250 Words on Space Time Capsules

[I try to start my day writing 250 words on anything. I’ll post one every Tuesday until I run out of good ones.]

Following up my recent piece on time capsules, the most audacious time capsules ever are those attached to four spacecraft that have left our Solar System and are headed to the stars.

The mission of Pioneer 10 and 11, and Voyager 1 and 2, was to explore the outer planets. Launched in the 1970s, each was a historic triumph. Until they flew past Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, our only views of those distant worlds were blurry photos through Earth-bound telescopes. 

Astronomer Carl Sagan convinced NASA to put messages in those far-flung bottles. Each Pioneer has a gold-coated plaque illustrating where the spacecraft came from and what humans look like. The Voyagers carry a gold-plated record (and stylus!) which, if aliens figure out how to use it, will play images and sounds from Earth.

Each could soar for billions of years, surely long after humanity and perhaps Earth itself are gone, before anyone recovers them—assuming there’s anyone out there at all. Our civilization’s last artifacts. 

I love and admire the effort, but I might have taken a different approach.

Keeping in mind that weight on a spacecraft is at a premium, I’d have sent two specimens: a fruit fly and a sesame seed, perfectly preserved in the frozen vacuum of space. Their chemical composition, cellular structure, genes and DNA would tell aliens nearly everything about life on Earth, because we are certainly more closely related to fruit flies and sesame seeds than we are to whatever would find them. 

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The East Wing

The colonnade at right attached the East Wing to the main White House structure, center. The grass and bushes at left were part of the Jacqueline Kennedy Garden, now also gone.

Karen and I vacationed in Washington, DC in March 2024. She had been there before but I never had, and I joked that I'd better see it before MAGA Republicans tore it all down. 

I didn't mean it literally.

One morning we toured the White House, which was a big deal for me. It's a sacred civic space, like a secular church or museum. The People's House. Tourists entered through the East Wing Visitors' Center, which isn't there anymore. 

A sign inside the colonnade explained what you were looking at through the windows.

Karen and other visitors inside the colonnade leading to the White House. This was a visitor's introduction to the history of the place, setting the context for the more structured self-guided tour to follow.

I took a few photos; wish I'd taken more, but at the time I had no inkling it would all be gone a year and a half later, illegally bulldozed to satisfy a stupid president's petty ego. Trump has committed worse crimes, but this one hurts. 

250 Words on Old-Time Radio

[I try to start my day writing 250 words on anything. I’ll post one every Tuesday until I run out of good ones.]

I spent most of my teenage years immersed in a radical outsider artform: AM radio. 

Every weeknight from 8 to 11 p.m., San Francisco station KSFO played one hour of radio dramas, one hour of vintage comedy shows, and one hour of tracks from comedy albums. The Shadow, Suspense, Dragnet; Fred Allen, Jack Benny, Burns and Allen; Tom Lehrer, Firesign Theater, Bob Newhart.

My gosh, it was wonderful! 

And my gosh, what a nerd I was.

In addition to being tremendously entertaining, the programs gave me great respect for creative artists of the past. Radio performers were toying with their medium—breaking the fourth wall, directly addressing the audience, parodying commercials and newscasts, doing callbacks that rewarded long-time listeners who paid close attention—in very clever ways. The “theater of imagination” conjured more comedy and terror than film could ever depict. 

In my field of comics, too many cartoonists don’t know their own medium’s history. Creators such as Winsor McCay, Cliff Sterrett, and George Herriman were doing work a century ago that would be heralded as graphic and storytelling genius if it were published as new today. It holds up. They still have much to teach anyone willing to learn.

“Everything old is new again.”

Disc jockey John Gilliland hosted KSFO’s programs and did a lovely job cultivating a community of listeners in the night. We were all out there, in our bedrooms or cars or with a transistor radio earpiece in our ear, thrilling and laughing, alone but together. 

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Juanita's Recipe

Anyone need cookies for 600?

