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Friday, August 24, 2007

* A brief history of science-fiction spacesuits. Via Gravity Lens, of course.

* Nabokov's genius.

There, in front of us, where a broken row of houses stood between us and the harbor, and where the eye encountered all sorts of stratagems, such as pale-blue and pink underwear cakewalking on a clothesline, or a lady’s bicycle and a striped cat oddly sharing a rudimentary balcony of cast iron, it was most satisfying to make out among the jumbled angles of roofs and walls, a splendid ship’s funnel, showing from behind the clothesline as something in a scrambled picture — Find What the Sailor Has Hidden — that the finder cannot unsee once it has been seen.

Genius, transcendent, makes a game of life’s transience. It was such games-playing, and the sense it gave him of God the games-player, that made Nabokov the fundamentally happy man he was, as if he, supreme games-player in literature, had worked out the rules of the secret game of the world.
* This AskMe has links to some big scans of images of post-apocalyptic New York from that World Without Us Scientific American article I've linked to before, suitable for framing.