“Lord, what fools these mortals be!” – Puck, A Midsummer Night’s Dream
This has been a grim couple of weeks, no matter how I stack it up. It’s hard to get excited about writing random little escapist fantasy stories or even generate the minimal wit required to frame a few clever anecdotes when there’s so much real life going on in the world right now. Take your pick: war, genocide, epidemic, storms, revelations of discord among the cast of Saved By the Bell…there’s no end to it.
However, I suppose this might be when we most need the frothy stories and a healthy appreciation of the absurd. On to the comic relief!
Kids, Don’t Try This at Home—I’m a Professional: Speaking of disasters, this is what it looks like when you break a tablet.
In your driveway.
With a Jeep.
This was a textbook-worthy example of a seemingly-random chain of mundane events leading inevitably to a shattering mishap, facilitated by a dunderhead.
Dunderhead: airhead, birdbrain, blockhead, bonehead, bubblehead, chowderhead, chucklehead, clodpoll…
Some Things are Best Appreciated From a Distance: One bright note in the news was the arrival of the ESA Rosetta probe at Comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko (try saying that three times fast) after a ten-year voyage that required some sophisticated gravitational slingshotting to match the comet’s velocity and put the spacecraft into a 100 km orbit around it. Rosetta is the first spacecraft to complete a rendezvous with a comet rather than fly by, and none have come closer to the nucleus. Rosetta will follow Churyumov-Gerasimenko on its journey around the sun and deploy a tiny lander in November to explore the comet’s surface and collect samples.
Unfortunately, Churyumov-Gerasimenko resembles some random oddment my dog hacked up, but let’s try not to think about that. Slate has posted a nice gallery of images collected by Rosetta.
UPDATE: 30 Oct 14 – Check this out if you’d like a better sense of how big Churyumov-Gerasimenko is.
I Need a Hero(ine): There’s been a clarion call of late for more “kick-butt” heroines in literature, comics, videogames, and film, which has me scratching my head because I had no idea there was a shortage. I could offer a long list of my favorite posterior-smiting women of valor (hmm, that sounds wrong, somehow), but there wouldn’t be room left on the page for my deathless prose.
Anyhow, this comic seeking a Kickstart looks like fun—it’s called Spark, and it features 9-year old Lucia Marquez-Miller as the newest superhero on the block, taking down the bad guys and gals with her radical telekinetic gadgetry powers. And here’s another one for a slightly older audience, The Adventures of Superhero Girl, which just won an Eisner Award for Canadian artist Faith Erin Hicks. And yet a third, Rocket Girl, about a time-traveling teen cop, a tale very impressive in both artistry and storytelling—and which I would have reviewed in full by now if a random goof hadn’t run over the tablet where my review copy resides.
Goof: dolt, ignoramus, knucklehead, lamebrain, meathead, moron, nimrod, nincompoop…
Frederation 