An 11-year-old arranged and played this version of Rush’s YYZ.

Stephen King has a new short story for the latest issue of Esquire. I really want to turn the “page” the story is written on to read the other side.

The 10.31 Project

This is a project I can get behind.

No, this isn’t a Weekly World News headline (I mean really… would they even know what a plague pit is?) – it’s from Reuters:

By Daniel Flynn ROME (Reuters) – Italian researchers believe they have found the remains of a female “vampire” in Venice, buried with a brick jammed between her jaws to prevent her feeding on victims of a plague which swept the city in the 16th century.

Worth the click…

I was looking at another site and saw an ad that caught my eye. This looked really cool, but I noticed something odd about the statue that wasn’t quite right. No, it’s not the placement of the jagged teeth in the tentacle or the number of slimy appendages. I’m sure those are as close to realistic as the maddened mind of an artist who has had Nyarlathotep, aka The Crawling Chaos, pose could depict.

No, it’s the spelling.

Granted, Nyarlathotep and many other of the Great Old Ones chronicled by their biographer, H.P. Lovecraft, do not have the easiest names to spell or pronounce. But the company appears to have gone with the incorrect spelling of Nyarlathotep used by others, possibly out of the superstitious fear of summoning the Crawling Chaos by mere mention of the proper name. Yet this theory does not seem to hold to the intrepid web master of Sideshow Toys, who does use the correct spelling.

For the price of $249 per statue, it is possible that the manufacturer simply want to assure every possible interpretation of Nyarlathotep’s name is covered for the devout cultists who are sure to want to have this representation of their god to display when they’re unable to be with the real thing.

If a picture is worth a thousand words (and in this case, it probably is)…

…I probably don’t need to quote the publisher’s summary, but what the Hell!

The Classic Regency Romance—Now with Ultraviolent Zombie Mayhem!

Indeed. That’s pure, weapons-grade awesome in book form. Click on the photo for a link to the publisher’s site.

[link via Andrew Sullivan, title via Alien Sex Fiend]

Firefly’s Summer Glau is among the rising stars featured in Vanity Fair:

From The New York Times:

After a closer examination of the Antikythera Mechanism, a surviving marvel of ancient Greek technology, scientists have found that the device not only predicted solar eclipses but also organized the calendar in the four-year cycles of the Olympiad, forerunner of the modern Olympic Games.

The new findings, reported Wednesday in the journal Nature, also suggested that the mechanism’s concept originated in the colonies of Corinth, possibly Syracuse, in Sicily. The scientists said this implied a likely connection with the great Archimedes.

Archimedes, who lived in Syracuse and died in 212 B.C., invented a planetarium calculating motions of the Moon and the known planets and wrote a lost manuscript on astronomical mechanisms. Some evidence had previously linked the complex device of gears and dials to the island of Rhodes and the astronomer Hipparchos, who had made a study of irregularities in the Moon’s orbital course.

The Antikythera Mechanism, sometimes called the first analog computer, was recovered more than a century ago in the wreckage of a ship that sank off the tiny island of Antikythera, north of Crete. Earlier research showed that the device was probably built between 140 and 100 B.C.

snip

The mechanism’s connection with the Corinthians was unexpected, the researchers said, because other cargo in the shipwreck appeared to be from the eastern Mediterranean, places like Kos, Rhodes and Pergamon. The months inscribed on the instrument, they wrote, are “practically a complete match” with those on calendars from Illyria and Epirus in northwestern Greece and with the island of Corfu. Seven of the months suggest a possible link with Syracuse.

Inscriptions also showed that one of the instrument’s dials was used to record the timing of the panhellenic games, a four-year cycle that was “a common framework for chronology” by the Greeks, the researchers said.

“The mechanism still contains many mysteries,” Dr. Freeth said, citing questions about some of the remnant gears and a star almanac at the front that has confounded the experts.

It even predates DOS!

The good question down lower in the story is why the technology disappeared.