Here are 6 developments of interest to fans:
(1) Steampunk now is recognized in a museum exhibit at Oxford:
The Museum of the History of Science is located at Oxford University in the original Ashmolean Building. This building housed the oldest museum in the western world. It was eminently appropriate that Steampunk would have its first, bona fide museum premier at this prestigious location.
Following the roster of artists are photos of their spectacular devices.
(2) Sean Kenney played the chair-bound Captain Pike during Spock’s court-martial in “The Menagerie”?
Kenney said he wondered what he had gotten himself into as he sat for hours in a futuristic wheelchair in an 80-degree room. He was wearing heavy makeup, his hair was bleached until it started to fall out, and he had surgical tape on his eyes and mouth. He ate through a straw for eight days and lost almost 13 pounds.
How naïve of me to assume it still was Jeffrey Hunter under all that makeup!
(3) The lovely and talented Diana Glyer explains the passive voice in “This Blog Was Posted By Me”.
(4) Philip Munz of Carleton University and his colleagues at the University of Ottawa wrote a scientific paper quantifying various properties of zombie epidemics:
Standard modeling techniques for disease outbreaks weren’t quite sufficient, the authors found. “The key difference between the models presented here and other models of infectious disease,” they wrote, “is that the dead can come back to life.”
No kidding. (Well, they actually are kidding. It’s just a very dry wit.)
(5) Here’s praise for the Fahrenheit 451 graphic novel from the Los Angeles Times.
(6) If you were told the first five titles on the list of 10 most-pirated ebooks, could you guess any of the others on the list?
While I’m not sure exactly how the information was compiled, the top-ten list of most pirated ebooks in 2009 (as formulated by Freakbits and reported on by GalleyCat) offers an interesting snapshot of what’s on the minds of pirates. Just look at the top five: 1. Kamasutra 2. Adobe Photoshop Secrets; 3. The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Amazing Sex; 4. The Lost Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci; 5. Solar House – A Guide for the Solar Designer.
[The links included in this post come via James Hay,David Klaus, John King Tarpinian,and Gary Farber.]
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re item 2, I’m astonished for the opposite reason than you were. I never thought it was Jeffrey Hunter under the makeup; indeed, I assumed that the reason Pike was mute and paralyzed at all was that Hunter wasn’t available to play him. (Writing TV plots around the availability, or lack of it, of returning guest actors is a common occurrence.)
Instead, because Pike was so utterly motionless (except for those blinking lights), I always assumed he was a wax dummy and that there was no human being playing him at all.
“This blog was posted by me.”
I prefer to refer to individual blog posts as “blog posts,” and to blogs as a whole as “blogs,” myself, rather than call both blog and post a “blog,” as many do, but naturally there aren’t many authoritative prescriptivists on such usage.
I think it’s clearer, however, to make the distinction. I am active, not passive, in opining so.