Said Who?

On TCM, Jennifer Jason Leigh narrates a tribute to Barbara Stanwyck, concluding with a quote from Frank Capra. She introduces that quote with this:

As director Frank Capra said, who used her more than any other actress

To me, that's definitely misplaced relative. It should come after "Capra" and before "said".

Happy Birthday, Li

Today in 1965, in Shenyang, Liaoning, China, Gong Li was born. Star of a number of films including Ju Dou, Raise the Red Lantern, The Story of Qiu Ju, Farewell My Concubine. and Curse of the Golden Flower, Gong is a stunning and brilliant actress.

Happy Belated Birthday, Bo

Born yesterday, in 1928 in McComb, Mississippi, The Originator, Bo Diddley.

He died last year, just shy of 80, and he is missed.

Christmas XII

Happy Birthday, Rudyard

Today, in Bombay in 1865, Rudyard Kipling was born. His parents sent him "back" to England to avoid the typhoid and cholera, and he used his school experiences in several of his works, the horrifying 'Baa Baa Black Sheep' and the delightful Stalky and Co. particularly. After school he went back to India and became a reporter, writing fiction and poetry in his spare time. Celebrity came after six years, and he returned to England. But he didn't like living there, and after a few years spent traveling the world, he settled in Vermont - and it was there he wrote The Jungle Book, probably his most well-known work.

Here's another:

A Carol

Our Lord Who did the Ox command
    To kneel to Judah's King,
He binds His frost upon the land  
    To ripen it for Spring --
To ripen it for Spring, good sirs,
    According to His Word.
Which well must be as ye can see --
    And who shall judge the Lord?

When we poor fenmen skate the ice
    Or shiver on the wold,
We hear the cry of a single tree
    That breaks her heart in the cold --
That breaks her heart in the cold, good sirs,
    And rendeth by the board.
Which well must be as ye can see --
    And who shall judge the Lord?

Her wood is crazed and little worth
    Excepting as to burn,
That we may warm and make our mirth
    Until the Spring return --
Until the Spring return, good sirs,
    When Christians walk abroad;
When well must be as ye can see --
    And who shall judge the Lord?

God bless the master of this house,
    And all who sleep therein!
And guard the fens from pirate folk,
    And keep us all from sin,
To walk in honesty, good sirs,
    Of thought and deed and word!
Which shall befriend our latter end....
    And who shall judge the Lord?

Planting

In today's local paper was a story about a new church with an odd design. It was about the church's growthin numbers, and the architecture of the building, not about its spiritual growth or mission or anything like that. Which makes this sentence a bit puzzling:

Cagle said he knows of many people who plant churches who are looking for an inexpensive alternative when it comes to buildings, and he's not territorial when it comes to the unusual architectural style.

"People who plant churches" is in the present tense, so it sounds like an habitual action. Are there people who go around doing this all the time?

I mean, I realize this is an evangelical catch phrase - planting churches - and that it's seen as better to start a new one than try to revive a dying one. But he makes it sound like there are people who do this constantly.

Wait.

Oh, right. Evangelicals and Baptists. They do do it constantly. Christianity Today puts it like this:

[T]oday, church planting is the default mode for evangelism. Go to any evangelical denomination, ask them what they are doing to grow, and they will refer you to the church-planting office. I have talked to Southern Baptists, General Conference Baptists, the Evangelical Free Church, the Assemblies of God, the Foursquare Church, the Acts 29 network, and a variety of independent practitioners and observers. I quit going to more because they all said the same thing: "We're excited and committed to church planting. It's the cutting edge."

I just wonder how these same people can complain that they're being persecuted when they don't pay a penny in taxes on all this new building they have going on.

Christmas XI

Say what?

Local news teaser (WVLT):

He thought he was going to die, but this officer's badge stopped the bullet that saved his life.

Wait, what?

Christmas X

Not telling nobody

I surfed past Spiderman 2 Sunday; it was on the scene where the people bring Spidey inside the train. Two boys bring him his mask, and one says, "We'll not tell nobody."

That sounds downright weird to me, a mix of registers (or styles). "We'll not" sounds extremely formal, compared with "we won't". And then the second negative... It just sounds weird. Either "We'll not tell anyone"or "We won't tell nobody" would be more natural.

But that might just be me.

Monday Science Links

This week's science (late...)