My late mother-in-law, Juanita, spent her career as a lunch lady for a middle school (lunch ladies don't have to be ladies, but that's what she called her job and the alliteration is too good to pass up). Yesterday my wife, Karen, and her sister, Cathy, unpacked their mom's recipe notebook, which Cathy saved from being trashed. 

I love this recipe for three reasons: first is the absurdity of scale, which starts with 7.5 pounds of butter and 30 eggs, and only escalates. Second is that it is written in her hand and stained with the residue of years of honest cooking. Third is that it hearkens to a time when school cafeterias actually cooked for students instead of reheating prepackaged glop and nuggets. 

Anyway, if you want to make 600 oatmeal cookies and have two gallons of oatmeal on hand, please enjoy, courtesy of Juanita.

Juanita!

Grandmother with my girls, quite a while ago.

No Kings 2025

Gathered in the grass of Doyle Park at the end of the route.

Made a little good trouble today. Karen, our daughters, our niece Claire and I marched a couple of miles in Santa Rosa, Calif. with a lot of other people in support of freedom, democracy, rule of law, American ideals, and basic human decency. 

There were two marches that began in different places and then converged to continue as one toward a large park. Crowd size is impossible to estimate when you're in it, but I've been in local demonstrations that had 5000 to 6000 and this felt larger. Indivisible Sonoma County, which helped organize the event, claims 10,000. All I know is that we overheard stunned local cops saying that it was WAY more people than they expected.

Shark and Penguin showed up. I complimented the Penguin because whoever was in there could only walk in a very small shuffle and kept it up for a couple of miles.

I took this photo of our march as we rounded a corner. This march was soon joined by another one just about as large.

Participants were in great spirits, volunteers in yellow vests kept everything orderly, cops were smiling and managed traffic in our favor. We ran into many friends, whom I won't name in case they'd rather I didn't.

Speaking of which: I've seen advice online and in print about not letting the authorities identify you at events like this. Wear a mask, don't carry your phone, don't drive your car, don't post on social media. I disagree completely. 

I want them to know who I am. Read my posts, put me on the enemies list. I'd be proud.  Any time wasted on a white, male, middle-class, squeaky-clean citizen means less time for hassling someone who isn’t all those things.

A video that captures some, but not all, of the extent of our march. That's a lot of good people.

EDITED TO ADD some aerial photos taken by our local Indivisible group. My family is down there somewhere!

250 Words on Time Capsules

[I try to start my day writing 250 words on anything. I’ll post one every Tuesday until I run out of good ones.]

Somewhere in a backyard in Rapid City, South Dakota is a jelly jar I buried when I was 7 years old. I don’t remember what’s in it, but I bet I could put a shovel in the ground within a foot of it.

I love time capsules. There’s something deeply romantic about leaving a message to the future. A note in a bottle. A nibble of immortality, the hope that anyone will care. “We were here, this was important to us.” 

In reality, most time capsules turn out to be disappointments. Those that haven’t been destroyed by water leaks are filled with the most boring antiques imaginable. Coins, proclamations, minutes from a board meeting. Never a singing frog. You could find half the artifacts in better condition at a flea market.

Two famous ones are the Westinghouse Time Capsule, entombed during the 1939 World’s Fair to be opened in the year 6939, and the Crypt of Civilization, sealed inside a former swimming pool at Oglethorpe University in 1940, to be opened in 8113. Both are worth a Web search. I appreciate their creators’ cockeyed optimism. 

Hidden in my rebuilt house, inaccessible but protected from the elements, is a signed copy of A Fire Story with a little note and drawing. I like to imagine that whoever finds it, whenever they find it, will take the time to read it and reflect on the life and times of the guy who stashed it. I was here. This was important to me.

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Unhappy Anniversary

The last photo we took of the wall of flame coming over the hills toward us as we evacuated. 

Tonight is a grim anniversary for my family and neighbors: eight years ago (!) in the middle of the night, the Tubbs Fire destroyed about 5600 structures, including ours. It also killed 22 people, and was only one of more than a dozen fires that broke out all over northern California during a freakishly intense and dry easterly wind.

