Rest in peace: Bettie Page and Majel Barrett-Roddenberry

Bettie Page (April 22, 1923 – December 11, 2008)

LATimes: Bidding Bettie Page farewell:

“I was not trying to be shocking, or to be a pioneer,” Page explained in an interview years later.

“I wasn’t trying to change society, or to be ahead of my time. I didn’t think of myself as liberated, and I don’t believe that I did anything important. I was just myself. I didn’t know any other way to be, or any other way to live.”

Majel Barrett-Roddenberry (February 23 1932 – December 18 2008)

Projo Subterranean Homepage News: Voice of the Star Trek computer, Majel Roddenberry, dies at 76:

See, Gene was a fantastic storyteller, probably the best in the business. What he did was tell stories. He didn’t lay plots and ideas and things like that — he told stories. You can take any one of our stories that we use right now, put western clothes on us, stick us out in the west and they’ll work just as well — any single one of them — because they’re stories about people, they’re stories about things. And, of course, Gene had to put some of his philosophy into each one of them, but that was just his way of, really, getting past the censors. The censorship in those days was just horrible.

Jim Carrey profile in The Atlantic

The Existential Clown: Why Jim Carrey makes us uncomfortable:

Jim Carrey will loom large in our shattered posterity, I believe, because his filmography amounts to a uniquely sustained engagement with the problem of the self. Who knows how the self became such a problem, or when we began to feel the falseness in our nature? “There’s another man within me, that’s angry with me,” wrote Sir Thomas Browne in Religio Medici, three and a half centuries before the scene in Liar Liar where the hero stuffs his own head into the toilet bowl. Other clowns have risen since Carrey first stormed the multiplexes with Ace Ventura: Pet Detective–Will Ferrell, Adam Sandler, Ben Stiller, Seth Rogen–but for more than a decade now, he has been the go-to guy for high-concept metaphysics, for Hollywood’s sci-fi of the self. How about … an insurance salesman who discovers that his whole life is an elaborate fiction created by a malign TV producer?! Or–yeah!–a mendacious lawyer compelled to tell the truth for 24 hours?! Or even a blacklisted screenwriter (The Majestic) who loses his memory and wakes up to find that everybody thinks he’s a war hero?!

“a Manual for our Kids to Save the Future”?

That’s what John Baichtal at his Wired Blog “Geek Dad” called Cory Doctorow’s book sci-fi novel “Little Brother”, in his glowing review posted last week.

While you can download the book for free legally from the website, I’m going to want to buy a copy for the bookshelf – it’s a great book so far.

One of the best purchases of mine these past few months was following his comic book series “Futuristic Tales” from IDW. As a sci-fi and comic book fan, I gotta tell ya, it was worth every penny.