• Check the gravity wells at xkcd. Pretty cool


• At Save Your Breath For Running Ponies bec takes on the veined octopus and its shells: Now while everyone might think this is really awesome and ingenious and everything, to me it all seems a bit much. I know Under the Sea isn’t always a bed of roses, but the other sea creatures get by okay without having to cart a couple of coconut shells around with them all the time, so I don’t see why the veined octopus thinks it needs to. Like, they’d all be hanging out, the veined octopus, the weedy pygmy seahorse and the nudibranch, trying to reconstruct the events of last night’s Christmas party whilst battling through their mad hangovers. (Yes, it's a bonus link)


• At Bad Astronomy, Phil Plait commemorates an anniversary: Five years ago today — on December 27, 2004 — the Earth was attacked by a cosmic blast. The scale of this onslaught is nearly impossible to exaggerate. The flood of gamma and X-rays that washed over the Earth was detected by several satellites designed to observe the high-energy skies. RHESSI, which observes the Sun, saw this blast. INTEGRAL, used to look for gamma rays from monster black holes, saw this blast. The newly-launched Swift satellite, built to detect gamma-ray bursts from across the Universe, not only saw this blast, but its detectors were completely saturated by the assault of energy… even though Swift wasn’t pointed anywhere near the direction of the burst! In other words, this flood of photons saturated Swift even though they had to pass through the walls of the satellite itself first!


• At Why Evolution Is True Jerry looks at birds sleeping with one eye open: The researchers found that birds sleeping at the end of a row engaged in [one-eye-open sleep] 31% of the time, as opposed to only 12% for ducks in the middle. Moreover, in “edge” birds, the eye facing away from the center of the group was open 86% of the time, as opposed to only 52% — not different from random — for “inside” birds. EEG recordings showed that this eye-closing indicated sleep on the opposite side of the brain. What is even more amazing is a fact documented in this wonderful Radiolab program on sleep rebroadcast yesterday (do listen to it if you have a free hour): the “edge” ducks occasionally turn themselves around 180 degrees. When they do this, the new outer eye is the one that remains open.


• At Not Exactly Rocket Science, Ed gives us a thirteen-thousand-year-old tree: In California's Jurupa Mountains, there is a very unusual group of tree - a Palmer's oak. Unlike the mighty trees that usually bear the oak name, this one looks like little more than a collection of small bushes. But appearances can be deceiving. This apparently disparate group of plants are all clones of a single individual, and a very old one at that. By repeatedly cloning itself, the Palmer's oak has lived past the separation of Britain from continental Europe, the demise of the mammoths and saber-toothed cats, and the birth of human agriculture. It is among the oldest plants in existence, first sprouting from an acorn around 13,000 years ago.

Why do they draw them like that?

This always puzzled me when I was a kid. Here's a stereotypical cartoon rendition of vultures (today's Mother Goose and Grimm):

Note, particularly, the white ruff and long bare red neck.

But here is a real (New World, anyway) vulture:


Note the lack of a ruff and bare neck. The beak isn't yellow, either.

How did that get to be what vultures look like?

Christmas IX

Happy Birthday, Linus

Linus Torvalds, chief architect of Linux, was born today in 1969 in Helsinki, Finland.

"Basically, it is short and sweet. It won't give your life any meaning, but it tells you what's going to happen. There are three things that have meaning for life - for anything that you do or any living thing does: The first is survival, the second is social order, and the third is entertainment. Everything in life progresses in that order. And there is nothing after entertainment. So, in a sense, the implication is that the meaning of life is to reach that third stage. And once you've reached the third stage, you're done. But you have to go through the other stages first."

Happy Birthday, Stan!

Born today in 1922, the one and only Stan Lee.

When I was growing up, you read either Marvel or DC comics. I read Marvel. The Fantastic Four, The X-Men, Spiderman - I was there for them all. That first incarnation of X-Men was genuinely amazing. And they didn't read like kid's books, either; as Stan said once,

"If a kid has to go to a dictionary, that's not the worst thing that could happen."

I vividly remember walking over to the drugstore every Saturday to get the new issues and reading them on the way home. Those guys all seemed so real to me.

Thanks, Stan. Thanks so much.

The Week in Entertainment

Hmmm. I seem to have missed last week. So here's two weeks' worth (and late at that! Ah, vacations...)

DVD: The Patrick Stewart version of A Christmas Carol, which somehow I'd never seen before.