My graphic novel, A Fire Story, says about all I have to say about it. I would only add that, at the time, I thought our fire was one of those once-a-century random disasters that happens sometimes. In the years since, as I've watched the western half of North America erupt into flames and our record of "Most Destructive Wildfire in California History" has been eclipsed again and again and again, I've realized that we were victims of climate change, and my book is an early entry into a growing body of work on what living in a climate-changed world is like. 

The street into my neighborhood. This is the exact spot I wrote about in the book, where I realized the scope of what had happened and uttered several "fucks."

Sometimes it seems like a lifetime ago; other times, like yesterday. Karen and I still look at each other blankly, trying to figure out if we had some item--a bowl, a tool, a piece of clothing--before or after the fire. Random stimuli raise the hairs on the backs of our necks. It changes you forever, I think. Or at least for eight years plus.

It's cool and cloudy in northern California tonight. We expect a little rain tomorrow. There is nothing we appreciate more than rain in early October. 

Our home shortly after sunrise the next morning.

Captain LOL

My pal Craig Yoe offered to send me a copy of his new kids book, Captain LOL + Rubber Chicken: Har Har!, if I'd consider mentioning it on social media. I replied with two caveats: I have scant social media influence (quality over quantity!), and I'd only say nice things if I meant them.

Luckily, it's easy to say nice things because Captain LOL is great fun and delightfully drawn. Superficially, it's a collection of dad jokes, dumb riddles and corny puns, with a little green fart cloud emitting from Captain LOL's tights on nearly every page. If that's all it was, I don't know if I could recommend it (although fart jokes are always funny).

 
But on top of that foundation, Craig has layered every page with richly detailed absurdity and metatextual silliness. I particularly enjoyed Easter eggs that the 7- to 10-year-olds the book is aimed at would never get but that someone who knows what comics were like in 1968 would love. Every page has a lot going on. It's dense in a way that would make it fun to read more than once.

My favorite feature is a little die-cut hole, passing entirely through the book, that gives every page its own hole-based gag. I know enough about publishing to know that punching that hole wasn't cheap, and a lesser writer or publisher wouldn't have bothered. It was worth it.

Craig is a writer, cartoonist, and publisher whose backlist shows a keen interest in comics history. He was the long-time creative director for the Muppets, after which he started his own company, Yoe Studio, with clients like Kellogg's, Disney, Cartoon Network and Nickelodeon. As a publisher, he's put out dozens of books reprinting obscure comics that deserved new attention. And, in my experience, he's a good person who approaches comics with deep knowledge, respect and love. 

I had fun with Captain LOL. Depending on your kid's affinity for Dad jokes and fart gags, they may, too. 

250 Words on Less is More

[I try to start my day writing 250 words on anything. I’ll post one every Tuesday until I run out of good ones.]

“I am sorry this letter is so long, I did not have time to make it short.” –Blaise Pascal*

When I lecture about comics, I often show that quote and talk about how the real art of cartooning is distillation. A cartoon isn’t an accurate rendering of reality; it’s not a high-definition video or a stenographer’s transcript. Comics may start with reality but then they amplify and simplify, polishing away everything unnecessary until they arrive at one gleaming gem of an idea. 

Whenever I rewrite or redraw a piece I’m not happy with, I always remove details, never add them. If I could ever draw a single black dot that conveyed exactly the message I intended, I’d die a very satisfied cartoonist. 

To be fair, there are others approaches to comics. There are artists who never use one line when a thousand would do, rendering elaborately cross-hatched minutia, and some of them are all-time greats! But temperamentally and philosophically, I lean the opposite way. 

I often end my comics talks with another quote, this one from cartoonist Larry Gonick: “Our brains represent things in some stripped-down, abstracted way. We don’t remember things as photographs or movies. We remember them as cartoons.”

I think that’s exactly right. When a cartoon is firing on all cylinders, it can feel less like reading and more like telepathy between writer and reader because a comic’s combination of words and images is speaking our brains' native language. That’s the goal: direct, instant, clear, intimate communication.

