Ray Bradbury Has Died at 91

It’s a sad day for writing and for science fiction. Legendary and iconic author Ray Bradbury has died at the age of 91. We should count ourselves fortunate that we had him for so many years, firing the imaginations of children and adults worldwide. I will never forget reading his ‘Martian Chronicles,’ ‘Fahrenheit 451,’ and ‘The Illustrated Man.’ I recently re-read 451 after many decades and thoroughly enjoyed it to the same extent that I had as a teenager. He was one of those writers more interested in the life of the imagination than in hard-core science fiction. He wrote not about the spaceship, but more about how one thought about a spaceship.
 
He provided much material for the movies, including the peculiar and not entirely successful Francois Truffaut adaptation of ‘Fahrenheit 451.’ He will be sorely missed and probably never equaled.
 
Here is a 1963 television documentary about Bradbury produced by David L. Wolper. It contains a film version of one of his short stories called ‘Dial Double Zero.’
 
Video found via Paul Gallagher at Dangerous Minds.
 
 

Live Coverage of Venus Crossing Sun

It will not happen again until 2117! So you better watch it now! Starting at 3:00 pm PST Venus will cross in front of the sun and the whole thing will last about seven hours. You can’t look at the sun. So don’t do that. But you can put a little hole in a piece of paper and let the sun shine through that onto a second piece of paper so that an image is cast. As for the video feed above, it is from the Keck Observatory.

 

Fairytale: Photographs by Miwa Yanagi

 
Japanese artist Miwa Yanagi makes these beautiful staged shots based on Japanese tales, the Brothers Grimm, and stories by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The photos are part of her ‘Fairytale’ series. She has girls play the various roles and seems to shoot many of the scenes inside a room with big windows that she transforms into mysterious and suggestive environments. Her photography has the bold dramatic effect of old Hollywood black and white films.
 
 

Glass Letter Boxes at Lunch by a Parking Lot in Los Angeles

 
I hated Steve Jobs. Now that he’s dead I like him better. Looked snotty to me, but he came up with some nice things. I’m using an iPad right now, trying to master the stiff-finger jabbing action in my lap with the thing leaning in front of a Greek salad on a greasy streaked patio tabletop out of the sun in a breeze that keeps flipping my napkins over and threatening to send them back toward the door from which my food came – delivered to a number on a stick. The number’s gone now. She must have taken it when she placed my trays in front of me. So far, the finger-jabbing is workable if not entirely productive. My problems with Steve Jobs notwithstanding, I dig this pad and carry it everywhere, even when I should know that it makes me look like – what do you call them – a goddamn geek. But I have too much face-breaker in me to ever be mistaken for a geek with an iPad. I annoy geeks because they sense the lout underneath the programmer.
 
So anyway or anywho as all the wannabe smarties like to say – if someone says anywho to you, just casually punch their front teeth out, understand? Even if it’s me. The use of the word indicates a fractured personality who wants to present itself as innocuous. Anyhow, there’s a thing about iPads and rear-facing cameras, filters, touch screens, Wifi connections, and trying to capture the moment or the under-moment of a place as surface-oriented and deeply mysterious as Los Angeles. You can’t let snobbery and distaste for a personality prevent you from diving into what you identify as bullshit for a nice swim in the same dirty water everyone else is so interested in. Sometimes, for the artist, immersion is essential. You can’t stand on the shoreline watching the swimmers, critiquing their bathing suits and lovely fat rolls. You’ve got to go in and swim around between their legs like a lingering shark looking for easy meat. You can still be a little separated as far as viewpoint, but you must try the water. That’s my theory behind the photo of the parking lot. It was taken on the move from parking spot to Panera Bread, then filtered up, framed and filtered again while trying to control the napkin traffic across my lunch. It’s a little like painting really. Despite the stupidity of the millions of photos uploaded to the hellish quagmire known as Instagram, the digital photo/filter combo just might be vastly superior to the instamatic toy point and shoots that it so cleverly imitates. You know, art’s a funny thing. It crops up in odd places. There’s that photographer – can’t remember his name now – maybe it was William Eggleston… don’t know… but any… who? Anyway, back in the seventies when galleries and museums – if there’s a difference – were all showing black and white photos as art… well this guy throws a bunch of color snapshots into a suitcase, travels to New York, walks into the Museum of Modern Art and demands a showing. He becomes one of the great photo artists of the 20th century and sets off the realization that color photographs can be shown as art. Everyone at the time of course really knew that, but they didn’t act as if they knew it. There’s a huge step in between.

SpaceX Dragon Capsule Docks with International Space Station

The Dragon capsule from SpaceX has become the first privately operated spaceship to dock with the International Space Station. Early this morning astronauts aboard the ISS used the station’s robotic grappling arm to snag the capsule after its successful close approach. The arm then pulled the capsule in to berth with station’s Harmony module. This is another incredible achievement in space and should begin a new era of private space travel and support for the ISS.

You can watch video of the robotic arm capture.