the Earth in 1832. The comet, tailless and misshapen, appeared as expected in 1839 and 1846, before vanishing, confounding astronomers who waited patiently in 1852, 1859 and 1866. Until:

The third period of the perihelion passage had then passed, and nothing had been seen of the missing luminary. But on the night of November 27, 1872, night-watchers were startled by a sudden and a very magnificent display of falling stars or meteors, of which there had been no previous forecast...

But what happened to the tails? This fascinating page suggests that the series of mysterious fires that struck America's north-west on 8 October 1871 were directly attributable to the Biela's wayward tail.

The summer of 1871 had been excessively dry; the moisture seemed to be evaporated out of the air; and on the Sunday above named the atmospheric conditions all through the Northwest were of the most peculiar character. The writer was living at the time in Minnesota, hundreds of miles from the scene of the disasters, and he can never forget the condition of things. There was a parched, combustible, inflammable, furnace-like feeling in the air that was really alarming. It felt as if there were needed but a match, a spark, to cause a worldwide explosion. It was weird and unnatural. I have never seen nor felt anything like it before or since. Those who experienced it will bear me out in these statements.

At that hour, half past nine o'clock in the evening, at apparently the same moment, at points hundreds of miles apart, in three different States, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Illinois, fires of the most peculiar and devastating kind broke out, so far as we know, by spontaneous combustion.

Most famously of all, this was also the night of the great Chicago Fire. Did a comet cause the Chicago conflagration? Academics, unsurprisingly, doubt it. In 1908, however, it was a different matter. Something definitely impacted in Tunguska, Siberia. Was this a comet strike? I hadn't appreciated that the first expedition to the site only got there 30 years later, yet the devastation was plain to see.

Elvis and his prosthetic limb factory.... a nice song, actually. via thingsmag