*Also attributed to many others, including Cicero, Pliny, Mark Twain, and George Bernard Shaw.

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250 Words on Hummingbirds

[I try to start my day writing 250 words on anything. I’ll post one every Tuesday until I run out of good ones.]

Ask people to name their favorite animal and most will say a charismatic megafauna: elephants, giraffes, whales, dolphins, gorillas, pandas, lions, tigers, bears—the especially attractive animals on zoo billboards. 

Mine is the hummingbird, which is not a magical mythical creature but might as well be.

I can watch them for hours—hovering, divebombing, zipping their long tongues in and out of flowers, pulling G-force maneuvers that would make fighter pilots black out. More than 360 species, all beautiful and fantastic.

Hummingbirds may appear to be gentle iridescent sprites but they’re brave and fierce, with a complex structure of hierarchy and dominance. Our yard always has one boss bird who surveys his domain and decides who enters. If you’re not on the approved guest list, expect to find a needle-sharp feathered bullet shooting toward you at Mach speed. 

At the same time, they can cooperate. We have friends whose home draws literally hundreds of hummingbirds that collectively drain several feeders per day. 

We once had a couple from Ireland visit the neighborhood who couldn’t wait to spot hummingbirds. It was one of the goals of their trip. At first sighting they were confused: they had expected hummingbirds to be larger, and wondered if they'd seen insects. We confirmed their ID and our visitors were delighted by their New World discovery. 

As am I, every time I’m in their presence. It feels like a privilege to encounter them, as if they were fairies from another realm. I’m not convinced they aren’t.

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I'd Like to Thank the Academy...

The day after my sister's wedding, my family and I took a few hours to visit the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in L.A. We happened to hit it on a free admission day, but I enjoyed it so much I'd have paid for it! 

In addition to its permanent collection of props, costumes, production equipment and ephemera, the museum had exhibitions on Jaws, Barbie, Cyberpunk, and the films of Bong Joon Ho. Something for everyone! Recommended.

I was stunned to see the Aries 1B lunar lander from "2001: A Space Odyssey," partly because it's from one of my top-five favorite movies but also because I knew director Stanley Kubrick had ordered all the models from the film destroyed so that nobody could make a cheap sequel. I also knew the Aries was one of the few props that escaped that fate but had no idea where it was. And, suddenly, there it was! She's a beauty.

Swatches that defined the color palette for the "Barbie" movie. I love this process stuff.

The red-armed C-3PO from "The Force Awakens."

Iron Man's helmet and, in the background, Captain America's shield and, in the even further background, the back side of Morpheus's costume from "The Matrix."

This one is hard to see, but it's a matte painting from the film "The Running Man" (1997). It's a sheet of glass maybe 3 by 5 feet in size, so you're seeing reflections of museum visitors in addition to a backlit cityscape. Matte paintings were used from the earliest days of filmmaking. In the pre-CGI days, artists painted vast backgrounds on sheets of glass, through which live action was shot or projected onto the scene. One of the most famous is the enormous warehouse at the end of "Raiders the Lost Ark"; only the worker pushing the cart is real, everything else is a painting. I've always been fascinated by the process and never seen one in person. Cool! 

The Hollywood Sign, visible from the upper floors of the Academy museum, just in case you weren't sure where you were.

Congrats to Lis and Randy!

My family and I went to L.A. this weekend to help my little sister get married! It's her story to tell, not mine, but it was fun and beautiful and nearly flawless, at least until Darth Vader showed up and force-choked me. All our love to the bride and groom, my new younger brother.

In a weekend of lifetime memories and highlights, I was especially happy to reconnect with Steve De Jarnatt, a film director who's known Lis for nearly 20 years and me since my book, Whatever Happened to the World of Tomorrow? came out. 

Steve directed the movies "Miracle Mile" and "Cherry 2000" in addition to countless TV episodes, but our connection is the 1939 World's Fair, which I featured in my book and Steve is an avid fan and collector of. After our fire, Steve sent me a care package full of vintage Fair memorabilia and ephemera, which was one of the kindest, most generous things anyone did for me in those days.