TV: All the usual suspects were in reruns, except for Better Off Ted, which was quite funny, and Scrubs, which wasn't. I loved Veronica's assessment of Linda: "You're weak and will never be a threat to me, which is your greatest asset." Many Sherlock Holmes movies, mostly with Basil Rathbone (in a TCM festival) and one silent(!) with John Barrymore. Here Comes Mr. Jordan, which I thought I had seen before but which was only vaguely familiar (and that may be because of Heaven Can Wait). Bedtime Story - the 1942 one with Loretta Young and Frederic March - which featured a total jerk of a husband winning back his wife. Adam's Rib, in which I always have to admit Hepburn is the annoying one. The George C. Scott A Christmas Carol, my favorite (though Mr. Magoo's comes a very close second). White Christmas, of course.

Read: I Do Not Come to You by Chance, which is a remarkable novel about the Nigerian 419 scammers, funny and poignant and riveting.

Found poetry

On a sign at a gas station:

ATM inside
Be thankful this season
We have diesel

Christmas VIII

Happy Birthday, Louis

Born today in 1822 in Dole, France - Louis Pasteur.

If you're like me, you think of pasteurized milk, and maybe beer ... but the man was a workhorse of applied science. Louis Pasteur brought about a veritable revolution in the 19th-century scientific method. By abandoning his laboratory and by tackling the agents of disease in their natural environments, he was able through his investigations to supply the complete solution to a given question, not only identifying the agent responsible for a disease but also indicating the remedy.

When in 1881 he had perfected a technique for reducing the virulence of various disease-producing microorganisms, he succeeded in vaccinating a herd of sheep against the disease known as anthrax. Likewise, he was able to protect fowl from chicken cholera, for he had observed that once animals stricken with certain diseases had recovered they were later immune to a fresh attack. Thus, by isolating the germ of the disease and by cultivating an attenuated, or weakened, form of the germ and inoculating fowl with the culture, he could immunize the animals against the malady. In this he was following the example of the English physician Edward Jenner in his method for vaccinating animals against cowpox. On April 27, 1882, Pasteur was elected a member of the Académie Française, at which point he undertook research that proved to be the most spectacular of all—the preventive treatment of rabies. Having detected the rabies virus by its effects on the nervous system and attenuated its virulence, he applied his procedure to man; on July 6, 1885, he saved the life of a nine-year-old boy, Joseph Meister, who had been bitten by a rabid dog.

Among his other discoveries - the theory of molecular asymmetry, showing that the biological properties of chemical substances depend not only on the nature of the atoms constituting their molecules but also on the manner in which these atoms are arranged in space. By means of simple and precise experiments, including the filtration of air and the exposure of unfermented liquids to the air of the high Alps, he proved that food decomposes when placed in contact with germs present in the air, which cause its putrefaction, and that it does not undergo transformation or putrefy in such a way as to spontaneously generate new organisms within itself.

He showed that milk could be soured by injecting a number of organisms from buttermilk or beer but could be kept unchanged if such organisms were excluded. After laying the theoretical groundwork, Pasteur proceeded to apply his findings to the study of vinegar and wine, two commodities of great importance in the economy of France; his pasteurization process, the destruction of harmful germs by heat, made it possible to produce, preserve, and transport these products without their undergoing deterioration. In 1870 Pasteur devoted himself to the problem of beer. Following an investigation conducted both in France and among the brewers in London, he devised, as he had done for vinegar and wine, a procedure for manufacturing beer that would prevent its deterioration with time. British exporters, whose ships had to sail entirely around the African continent, were thus able to send British beer as far as India without fear of its deteriorating.

In 1865 he undertook a government mission to investigate the diseases of the silkworm, which were about to put an end to the production of silk at a time when it comprised a major section of France's economy. To carry out the investigation, he moved to the south of France, the centre of silkworm breeding. Three years later he announced that he had isolated the bacilli of two distinct diseases and had found methods of preventing contagion and of detecting diseased stock.

In 1854 Pasteur became dean of the new science faculty at the University of Lille, where he initiated a highly modern educational concept: by instituting evening classes for the many young workmen of the industrial city, conducting his regular students around large factories in the area, and organizing supervised practical courses, he demonstrated the relationship that he believed should exist between theory and practice, between university and industry. A skillful experimenter endowed with great curiosity and a remarkable gift of observation, Pasteur devoted himself with immense enthusiasm to science and its applications to medicine, agriculture, and industry.

"Science knows no country, because knowledge belongs to humanity, and is the torch which illuminates the world. Science is the highest personification of the nation because that nation will remain the first which carries the furthest the works of thought and intelligence."

info and many sentences from: "Pasteur, Louis." Encyclopædia Britannica. 2006. Encyclopædia Britannica Online. 27 Dec. 2006 < http://www.britannica.com/eb/article-12562 >.

