Wiki-snooze?

An article at The Atlantic notes how Wikipedia is having trouble recruiting and keeping new editors for its online articles.

As its major articles become more and more settled -- meaning that someone comes along and removes some of the stupider stuff that some idiot wrote -- there is less and less for editors to do. Sure, new things crop up and there are plenty of older books and movies and whatnot that can be written up and refined, but apparently the people who do that aren't the people who act as the volunteer editors for the site.

My guess is that it's no longer the newest shiny internet toy, so nobody wants to play with it anymore. Ephemera begets and attracts ephemera. Plus, some of those articles are longer and longer, which is almost like reading a book and who wants to do that in our brave new world?

I've Got a So-So Feeling About This...

So, Disney bought Lucasfilm. There are some downsides:

1. Truth-in-advertising requires removal of the word "creative" from Lucas's new job title.

2. "Hey, Luke Skywalker! You just blew apart the Death Star with a shot that was 'one in a million.' What are you going to do now?"

"I'm going to Disneyland!"

3. Not looking forward to the Han Solo/Lando Calrissian version of "You've Got a Friend in Me."

4. Also not looking forward to Jar-Jar Binks' updated "You Ain't Never Had a Friend Like Me," now voiced by Robin Williams.

5. Not sure about the new "C-3Pinocchio" character with his guide Jiminy D2.

6. "Grumpy leads to hate, and hate leads to the Dark Side. A much better dwarf shall I make than him."

7. "Chewie! What's with this number 53 painted on the Falcon? And why are you calling it 'Herbie?''"

On the upside, Disney can digitally insert one of its theme park animatronic statues in place of Hayden Christiansen in the prequels and upgrade those movie's acting levels. And we could get treated to a rollicking "Everybody Wants to Be a Hutt" from Jabba. Plus, the new translation of the Lion King phrase hakuna matata can now be, "Han shot first!"

Assortment

-- I'm so embarrassed to be living in the United States, where we're so unsophisticated, provincial and backwards compared to the wise and cultured folks of Europe.

-- So I'm really very happy that the second half of the final Twilight movie is coming out. But my happiness may not come from the same word in that sentence that makes the Twi-heads happy.

-- Friends was pretty funny. I'd forgotten. But I can't believe that they went 10 seasons without once making a joke about Courteney Cox being in the "Dancing in the Dark" video.

-- Folks were visiting this weekend, and they like watching Everybody Loves Raymond. My dad couldn't remember how it ended, but we theorized that the only realistic finale would involve everbody killing Marie, like on Murder on the Orient Express.

Cold and Mad

Wyoming game warden Joe Pickett has had to deal with a lot more than fish and game licenses whole we've been following him through the pen of C. J. Box, but the discovery of his mother-in-law's latest husband displayed very publicly and very dead may cause him the most trouble of all. A falling out following 2010's Nowhere to Run has left him without the help of his friend Nate Romanowski, and the people investigating the death don't trust him because of his closeness to the whole matter. Domestic issues with their foster daughter April and with his oldest daughter Sheridan off at college complicate matters for Joe, and by the time Nate does re-enter the picture, he has issues of his own to handle.

Box's smooth storytelling style is on good display here, and he's left out some of the silliness that has plagued recent entries of the series. The twists and turns of the investigation can be a little confusing, and Joe often has similar confrontations with different law enforcement folks who want him kept out of things for reasons of their own. Cold Wind doesn't completely escape the silliness, though, as the ending sets up a pretty much unnecessary exploration of Nate's past that strays a good distance from the upright family man doing a hard job that's been the strength of the Joe Pickett series. That will play out in Force of Nature, but it does minimal damage here.

----- 

While his "Prey" series with Lucas Davenport has been in a little bit of a retread mode for the last few books, John Sandford has been a little more adventurous with his investigator-at-large Virgil Flowers and continues that in Mad River. Three teenagers have begun a robbery and killing spree like something out of Natural Born Killers or In Cold Blood, and Virgil is tasked by his superiors with leading the hunt. None-too-bright local law enforcement and the blind luck and blood lust of the fugitives are working against him, and the more Virgil digs into the case the more he's convinced that there's a lot more to this case than simple thrill-killing.

Even when he does tend to coast, Sandford is a top-notch writer and in Mad River he's not coasting. Every so often he's leaned into a kind of bratty style redolent of a middle school locker room, but here he gives his characters more of the wry and cynical humor you might expect from intelligent men regularly facing humanity's seamy underbelly.

At two different points, Virgil faces the choice to either take the law into his own hands or confront those who do, and he makes different decisions each time. One of them should have consequences later in the series, but it remains to be seen if Sandford follows up on that. If he does, Sandford might be taking a step forward with his work, actually digging into the human condition through genre fiction. That would be a welcome read for someone of his talent, but we'll have to wait and see if it happens.

Nightfall

We're finding more and more weird planets as we look deeper into the universe with better and better instruments. Here's one that in essence orbits not one but four separate suns.

The planet, a gas giant the size of Neptune, orbits a binary star system, which is already a little unusual. Then another pair of stars orbits the original binary system, giving the world named PH1 four different suns in the sky.

Since it's a gas giant, any life that might exist in PS1 is nothing like life as we know it (speculation suggests that blimp-like creatures might live in the extremely dense atmospheres of these giants, but a  lot closer examination will be needed to find them if they exist). It would probably not be able to see these suns as we do, living deep in the atmosphere where the pressure and heat could sustain life.

In 1941, science fiction writer Isaac Asimov published a short story called "Nightfall," about a world which had light from six stars. Because of their interlocking orbits, the inhabitants never see the night sky. They believe themselves to be the only beings in the universe, having no knowledge of any other stellar or planetary body -- even their own moon.

Asimov sets his story on the eve of a once-in-millenia occurrence. The six suns are going to reach a point in their complicated orbits in which only one shines in the sky, and the moon will obscure that one. The inhabitants steel themselves for darkness, having learned that when this event happened before, the people went mad and their civilization collapsed. They practice by spending time in caves and underground.

They prepared for nothingness -- they didn't prepare for the stars. They're driven mad not by the absence of light, but by the awareness they're not alone.

Asimov, a committed humanist who disbelieved in anything beyond what rational thought and experiment could show, would probably not approve of how I think that story connects with our awakening to our fallen nature, but I'll take the liberty and ask his forgiveness.

Planetary Belch

So the Cassini probe orbiting Saturn detected a huge unusual storm at the end of 2010, which produced a large temperature spike and bubbles of a gas usually not found in that planet's atmosphere.

Which means that the planet Saturn closed out 2010 with a major burp. And that means we had better be careful, because the last time Saturn burped we wound up with the Latin/Roman pantheon of gods.

Laser Beams Optional

A pool shark is a person who is skilled at some kind of game of billiards and who wins money off of people who are not as skilled by defeating them in a predatory manner.

A golf shark is a real live leopard shark dropped from the sky onto a golf course. No, I'm not kidding.

(edited 10/30 to fix link)