Month: October 2006

Now, I’m not just saying this because my wimpy little poem is in there, and if you read two posts back, you know I’d be honest if I didn’t like the ‘zine. But–this magazine was VERY WELL-DONE. Wonderfully so! First of all, Fred Coppersmith has a wicked sense of humor. If you get the ‘zine, be sure and read the little things you usually skim past, like the little box on the cover page with all the publication info in it. He slips little one-liners in there that are really funny. Make sure you check out the horoscope on page 42, too. I actually laughed audibly once. I’m very, very impressed…after the prior unfortunate experience with the unnamed “magazine”, my faith in the small press is soundly restored. I’m proud that my work appears in this little ‘zine. Card stock cover, lots of artwork, crisp black and white photos all over the place, the humor sprinkled in odd places, great use of space, great mix of fiction and poetry and an essay or two, fastidious editing and attention to detail. The fonts look fantastic. I haven’t found a typo yet. And there’s Bruce Boston, Kristine Ong Muslim, and Aurelio Rico Lopez–people I’ve read before. Kaleidotrope is a very professional-looking magazine, and it’s just the first issue…I see a fine future for Fred Coppersmith…I hope he continues to publish this magazine for a long time to come!

My thanks to John for the kind words, and again to all my contributors, without whom this issue wouldn’t have been possible.

How many dark or scary movie titles can you find hidden in this Renaissance-style painting?

And the incredibly creepy sound of Alvin and the Chipmunks slowed down.

I’m just saying.

And yes, I realize there are some things software cannot do, or cannot be made to do easily, and that often programs are designed with different functions and/or users in mind, functions and users which may not share the same needs, and therefore not everything can be shoehorned into one single package. However, when a piece of software fails fairly consistently in the performance of certain necessary tasks, when it actually makes other tasks more difficult, is itself difficult to learn and a little ugly to boot, isn’t it maybe time to re-evaluate the entire package and find a better solution?

Again, I’m just saying. This was born out of using a very specific software package at work this afternoon and learning about the added litany of steps that would be necessary because the software could do a but couldn’t do b, and so on.

• Artist Draws ‘Clean’ Graffiti from Dirty Walls:
  

  A British street artist known as Moose creates graffiti by cleaning dirt from sidewalks and tunnels — sometimes for money when the images are used as advertising. But some authorities call it vandalism.

• Presidential Doodles:
  

  Perhaps this is why doodles are so compelling. If they are significant, it is not because they are great art or the products of great men. It is because they are ordinary, and historians have fought to preserve open-access laws so that presidential doodles can be so ordinary. Anyone can view them—they belong to us. And when we view them, we see that they resemble our own words and our own idle lines. The drawing or scrawled comment on a yellow pad is like an ancient cave painting: a familiar image, but from an unimaginable distance of time and situation. [via]

• A step-by-step behind-the-scenes look at how the comic For Better or For Worse is created. [via] Revealing the creation process behind something like Garfield, on the other hand, would probably be difficult. Those big factories are usually off-limits, and Satan is notoriously camera-shy.

• Dolphins — not as smart as advertised? [via]
• Sleeping pill Ambien shown to awaken persistent vegetative state victims [via]
• “At long last researchers have teleported the information stored in a beam of light into a cloud of atoms…” [via]
• A possible link between child autism and television viewing [via]
• Human species ‘may split in two’:
  

  Humanity may split into two sub-species in 100,000 years’ time as predicted by HG Wells, an expert has said.

  Evolutionary theorist Oliver Curry of the London School of Economics expects a genetic upper class and a dim-witted underclass to emerge. [via]

• Earth’s second moon:
  

  Asteroid 2003 YN107 is looping around our planet once a year.

  Measuring only 20 meters across, the asteroid is too small to see with the unaided eye—but it is there.

  This news, believe it or not, is seven years old.

  “2003 YN107 arrived in 1999,” says Paul Chodas of NASA’s Near Earth Object Program at JPL, “and it’s been corkscrewing around Earth ever since.” Because the asteroid is so small and poses no threat, it has attracted little public attention. But Chodas and other experts have been monitoring it. “It’s a very curious object,” he says. [via]