THE MOST PRECIOUS THING IN THE WORLD

It all began with the death of the old hermit.  I was hiking off trail in a remote valley when I stumbled on what appeared to be a hermit's cave. After calling and getting no response I cautiously entered and soon discovered the skeletal remains of an old man underneath a ragged blanket.  Clutched in one hand was a hand-made map. The inscription read, "Follow these directions and discover The Most Precious Thing in the World."

I know what you're thinking, that what I held in my hand was just the raving of a crazy old man, but there was no mistaking what the map was wrapped around: a dazzling blue emerald the size of a quarter.

I used the emerald to finance a quest for the seven keys mentioned on the map. At the final location I'd need the keys to unlock something...I couldn't tell what. The quest took me to some of the most remote spots on Earth.

Some of the places I visited (above) weren't even on conventional maps.

For one of the keys I'd had to battle lions.

For another I was forced to run a gauntlet through screaming Maoris.

One thing all the key holders had in common.....

.....none of them wanted to give up their key without a fight.

One key was guarded by rabid bats (above).

Another by piranhas.

One I had to wrestle for.

Finally, weak and weary after years of questing,  I reached the hidden lake described on the map. According to that document I should find an island, and on that island I should find what I was looking for. I made a makeshift raft out of driftwood and set out.

On the island (above) I discovered magnificent gardens. They looked freshly tended, yet there wasn't a soul in sight.

The gardens led to a magnificent palace (above), and in that palace was a long, silent hall. Again....no people.

At the end of the hall was a dark, quiet garden with fragrant flowers and a reflecting pool. A door stood open.

Inside the dimly lit room was an ornately carved platform. On the platform was a box.

  The box (above) contained seven locks. I fumbled through my pocket for the keys.

One by one I inserted them.

My hands trembled...that malaria I'd had made the turning difficult.

At last, the final key!

Yessssss........



TO BE CONTINUED on THEORY CORNER.....................

RECENT ASTRONOMICAL PICTURES

Above, Saturn's moon, Helene. Nobody knows what causes the stretch marks, or why cratering is so slight. The moon is thought to be made of ice...a giant iceberg 30k across.

Not all spiral galaxies are perfect disks. Some are floppy like this one (above). Our own galaxy is slightly floppy, which supports speculation that we collided with another galaxy billions of years ago and are still in the process of settling down.

Above, a back lit photo of Enceladus, another moon of Saturn. Like Europa this is thought to contain a substantial underground ocean of liquid water.

This (above) is one of the clearest views yet of the Orion Nebula.

Above, the core of a dense star cluster way out near the rim of our own galaxy. Stars are incredibly close here and, with every star churning out solar ejecta, the area is probably radioactive beyond anything we could imagine.

Here's (above) two galaxies colliding, along with the resulting shock waves. We're seeing the collision from the back of the foreground galaxy. The galaxy that's hitting it is behind the one we can see, but we can see a glimmer of it in the form of a blue rim light




As the title says, this (above) is a film which zooms into the center of our galaxy and reveals the supermassive black hole there. It's a montage of pictures shot on optical and infra red wavelengths. What makes this special is that it includes a picture of the central black hole. Well sort of...it's actually a picture of a newly discovered gas cloud surrounding the black hole.

Nifty, huh?

JOHN K's "CANS WITHOUT LABELS"

John Kricfalusi's gearing up to do a new George Liquor cartoon, "Cans Without Labels," and to judge from the pitches, it promises to be the best thing he'll have done with that character....by far! If the man animates as well as directs then we'll have something for the ages....pure animated joy!

Here's (above) a picture of John attempting to pitch...I'm guessing...a George Liquor cartoon. It's amazing that he can even speak, covered as he is with purple ants running around screaming at their larvae.

The film features old Spumco hands Jim Smith, Eric Bauza, and Gabe Swarr, and new talent: John Kedzie and Sarah Harkey. I'm in there too as the voice of Cigarettes the Cat!

The film also features Mike Pataki as the voice of George Liquor. Mike's always been good with this voice but his performance on this film may be the best thing he's ever done...a career high point. Let me explain.