Happy Daughters AND Comic Book Day!

I'm reminded that today is both International Daughters Day and International Comic Book Day. I am in the very unusual and nifty position of being able to celebrate both simultaneously, as my daughters have appeared somewhere in every graphic novel I've done (yay, crowd scenes!).

This drawing features me, my wife Karen, and our daughters Laura and Robin. Long-time readers may not recognize this art because it's from an as-yet-unpublished book that I suspect will probably stay that way. Alas. But at least I get to use it for today. 

Happy International Daughters/Comic Book Day, Chiquitas!

250 Words on Artistry Unleashed

[I try to start my day writing 250 words on anything. I’ll post one every Tuesday until I run out of good ones.]

I’m fascinated by artists whose creativity runs amok toward the end of their lives. Not just those who start when they’re old or work steadily until they die, but artists whose motivation seems to suddenly turn to pleasing nobody but themselves. It’s self-indulgence that can be baffling and even off-putting, but it’s also always interesting.

Beethoven was 55 and deaf when he composed his late string quartets, including Die Grosse Fuge (“the Great Fugue”), in 1825 and 1826. He died in 1827. The pieces were discordant and difficult to play. Audiences were bewildered. Critics called them “indecipherable uncorrected horrors” and “a confusion of Babel.” To modern ears they sound like Jazz a century before its time, and are now considered among his greatest masterpieces. 

Charles Schulz was no Beethoven, but I think he had a comparable late Renaissance. His comic strip, “Peanuts,” began in 1950 and became a cultural juggernaut in the 1960s. “Peanuts” was good in the ‘70s and ‘80s, but I think Schulz’s creativity reawakened in the ‘90s until his death in 2000, producing some of his most personal, thoughtful, and formally inventive work.

I’m also reminded of director Francis Ford Coppola’s recent movie “Megalopolis,” which he funded himself when no one else would. Critics’ reactions ranged widely, but all agreed they’d never seen anything like it. 

I think you can get the clearest distillation of a master’s artistry when they have nothing left to prove and don’t much care what anybody else thinks. That’s the pure spirit.

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Gornpyramide

 I made this.

It's my take on a German Weihnachtspyramide, a candle-powered carousel that is a traditional Christmas decoration in both that country and ours. Except instead of the Christ child in a manger or jolly Santa in the sky, I recreated the classic battle between Captain Kirk and the Gorn from the "Star Trek" episode "Arena" (1967).

Note the carefully observed details, including the Enterprise in orbit overhead, the Gorn's handmade weapons, and Kirk's bamboo cannon, diamond projectiles, and chemicals he found to make gunpowder. Also enjoy the scenic and iconic Vasquez Rocks, the shooting location of many "Star Trek" episodes and countless TV shows and movies, separating the combatants.

My tiny Enterprise, made of dowels and toothpicks.

The reptilian Gorn, with his silver eyes, gold toga, snare net, and obsidian dagger.

Our hero, James T. Kirk, smug in the knowledge that he has everything he needs--bamboo cannon reinforced with native fiber, diamonds, charcoal, sulfur, and potassium nitrate--to defeat the Gorn.

My glorious inspiration.

I don't know how the idea came to me but I've wanted to make it for a long time. Like, for years. Finally decided "Just do it already!" It was a tricky build--you have to optimize for mass, balance, and friction, and I basically had to build it twice to learn from my mistakes and get those right. Even still, it needs enormous vanes to catch enough candle heat to keep moving.

But, to quote Galileo, "It moves."

My wife, Karen, says she's never been prouder, but sometimes she's sarcastic and I can't tell.

I'm just happy in the knowledge I've created something that has never existed before in the history of the universe. Isn't that what Art is all about?

250 Words on Mythology

[I try to start my day writing 250 words on anything. I’ll post one every Tuesday until I run out of good ones.]

Do kids still love mythology?

I remember mythology—Greek, Roman, Norse, Egyptian—being a big deal when I was a kid, but I’m not sure if that was just my particular experience. I loved myths and read every book of them I could. My lodestone was the classic Mythology by Edith Hamilton, which has been in print since 1942. 

