They're Made Out of Meat!

My favorite Terry Bisson short story--with the possible exception of "Bears Discover Fire"--is "They're Made Out of Meat" which appeared in Atlantic Monthly many moons ago. How many? Well, we studied it in my college SF lit class at A&M, so it's been a while.

Now, Chris Roberson (who always has the coolest and latest stuff on his blog) points out that "Meat" has been made into a brilliant short film, available now on YouTube. Go watch it now!

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Things you never knew you needed

As if I didn't already have enough things in my life to lust after but could never afford, along comes my sister with a link to wooden computers.



Gorgeous monitor and keyboard. And there's more. How about a case for the computer hardware itself?



Pure sweetness. For a guy who spent years designing and building his own floor-to-ceiling book cases, this stuff is like fine-grained mahogany-flavored crack.

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Landing on Titan!

Now this is cool.



Maybe it's not as cool as dust devils on Mars, but a fish-eye movie of the Huygens probe's descent and landing on Titan is still pretty darn nifty. Especially when you consider how smooth it is, with the good folk at NASA constructing it out of thousands of still photos. It's not like they had a broadband webcam set up on the thing. I just wish they'd posted a higher resolution version of the movie.

Cassini is one of the greatest space missions ever. Period.

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Parental pause

The ditch at the rear of our subdivision is still full of tadpoles. The girls like heading over there whenever they get a chance.

So the other day I'm there with Calista, and we see some tiny tadpoles, obviously just a day or so hatched from the egg. Calista surmises that the eggs were laid fairly recently, and laments "I wish I could've seen the frogs humping."

Humping!?

"What did you say?" I ask in a neutral voice, disbelieving what just came out of my 7-year-old's mouth.

"Humping. You know, Dad. Mating? That's what it's called," she answers me in a tone clearly indicative of exasperation at having to explain everything to her brain-addled father.

A little later, when the neighborhood kids weren't around, we had a little discussion about how "humping" is probably not the most socially acceptable description of anuran reproduction. I suppose I should be grateful she's not tossing off the F-bomb...

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How to clone at home!

In case you thought the madness had passed, I'm still obsessing over passion flowers. Since I've gotten ambitious lately and trying to root more cuttings than I have in the past, I figured it was time to ditch the plastic bags on the window sill and build myself a propogation chamber-- which is also known as a cloning box. It's called a cloning box because that's what it's used for, growing an entirely new plant from a sample of a mature one. A clone. So this is what I came up with on a budget (which, by the way, my wife loves, because it takes up much less space than the boxes and bags I used previously).



It's not entirely finished yet, but I've already started using it. First component is a plastic tub, bought at Wal Mart for $4 and change. The plastic fermentation bottle was a 3-liter diet root beer that I bought for $1.50. The 10 feet of tubing was bought at Home Depot for $1.68, and the waterproof silicon sealer was $3.



My biggest expense was the 75-watt plant bulb for the lamp, which was $6 something. The shop lamp itself I can't quite remember the price, since I'd bought it several years ago and already had it on hand. The lid was likewise plywood I had on hand, which I cut out using a jig saw. I covered the whole lid with foil for reflective purposes and to protect the wood from humidity--duct taping the foil securely on the outside. Yeast and sugar I already had, since I do home brewing.



I still need to put some vent holes in to improve air flow, as the temperature inside gets a little too hot for my seedlings. But even with the higher temps, the results were obvious after the first night I put the plants in there. The seedlings grew substantially more than they had in the open, and the cuttings perked up. As of now, I have two passiflora mexicana cuttings, 18 edulis seedlings and 10 incarnata cuttings inside. My brother's already made jokes about me getting busted for growing pot, but I'm pretty proud of what I was able to come up with on a shoestring budget.

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Oh yeah...

For those keeping score at home, I did get my printer fixed over the weekend and get a decent copy of "Europa, Deep and Cold" printed out. I packed it up and mailed it out to Stanley Schmidt at Analog yesterday. So you folks can all sleep easy now.

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This is precisely the sort of thing nobody ever believes

I've made no secret of my love for Terry Gilliam's "The Adventures of Baron Munchausen," and the more I learn about it, the more it surprises me and the more I love it. For example, consider the scenes on the moon. When the King of the Moon is chasing the Baron and his companions, he rides atop a giant, three-headed griffon that sports vulture heads. For years, I'd just assumed the three-headed vulture was a simple manifestation of Gilliam's oddball creativity--he never accepts a simple idea without adding on to it and building it into something more elaborate and bizarre.

But here I am reading Palgrave's The History of Science Fiction by Adam Roberts, and in just the second chapter, "Science Fiction and the Ancient Novel," Roberts is discussing Lucian's Alethes Historia:

Landing on this 'sky island,' which is of course the Moon, the voyagers are captured by soldiers riding three-headed flying 'horse-vultures,' and taken to the lunar king, Endymion.

There's even a reference to vegetables, kind of tenuous in Roberts' context, but enough to think maybe there's allusional reference in the movie's "asparagus spears" as well. Damn, that movie's awesome. I need Jess Nevins to annotate it for me!

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