This “sample page” appears on Golden Age Comics blog, and makes me wonder if the wolfbane is blooming yet!    The artist, Howard Norstrand, was a prolific inker of horror comics in the 50s.  Thanks, Mr. Door Tree!

Given the opportunity, I just couldn’t resist sending a little micro-chipped token of my affection to my favorite sub-miniaturized phantasm on Mars.  Aloha,  Perky Pat!  How’s the water at Lake Shalbatana?  Thanks to NASA, you too can send a Can-D gram to the red planet!   Don’t be Chew-Z, sign up today!

http://mars9.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/participate/sendyourname/index.cfm

It is hard for me to imagine, but I am more than forty years old, indeed very close to fifty years!   I know, dear reader, you will be startled to hear such a thing, since all you encounter on my blog are absurdities, and many seemingly juvenile links to old comic books and science fiction artists.   But there is reason encoded behind the screen of disconnected trivia that you find here.   In fact, I am arranging these posts into a secret code; nor would it especially please me to know that you have figured it out…the news is not pretty! These are clues, do with them what you will.   But mind you, time and decades are flashing past like lightning!   Like a cinder snapping out of a burning log in the fireplace, ride this moment like a rocket…

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It’s been raining for a few days here, and I noticed some strange fungus growing on a stump along the Minuteman Bike Path.   Little did I know that two days later it would be erupting into a giant orange patch of alien shrooms!   Yikes.   I don’t remember seeing stuff like this before…

June 10th

June 11th

June 12th

At first, the survey of political systems in Mack Reynolds‘ interstellar spy novel, Planetary Agent X, seems quite whimisical and superficial.  There are planets full of anarchists, and planets crawling with feudalism, nihilism, socialism, and what have you.   There are some playful jabs at democracy, individualism, and even the tyranny of the uninformed voters (a la John Stuart Mill).  The tone is not as playful as Ron Goulart, but definitely not very serious either.   So it came as a pleasant surprise when the protagonist, Ronny Bronston, is given a sarcastic lecture by his handler, the mysterious Tog Lee Chang Chu, on the disasters brought about by “industrial feudalism.”   How strangely familiar!

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Reading the MOMA Book on Rodchenko, I was struck by Rodchenko’s diary entry about the early aviator Aleksandr Vasiliev.  What must a barnstorming demonstration have been like at Kazan in the year 1912?   At a time when the world was being transformed by new technology, here was a living vision of speed, of man’s ascent to the skies, of futurism come knocking at the skulls of old consciousness, and the dawning of a new age of man.    According to Rodchenko, on Sunday, June 3rd, 1912:

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This beautiful illustration for the cover of Daughter of IS (1978), by Mikal D. Huber, is a wonderful example of the science fiction art of Carlos Ochagavia.  The background is rendered in a light, airy tone that fades away, with major features that become transparent (in this case, a moon) .  The main figure is also somewhat soft — a woman rising up in cloud — while the most tangible figure in the painting (a hand on fire!) is disembodied.   In the middle distance are Ochagavia’s characteristic space-vehicles, usually saucers standing on chunky legs, and arcing behind the scene is a jet that leaves a visible trail.   The image, as a whole, is strangely ethereal; is it a realistic painting, softened at the edges?  Or a surrealistic painting, with a few concrete objects for our gaze to anchor upon?   Ochagavia tantalizes us to find out…but often as not, the books being illustrated hold few clues as to what the artist was thinking.

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What a fitting discovery while badgering through the mountain of cheap book carts at Brattle Book Shop, when I happened across a fine copy of Jorrock’s Jaunts and Jollities.  Originally published in 1838, this farcical book on fox-hunting and gad-about adventures, was written by Robert S. Surtees, who is an amusing stylist, to say the least.  The overall tone of the book is very reminiscent of its predecessor picaresques, such as Humphrey Clinker, and it’s followers, for example Jerome’s Three Men On a Bummel… in which a cast of characters go off on a jaunt that allows the author to skewer them and the societies they are escaping from or escaping into.

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The topic of Skinner’s rural-urban continuum came up in a staff meeting today, where my colleague Sumeeta referred us to a recent column by Steven Strogatz in the NYTimes.   The idea is along the lines of Christaller’s central place theory, in which the demand for goods and services drives the spatial distribution of human settlements.   In the article, Strogatz draws a parallel between Zipf’s law as it has been used to show the relative size in cities, and the ways in which biological organisms develop into holistic systems.    There is a self-determining economy of scale that occurs, whether in the exfoliation of leaves on a tree, the distribution of tissues in a human body, or the amalgamated infrastructure of a modern metropolis.   It turns out that the efficiencies gained by hiving together are a natural driver which brings all us living beings – kicking and screaming in defiance, to be sure! — together into super-organisms.   So we are basically just cellular automata, after all, which is sure to make Rudy Rucker happy.

“Another drink…  I’m already sloshed!” While searching for old Rarotonga comics with Antonio Gutiérrez art, I happened across this strange gem from 1951, which apparently is the first appearance of Rarotonga.   I’m sure there must be other examples, but so far I can only find a single cover of Rarotonga from the early series.

