One of my favorite science fiction stories ever is a little gem written in the 1930s called "A Martian Odyssey" by Stanley G. Weinbaum. Imagine my excitement when I was checking deviantArt and one of the artists I watch, George Sellas, was hired to illustrate a comic book adaptation of it. It finally came in the mail the other day and it's great! Beautiful art, very faithful to the story with only minor cuts for length. Also, as you can see from the cover, there's a War of the Worlds adaptation and a few other stories. You can get it here.
Speaking of great SF short stories, I love the Year's Best series edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer. I'm reading Year's Best Sf 14 right now, covering 2008 I believe. Fantastic. Every one I've read is amazing, though #10 for whatever reason was perhaps a little weaker than the rest. Short stories might not be the most popular form but in the science fiction field at least, they are as strong as ever. Kage Baker, who died this morning, had a story or two included along the way.
Also strong as ever is Empire Strikes Back. Check out this guy's Lego diorama, complete with LEDs and winch motors. And Avanaut's Lego on Hoth photo set is beautiful. Especially this one.

Hard to believe my little girl turned 1 years old today! What an amazing year. I got home from nightshift this morning and she was so excited to see me. I always think her little brain would forget all about me when I go away for four days alla time, but she always remembers. So cute. And big and strong and smart! Happy birthday Boo Bear!

Last night we had some fine dining (Michelle's birthday is coming up dontchaknow) and then we took in some fine roller derbying.

Still no comments. The problem is, I wrote my own template with CSS (I learned just enough to achieve what I wanted), and then Blogger changed how they did things and now I dunno how to make them mesh. Blogging without comments is no fun! It's like farting in private, no one else can enjoy it.
So here's some pictures from work yesterday.

I remember these stickers!



Get your own here.

On the bus today someone was telling me about The Time Traveller's Wife, about how Eric Bana keeps getting yanked back in time against his will. Wait- are you sure you're not thinking about Star Trek? Poor Eric Bana. Typecast as the guy who always gets thrown back in time against his will.

For Steve:

I wish Megan would buy Steve some more Star Wars guys
More aliens and clones and Siths and Jedis
Then when he finally has more figures than me
I can tell Michelle that I need more, can't you see?

So get on that Megan, if you would!
Sorry it took so long to get to it, night shift was a hard one this week. Last night especially was a gong show. I don't think my foreman was too pleased when he finally was wrapping up one incident report (a dozer and a haultruck had a bit of a lovetap) when me and Robin walk in and plunk a pickup's sideview mirror on the counter. Better a mirror than someone's head right? Right!
Working on the comments situation.

For gabrielle:

Poe was on Facebook checkin out Lola's status:
"Of all the kittens in the world I think Poe is the fattest!"
Poe was spitting hissing mad so she wrote on Lola's wall
"You're a great big rusty car and the slowest of them all!"

Continuing adventures? Aren't they on totally different continents? Ah well, this is what I came up with off the top of my head. I liked the idea of a car and a cat keeping up on Facebook. Knowing those two they will be friends again in a minute.
Guess what? We bought snowshoes! Thanks to Steve for the inspiration. You can check out some photos from our snowshoe adventure here. On Flickr. Not Facebook, where all you ever get is trashtalking Sunfires.

For Sarah:

What should we do with old shovel 4?
It's rusted and broke and can't dig any more
Scrap it or fix it or sell all its pieces?
Or bury it right there and not tell the polices?

We went and saw Avatar last night. I was kind of indifferent about seeing it, but I loved it. Loved it loved it loved it. Even if the miners were kind of the bad guys. But consider this- they mention "The Company", which if you recall is the corporate bad guy from Aliens, Cameron's other masterpiece. And a lot of the military hardware was similar to the stuff in Aliens. So, obviously Avatar is set in the same universe and The Company are all a bunch of bastards! I can buy that.

SO I made a Flickr group called Scrap Iron, meant to be a place for photos of retired and abandoned heavy equipment. Though tractors and trains and trucks are cool too. Here are some of my favorites so far:


There's plenty more where those came from so click on through if you like to see more. Anyways, I know I have been Flickrering a lot lately and not really writing much, so this is what I'm gonna do: you give me a topic, can be anything, and I will write a poem about it. Most likely a quatrain but who knows. My comments are apparently going to go away forever sometime soon so do it now! Now I say!

Not too much else to say, I just want my blog to have an entry on January 1st, 2010.

But check these out- laser pointer goodness, no photoshop: