I guess sometimes the mind just washes itself clean to prevent unnecessary trauma.
(headclutch)
For I have lived to see this.
And Frank Welker as Ch’p. What more could one ask for?
Oh, Paul, you wicked, wicked thing. 🙂 But then I might have known you had it in you, after the stuff you inveigled us into doing to the Castle Greyskull set in Art Nadel’s office…
I’m a tea person myself….(except when in the States: I usually share Neil’s experience there). But this made me grin.
Especially remembering that time on Hydra when I drank six iced coffees in a row, and my consciousness got, uh, unusually altered….
dscf0147.jpg
Originally uploaded by ch0ng.
…Over here at DeLarge.
…only the utterly talented John M. Ford, could come up with this, I swear. From the man who brought us “Dilithium And You!”:
Welcome, Padawan! Your acquisition of an Incom-Flickertek “Divisa-S” Lightsaber is the beginning of an exciting future of Galactic wisdom and influence. Regardless of your choice of Force paths, the Divisa series offers a lifetime of subtle and precise striking down.
However, as with all ancient weapons, the lightsaber requires care in use and handling. We hope you will find the following tips useful…
[skipping down a bit]
Other Padawans may tell you that turning the Proni collimator 90 degrees within the casing will cause “cool things” to happen on ignition. THEY ARE WRONG.
(in the comments to this post at Electralite / Making Light, to which many thanks…)
Funny, the things that will pique your curiosity.
Last night, while getting ready to burn some DVDs, Peter and I were watching a somewhat comical documentary called “The 50 Worst Predictions”. One entry on the list described a bizarre media-borne prediction which I’d forgotten about, if indeed if I’d ever noticed it to begin with.
In 1994, full-page ads were taken out in at least one UK newspaper (and there may have been more: I’m trying to find out how many) by a woman who identified herself as “Sister Marie Gabriel”. (She also goes by the name “Sofia Richmond”; one source gives her real name as Sofia Paprocski, and this would seem to be confirmed in the advertisement below.) Her prediction was that Halley’s Comet would strike Jupiter (it should be mentioned that Shoemaker and Levy had made a similar prediction about their own comet a couple of months earlier, with somewhat more reason). This would produce some kind of gigantic sign in the heavens, one meant to warn the world to “stop all crime”. (You can see the “press-release” version of the announcement in this Google Groups post. It also turned up in sci.skeptic, alt.astrology, alt.christnet.second-coming.real-soon-now, and alt.usenet.kooks: but, surprisingly, not much of anywhere else. — Also, all honor to Somefoolwitha.com, where I found the large-format version of the original ad: click on the image below to see a slightly crisped-up version.)
The text of the basic press-release announcement is interesting. It features a favorite theme of this kind of prophecy (“You should all play nice now, or else!” — not that this is necessarily a bad message, mind you: and some folks reading this may remember the same opinion being covertly expressed in a story called “Apparitions” I did for a Superman anthology some while ago). But even the PR version of the announcement, which theoretically ought to be concentrating on far more urgent information like the imminent “destruction of nations”, spends a surprising amount of page space discussing how many famous people will come to “believe in Sister Marie Gabriel”, and what bad things will happen to those who slander her: namely, they’ll “suffer direct and instant retribution from God himself” on the day of the collision.
The author of the press release and ad later appeared on at least one UK interview show, a clip of which was shown on the “50 Worst Predictions” show which Peter and I were watching. “Sister Marie Gabriel” was a small woman wearing a plain skirt and sweater, a headscarf, big sunglasses (apparently to protect herself from the blinding flash when Jupiter exploded), very blonde hair that looked either dyed or artificial (maybe even a wig?…), a lot of makeup, and an affect (in the psych sense of the word) which I can only describe as generally very peculiar. She spoke in a very soft whispery voice that must have driven the studio’s sound engineers to distraction.
Having seen the clip, I was ready to say, “Okay, so maybe she’s just an eccentric.” Possibly one with a grudge of some kind, and certainly one with a seriously weak grasp of both current events and astronomy. Certainly a lady with access to a little money: those full-page ads aren’t cheap. One commentator on the clip — I think it may even have been Uri Geller — wondered whether she was being bankrolled by someone, and if so, by whom, and why? “Well,” I remember thinking after I heard that remark, “yeah, why?” I had trouble coming up with reasons that made any sense. Was she indeed just an eccentric who’d had a scary vision, and didn’t mind spending her life savings to tell people about it? Or was something else going on?
At any rate, we finished watching the documentary and went on to other things. But I was left wondering whether, subsequent to the failure of her prediction, anyone had ever found out exactly what had been going on with “Sister Marie Gabriel”, or whether anything more about her story had been uncovered. So I went Googling. Various useful pages about Millennial and other predictions shed a little light here and there. (And, looking at the timelines, I started to get a sense that any year in which the world is not predicted by somebody as being about to end is a weird year. And oh gosh, the names of some of the organizations predicting one or another catastrophe! “The Sacerdotal Knights of National Security”?? — Though that group, at least, may not have been entirely serious.)
Anyway, web-based references to either Sister Marie Gabriel or Sofia Richmond are surprisingly few, considering all the fuss. “Sofia Richmond” does turn up in an episode of NOVA, “The Doomsday Asteroid”, where the narrator describes her as a “mystic”. At first I thought maybe this was the documentary writer being neutral, or kind. But then, as I dug about, I went back to that full-page ad and read it a little more closely. (You may want to do so too, but I warn you, you’ll have a squint by the time you’re done.) “Sofia Richmond” does indeed describe herself as a mystic “like St. Theresa of Avila”; and also an astronomer (“Sofia is a Polish astronomer like Copernicus”).
