I just remembered that several years ago I attended a lecture by Pulitzer-Prize-winning “comix” artist Art Spiegelman, during which he compared himself to legendary poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Mr. Speigelman said his own work was much more difficult than poetry, because a poet just has to write words, while a comics artist has to write words and draw pictures.
from Breakdowns: Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@&*! by Art Spiegelman, 2008
I’m not a Christian, and certainly not a Catholic. In fact, my beliefs fall pretty much opposite of what anyone could reasonably define as “spiritual,” with the exception that I’m certain there’s a troll living under the Fletcher Dr. bridge. And when it comes to art, my tastes lie with Richard Serra’s monumental, twisted steel plates or Ellsworth Kelly’s radiating colored shapes. Yet despite all of that, the greatest work of art I’ve ever seen, the one that I hope aliens find when they descend upon our dead civilization after following the electromagnetic trail of an ancient Red Lobster commercial, is Michelangelo’s ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.
No photos of the chapel can prepare you for the real thing. Looking at an image of a single panel of the ceiling is like looking at a single frame of a movie, and looking at an image of the whole ceiling is like looking at that movie’s print unspooled across a pool table. The scope of the work just can’t be reproduced in two dimensions. But I’ve just discovered the Vatican’s high-res virtual tour of the chapel, and it comes as close as possible.
The back cover of this collection says the stories “easily match or beat Arthur Conan Doyle’s master detective,” which aside from not really making sense is just blurbtalk. With a few exceptions, these stories are deservedly forgotten and lacking style, character, interesting plots, or any sense of how to structure a mystery.
Those exceptions include a Sherlock-less train mystery from Sir ACD himself, who shows up like Springsteen at SXSW to show the kids how its done, and the funny and ingenious “The Problem of Cell 13″ by Jacques Futrelle, featuring his fantastic Thinking Machine. And at the other end of the spectrum is “The Stone of the Edmundsbury Monks” by M.P. Shiel, one of the most enjoyably terrible mysteries ever written, which I wrote more about here.
The book itself is an amateurish production, with one of the least appealing covers I’ve ever seen and art-school-quality illustrations that are unattractive in the most boring way possible. Rookie mistakes abound, including footnotes appearing on the wrong pages and the lack of any information about the man who edited this collection and wrote its notes and introduction, Leslie S. Klinger. That’s a slap in the face to Klinger, who’s one of the world’s foremost Sherlockians (not to mention the editor of Neil Gaiman’s new The Annotated Sandman.)
Anyone without a truly compelling interest in Victorian detective fiction can pass this up, or better yet put the $16.99 towards Klinger’s perfect The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes.
This eight-minute, HD video shows the entire trip of one of the space shuttle’s solid rocket boosters, from lift-off to splashdown. The filmmakers compiled footage shot by cameras attached to the booster itself which, best of all, were coupled with microphones. Legendary sound (and film) editor Ben Burtt at Skywalker Sound helped to clean up and enhance the audio. All that together produced more involuntary smiles in me than everything I’ve watched on YouTube combined to date, including even both the Tiny Fuppets and Rusty the Narcoleptic Dachshund.
I love work that shows me something completely new, and this video pulls you through an intensely visceral journey that you’ve absolutely never seen before. Even if you have zero interest in space travel, take the time to view, and do it on good-size screen; at the very least don’t watch it on your fucking telephone. If you get bored and turn it off before splashdown, please delete my web site from your browser history and just assume I fell into a tar pit.
Oh and if you like this sort of thing — space videos, not me falling into tar pits — consider tracking down one of my favorite documentaries, Al Reinert’s For All Mankind. It’s an 80-minute history of the Apollo program composed entirely of NASA footage of its missions, including some of the most beautiful imagery ever filmed.
We’re living through historic times for #SethBuyMeLunch. Thanks to Christy Mac, AKA @CandiedVinegar, we have out first winner who’s volunteered to cross state lines for lunch. Christy will be driving 375 miles from Phoenix to Los Angeles, just to have lunch with me. Just for me! She thinks that she’ll also be visiting friends, but I’ll meet her at the border and escort her to and from the restaurant to prevent that. Next time read Addendum F.4, Christy!
