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Today’s “Saturday Science” article from NASA talks about astrophotography on the ISS, some intelligent tinkering, and noseprints on the windows. There’s photography of Earth, too: aurorae and city pictures (like this image of London at night. Pratchett fans: in the larger version of this image on the article’s page, you can clearly see at least part of the dread rune Odegra. …That’s the M25 ring road, to the rest of you). …If you’re interested in hunting down images of your own area, look here: this link is the gateway “search” page for astronaut photography.

…And check out this image of the Wicklow Mountains under snow. Hey, I can see our house!

— If you’re interested in receiving a space science story like this every day, you can sign up at http://science.nasa.gov/news/subscribe.asp.

If you haven’t come across this web page in your travels, you should take a look at it. Dave Mackey is building a filmography of Warner Bros. cartoons there, including a title card gallery and a field guide to titles and credits. Invaluable.

And another site worth visiting for those who (like me) are passionate about cartoons: The Termite Terrace Trading Post message board, one of the Toonzone forums. They’ve just completed an upgrade to vBulletin 3.0, and the place looks spiffier than ever.

Cynthia Armistead writes to say that Out Of Ambit is being syndicated on LiveJournal at / as http://www.livejournal.com/userinfo.bml?user=outofambit. Welcome, guys!

The things you find while cruising other people’s blogs…. I’d completely forgotten about this wonderful miniseries by Mark Evanier and Sergio Aragones. Now I have to find where the heck it is, and make time to re-read and re-appreciate it. (It’s probably in the storage, twenty miles away, dammit.)

I hope Mark doesn’t mind me linking to this image from his page. Green Lantern was always my favorite… (The Hal Jordan GL, I should say. It would also be correct to add here that the “Young Wizards” universe owes a considerable debt to the Green Lantern Corps. The old Corps, when there were 3600 of them, and you could have a decent-sized cocktail party with the whole group between Threats to the Universe.)

…Yeah, and I liked Amethyst, Princess of Gemworld, too. Though I confess to emitting occasional tormented shouts of, “Hey, Amy! Lose the goddamn fluffy stereotypical flying unicorn!” …By the way, there’s an interesting overview of the series here which points out similarities between Amy Winston and Harry Potter.

Possibly a good moment to have another look at this. (NB: not updated since 1999, apparently.)

I almost forgot…

The one thing I’m going to stay up for: Peter O’Toole’s acceptance of his special Oscar. That should be worth seeing.

Meanwhile, I’ve shifted my two buckets of dirt and stones for this hour. I can’t believe the effort digging that hole must have caused Peter. (You can see the [temporary] result of his labors alongside. This picture was taken before the various water plants died off for the winter. But there are plenty of leaves from the huge beech trees that line the opposite side of the road. Every now and then I alternate hauling buckets of dirt with pulling a bunch of the leaves out in a futile attempt to keep the water from turning into beech tea. But they just keep coming back, the way the kitchen sink somehow just keeps filling with dishes… Anyway, still plenty of work to do on the pond, as you can see. Shelving stones need to be added all around, more stones added in the back, etc etc. I’m not going to do any of that until the rockery work to the left is finished. Sometime in 2004, at this rate.)

I have this awful feeling that we may be in the middle of it.

We’ve had this happen before. Often enough, at least in this part of the country, we get some of our best weather of the year in late March and early to mid-April. The weather goes sunny and still, and though nighttime temperatures can drop to freezing, daytime temperatures rise into the high 60’s if not the low 70’s F — pretty warm for this part of the world. Then May hits and it starts to rain…

Today would be the sixth or maybe seventh day straight of this kind of weather. The cats have been having (literally) a field day in the increasing hours of sunlight, doing a lot of hunting in the grass of the the “paddock” or empty fenced field next to the house. The kittens seem to have found a nest of mice, and every day more livestock of various kinds gets brought into the kitchen to be played with and lost under major appliances (if said livestock is still alive, which is often the case). We’ve had mice and shrews and various large bugs, and I expect the first frog any minute now.

It’s good weather to garden in. Every hour or so I get up from writing to go out and do a few minutes’ worth of work on the second part of the rockery I started building the year before last. Originally this was just a rock-studded, weedy dirt bank with rocks and various ancient garbage embedded in it, and a hedge growing on top. During 2001 I dug that bank out, got rid of the weeds, rearranged many rocks, added some new ones, and put in various alpines and rockery plants. In 2002 we ordered in a fishpond “shell” to replace the cinderblock-and-pool-liner fishpond we’d erected in the walled-up spot where there had once been a gate into the yard.

With great labor (because the substrate ground is rocky) Peter dug out the hole for this shell. (During part of that period I was away on business, and the neighbors started teasing Peter about the hole he was digging, and the fact that they hadn’t seen me for a week or so.) Now it’s become time to deal with the bank on the left side of the fishpond. There’s no digging to do there — it’s just a place where the hedge grows on and in the older stone wall, part of which kept that joyriders’ car out of our house the other night. What I’ve been doing is taking the “spoil” that Peter dug out from the fishpond site and dumping it, bucket by bucket, at the foot of that wall, while adding some big stones to continue the rockery. The plants — heathers, daphne, skimmia, mahonia, various others — are lined up are all ready to plug in, in their appropriate order, as the groundwork is laid for them. Pretty soon this side of the rockery will extend right over to the wire fence that keeps the sheep out on the left side of the house. When that’s done, I’ll finish the rockwork around the front of the pool, making a place for the cats to sit and look at the fish, and in back, a waterfall.