Myths illuminate us as much as the people who created them. What we fear, what we value, what we admire. Poseidon was volatile and cruel because the sea could be volatile and cruel; the sun god Ra was also the god of order because nothing mattered more to ancient Egyptians than the constancy of the sun. Gods were arrogant, petty, violent, vain. We know people with those flaws, and it’s easy to imagine the havoc they’d wreak with limitless power.

I loved mythology for its potent combination of superpowers and drama—soap opera on a cosmic scale. I was drawn to Marvel comics because they made the connection explicit: Thor and Hercules were the mythological gods AND superheroes, fighting alongside Captain America and Spider-Man. Marvel might as well have injected narrative nitroglycerine directly into my veins. 

Do young adults raised on Disney’s “Hercules” believe that Zeus was a faithful loving father? Do people accusing others of narcissism know who Narcissus was? Do they know Thursday is Thor’s day? Myths are our linguistic and cultural heritage, as much as Shakespeare or the Bible. I hope they’re still loved and taught these days.

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250 Words on Being in the Sports Zone

[I try to start my day writing 250 words on anything. I’ll post one every Tuesday until I run out of good ones.]

I have never been a natural athlete—except once.

In seventh grade, age 12, our PE class did a track and field unit. Coaches were scouting for talent. They set up all the equipment, and on that particular day I was the best high jumper in my middle school. Better than boys who were two years older than me. My form was perfect. It felt smooth and effortless. I floated and flew. I was in the zone.

What a tremendously exhilarating feeling!

The coaches urged me to join the track team, so I did.

And never came close to duplicating that spectacular performance again. 

I competed in high jump and long jump for three seasons, and stayed stubbornly mediocre at both. Whatever magic I’d had that day was gone. 

I did notch one triumph I’m proud of. Track meets are scored on a point system. The team that tallies the most first-, second-, and third-place points wins. At one meet, I was warming up to do poorly in the long jump when I noticed an 880-yard race about to begin with only one runner, so I ambled over and checked in. 

My competitor shot off like a caffeinated jaguar, while I plodded out the half mile choking on his cloud of dust. My coaches and teammates did a double-take, then cheered me on! I earned the second-place points for my team! A heroic heads-up play!

To this day, coming in second in a two-person race is my greatest athletic accomplishment. 

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250 Words on Gray Divorce

[I try to start my day writing 250 words on anything. I’ll post one every Tuesday until I run out of good ones.]

There’s a social trend called “gray divorce,” in which older people who’ve been married for decades split up, to the astonishment of their families and friends. Often the couples seem happy, faithful, settled, comfortable. Why upset the status quo? Why not just run out the clock?

I don’t want a gray divorce but I do think I understand it. As I get older, the idea that I have a finite and shrinking number of days on Earth grows more insistent, and I sometimes ask myself:

“Do I really want to put up with this for the rest of my life?”

“This” could be almost anything: Socializing with people I don’t like. Traveling to places I don’t want to go. Eating food I don’t want to eat. Caring what anyone else thinks. Enduring the hundreds of little obligations we all bear, many of them optional. 

There’s a perception that people lose their inhibitions and get cranky as they age. I don’t think their personalities change; I think they just drop their masks because they don't need them anymore. Sometimes that reveals an angry bigot, but more often, I think, it frees them to be who they want to be, do what they want to do, and fly their freak flags in all their colors. 

I’m no psychologist, but I imagine many gray divorces happen when one person looks at their spouse and thinks, “The obligation I really don’t want to put up with for the rest of my life is you.”

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BIG ANNOUNCEMENT! Mom's Cancer Anniversary Edition

In 2006, Abrams ComicArts published Mom's Cancer, about my mother's treatment for metastatic cancer. The story had already gotten some notice as a webcomic, for which it won an Eisner Award, and it's been in print ever since. The book has had a life I couldn't have imagined when I wrote and drew it, including being taught in medical schools.