Happy Birthday, Johannes

Today in 1571 Johannes Kepler was born in Wurttemberg, Germany. Kepler was born to Lutheran parents, but never subscribed fully to the doctrine of "the real presence" and refused to sign the Formula of Concord; therefor he was excluded from the sacrament. Being unaccepted by the Lutherans and not a Catholic, either, Kepler had no refuge during the Thirty Years War and the counter-reformation, which meant he was forced to move over and over again to stay alive.

I quote from the biography of Kepler on NASA's Kepler Mission page, where you can go for more details on his work and his three laws (my emphasis):

Kepler was forced to leave his teaching post at Graz due to the counter Reformation because he was Lutheran and moved to Prague to work with the renowned Danish astronomer, Tycho Brahe. He inherited Tycho's post as Imperial Mathematician when Tycho died in 1601. Using the precise data that Tycho had collected, Kepler discovered that the orbit of Mars was an ellipse. In 1609 he published Astronomia Nova, delineating his discoveries, which are now called Kepler's first two laws of planetary motion. And what is just as important about this work, "it is the first published account wherein a scientist documents how he has coped with the multitude of imperfect data to forge a theory of surpassing accuracy" (O. Gingerich in forward to Johannes Kepler New Astronomy translated by W. Donahue, Cambridge Univ Press, 1992), a fundamental law of nature. Today we call this the scientific method.

In 1612 Lutherans were forced out of Prague, so Kepler moved on to Linz. His wife and two sons had recently died. He remarried happily, but had many personal and financial troubles. Two infant daughters died and Kepler had to return to Württemburg where he successfully defended his mother against charges of witchcraft. In 1619 he published Harmonices Mundi, in which he describes his "third law."

In spite of more forced relocations, Kepler published the seven-volume Epitome Astronomiae in 1621. This was his most influential work and discussed all of heliocentric astronomy in a systematic way. He then went on to complete the Rudolphine Tables that Tycho had started long ago. These included calculations using logarithms, which he developed, and provided perpetual tables for calculating planetary positions for any past or future date. Kepler used the tables to predict a pair of transits by Mercury and Venus of the Sun, although he did not live to witness the events.

Johannes Kepler died in Regensburg in 1630, while on a journey from his home in Sagan to collect a debt. His grave was demolished within two years because of the Thirty Years War. Frail of body, but robust in mind and spirit, Kepler was scrupulously honest to the data.

What a tremendous epitaph that is.

Do you care?

I've posted before on the local (East Tennessee) use of "don't care to" to mean "don't mind". Earlier this week, while doing last minute Christmas shopping, I ran across a variant of it.

The Home Depot clerk asked me, when she ran my card, "Do you care if I see your ID?"

That was just weird enough that it took me a minute to process it into "I need to see your ID."

Useful Links

I've seen those ads about making money posting links for Google. This is for Yahoo... but I imagine the principle is the same.

Still, is this the best you can do, Anon? Does people actually pay you to make comments like this on old posts (stripped of actual linkage, of course)?

Hello! I'm newbie in Internet, can you give me some useful links? I know only about Yahoo http://yahoo.com Yahoo

Seems a bad use of their money to me.

And then there's this sort of thing, also from Anonymous:

Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "Precocious Alex":

Please, can you PM me and tell me few more thinks about this, I am really fan of your blog...

Truly odd. Even if I thought this Anon really wanted to discuss pronoun antecedents, how could I possibly PM them?

Christmas VII

Greetings of the Season!

Season's Greetings to all my readers, and may you all enjoy a very Happy New Year!

Sky Watch: December Dawn

This is dawn, December 23 this year, the sun rising through bare trees whose trunks are clad in ivy. The days are beginning to lengthen as the sun returns, bringing light and life in the darkest season.





more Sky Watchers here

Christmas VI

The Return of the King(s)

Yes, the winter wake of buzzards (turkey vultures, that is) is back. Over fifty of them were on and around the water and cell phone tower down the street. Particularly the cell phone tower, which had a buzzard on every available vertical projection. Others sat on the railings around the water tower, and more circled in the air.

a lot of your

On the news the other evening the anchor was talking about the local National Guard unit, many of whose members are home for Christmas leave. Several local businesses chartered a bus to bring the soldiers back actually home for free, and the anchor described this as

"a lot of your generosity"

This sounds very odd to me, whether he meant (as I thought) " the generosity of a lot of you" or (as my father thought) "your ample generosity".