Mike (above, as a Klingon on Star Trek) was a truly great actor who was rarely used correctly during his lifetime.  His one-of-a-kind gravely voice, his musical delivery, his ability to project personality, and his endless nuance and invention made him unique. I'm amazed that, before John, no one attempted to build a character around him. I was present at the recording for this film and I got a strong sense that Mike felt he was finally working for someone who "got" what he was about. What I saw was an actor at the peak of his power who was determined to give the session 100% of himself, with no holding back.

John had to have been Mike's dream director. John had a definite point of view about things and I think Mike needed that to help him focus. The two complemented each other perfectly. You could feel the respect and affection they had for each other.

And why shouldn't they? Here were two enormously talented people who had subordinated everything to their work, who made enormous personal sacrifices to make the discoveries that they did. Here they were in a studio session, working on a project they both strongly believed in. I had no doubt whatsoever that I that was watching history being made.

Geez, I forgot to talk about the story! That's okay...you can listen to John pitch it himself  on Kickstarter. Here's the link:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1056985656/john-ks-cans-without-labels


Thanks to Fred Seibert for the picture of John covered with ants.


http://archives.frederatorblogs.com/frederator_studios/tag/john-k/ 

"THE WRINKLE MANIFESTO"

Most of these pictures are from Phileppe Halsman's "The Jump Book." It might just as well have been called "The Wrinkle Manifesto," because that's what it is: a visual argument for bringing back loose clothing that wrinkles easy.

Current fashions (above) don't wrinkle much. They make the wearer look good, but that's the problem. They make the wearer look too good. How boring!

It's selfish to dress for yourself. The truly social person dresses for the amusement or enlightenment of the people he encounters on the street. Nobody wants to see a street full of generic people, all without obvious defects. Why leave home if that's all there is to see outside?  

This woman gambled and lost. A gust of wind came up and blew her dress too high..but I don't think many people minded, at least not many men. I admire her for wearing a dress that wasn't risk free. 

Now, don't get me wrong...I'm not suggesting that we do away with tailoring and wear bedsheets. The best clothes from the Wrinkle Era (the 1930s and 40s) were all made from good fabrics and were all nicely tailored...but the tailoring was alternately loose and tight...it never did away with risk. 

It's true that wrinkles sometimes make the wearer look bad, but so what? To put on loose, wrinkly clothes is to take a risk, and that's what life is all about. "A harbor is a safe place for ships, but ships were not made to stay in harbors."

The Golden Age of Wrinkles ended sometime in the mid 50s. That's 50s Rock and Roll personality Dick Clark above. Dick did a great jump but his skinny trousers failed to flap and wrinkle at the right time and a potentially beautiful picture was lost.

Clark could have had this (above).

WHAT KILLED ROMANCE COMICS?

What killed romance comics? I wish all questions were as easy to answer. It's pretty obvious that what killed love comics was...good artists.  People who draw well, like Neal Adams, simply couldn't master the surreal, grotesque world of twisted love.  Good artists took over the romance comics and drove the readers away.

I know what you're thinking...Jack Kirby (above) was a good artist and he was one of the inventors of romance comics. True enough, and he did a good job. But Kirby was the rare exception that proves the rule.  Cheerful, wholesome, family men like the artists at D.C. simply couldn't get down and dirty enough.

BTW: How do you like the Kirby drawing above? I like the way the man with blocky fingers wraps his arm around the girl with the webbed claws.  Amazingly, their faces seem to occupy the same space.

Here (above) a lesser artist tackles the same subject. In real life the girl's neck would be broken by this pose, but it works. The pose on the man's hand is a bit off, but it appears to have been scratched by bears so we forgive the mistake. 

Is this guy (above) kissing a cardboard cutout? What are those ginger root thingies on her arms? And why is she posed like that? I don't know, but it works for me. This is the kind of artist who belongs in the romance biz. 

The girl (above) puts her tiny little arms around her giant behemoth of a boyfriend, who appears to be sucking on her forehead. The artist is on to something here. The real life size difference between men and women is shocking. You can't imagine how people so different could even procreate. It's an interesting observation,  but only the lesser artists take the trouble to comment on it.  

Here (above) the girl has the usual tiny arms, awkward perspective cheats, and fish fingers.  That's okay, I'm used to it. 

