star wars: revenge of the sith

Saw this a couple weeks ago. Best part: great swashbuckling, Douglas Fairbanks type action sequences. Worst part: tendency of characters to say “younglings” when they mean children. Yoda looks pretty real now. (Still talks like a dork, but this being a prequel, he has to stay true to form.)

sailing away

Because I’m a member of the Planetary Society I was going to proudly place a link here to news of the first ever solar sail spacecraft–a project led by the Society. As of now, however, Cosmos 1 seems to have been lost in space. You haven’t seen it, have you? I’ll keep up my subscription [...]

solstice fair

The highlight of the Fremont Fair for me was watching Extremo the Clown (from Portland) sitting in his Extremo-mobile, singing along to a recording of the climactic song from “Tommy” while manipulating two death’s head puppets and cackling fiendish laughter between verses. I came along just as he was singing, “See me…touch me…feel me…”
Another car [...]

we’ve been impactionated

You may have heard a dentist talk about an impacted wisdom tooth. Or a veterinarian talk about an impacted bowel. Sure. It means “wedged in.” Or it used to. Now I often hear it used like this, “The new legislation impacted people across the nation.” To me this sounds as lovely as a dirty, chipped [...]

must…be…destroyed

To the guy in the pickup who came within one inch of hitting me and my bike on my way home from work last week (and then honked and flipped me off): die! die! die! you don’t deserve capital letters. see this thesaurus entry.
Of course, then he was sitting about 50 yards up the road [...]

phlox on library roof, underwear autograph, and lithuanians have my debit card number

Finally went to our newly built Ballard neighborhood library and found that it has a “green” roof–soil and plants on the roof for insulation and reduction of rainwater runoff. Creeping phlox and tufted saxifrage on the roof! There is also some weather-related art, 17 solar panels, and many more environmentally considerate design features.
There [...]

they have arrived

stand on zanzibar

It happened again. Every few years I read something in a newspaper and realize how much the world is turning out to be like the one portrayed in a book I read back in 1968 or 1969–Stand on Zanzibar, by John Brunner. The book, written in ‘68, was set in the near future. Brunner’s [...]