Christmas V

Happy Holidays

There are two holidays in the Western world, both of them falling on December 25th and both of them now called Christmas. There's the Christian festival, the Feast of the Nativity - the one with the creche and Baby Jesus and sacred songs; and there's the other one, the secular Yule - the holiday with the tree and the presents and Santa Claus, the holiday Irving Berlin wrote secular songs for. The holiday with holly and turkey and trimmings, the one with snow and tinsel and old fashioned Father Christmases, the lights and ornaments and reindeer... Most people in this country may keep them both, but precious few keep only The Nativity. Many more than that keep Yule...

There is certainly a religious component to Christmas - but which religion? Christmas as it is practiced in the US at least, and I expect around the European-origin world at large, isn't really about Baby Jesus® anymore.

So I celebrate - and say "Merry Christmas".

And now, to all my readers:

Season's Greetings - and Happy New Year!

Whatever you want those words to mean.

Rejoice with the return of the Sun and the lengthening of days. Be well, be happy, be kind to one another. This is our life: live it well together.

Christmas IV

In my father's front hall

Christmas III

Another Shoney's display

Happy Birthday, Edwin

Today in Head Tide, Maine, in 1869, Edwin Arlington Robinson was born. His poetry was unsuccessful to begin with, and he lived on the brink of starvation. Then one day Kermit Roosevelt read some of the poems and gave them to his father, Theodore Roosevelt. TR gave him a cushy job in a Customs House, saying, "I expect you to think poetry first and customs second." All Robinson had to do was show up, read the morning newspaper, and leave it on his chair to prove he had been in. In 1922, the first year the Pulitzer Prize for poetry was awarded, he won - and again in 1925 and 1928.

This poem is very long - 314 lines, too long to post it all - but it's my favorite of his. Select the title to read it all.

The Man Against the Sky

BETWEEN me and the sunset, like a dome
Against the glory of a world on fire,
Now burned a sudden hill,
Bleak, round, and high, by flame-lit height made higher,
With nothing on it for the flame to kill
Save one who moved and was alone up there
To loom before the chaos and the glare
As if he were the last god going home
Unto his last desire.

Dark, marvelous, and inscrutable he moved on
Till down the fiery distance he was gone,
Like one of those eternal, remote things
That range across a man’s imaginings
When a sure music fills him and he knows
What he may say thereafter to few men,—
The touch of ages having wrought
An echo and a glimpse of what he thought
A phantom or a legend until then;
For whether lighted over ways that save,
Or lured from all repose,
If he go on too far to find a grave,
Mostly alone he goes.

Hearprint

Today's Get Fuzzy has a nice coinage:



Satchell's on the right track. Maybe, "seeprint"?

Christmas II

Santa at the local Shoney's

Happy Belated Birthday Ossie

Ossie Davis, actor, playwright, and civil rights activist, was born on Dec 18, 1917, in Cogdell, Georgia. Among his plays are Paul Robeson: All American, Escape to Freedom, and Purlie Victorious. He also wrote Just Like Martin and Life Lit by Some Large Vision. In 2004 he and his wife Ruby Dee were recipients of the Kennedy Center Honors.

A linguistic note, on his name: it was really Raiford Chatman Davis; he acquired the name "Ossie" after a county clerk misheard his mother pronounce his initials, "R.C." I personally turned a "Forrest" into a "Fost" (short, I supposed, for "Foster"), and a "Burton" into a "Button" (well, he was five) in exactly that same way (though in neither case so lastingly).

The Season is the Reason: Happy Solstice

Happy Winter Solstice to my Northern Hemisphere readers...


And happy Summer Solstice to my Southerners...

Awwwwwww

It's the longest night. And this Mutts is so sweet.

Christmas I

A cellphone photo of the tree in front of the Bethesda Barnes & Noble...

Alex's weird feet

Not to trespass on Josh's turf, but ... what is up with Alex's feet??? In panel 3, they're clearly clad in something brown. But in panel 8 ... well, I'm not sure what's happened!

And he still doesn't get it...

So, last night I flew out of National, just before the big storm hit. But I almost didn't: the Maryland Shuttle was an hour and forty minutes late!

He was supposed to pick me up at 5:15. At 5:30 I called. "Oh, traffic's bad. He should be there any minute."

At 6:00 (I know; I shouldn't have waited that long) I called and said I was going to call another company. "Oh, there was a huge accident; he's on his way. He'll be there in 20 minutes."