What I'm not used to is the way their faces fit on their skulls, The girl's face is extremely wide, and wraps around the whole front of her head. The boy's face is just the opposite...it's pinched and crammed into a thin, vertical strip. You see incongruities like that in real life but only the lesser artist is brave enough to comment on it. 

Like I said, good artists killed romance comics. Good artists are too predictable, too wedded to stereotypes to portray the kind of quirky love that romance media demands.

ARE YOU A FOOT PERSON?

Man, there's a lot of adult foot sites on the net! I mean a whooooole lot! Evidently there's a lot of guys who like to look at feet. 

I wonder what it's like to be a girl and know that there's thousands of men out there who want you to step on them. What if the situation were reversed and thousands of women wanted men to step all over them? It's so strange...I don't know what I'd think. I guess I would step on them if it really meant that much to them, but I'm not sure.

Most of the sites (above) aren't dirty...they're just odd. They're full of pictures of fully clothed women walking around and lounging in their bare feet. Yep, that's all they do! I kid you not, people pay for that!

Hmmmm. Actually, I kinda like the walking feet picture. Maybe I should have led with that.

The girls in these pictures usually look bored. I imagine this girl (above) is thinking about her grocery list.

"Hmmmmmm," she thinks, "Pears are on sale today but I always buy too many and they go to waste."

Of course not all foot sites are PG-rated.  Some are really raunchy (above). Usually the drastic ones combine feet interests with some other thing. There's a million mean girl sites on the net where the girls snarl at the camera and make like they want to punch you in the nose. Sometimes foot themes get grafted onto that.

Does it work? You be the judge.

Here's (above) foot interest combined with fur obsession. Personally I don't think it works. On the other hand, if she were smoking at the same time, you'd appeal to the fur people, the foot people and the smoking people all at once. Throw in a little mean for extra measure.

NEW DISCOVERIES ABOUT THE NATURE OF EMPTY SPACE

This is the most complicated science post I've ever done on Theory Corner, but it might also be one of the most rewarding. Give it a try, and if what I write here doesn't make sense then watch the 45 minute video above, which is my source for most of what I'll say here. Watch it soon though, because it could be withdrawn by YouTube at any time.

So what's the video? It's an episode of "Morgan Freeman's 'Through the Wormhole' " series on the Science Channel. It's a show about new discoveries in the nature of empty space, which we now realize isn't really very empty.

This directly contradicts an older TV documentary I saw which claimed that the amount of energy in space is small, so small that the amount of space contained in a volume the size of the Earth would be only that which was needed to make a paperclip fall on the ground. Who's right? I'll have to go with Freeman since his is the more recent explanation, and physics seem to change every six months nowadays.

Outer space is now known to be swarming with neutrinos which wouldn't appear in older measurements, and our part of space is shielded from intense deep space radiation that we only discovered a few years ago when Voyager hit the the heliopause barrier (above).  But we can ignore that that for now, because the amount of energy from these sources is small potatoes compared to the energy Freeman's talking about.

According to Freeman outer space is now believed to be 10 to the 120th times more energetic that can be accounted for by understood sources. That's enough to boil off the  entire universe. Since we're obviously not boiling off, something must be restraining it...but what?

One theory, favored by the creator of the Super Symmetry theory (whatever that is), posits that ordinary matter sends off energetic waves in every direction, including into deep space, and that these waves are countered and neutralized by other waves coming from the opposite direction. Is that the "restraint" we're looking for?

In another part of the show Freeman posits that The Big Bang was really a sort of explosion that occurred when the highly energetic and very hot "empty" space in the previous universe could no longer sustain itself and it dropped to a colder, lower energy state. That's the  universe we live in now. In our present energy state particles of matter are able to form creatures like us, but our time is limited. About a billion years from now the universe will convulse into an even lower, even colder energy state where the kind of matter we're familiar with will no longer exist...in other words, another Big Bang.

How does he know this? He claims that it follows from Quantum Mechanics which claims that all elementary particles constantly vanish and reappear again as particles in a different location. Every time they change location they move to a lower energy state. Even "empty" space is constantly devolving this way. Over time this means our whole universe will reach a crisis point where old laws of physics no longer apply, and we  violently transform to a lower, colder state. Geez, another thing to worry about!

Fascinating, huh? Is it true? How should I know? Watch the show on YouTube and judge for yourself.