The MAKE stage has gotten a whole lot bigger! Coming to public television stations across America, Make: television brings the spirit and energy of the magazine to TV sets in beautiful HD.

Make is a great magazine, so I hope the show can manage to be as good. Make’s senior editor Phillip Torrone was excellent when he hosted the Engadget podcast years ago, so making him a part of the show (I don’t see him in the trailer) would be a surefire way to make it good.

And let’s hear it for Twin Cities Public Television and PBS. I’m sick of all the cool, geeky, science shows being out of my reach on cable.

Of all the PBS Kids lineup, Sesame Street is my favorite to watch with my eldest daughter. But like any long running TV show, Sesame Street has gone through dry spells where the writing just wasn’t up to par.

Not to say recent years have or have not been part of any such spell, but Sesame Street season 39 kicks off next month on August 11th, and it looks to be a great one:

I’m not necessarily a sucker for celebrity cameos, but Will Arnett and Neil Patrick Harris (as a shoe fairy, of all things)?! (Jack Black and Jonah Hill should be fun, but it looks like their clips are short and simple.) Not to mention last season’s EXCELLENT full time cast addition of Christopher Knowings as Gordon’s nephew Chris.

It makes me sad when cornerstones of my childhood change (the new, early 2000’s performers for Cookie Monster and Big Bird just don’t have the voices right, for example), but it’s nice to see that Sesame Street can once again keep things fresh and original without losing the magic.

I don’t know I’d go quite as far as Mr. Doctorow here (mostly because I don’t know enough about TV cartoons), but Freakazoid WAS in a class of its own. My sibs and I watched it religiously, and not a year has gone by that I haven’t lamented its lack of a DVD presence. Now that it’s out, well…I don’t know if I’ll ever own any of the seasons. But I do look forward to more YouTube clips! Oh yes.

Happy Monday:

Not very newsworthy, but I figured I’d continue the series. Back in May I pointed out that Firefox 3 had a different image (and broken image) placeholder for the first time since the 0.1 BETA (which was copied from Netscape/Mozilla). It looks like 3.0.1 has changed it again.

I definitely liked the old-new one better:

But it’s still better than the original:

I imagine numerous essays and books have been written on the subject of art attempting to depict incredible things described in literature. From indescribable beauty to unimaginable horror, countless authors have included such elements in their stories with little or no effort. “A face more beautiful than any that of any man or woman who ever walked on the earth” is an easy enough phrase to write, but would probably not be done justice by any visual representation other than a photo of that very face (if it actually existed).

H. P. Lovecraft is one author who thrived on describing things in his stories more by the emotion they evoke in the people exposed to them, and less by detailed physical delineation. In The Call of Cthulhu, sculptures and idols of the title character (an ultimate evil) are described as “simultaneous pictures of an octopus, a dragon, and a human caricature…a pulpy, tentacled head surmount[ing] a grotesque and scaly body with rudimentary wings”. A first hand account of Cthulhu itself merely reveals that the “thing cannot be described”. Many depictions of Cthulhu have been attempted, ranging from realistic to absurdly cute. But most similarity between depictions comes from a familiarity with famous works; Lovecraft’s descriptions leave much to the imagination.

But horrors like Chuthlu are supposed to be visually terrifying by their size and strangeness (one wouldn’t expect a painting or figure to try to imitate a stench or sound). A skilled artist could conceivably (and likely did) create a representation of Cthulhu that would have impressed Lovecraft himself. Other Lovecraftian horrors simply can’t be successfully recreated by any artist, and I doubt Lovecraft would have cared for anyone to try.

His 1927 short story Pickman’s Model is nothing spectacular, but it’s a good example of things better left to the written word and the imagination. Its narrator accepts an invitation to visit the secret studio of his artist friend Pickman, who has recently been expelled from college and ostracized by his peers for the disturbing nature of his admittedly skillful art. This studio is located in an old, decrepit house in an old, decrepit neighborhood, with Pickman’s otherworldly art filling the darkened, stale rooms. Deep down in the cellar is where Pickman actually does his painting as he finds it’s “where the inspiration is thickest”. Of the paintings seen here, the narrartor says:

“There’s no use in my trying to tell you what they were like, because the awful, the blasphemous horror, and the unbelievable loathsomeness and moral foetor came from simple touches quite beyond the power of words to classify.”

