Simak won the Hugo in 1964 for this quiet piece. Enoch Wallace, a civil war veteran from southwestern Wisconsin, is chosen by Galactic Central to operate a way station on earth, where alien lifeforms pass through on their way elsewhere. While there is a dramatic plot, Simak clearly puts the emphasis on fleshing out the […]
When we toured all the big monuments on our recent visit to DC, I got gut feelings about them, I was left cold by the World War II memorial, touched by the Vietnam Memorial’s somber simplicity, avoided what looked like a bad kitschy joke, but was in fact the Korean War Memorial, looked up with […]
Nature berichtet in seiner aktuellen Ausgabe, dass man einen britischen Tierversuchs-Lobbyisten für eine Fernsehsendung den Alltag eines Versuchsnagetiers nacherleben liess. Unter anderem musste er dabei teuflisch warme Fussböden und brutal trockengefönte Haare erdulden. Wir Nagerfreunde begrüssen dergleichen Kaspereien natürlich, nicht nur als soliden Beitrag zu einer komplexen Diskussion, sondern auch als ersten Schritt in eine […]
5 When three of our local drugstores, two Walgreens and a Longs, failed for different reasons to produce acceptable passport photos, we decided to take matters in our own hands, and save a few bucks in the process. I took a picture of Caroline against our kitchen wall, cropped and scaled them in photoshop to […]
Berkeley on Thanksgiving Day is its most deserted – this holiday includes everybody in it’s national myth. No parked cars, hardly anybody on the streets but beggars trying to ear a buck by wishing the occasional passerby a happy holiday. All shops and restaurants are closed and dark. Only at Blockbuster is there life, scores […]
A few years ago at a Society for Neuroscience meeting, there was an ethics panel discussing animal research. I quickly realized that the panel’s discussion was not about whether or not animals should be used in research, but rather how to propagandize their use properly and avoid lawsuits and flamebombs. This seemed a somewhat conservative […]
4 This morning I received something that looked like an invoice for my Newsweek subscription, complete with a stub to send in with the payment and a due date. I am not now, nor was I ever, a subscriber of Newsweek.