As you know, I’m very tuned into the doom meme, and I write and tweet a lot about past and current cultural variations on the fear and fascination of apocalypse. But I think I’ll never outdo George Carlin, who, in an absolutely brain-bending and jaw-dropping riff on the subject (see the video below), mounted the…
Recommended Reading 8
This week’s link list is slightly shorter than usual, because my time and energy have been dominated for the past few days by the task of writing three essays for ABC-CLIO’s “Enduring Questions” academic reference database, in the enticingly titled category, “World Religions: Belief, Culture, and Controversy.” But there’s still plenty of worthwhile reading here,…
‘The Twilight Zone’ for teachers: ‘Changing of the Guard’
In 1962 The Twilight Zone ran an episode titled “The Changing of the Guard.” It starred Donald Pleasence (in his first American television appearance) as an elderly literature professor who is forced into retirement and decides to kill himself on Christmas Eve when he’s overcome by the sense that his entire life and career have…
New Outer Limits: “Stream of Consciousness”
If you, like me, are feeling more and more haunted in our information-glutted age of universal online connectedness by T.S. Eliot’s famous lines “Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?” then maybe you’ll find this 1997 episode from Season 3 of The New Outer…
A Lovecraftian tragedy? ‘Prometheus’ may have finally killed del Toro’s ‘At the Mountains of Madness’
The sad news is currently sweeping through the fantasy/SF/horror community and the movie-oriented corridors of the Interwebs: Guillermo del Toro has publicly announced that his long-anticipated adaptation of Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness is really and truly dead. What’s more, the (unintentional) culprit is Ridley Scott’s forthcoming Prometheus. Say what? I wrote a recent…
Ultimate audition: One man plays every character in the history and future of science fiction
Thanks to an emailed link from my friend Don Webb (the Austin-based horror writer, writing teacher, and former High Priest of the Temple of Set), I kicked off my day with the funniest video I’ve seen since Funny or Die’s “Wax On, F*ck Off with Ralph Macchio.” I literally almost did the proverbial coffee spit-take…
Awesome new NASA video: “The Pursuit of Light”
I’m fairly entranced by this just-released video, and I daresay you will be, too. Here’s a description of it, apparently issued by NASA themselves (although I’m unable to source it): NASA dreams big science. The Space Shuttles may be gathering dust, but weâre not staying on Earth! In this awesome new short, NASA presents the…
Recommended Reading 6
This week’s recommended reading includes: a news report about worldwide beliefs in the imminent End of Everything (to which I’ve added a recent local television news report about a doomsday-type drill that was run at Chicago-area hospitals); multiple articles and essays about Jung, psychology, consciousness, science, and spirituality; information about early psychological warfare studies and…
It’s the Republicans’ fault. Seriously.
Thomas E. Mann is a senior fellow at the left-leaning Brookings Institution. Norman J. Ornstein is a resident scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. Thus, the essay that appeared by them in The Washington Post six days ago, and that set off a kind of seismic chain reaction of positive and negative responses among readers…
Video: “Outer Space” (with images from NASA’s Cassini and Voyager missions)
There’s something exquisite about this. Creator: Sander van den Berg Description: “The footage in this video is derived from image sequences from NASA’s Cassini and Voyager missions. I downloaden a large amount of raw images to create the video.” Music: “That Home” by The Cinematic Orchestra