…for a belated holiday present for your favorite steampunk/airship pirate wannabe/pulp aficionado/Edwardian engineering fan/over-the-top Burner who’s gonna out-do that damn motorized dragon, might I suggest that you could do worse than get them a copy of D’Orcy’s Airship Manual: An international register of airships with a compendium of the airship’s elementary mechanics?

How could you go wrong? It has the word ‘compendium’ in the subtitle!

Hey… does this belong under DIY, too?

[via The Stranger, from an article that's also worth your while about a Seattle-area bookstore that has installed a print-on-demand Espresso Book Machine.]

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.

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.

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

A photo found in the crate. Written on back was, “My new car at the beach.” From a diary also found in the box, I believe this photo to have been taken by Beau Jackson in early May just before the events in The Howl of the Werewolf.

Note: Miskatonic University Library, Arkham, Mass. 1929.

Nellie Thompson is identified on the back of the photo as middle row, 1st on the left.