"Are you certain of that?"

"Oh, yes, I'm talking to him."

At 6:25 I did what I should have done well before this (and would have without the lies): called Columbia Cab. Again (they're very responsive!) they said they'd send somebody "right away," (of course, "right away" from Columbia is 15-20 minutes...) so I called the shuttle to tell him to tell the driver not to bother. "Oh, my driver is almost there! He's in Laurel."

"Where?" I ask.

"He's at 198 & Rt 1 - he just passed there."

Now that's less than two miles away, so he'd probably beat the cab. Nonetheless, I did not call and cancel it.

Sure enough, fifteen minutes later, with no shuttle yet, the Columbia cabbie called to make sure of the address and tell me he was maybe ten minutes out yet. But while I was talking to him the shuttle pulled up. It was probably too late to get to National unless the flight was delayed - but then again, I've literally never taken this flight when it left on time. So I jumped in the shuttle and got the cabbie's address to send him the fare he was missing. He sounded quite surprised and told me not to send the whole amount. I'm going to anyway. It was a horrible night.

Anyway, the shuttle driver (who had transformed into a woman, but never mind) drove slowly even on the moving-very-nicely-thank-you Parkway and I got to the counter with 18 minutes to spare ... which is too late to check in. I must have looked stricken (I certainly felt that way) and the agent called the gate. Whew! Despite the "on time" notice on the website still there when I checked from the cab, the plane was in a delay. She checked me in - and at least at National there's never far to go from counter to gate. (I have a cat. I can't check in on line because I can't pay for her on line. Annoying as hell...)

The captain had the maintenance people looking at something, so at least the plane was there and not on the ground in North Carolina or something. We were waiting, and now I'm afraid we'll sit there and end up stuck in the storm. But yay! Wegot off the ground at 8:47 ... as the first flakes of snow started to come down.

I can't believe that shuttle guy would lie like that. Had he been honest - traffic isn't their fault - I wouldn't be so angry. He could have kept the damned fare; I'd already paid on line, after all. But his lying very nearly got me stuck, most likely for several days. So he's lost his firm a customer. There are other shuttles around the area. One of them gets my business from now on.

Happy Birthday, Saki

HH Munro, aka, Saki, was born today in Akyab, Burma, in 1870. His stories are brilliant and indescribable - who can forget Tobermory ( "If he was trying German irregular verbs on the poor beast," said Clovis, "he deserved all he got."), or the girl in The Open Window (Romance at short notice was her speciality.) or Lady Carlotta and The Schartz-Metterklume Method (

"How tiresome for you, dear Carlotta," said her
hostess, when the overdue guest ultimately arrived; "how
very tiresome losing your train and having to stop
overnight in a strange place."

"Oh dear, no," said Lady Carlotta; "not at all
tiresome - for me."

), or Conradin and Sredni Vashtar (

Sredni Vashtar went forth,
His thoughts were red thoughts and his teeth were white.
His enemies called for peace, but he brought them death.
Sredni Vashtar the Beautiful.

), and the wolves, all the hungry wolves, in so many stories? Read Saki here.

Happy Birthday, Steven

Today in 1946 Steven Spielberg was born.

Back in January 1978 Martin Gardner wrote this for The New York Review of Books, reviewing Close Encounters of the Third Kind:

"It is fashionable now to describe Spielberg as a terribly gifted but innocent prodigy, bug-eyed with wonder and lost in the Ozzy worlds of modern technology and the silver screen. It will be interesting, concluded Newsweek, to watch him grow up. Yes. And the more he grows the less likely he'll make another blockbuster."

Well... like that movie or not, you have to admit: Either Spielberg never grew up, or Gardner was dead wrong.

(Here's the review, but it costs money to read it.)

Sky Watch: October Dawn

This week has been crazy, so here's an old picture for you: an October dawn, two years ago.



more Sky Watchers here

Happy Birthday, Willard

Today in 1908, in Grand Valley, Colorado, Willard Frank Libby was born.

He was awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1960 for leading the team that developed radiocarbon dating process - carbon-14 - which revolutionized archeology by allowing us to finally know how old things were. Further refinements, using other elements (such as uranium-lead, for instance), have substantially increased our knowledge of the age of the world and the things in it.

Happy Belated Birthday, Noel

Yesterday in 1899 Noel Coward was born, in Teddington, Middlesex, England.

He chose his own epitaph: A Talent to Amuse.

And how perfectly fitting it is.