After describing the settings for many of the paintings, such as churchyards and subway tunnels, he continues:

“But don’t get the idea that it was all this hideous business of theme and setting which struck me faint. I’m not a three-year-old kid, and I’d seen much like this before. It was the faces, Eliot, those accursed faces, that leered and slavered out of the canvas with the very breath of life! By God, man, I verily believe they were alive! That nauseous wizard had waked the fires of hell in pigment, and his brush had been a nightmare-spawning wand.”

Obviously no artist would ever be able to recreate such a painting, unless they find a nightmare-spawning wand brush down at the art depot. But I can’t blame someone for trying, just for the fun of it.

It’s important to note that Pickman’s paintings are supposed to very detailed and very “realistic”:

“And the queer part was, that Pickman got none of his power from the use of selectiveness or bizarrerie. Nothing was blurred, distorted, or conventionalized; outlines were sharp and lifelike, and details were almost painfully defined. And the faces! It was not any mere artist’s interpretation that we saw; it was pandemonium itself, crystal clear in stark objectivity. That was it, by Heaven! The man was not a fantaisiste or romanticist at all - he did not even try to give us the churning, prismatic ephemera of dreams, but coldly and sardonically reflected some stable, mechanistic, and well–established horror - world which he saw fully, brilliantly, squarely, and unfalteringly. God knows what that world can have been, or where he ever glimpsed the blasphemous shapes that loped and trotted and crawled through it; but whatever the baffling source of his images, one thing was plain. Pickman was in every sense - in conception and in execution - a thorough, painstaking, and almost scientific realist.”

It is difficult (though surely not impossible) to make truly frightening, photo-realistic art without employing gore or other violence.

Iowa native Stephen Gammell significantly contributed to my childhood fear of the dark with his deeply disturbing illustrations for the children’s Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark book series. But his black and white sketches are far from photo realistic, accomplishing their goal through dreamlike wisps of suggestion, decay, and the uncanny. Goya’s Saturn Devouring His Son is disturbing, while it’s more realistic predecessor, Peter Paul Rubens’ Saturn Devouring His Son is unpleasant but not nearly as unsettling.

So it’s with frustration that I picked up an H. P. Lovecraft collection at the bargain-sale cart at the library last week and was assaulted with this cover:

I don’t find the images on that cover to be frightening, or even disturbing. Rather, I think they’re tacky and unappealing for the cover of a book. I would like to think that Lovecraft, a self-proclaimed antiquarian, would refuse to allow such cover design for one of his collections, instead preferring something more classic (which can still be quite foreboding and interesting if done correctly), or at least more stylized. The bulk of his work was published in pulp magazine Weird Tales, and the narrator in Pikeman’s Model says early on:

“Any magazine-cover hack can splash paint around wildly and call it a nightmare or a Witches’ Sabbath or a portrait of the devil, but only a great painter can make such a thing really scare or ring true…I don’t have to tell you why a Fuseli really brings a shiver while a cheap ghost-story frontispiece merely makes us laugh. There’s something those fellows catch - beyond life - that they’re able to make us catch for a second…”

Taking horror from words to images involves walking a fine line. Hitchcock said “Suspense is like a woman; the more left to the imagination, the more the excitement”. The stuff our imaginations tend to use to fill in the blanks is almost always going to be greater than any rendition of the real thing.

(I’m writing and posting this from my Palm Centro.)

Nobody makes a WordPress specific app for blogging from a Palm smart phone. And while self-hosted WordPress blogs can set up posting via e-mail, WordPress.com users get no such feature.

But this morning I found out about m.wordpress.com. It seems to work fine for posting, although it’s nowhere near as slick as a native Palm ap would be.

