Words’ End

From NBC:

Exclusive Heroes Webisodes Coming Soon!

On July 14th, Heroes unleashes its first ever web series, “Going Postal.” The trilogy of online-only videos introduces us to Echo De Mille, a seemingly ordinary mailman with an extraordinary ability.

The three-part series is written and directed by the same creative team behind the award-winning TV show. Part one, “A Nifty Trick,” premieres Monday, July 14th, with new episodes rolling out on subsequent Mondays. Visitors to this year’s Comic Con, will get a sneak peak at the epic conclusion at the Heroes panel on Saturday, July 26th.

Here’s the trailer, if you’d like to see it. As usual these days, the links are to pretty processing-intensive pages.

4:42pm: Molly and I leave a BU parking lot and head out to get her daughter Natalie from daycare, near their house. Normally this is a 25-30-minute drive.

5:20pm: traffic crawling the entire way there, both on Storrow Drive and on I-93. The sky’s been dark on and off for several hours, and thunderstorms were in the forecast, and at this point the clouds are black and boiling. We take opportunities to [photo|video]graph them off the freeway.

5:28pm: we’re on the off-ramp. The skies open up. Truly impressive sheets of water come down.

5:30pm: we’re underneath the big freeway overpass. Whoa, man: we’re at least fifty feet away from the nearest spot under the open sky, and we’re still getting wet from all the rain that’s being blown our way by the wind.

5:35pm: we’re at the daycare. Parked practically right in front of the front doors, and armed with Molly’s hyooge rainbow-colored umbrellas, we still get soaking wet up to our waists in the twenty feet between the car and the building’s front porch.

5:37pm: we open the doors to go outside and the poor child shrieks, terrified of the racket made by the rain and the wind. She’s still wailing when Molly puts her in the car; we make big excited noises about omigods it’s raining SO HARD and isn’t it COOL and we’re all WET and COLD and we should really get home and put on some dry clothing and maybe have tea! And isn’t this fun! Natalie, being a smart human, looks at us sceptically, but we actually mostly mean it. The flooding rain is ridiculous and exhilarating in its suddenness.

5:45pm: we’re at their place. Safely inside, we change into dry clothing – I get to wear her dad’s warm, awesome flannel-lined jeans. Her dad juggles and does other circusy stuff. This is relevant later. There is dinner full of noshing, and leftover beers from a birthday party last weekend. They are cool, and have a warming effect.

7:15pm: Natalie wants me to do bedtime with her. I read her two books, we giggle a lot, I turn out the light, we cuddle and giggle some more, she gets goodnight kisses from me and from mommy, relocates to her big-girl bed, and quietly sings herself to sleep. Bedtime is pretty fun these days, apparently.

8pm: Molly goes off to play Rock Band, as an entire Pixies album (their first?) was released for the game today. That’s why I’m monitor-sitting, you see.

9pm: I’m totally asleep on the couch, with the monitor.

10:15pm: Molly sheepishly wants to know if I’m willing to stay a little longer. I have no idea what time it is, so clearly, the answer is yes. I mumble as much into the phone.

11:25pm: she returns, grinning from ear to ear, the evening a total win. “B and C are waiting outside and can give you a ride, if you like!” Of course I like. B and C are also circus people – aerialist and musician, respectively.

11:30pm: David, whose clothing I’m wearing, returns from his evening’s outing and happily announces that there are circus freaks outside his house! I make a wide-eyed face and ominously declare that they’re waiting for me. Good-byes, a ride, conversation about accordions and a bass and how cool the Pixies album was.

11:45pm: I get home, and receive an offer of whipped parsnips with butter and cream. I swoon, but am not hungry, so this is a useful mental note for later.

11:50pm: I get an irresistible urge to juggle. And do. Must be channeling all them circus freaks.

00:21am: I take echinacea and goldenseal, just in case, to ward off what I think might be a cold. Or maybe it’s just allergies. Or maybe I should be asleep again. Or maybe I should’ve had tea instead of beer.

In conclusion: I love my friends.

Albert Hofmann’s dead. At the age of 102, in good health almost right up until the heart attack at the end. As someone on a mailing list said, he had a good run.

Thank you, Dr. Hoffman, for the wonder and perspective you’ve brought into the world.

