My friend Mike had a lot more fun than I did over the weekend... he went on a Lane Victory cruise in Los Angeles; a sort of reenactment. What fun! I want to do one of those...As for here in the D.C. 'burbs it was way too hot to do much on Saturday - 100 degrees and humid. So I contented myself with going to the one morning yard sale that was being held (where I bought a book and a film noir era-looking telephone) and went to the library. I picked up a forgettable documentary videotape about the literary King Arthur and watched it. Seeing it, I fondly remembered when I was a kid and used to use an old ceremonial sword to puncture cardboard boxes. So, on a whim, I got it out of the basement, cleaned it up and hung it on a pillar. It looks okay; it goes with the brasses I have on the pillar. Back when I was fifteen or so I went through a great deal of effort to use wipe on silver and gold to make it look more impressive. As it turns out all I really needed to do was to clean it off with a wire wheel and paint the scabbard flat black.
On Saturday I also drove to Tyson's Mall in an attempt to get a cast away Sony Reader (a Kindle-like device) to work, but the guy at the Sony store said, "Sorry. All we do here is sell stuff and go to lunch," so I'll have to call the support line on the card he gave me. My son gave this device to me; he found it at a Best Buy where he works. I will spent some time trying to get it to work but if it costs me anything, forget it.
I am now reading "Alpha and Omega - The Search for the Beginning and End of the Universe" by Charles Seife. It's one of those books about cosmology that I sometimes read. I learned that the Hubble constant (a measure of the expansion of the universe) is only constant in our time. The value of it has shifted over the past 14 billion years or so. I didn't know that.
I found this news report interesting: Wooden version of Stonehenge found. There is already a "Woodhenge" - I wonder what they'll call this one. The working name seems to be "New Henge."
I stumbled across an old Lois Lane comic cover the other day. The Lois Lane of my era (usually called the "Silver Age" of comics) always looked unique - due to that rather fussy 1950's hairstyle. You could always immediately see that it was Lois Lane. Nowadays, however, Lois Lane's looks have become absolutely generic. (Typical renderings here and here.) There is nothing about her looks to suggest who she is - you have to be told she's Lois Lane or you wouldn't know.
One gets the impression that, in the early days, she was a favorite character of Siegel and Shuster, Superman's creators (see vampy sketch above)...
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