What was it, you ask, that finally drew me back to my blog (well, one of them, anyway)? Has my muse compelled me to write on matters of National importance? Have I been moved to the pen by some bowel-clenching happenstance?
No.
By smugness.
Tawdry my motives may be, but they are real, at least. And so, to the tale:
Just a few links today, but they’re to things I’d be pleased to own in that they stimulate the observer. First some T-shirts:
In the non-wearable corner, there’s this exquisite paper-cut art by Peter Callesen. I love the large-scale papercuts, but they’re all so beautifully imaginative!
Many of you will already have seen the news that Jo Barbera has died. What’s odd for me is that as a confirmed Tex Avery fan, and as someone who never really had a passion for the Hanna-Barbera cartoons in general, I find myself more moved than I’d have expected by his passing.
Stunning (if not very detailed) pictures of the NASA Viking Mars probes (launched 1976/1977) taken from orbit by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter are now available. The Beeb has a brief description too.
For people as old as me who remember the Viking landings and good ol’ Carl Sagan waxing lyrical about it, seeing those probes pop up in the news again, revisited by another generation of technology, brings a nostalgic glow to my breast.
Mind you, they’re probably up on bricks by now, their parts on the Martian equivalent of eBay.
That cryptic title just about covers the last excellent 24 hours. Last night, we went and saw the 40th Anniversary tour of the magnificent Bonzo Dog Do Da Band. An evening of mayhem, music, and madness. Truly excellent renditions of “Urban Spaceman”, “Mr. Slater’s Parrot Says Hello”, “Mr. Apollo” and much more had the audience baying for more. Guest appearances by Phil Juptus and Ade Edmonson (who were clearly in seventh heaven) bolstered the band’s complement and added to the lunacy (picture Ade dressed as a parrot wandering into the audience squawking “Hello!”)
I’ve just noticed that my list of Toons-to-read-before-starting-work-each-morning has topped 16… No wonder it’s 9.30 before I get anything I’d get paid for done :)
Of those I really love, there’s
With the Bristol Animation Festival (now, irritatingly diluted by combining with the Short Film Festival) on the horizon, some of the above (esp. Bunny) would be just fantastic done as an animation.
One of my all-time favourite movies may just be coming true. Ok, it’s not Los Angeles and it’s not Giant Ants, but surely the appearance of radioactive snails some 40 years after a hydrogen bomb accident is too much like those great tales of yore to be overlooked.
In the month since I last posted about my Perplex City card addiction, I’ve spent a lot of dosh on individual cards and gained lots of points, and am ecstatic to report that I’m now at 264th place (as of last night).
However, as only the black and silver (hard and very hard) cards are left, scoring any higher than this is going to be problematic… Not that that will stop an addict like me from trying. Heh.
We’d all be in a very different place now if it were not for Colonel Stanislav Petrov, a man who literally changed the course of history in 1983. That’s something to put on your Curriculum Vitæ.
You can keep the new supercomputer that IBM have built out of Cell Chips. It may be able to do thousands of trillions of calculations in a second, but it has none of the elegance and charm of the wonderful device that has been lovingly recreated at Bletchley Park. I caught the unveiling on the news yesterday and watched, beaming, as the rotors ratcheted around in the little dance of decoding they do. If you’ve not heard of Station X and the Turing Bombes, then you’re unaware of one of the most amazing technological developments made during World War II. And sometime next year, I shall be visiting Bletchley Park and watching the Bombe do its work.