I’m not sure that this would cause me to continue more Twitter snippets as full blog posts, but it could come in handy if I ever just HAVE to blog.

What’s happened to the Become A Robot blog? Twitter, mostly. Little things like starting or finishing a book, finding a great new website or product, seeing a movie, learning a lesson…all of these have been reduced to few-sentence blips on my Twitter feed.

If I actually had something else to write about, I expect this refinement of blog content would be a better thing. But right now it just makes for some loud echos around here.

I have some things I’d love to complain about, like authors and publishers not getting serious about e-books, or childless people’s reactions to young children in public. But these types of things tend to just get shuffled over to Twitter too. I’m lazy, and it’s a lot easier to condense my thoughts down to 140 characters than it is to blow them up to a reasonably sized blog post. Even regardless of length, I can Twitter by sending an SMS from my phone, which is a lot simpler and faster than firing up a browser and clicking through WordPress admin screens (if only WordPress loved Palm like they love the iPhone).

So know that even while the cobwebs are collecting around here, I’m still alive and active on teh interwebs (and in real life too I guess).

While getting my 22-month-old daughter dressed after her bath last night, my wife directed my attention to the TV. The evening news was showing the first pictures taken from the inside of the Cedar Rapids Public Library after last weekend’s record smashing flood.

I had wondered and worried aloud about the status of the library and its contents repeatedly during the flooding, to a point that my wife had to mock me for being so focused on one part of the extensive destruction. But for days as the waters rose, the general public knew nothing of what steps were (or weren’t) taken to protect the library. Around the time the water was cresting, an interview with the library’s interim director came out, saying that they had used volunteers and the final hours before evacuation to move books on the 1st floor up to higher shelves. My wife and I were shocked that they didn’t just move as much as they could up to the second floor. There’s an elevator to make such a task easier, and lots and lots of room up there for materials. They were busy moving things out of the basement too, but there was never a call for volunteers on TV or radio or city websites or anything. We had no idea they didn’t have the manpower (or brainpower) needed to move things to the 2nd floor.

So I took my daughter to the computer and we looked at the pictures on the Gazette website.

Her response to the above photo was, “Books…oh no…” She knew something bad had happened to the books. Other photos like the one at the top of this post caused her to screw up her face in concern and confusion as well. We’ve spent hours at the library with her, and she easily recognized her favorite indoor place to visit.

Plans for a major renovation are currently on hold (although I suspect they’ll be getting new carpet, furniture, and computers now that they have none), and it’s possible that a tax levy will be utilized. I imagine a lot of citizens will be even more upset about the poor preparation for the flood (like not moving anything upstairs) if they’re asked to help pay for it.

Another one of many sad stories here in Cedar Rapids right now. This one just happens to hit a little closer to home for us than most.

Late yesterday afternoon my wife and I packed up the girls and drove to a birthday party on the other side of town. With only a couple of bridges open across the river, the 20 minute drive was replaced with a traffic clogged 40 minute trek. Still, it was nice to have SOME way to get across the river, so I can’t complain much. This morning the National Guard restored access to 3 bridges downtown making it much easier to get around the city for the first time since late last week.

As the Cedar River’s water level continues to recede (but still has over 6 feet to go before it’s below “flood stage”) recovery efforts are progressing across the city. I had saved some photographs to posts here on the blog, but instead of stealing from the fine folks at the Cedar Rapids Gazette, I decided to link directly to some of the excellent (and sobering) galleries of photos taken by Gazette (and some AP) photographers.

Don’t let the thumbnails fool you, these links take you to galleries of multiple photos.

Aerial Shots From Monday by Cliff Jette

Downtown Cedar Rapids on Tuesday by Liz Martin

More Cedar Rapids on Tuesday by Cliff Jette

Cedar Rapids on Tuesday by Courtney Sargent

The Gazette has many more galleries of photos related to the 2008 Iowa floods, here, including photos from last week when the city was submerged and recovery efforts weren’t yet an option.