There’s some slight urgency about all of this, since there’s never any telling how long this kind of weather will last. This morning’s map from Digital Atmosphere suggests that the high that’s been sitting over us has now passed on, leaving us for the moment with a benign but not very permanent “pressure trough”.

Better go out and move a few more buckets of dirt, before it all turns to mud…

Philip Morris loses a $10 billion verdict. …But don’t worry, guys; I’m sure the damages will be “light.”

If you gather that I think smoking is suicide — commercially-assisted suicide via an addictive substance — and that cigarette companies deserve every bit of the punishment they’re getting at the moment, then you’d be right. Peter’s dad died relatively young of complications of smoking, an event which still profoundly affects Peter: and in my early nursing days, I had to care for entirely too many people dying of lung cancer who were still resolutely smoking cigarette after cigarette through their tracheotomy stomae. The memory burns.

Time for the Saturday-morning cartoon-time sugar rush. (Boy, what would I have thought when I was eight, if someone had told me I would live to see a day when I could watch cartoons all day long? …Then there’s the flip side, possibly slightly depressing in retrospect: how would I have felt if someone had told me when I was eight that, when I was forty, I would be writing cartoons all day long? [Sometimes, anyway.] …Of course, to the kid I was then, I suspect it would have looked like heaven. I can just hear myself. “Wow, people write those? People pay you to write those? Yay, I can’t wait to grow up!!”)

Where was I? Oh, yeah, the sugar rush. Try Topher’s Breakfast Cereal Character Guide.

…A random thought as I wander through this site. Some of you will probably have seen the “Powerpuff Girls” episode in which the girls decide that their present personae aren’t cool enough. (I particularly love Buttercup’s dark enthusiasm about an antihero who looks suspiciously like Spawn: “He has scabs that never heal!“) …Anyway, Bubbles reinvents herself as a manga-originated, Hello-Kittyish knockoff called “Harmony Bunny”…who, when called upon to function, suddenly comes out with a declaration that sounds very, very, very much like the General Mills-sponsored Underdog’s old one: “When X is in danger, I am not slow: for it’s [in Harmony’s case] hop, hop, hop and away I go!”

Which leaves me wondering who on Genndy Tartakovsky’s staff put him onto this stuff. His bio says he was born in Moscow in 1970 and didn’t come to the US until 1977, at which point Underdog was long gone.

That’s enough mystery for one morning. Time for some cereal.

I was browsing through Major Fun’s weblog a day or so ago and found this (scroll down to the second entry). At the moment it seems like a good thing to share. It makes me think, too, of the connection between the Old English root word saelig, “holy, blessed”, and its descendant-word “silly”, and a sense in the literature of the older dialects of English that crazy or “simple” people were under the protection of God. …”The folly of Heaven is wiser than the wisdom of men…” (Now where does that come from? Sounds like it might be C.S. Lewis: or possibly Lewis quoting someone else.)

In any case, the reference to the Zohar has a Zen ring to it. So often, after issuing a koan, one Zen master or another just breaks up in gales of laughter and wanders away: and often enough, when a student “gets it”, the same result ensues….

“A Wizard Alone” has been chosen for inclusion on the New York Public Library’s “Books for the Teen Age” list for 2003. This is so neat in a number of ways…especially since frequent visits to NYPL’s main 42nd Street branch have always been wound together with the “Young Wizards” books. In particular, most of the heavy research for “Deep Wizardry” was done while working there in the “writer’s room”. (For those of you interested in such things, Alone also made the Locus 2002 Recommended Reading List; and the American Librarians’ Association and the Young Adult Library Services Association put “So You Want To Be A Wizard” on one of the 2003 ALA/YALSA Popular Paperbacks for Young Adults lists [specifically, the “Beyond Harry and Frodo” list]. So all in all, this has been a really good year for this kind of honor.)

It would be fun to be at the NYPL awards ceremony — I’ve never yet been at a ceremony where I’ve actually won something — but the event turns out to be, uh, today. 🙂 So somehow I don’t think I’m going to make it. A shame, as many other nice people who I’d like to see (such as Neil Gaiman) will be there. Oh well…maybe some other time.

Meanwhile, as regards matters closer to home: I’ve killed the “testbed blog” at http://secondambit.blogspot.com, as the RSS feed from outofambit.blogspot.com seems to be working just fine now.

According to an e-mail from my editor’s office at Warner, the book has just gone into its third printing.

Which delights me, and the only thing that leaves me bemused is: why, exactly? Better publicity? A better-convinced sales force? Better word of mouth? A better story?

Sunspots?…