The section that really caught my attention — already piqued by some material further up in the advertisement — occurs about three-quarters of the way down the page. (The actual print version is in small, tight-packed, shouting all-caps, reminiscent of parts of a Dr. Bronner’s label, but without the (relatively) organized graphics. Punctuation is the author’s.)
In 1983 she delivered a document to all the major embassies warning them of the cosmic explosion and resulting fireball. For 10 years her warnings were not heeded. So she wrote a book of cosmic forecasts and published the first edition by hand on 11 February 1993 nearly a year ago. In this book she explains the reasons for the cosmic explosion between the comet and Jupiter and she illustrates the blast and constant explosion with pictures (title of book: “Supernatural Visions” by Sophia Marie Gabriel Richmond). She wrote her prophetic book over a period of 10 years. The Sunday Telegraph reviewed her book on 14 February 1993. Adam Nicholson said it could be bound for the bestseller lists. Then she gave her book to a printer on the 11th of March 1993. …Copies of her book are in Cambridge University Library and Oxford University library. The printer however turned out to be dishonest. He sold all her books to shops all over the UK and abroard [sic] and kept all the money from her copyright work. Sister Marie has not received one penny from her own book while printer and book shops have made over quarter of a million pounds approximately. Her court hearing about her prophetic book is on the 11 February 1994 at 10 a.m. at St. Martins Lane County Court, WC2. (Reporters welcome.) …There will be a criminal prosecution against the printer in the future for stealing all the money from her book.
Oh, indeed. To quote a Vulcan of my acquaintance, “Fascinating…” Yet there’s also a strangely pathetic — in the sense of pathos-inducing — quality about this: and if you’re a writer and you’ve once been cheated out of a fee for work when you held up your end of the bargain, a certain sympathy arises in your heart when you hear a story of this kind, however occasionally self-contradictory and sandwiched- between- big- helpings- of- looniness the account.
Confirming some of this info is impossible while sitting at the desk nursing a cup of tea: the Telegraph’s online archives only go back as far as 1996. As for the court case: where would one go to find online data on something of this kind? If anyone wants to send me a URL…
The advertisement goes on to mention various TV appearances, including “German television”, Sky News, BBC’s Horizon (this would have been the source of the “Nova” material) and “Australian Channel 7 News”. (This is sounding more and more like somebody’s CV every minute: just a very ineptly framed one.) And finally this:
The world has only a few months left to prepare for the most dangerous cost the convention history. A publisher is urgently needed to reprint her prophetic book by Easter 1994.
The article concludes (as it began) with a command that the Pope fly in to meet with her immediately, as in that day, by 3 PM (“Subito!”), continuing the generally confused, loosely-associated and inconsistent tone of the whole piece. It’s the kind of thing a coffee room full of psych professionals could blow a whole lunch-break diagnosing.
…And here at the desk, while the tea gets colder, I remain fascinated. So was this whole business actually an attempt to get some PR for a self-published book? Or was the book ever actually published at all, and did someone genuinely rip this lady off? Googling on the title of the book along with any of the author’s various names produces no result. (sigh) I’m left with more mysteries than I started with, and no time to investigate them: I’ve got a bunch of wizards running around on Mars and digging the place up at the moment.
Yet one more thing. While Googling around, I came across this newer story in the Edgware Times, dated 2001. The first paragraph:
A Christian visionary and author from Childs Hill has taken an advertisement out in a national newspaper offering 31 of her books to publishers.
Doing business again as Sister Marie Gabriel, but sporting the new pen name “Sofia Marie Angel”, she is touting various of her books (the number cited in the article is seventy-seven) as possible Hollywood-blockbuster material…but is also also apparently stating in the new advertisement that there’s yet another a meteoric disaster coming. The Times mentions — perhaps with tongue in cheek? — that she has published other ads in newspapers before, and that she correctly “predicted” that a comet would hit Jupiter in 1994. (Without mentioning how spectacularly the rest of the prediction tanked.)
Is she getting better at her PR? Or just better at being crazy? (For I’ve seen that kind of thing too.)
Ah well. Back to Mars…
But just one more thing before I go out for the groceries…
Absolutely. No. [verbal] Comment. {headclutch]
This is so neat.
It was previously reported (March 2004) that Spirit had captured the light of a falling star (meteor). Space.com now reports that scientists have traced that speck of light back to the comet that it originated from.
(Courtesy of Martian Soil, a blog I’ve been keeping my eye on for a while now)
A couple of neat things from Krazydad:
With planets, I incorporate many Venetian glass techniques, such as murrini (mosaic glass, also known as millefiori) and vetro a filigrana (filigree glass, also called latticino). These ancient traditional techniques are just where I start. The cores of Planets are full of bubbles, threads, and kaleidoscopic patterns evoking unseen landscapes and underwater worlds. I know I’ve succeeded when you feel like you have to look closer at one of my little worlds and then lose yourself in its textures and color.
…Also: I’ve been a sucker for graphical renditions of mathematical (and other) relationships since I saw my first fractal. Now here’s a poster representing some of the photosharing relationships in Flickr. (Looks like it can be ordered at this link.)