Extended oddments
Some more items, but these ones are categorized in groups.
Shakespeare:
- Pericles, Prince of Tired Plots
- Lyrics to Adam McNaughton's song "Oor Hamlet," a.k.a. "The Three-Minute Hamlet"; apparently it's meant to be sung in a thick Scottish accent, so another site provides more Scottish lyrics.
I read Niven's story "Chicxulub" in a recent issue of Asimov's, and wasn't sure what the title meant, so I looked it up. Turns out in real life it's the location of the asteroid impact believed (at least by some) to have caused the mass extinction at the K/T boundary (end of Cretaceous period, beginning of Tertiary), 65 million years ago. Also turns out there's some amazing stuff about it online:
- Astronomy Picture of the Day for 26 February 2000 shows gravity and magnetic field data for the region. If you turn it upside down, it looks a little like a C-in-circle character, leading me to wonder if perhaps someone was just putting a Copyright stamp on the Earth, to prevent piracy.
- The NASA/UA Space Imagery Center has web pages at the U. Arizona Lunar and Planetary Laboratory with information about Chicxulub.
- That whole site is worth looking at, but particularly astonishing are the pages on the regional effects ("Because part of the crater was in a shallow sea, giant tsunamis radiated across the Gulf of Mexico. . . . If the impact had occurred in a deep ocean basin, these waves might have been 4 to 5 km high and affected coastlines as far away as 10,000 km. Because the Chicxulub impact occurred in relatively shallow water, approximately 100 m deep, the waves were probably not nearly as large. One estimate suggests waves that hit the Texas coast were 'only' 50 to 100 m high.") and global effects. ("Current estimates suggest that the dust made it too dark to see [worldwide] for 1 to 6 months and too dark for photosynthesis for 2 months to 1 year. . . ." And then there were the greenhouse gases, the acid rain, the ozone layer damage, the massive forest fires, etc.)
A couple of movies of note:
- Franz Kafka's It's a Wonderful Life, a 24-minute film written and directed by Peter (Local Hero, Lairrrr of the White Wyrrrrrm, Dangerous Liaisons, Neverwhere) Capaldi, starring Richard E. "Withnail" Grant (better known lately as the 10th Doctor).
- Escape from It's a Wonderful Life, a 1996 TV movie, apparently a redubbed and re-edited version of the original: "George Bailey is sick of doing the Wonderful Life film and wants to star in action films. . . ."
You may be familiar with the idea of face-blindness/prosopagnosia. I sometimes think that I may have a very very minor form of it, but more likely I'm just not very observant. Anyway, I find it fascinating.
- Bill Choisser's Face Blind! site, an online book on the subject (from a gay male point of view) originally published in 1997, with expansions and addenda since then.
- Cecilia Burman's face-blindness site features a really excellent page that demonstrates what it's like to be face-blind by introducing you to some stones.
- Harvard has a Prosopagnosia Research Center. It includes a page on other recognition impairments, some of which I have a vague idea were described in "Liking What You See: A Documentary" or maybe in "Congenital Agenesis of Gender Ideation."
