Destination Moon!

The Life archive on Google (search for any topic or photograph by typing source:life after your search term) has a huge collection of photographs from Destination Moon, the 1950 movie co-written by Robert Heinlein.

I've never read Heinlein, but anyone who writes dystopian novels for juveniles is all right by me.

Here are some more photos from the set:




The actors in the background are midgets to make the set seem bigger!

The Smell of Books and the Kindle

Reading books is just an excuse for smelling books. Now you don't even have to read a book to smell it because of Smell of Books, which offers four varieties of book scents in aerosol: Classic Musty Smell, Crunchy Bacon Scent, Eau You Have Cats, Scent of Sensibility (for ladies), and New Book Smell.

This is another little joke in the time of the Kindle, which many people are saying will replace the book. I think it'll be a while yet: books have been so fetishized for so long that we can't get rid of them abruptly. Also, the varied pricing of books makes them an appealing product to shop for or collect: I can get a copy of Sense and Sensibility for $.25 at a yardsale or $75,000 from a rare book seller.

Nothing

The Oxford University Press puts out a series of books, each called A Very Short Introduction....to.......  There are about 200 volumes.  Each is the size of a very large cell phone and can easily fit into the back pocket of a pair of jeans.  Spacious jacket is also a bookmark.  Some of the titles I have read include very short introductions to Buddhism, Galaxies, Quantum Physics, Autism, Modern China, Memory, Chaos(that was a good one), Cosmology, The Crusades and Game Theory, to name a few.  I was going to hyper-link all of these but I am too lazy and it is 12:54AM.  The books used to cost $9.95, but with the current economic dyspepsia, they are now $11.95.

Here's the weird thing.  I just bought A Very Short Introduction to Nothing, and it immediately disappeared.  No kidding!  So the question is, was that what was supposed to happen, or should I keep looking, or should I just ask for my money back.  But then I wouldn't get Nothing.  But I might find Nothing too.