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By far the most downloaded images from Yunchtime are the astronaut and cosmonaut photos from the 1960 edition of Das Bildbuch der Weltraum Fahrt that I picked up in Vienna.  So I thought I should scan a few more.   This series features the extreme temperature tests conducted on U.S. spacesuits during the 1950s, and an astronaut getting the feel for handling the controls from his rocket seat.   The rubber gloves don’t look especially good for handling those knobs and switches, and the fact that the astronaut is stretched out like Plastic Man just to reach the controls shows you the state of ergonomics in those days.   The greatest thing about the rocket seat photo are the pilot’s lace-up shiny leather shoes.  DOH!  Mission Control, do you read?  I left my space boots in the locker at Canaveral, over!

If you’re into this sort of thing, check out our friends at SpaceFacts.   And some miscellaneous galleries:  Appollo Mission Photos,  NASA images, Today in Space History.

The wonderful Muzafar Bhaid is riding his bicycle for peace across Pakistan!  From the highest mountains of the world in Hunza region, the intrepid Muzafar is taking annual stages on his way to Islamabad.  Is this fellow wonderfully awesome, or what?

As our government sends in a fascist whacko to launch commando raids, Muzafar is biking along the steepest grades and the dustiest highways of the world…   My hat is off to you, Muzafar, brother!   Ride on all peace-loving people, we will get there someday.

Check out the two stages of Mazafar’s route so far:   last year from Gojal (shown on map as Ghulmit) to Gilghit,  then this year from Gilgit to Abbotabad.   Amazing!

When I am able to blank out the last thirty five years, during which I have continuously despised and fought against the automobile (even when I owned one myself…yes, I’m talking about that rattling death-trap of a 1967 Ford Falcon!), when I can forget all that, it does my heart good to hear people talking about Ecocities.   Richard Register has a decent column in Foreign Policy in Focus this week, advocating for more sustainable cities built around better transit systems and less automobile traffic.  His points are well taken and straightforward, building upon his books on the subject (from 2001 and 2006):

• Switch to a pedestrian and transit-oriented infrastructure, built around compact centers designed for pedestrians and transit;
• Roll back sprawl development while vigorously restoring nature and agriculture;
• Integrate renewable energy systems while using non-toxic materials and technologies and promoting recycling.

Which he follows immediately by pointing out the major obstacles to achieving this dream:

A major difficulty in moving toward ecocities is that cars have influenced urban design for 100 years. Many of us caught in this infrastructure find it extremely difficult to get around in anything but the car. The distances are just too great for bicycles, the densities just too low to allow efficient, affordable transit.

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There is nothing like a platter of hot takoyaki octopus balls, one of the most beloved snack foods in Japan.  Something about the half-cooked, gooey, pancake-like sphere, slightly browned on the outside, with little rubbery bits of chewy octopus tentacles inside, that simply drives Japanese people crazy with delight!  These snacks are not always served in splendidly decked out shops like the Red Devil Takoyaki House of Namba, Osaka.  Typically they are vended from funky little hot dog carts found alongside bus stations, baseball stadiums, or tourist spots.  A little paper dish of those fresh grilled octopus balls, dribbled with sticky brown sauce (with a soya tang), is almost irresistible in the land of the Rising Sun…

How great to know that you can now enjoy this sensation anywhere — well almost anywhere — thanks to the Frito Lay corporation, who have packaged up a neat ersatz version.  The Frito Lay takoyaki tei (”grilled octopus stand”) boasts of a super thick, delicious “sauce,” depicted as flowing in an airborne swirl over the head of a prototypical uber-cute pink octopus cartoon.   For some reason that floating swirl of sauce — frozen in mid-air — recalls the image of the girl being launched into freeze time as she crashes her scooter in Kamikaze Girls.

The fact that the actual product is some kind of genetic half-breed of a Funyon and a Shrimp Chip, laced with sparkling flecks of MSG and aonori powder, and is completely dry seems not to bother the marketing folks one bit.  Indeed, they know perfectly well that anyone crunching a mouthful of these cheese-puff style octopus balls will succumb to an instant case of cottonmouth so intense that they will scramble wildly for the nearest bottle of beer or sparkling water.

Even so, it was a super special treat to try a pack of these, graciously given to us by our friend Kumi, who had them airlifted in all the way from Tokyo!   Thanks, Kumi, fun munchies!

While randomly grazing the sweet grass of the intertubes, and reading about such things as the Comic Salon Erlangen and looking at Andy Konky Kru’s photos of the 2006 Salon, I stumbled across Skip Williamson’s recent post on the history of Underground Comics.  Not only did this remind me of my first major comic book convention (at the Playboy Towers in Chicago) where I met Skip Williamson, but also of Skip’s terrific “Class War Comix,” published about five years later in Snappy Sammy Smoot (1979).   In addition to the classic newstand headline: Agnew Breaks Wind, Thousands Die! this comic featured a paranoid schizophrenic Richard Nixon being replaced as President by an even more freaked out long-haired capitalist, Amphetamine Arnie.

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There is something strangely futuristic about the fashions of the 2009 Estetika and Wellness Fair, held this week in Bucharest, Romania.  A set of photos is floating around, depicting the weird loops and cascades of hair on display during the stylist contest.  Reuters blog snarks “Very 17th Century Brothel, Honey!” but it reminds me more of an SFnal flashback to the 70s and 80s.