You can win a free lunch from simply me by tweeting #SethBuyMeLunch any Monday, including today. Details are here.
As a small child growing up in Pittsburgh, every St. Patrick’s Day I would carefully look for leprechauns on my walk home from school. I never saw one. (Though once I was pretty sure I did; it turned out to be a discarded Capri-Sun packet.) I know now that I was being foolish, because leprechauns have been extinct in Pennsylvania since 1972. They’ve died off from most of the globe, except for isolated regions of the United States where domestic leprechauns released by Irish immigrants formed small feral populations, all of which are critically endangered. Even in Ireland leprechauns are sadly classified as “threatened.” The chief factor in their population loss in Ireland is traffic accidents, which are estimated to decrease their number by as much as 7% a year. (A full 37% of roadkill found in Ireland is leprechaun.)
All of the above is just an elaborate excuse for me to post this chart I created in 2006 for the defunct The-N.com, delineating Things That are REAL, Things That are NOT REAL, and Things That are EXTINCT:
If I had any disposable income to dispose of (or for that matter any income at all) I’d be disposing of a significant portion of it on the brand new Petridish.org.
The brilliantly named Petridish.org is a Kickstarter- or IndieGoGo-style fundraising site for science projects. They’re in beta right now with a dozen initial campaigns ranging from biology to astronomy to environmental science. A California entomologist needs only another $1300 to fund an expedition to Madagascar to find new species of ants. A Harvard researcher is more than 60% of the way to the goal for his project to discover the first moon outside of the solar system. And a Stanford conservationist could really use a leg up in her fundraising to track sea turtles in Peru.
My favorite of the 12 comes from psychology researcher Morgan Gustison, who plans to study the complex vocalizations of gelada monkeys in Ethiopia. That’s largely because my animated pilot The Monkey Planet features a fat gelada monkey (and political crony) named Crick. But also I’m fascinated by the study of animal communication and intelligence, a rapidly evolving field that’s showing us how wrong we are about what we thought we knew. So I’m sacrificing a couple of Crunchwrap Supremes to send Morgan a crisp five-dollar bill.
Just like Kickstarter and IndieGoGo, Petridish allows you to donate in any amount, and the scientists offer rewards for various pledge amounts. For $50 Morgan will send you a bag of Ethiopian coffee. Or now’s your chance to finally start collecting framed algae pressings.
Sign up for Petridish, give a little, or send a note of support to the scientists. The work they’re doing matters.
Seeing the mobile version of this post? Scroll to the bottom of the page and set “Mobile Theme” to “off.”
During one of the frequent moments of quiet reflection an individual is blessed with while unemployed and drunk on vanilla extract, I thought about the type of people I’m prone to like and want to spend time with. It occurred to me that the people I most prefer are some combination of smart, funny, kind, and curious.
I delved further into that realization during one of the frequent moments of quiet reflection an individual is blessed with because quietly reflecting on the type of people one is prone to like and want to spend time with leads to one spending time alone and disliked. It occurred to me that, more specifically:
The people I like and want to spend time with all have at least three of those four characteristics.
To prove that having a minimum of three of those qualities is a good measure of character, I’ve assembled a Very Useful Chart illustrating examples of people with only two of the four traits.
Seth Madej has written, produced, and performed award-winning projects for television, radio, print, stage, and the Web. He was once known as The-Seth. You have never heard of him. Remedy that by clicking here.
The magazine pieces in this collection, which are mostly too short to be satisfying in book form, deal less than I expected with travel and more with the outdoors and adventure sports. Unfortunately there are very few things less interestin...
The Big Nowhere seems to be the book in which Ellroy found his footing. It reads like a practice run for LA Confidential, which this book precedes and with which it shares some characters. It retains the murder-mystery aspects of Ellroy's e...
During one of the frequent moments of quiet reflection an individual is blessed with while unemployed and drunk on vanilla extract, I thought about the type of people I’m prone to like and want to spend time with. It occurred to me that the people I most prefer are some combination of smart, funny, kind, and curious.