“You know what I would do if I were in your place? I’d drink from the milk basin of the Milky Way; I’d swallow comets; I’d lunch on dawn; I’d dine on day and I’d sup on night; I’d invite myself, splendid table-companion that I am, to the banquet of all the glories, and I’d salute God as my host! I’d work up a magnificent hunger, an enormous thirst, and I’d race through the drunken spaces between the spheres singing the fearsome drinking song of eternity.”

This is what Galileo’s spirit told Victor Hugo at a séance, per Hugo himself (source). I suspect we bow to different deities, but this grabbed me by the heartstrings, flinging me out into the blue.

Next project: learn eternity’s drinking song all by myself.

Insomnia is no fun at all. Or, I don’t know – what do you call going to sleep utterly exhausted, then waking up five hours later feeling reasonably rested but knowing that that’s an illusion, and yet staying up because if you go back to sleep then you’ll have to deal with the emotional repercussions of the dreams you’ve been having?

Yeah.

On the brighter side, a few daya ago my housemate found my favorite Russian cartoon, “Hedgehog in the Fog,” with English subtitles so I can share it with you! It has won all kinds of awards since it was released in 1975, including several years ago best piece of animation of all time at a festival in Tokyo. It’s just about ten minutes long.

Sometimes I feel like I’m in a temporal fog. The furthest I can see is a day, maybe. Maybe several hours. Maybe a couple of days. Certainly no long-term clarity (which tends to be an illusion anyhow). I make tea, sit down wih the mug, close my eyes and breathe.

What I like about this small collection of links is that none of them came from News of the Weird. This is all off my feed reader – you know, BBC, Wired, ScienceBlogs, personal blogs, that sort of thing. On to the articles of interest:

If your surgeon is a videogaming geek and has played around with a Wii, you may be in luck! Chances are, her skills have improved.

I love Norway: “A millionaire real-estate magnate and art dealer from Setesdal in southern Norway has been fined NOK 425,000 (USD 85,000) for drunk driving, and been further required to chop wood for 30 days.”

Hey, baby, want to see my spy gear?

And on a slightly more serious note, here’s a well-written article on the politics of legal and illegal drugs. Even if the author get just a tad too earnest, I am thankful for publications like SFGate, which run these stories from time to time to remind us that the war on drugs has nothing to do with science.

I grew up a three-hour train ride from Odessa, a Urkainian resort town on the Black Sea famous for its Jewish population and the denizens’ sense of humor. (Some of the best Soviet stand-up comedians…. well, sorta stand-up comedians… came from there.) My family had friends there, and we went there several times when I was growing up.

The most memorable of those trips was one when I got a kidney infection from swimming in the sea, with its notoriously dubious and changing pollution levels. I do not recommend the experience to anyone; nevertheless, I remember Odessa fondly.

Now, check out these photos from 31 December. Pretty, if stark; but the color of the water! Gah!

An hour ago I woke up from a nightmare in which we (whoever “we” is) were on a road trip somewhere in a camper, stopped for a picnic in a park, let the cats out, and Aki got mauled by a bear.

But wait, it gets better! The bear, an adolescent cub really, took him in both its front paws and twisted him a bit — something I doubt a bear would be able to do. I remember thinking that there were no sickening breaking sounds, and that this meant there was hope. I somehow wrested him from the bear, and he was lying in my arms belly up, eyes wide like Puss in Boots’, staring at me. I was asking some dog-walking jogger ladies where the nearest animal hospital was, feeling very vivid shock, when I woke up to Aki on my belly, purring sleepily as he had been doing for hours.

He never lies on my belly for hours; I’m usually too tossy-turny. But he did, and I was still enough for his highness, and I think this was my first nightmare ever about him.

I’m glad that nightmares aren’t a regular occurrence, because man, they sure are intense when they happen.

Of course, now I want to go on a road trip with the cats. But the idea of a gas-guzzling camper has always bothered me, and who knows how they’d do in a Honda Fit?

These wishes from Neil Gaiman’s journal have been going around:

May your coming year be filled with magic and dreams and good madness. I hope you read some fine books and kiss someone who thinks you’re wonderful, and don’t forget to make some art — write or draw or build or sing or live as only you can. And I hope, somewhere in the next year, you surprise yourself.

All of that would be nice. So far, I’ve surprised myself.

Actually, new species discovered deep underwater. Gorgeous video set to good music, just under five minutes long.

There is so much we still don’t know about the life with which we share the planet.

(The title of this post refers to Captain Low-Rez and the Pixel of Destiny (SWF). If you haven’t seen it, I highly recommend it. Watch the entire thing, especially if you have designed a website lately.)