In our Weekly Digital Disc Picks, Alex notes that the best thing to watch this week would be the Olympics. They featured an awesome opening ceremony that careened from sublime to ridiculous, sometimes on purpose, and made a few nodes to SF and Fantasy.1 The games, as always, have been sensational.
Of course, some of us still want our hit of digital genre, and that brings us to this week’s episode of Continuum.
Mary Tamm, the first actress to play the companion Romana opposite Tom Baker in Doctor Who, is dead at 62 after an 18-month fight with cancer. Romanadvoratrelundar (her full name) was the second “Time Lady” to act as companion, and perhaps the only companion who could really be considered the Doctor’s equal in abilities. Tamm is the third companion to pass recently.
The much-discussed fan film begins. Not intended for younger viewers.
It’s (sort of) alive! It’s (sort of) alive!
Harvard researchers have created an artificial jellyfish— sort of– from silicon and rat parts. Video below.
Keeping abreast of medical news: The winner of this year’s Google Science Fair, 17-year-old Brittany Wegner, has developed a new method of detecting breast cancer.
Close also counts in rings:
Depending on where you are, it’s a good time to view Saturn.
He should probably buy a lottery ticket next:
The general cure isn’t here just yet, but the 19th International AIDS Conference, held this week in Washington, features Timothy Ray Brown, the only person to have been cured of HIV/AIDS– under very unlikely circumstances.
Getting cryptozoologists’ goats:
Utah’s “Goat Man” turns out to be a guy in a goat suit. He should not be confused, of course, with the better-known and still-mysterious Goat Man of Pope Lick, Kentucky (Also known as the “Sheep Man” or just “The Pope Lick Monster”). A video appears below, along with some robots programmed for soccer, and the first official trailer for Man of Steel.
DC’s sales soared with the New 52, but the best rebooting of the DC Universe in recent years may be Darwyn Cooke’s fantastic, thought-provoking reimagining of the Silver Age. So mix a Tom Collins, kick back in your space-age egg chair, cue Sinatra, and fly yourself to the Utopia Casino in Vegas, where Bruce Wayne, Lois Lane, Carol Ferris, Hal Jordan, Selina Kyle, Oliver McQueen, Richard Flagg, and “Ace” Morgan find Ted “Wildcat” Grant’s post-title-bout party interrupted by a supervillain– and the new Flash.
This week riffs somewhat predictably on The Manchurian Candidate, but it also features some promising and suspenseful developments in the greater story arc.
We have several items today, but I’ll leave out the gag remarks, since several relate to the mass shooting July 19 at the Denver, Colorado premiere of Dark Knight Rises.
Video and other items (including some lighter news) below the cut.
I know it’s been a short time since our last “Newspace,” but Rush Limbaugh’s hilariously bizarre and temporally-challenged claim that the villain “Bane” in Dark Knight Rises was named for Bain Capital led me to post his rant below, and several other videos. We’ve found lots of Dark Knight-related material, new Comic-Con stuff, and a Zombie-proofed Hyundai.
Robert R. McCammon won the World Fantasy Award for best novel back in 1992 for this book, about a boy who witnesses a horror and begins retelling the events that unfold in the year that follows. Although written from the perspective of a twelve-year-old, it plays as a more mature version of King’s It or Simmons’s Summer of Night. Despite strong elements of horror (McCammon began his career as a horror writer) this feels more like magic realism.
Corey is twelve. Summer approaches.
Every cop show has an episode where a main character knows the victim, suspect, or perpetrator, but someone remains involved in the case. This is that ep. “The Politics of Time” also features a fair bit of SF.