To mark its 20th (!) anniversary, Abrams and I are publishing an updated edition with 32 pages of new material. That includes 22 pages of comics that tell the rest of the story after the events of the 2006 book, plus a new foreword by my friend and Graphic Medicine co-founder MK Czerwiec, as well as an author's note with background, sketches, ephemera, and my perspective on "what it all means." We didn't touch the original story, just expanded it to bring it up to the present.

The first page of new material.

If you're familiar with the original book, the new cover looks subtly different. I painted it with watercolors rather than digitally this time, which I think gives it a tad more life. We added the "Eisner" seal. Notably, the spine will be pink cloth instead of navy blue to differentiate it from the original. It echoes the pink that symbolizes women's cancer and the stripes in Mom's shirt. Also, a few years ago, a Brazilian publisher put out a Portuguese edition of Mom's Cancer that had a neon pink cover, and we all looked at it and thought, "Gee, I wouldn't have done that in a thousand years, but it's kinda cool!" So it's also a nod to that.

The very pink cover of the Portuguese translation from a few years ago.

My editor, Charlie Kochman, and I are very proud of this new edition. It was his idea to do it and I'm grateful. I hope/think this will become the definitive version of the story. In my mind, it gives Mom's Cancer the ending it deserved but never really had. 

The 20th anniversary edition of Mom's Cancer will be out in March 2026. We're actually reviewing printer's proofs now. You can find it at the Abrams website and, soon, wherever books are sold. Please patronize your local heroic independent booksellers!

Big thanks to my friends and readers (not to mention my editor and publisher!) for 20-plus years of support! It means everything. 

250 Words on the Best Spaceships

[I try to start my day writing 250 words on anything. I’ll post one every Tuesday until I run out of good ones.]

Nerd Debate Day! In my opinion, there are three science-fictional spaceships that stand head and shoulders above all others.

Three: The Discovery from 2001: A Space Odyssey, which resembled a column of vertebrae connecting a skull to a pelvis. Its bulky nuclear engine was at the rear, far from the spherical crew compartment, which had a centrifuge to provide gravity. It was an elegant, practical-looking vessel, and director Stanley Kubrick shot it beautifully.

Two: The Eagle ships from Space: 1999 were better-conceived than the TV program they were on. Eagles were adaptable: different specialized modules plugged into a cockpit/engine superstructure to carry cargo, passengers, or scientific instruments. It was a utilitarian, no-nonsense vehicle and a reasonably speculative extension of NASA's lunar module design.

One: Star Trek’s Enterprise was, I contend, the first make-believe spacecraft that really felt like it flew people through space. Earlier ships looked like the sparkler-spewing models they were; one Enterprise contemporary, the Jupiter 2 from Lost in Space, was an unconvincing pie pan with lights and legs. The Enterprise had it all: scale, grace, dynamism.  

One quality my favorite spaceships share is verisimilitude. They feel plausible. Kubrick was a stickler for scientific accuracy. The Eagle’s modularity was elegantly engineered. Enterprise designer Matt Jeffries applied principles of real-world aeronautical design.

There are many other contenders: the Millennium Falcon, Firefly’s Serenity, Battlestar Galactica, Nostromo, Dark Star. I think much of what makes a spaceship great is the emotion we attach to it. Love the show, love the ship.

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Conjunction Junction

Karen wakes before I do and has standing orders to roust me out of bed if she sees anything interesting in the pre-dawn sky. Today was one of those days. If you rise before the Sun you may have seen it, too, but I can still shed some light (heh!) on a few details.

My iPhone picture isn't great but it's sufficient. Photo on the left, annotations on the right. The spectacular trio that really dazzles is the Moon, Jupiter, and Venus. Their conjunction is happening in the constellation Gemini, headlined by the stars named for the mythological twins Castor and Pollux. 

What you may not have noticed, and is faint in my photo, is the planet Mercury peeking over the horizon. It is said that the great astronomer Copernicus never saw Mercury. I doubt that's true--Mercury isn't that difficult to see--unless he wasn't such a great astronomer after all or just never bothered to look for it.

The scene will look much like this tomorrow except the Moon will have moved closer to the Sun, down near where Mercury was this morning. If you're an early riser, enjoy the show!

250 Words on Living Lighter

[I try to start my day writing 250 words on anything. I’ll post one every Tuesday until I run out of good ones.]

One consequence of the wildfire that destroyed our home in 2017 is that Karen and I are living lighter.

Possessions don’t carry the same emotional weight they used to, partly because very few of ours are more than eight years old. We did save some things when we evacuated, and were given some family artifacts afterward, and those are priceless. The rest of it? Whatever.

When we rebuilt our home, we had to think about how to fill it. For example, I used to have thousands of books and a good comic book collection. Should I reassemble that library? Mostly, I decided not to. I repurchased a few books that I considered essential, but otherwise resolved to start fresh. The fun part of acquiring my old books had been the thrill of discovery and the hunt. Even if I could afford to reacquire them, the fun would be gone. 

And now my bookshelves are packed with new books. 

We have a shelf full of mugs in our kitchen. Whenever we get a new mug, an old one has to leave the house to make room for it. Do I like this prospective mug better than an old one? If not, no sale. 

For nearly everything we buy, we ask ourselves, “Do we really want it? What are we going to do with it? Where are we going to put it?” We don’t live like monks—we still have plenty of junk—but it’s mostly gathered with thoughtful intention. It’s good. 

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250 Words on Three Telescopes

[I try to start my day writing 250 words on anything. I’ll post one every Tuesday until I run out of good ones.]

When I was about 12, my parents bought me a telescope. It was a refractor, the type with a lens at the front—exactly what you envision when you hear the word “telescope.” It was a terrible optical instrument from K-Mart, worthless for looking at anything but the Moon. 

I think well-meaning folks do more harm than good when they buy their kids subpar hobby gear that only frustrates them. Investigate more and get better stuff. Still, I spent hours with it. 

In college, I hosted my campus’s public stargazing sessions with a reflecting telescope inside a little domed observatory. The scope’s tube was about 7 feet long, and I got so familiar with it that I could spin it around to point at a nebula or galaxy with my back turned to the sky. We did real research with it, and I spent many nights pushing both its and my capabilities, hunting for the dimmest deep-sky objects I could see. 

Also in college, I had a few opportunities to visit Lick Observatory, built atop Mt. Hamilton east of San Jose, California. Established in 1888, Lick is a historic institution, and its 36-inch (diameter) telescope looks like a gigantic steampunk hallucination. Viewing the M13 globular cluster through that eyepiece was a religious experience. It’s a dandelion puffball comprising half a million stars, and I swear I could see every one. 

I was awestruck. Dumbstruck. Thunderstruck. I’ve visited some sacred places, but Lick’s dome is the holiest temple I’ve ever entered.

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250 Words on 250 Words

[I try to start my day writing 250 words on anything. I’ll post one every Tuesday until I run out of good ones.]

Exactly one year ago today, August 5, 2024, I posted my first “250 Words” essay (it works out to the same date because I initially posted them on Mondays before switching to Tuesdays). I still enjoy doing them and don’t plan to stop. I hope you’re enjoying them, too.

Some readers have said that these posts are one of the few light or thoughtful things they can count on reading every week, and I appreciate that. That’s the goal. They’re a good length to express one idea with a beginning, middle and end that can be read in a minute.

When I started writing 250-word pieces as a private morning warm-up, I first tried 200 words. That was too short to finish a thought. I tried 300 words but that was too long. I decided that 250 was juuuust right. I think of this as writing a weekly column for a small daily newspaper. 

They’re all precisely 250 words, by the way. I work at that. 

As I review the preceding 52 essays, I see surprising cumulative weight. Each is a bite-sized nugget, but together they also provide a good, granular overview of how I think about things, what I care about, and my life. I always said that if someone wanted to know me better than my longest, dearest friends do, all they had to do was read my comics. Now I’d add these essays to the list. 

On to another year, or until it stops being fun! Thanks.

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