someone’s old-skool page of redrawn RPG Maps, including a version of City-State of the Invincible Overlord, that while reproducing the specific details I recall from the map of my childhood, lacks the handmade aesthetic appeal of the original.

The Yahoo! User Interface Library (YUI). Neato.

On Friday as I began my drive home from work, I was at a stop light on Royal Brougham Way, between the stadiums and right across from the main entrance to Safeco Field.

As I waited, a big, balding man with shoulder-length white hair and a soup-strainer mustache, also white, came out of the stadium, holding a fistful of Mariners literature close to his actual vest and pocketwatch chain.

He was trim and tall in the jacket and vest of a grey tweed three-piece suit over jeans and black boots, sort of a cowboy look, sans hat. His boots were square toed and plain.

As I looked at him, I thought to myself, geez, that guy looks a lot like David Crosby. The light changed, and I dove off.

This morning, I as I read the paper, I noticed an ad for the June 6 appearance of Crosby Stills and Nash at Chateau Ste. Michelle, which features current headshots of all three musicians.

There’s no question: the guy I saw emerge from the ballpark was David Crosby, looking fit.

Now, I do hear tell that the Mariners have signed a Crosby lately. I wonder if it’s a two-fer.

macosxhints.com: Share internet and TCP/IP services over Bluetooth, Mac to Palm. Dating to 2003, and yet untested by me.

Following a heated shouting match several years ago with the Flexcar founder and CEO over the meaning of ‘lifetime,’ I conceived in my heart a vicious hatred of the company, a shiftless excuse to milk the public teat under the guise of environmental sensibility not equaled until the dawn of ecofuels.

During the operation’s recent endgame, the con-artists sought to protect a set of tax breaks that made them a more attractive acquisition target, and, surprise surprise, were bought out by East Coast-based carshare operation Zipcar.

Hey! What’s this? It seems, according to Slog post Zipcar Responds, that they are staffed by a higher grade of evildoer than the home-grown operation.

This should come as no surprise, if one considers the predator pyramid. The only question, really, is whether or not Zipcar employed mind-controlling earwigs to drive the tax-break-protection lobbying, or if the Flexcar drones acted of their own free will.

As noted earlier, we stopped by the EMP-slash-Science Fiction Musuem or whatever it’s called this weekend, and much to my surprise, shoehorned into the corner and basement of the Gehry Blob, it’s a superior museum and display experience to the EMP.

I’m not fully sure why this is. Partly it seems to be a reflection that SF fandom has always emphasized the cult of the physical object – the book, the zine, the prop – over the act that sacralizes the object – wearing the costume, writing the book. Thus, seeing vitrines filled with mixed stuff – book cheek by jowl with prop and poster – is of greater interest to me than the act of gazing on Greg Ginn’s now-mute plexiglas SG.

Additionally, it was interesting to see several books currently in my archives on display in editions suspiciously similar to those I own. Among these were mid-seventies editions of both Delany’s Dhalgren and Brunner’s The Sheep Look Up.

Of course, the original command chair from TOS Star Trek is on display, and that was cool to see. But my very favorite props were small. One was a can of Leopard Lager from Red Dwarf, which caused me to reflect upon my foolishness in giving away the Red Dwarf series one ‘baby girl scutter’ prop that a coworker once gave me. She’d received it as a going-away present from the show’s propmaster just before moving to the US. For a few years it was a totemic presence in my living room during the KCTS-9 Red Dwarf marathons.

The other item I relished as if it were tranya was the 18-inch molded-plastic AMT Enterprise model used in a scene shot for The Trouble with Tribbles. I had long heard that this kit was used by the TOS effects team, and having built it myself around 1974 or so I was charmed beyind measure to see the tiny ship, painted grey and decals flaking, mounted at kneecap level.

A major feature in today’s P-I profiles indie-music stalwart Calvin Johnson and his career in tyhe wake of a serious 2003 accident. As befits the subject, the piece is self-evidently heartfelt. Written by one Travis Nichols, it’s clearly the work of someone who is deeply familiar with Johnson’s work. I’ve noticed Nichols’ byline here and there lately; more power to him, and I can’t wait until he starts writing about people and things he hasn’t cared about at all in the past, because I believe that is when one takes one’s measure in gigs such as the ones he is pursuing at the moment.

I remain amazed to see a major, front-of-section feature in ANY daily on artists that matter to me, as Calvin does.

As noted, among other films this weekend Viv and I took in There Will Be Blood. For me it clearly seemed a step up from Anderson’s other ambitious films and while to claim I enjoyed watching it would be inaccurate, the film was clearly great.

In the ending sequences of the film, the oilman character played by Daniel Day-Lewis is living in a sprawing neo-Tudor 1920’s mansion, and I was struck by the interiors, which seemed exactly right for a late-20’s Tudor-revival construction. This style is familiar to me as I lived in a 1928 Anhalt building here in Seattle for thirteen years, and the interiors in the film seemed too detailed and persuasive to me to have been sets constructed wholly from scratch.

A bit of the old googly-moogly led me to the entry for Greystone Mansion, apparently a city park smack in the middle of Beverly Hills. The house was constructed in 1928 for the son of Orange County land baron and oilman Edward Doheny.

A prominent Orange County coastal feature in OC is named for the family, Doheny Point. coastal park in the city of Dana Point is named for the family, Doheny State Beach.

In the film, Plainview constructs an oil pipeline through from the interior to the sea in Central California, “near Santa Barbara,” according to the Wikipedia entry for the film. I myself heard reference to San Luis Obispo, which is just inland from Morro Bay, south of Carmel and north of Oxnard and Ventura.

Having long heard the Doheny name on visits to my in-laws, I was fascinated to learn of the connection to a real-world oil tycoon, and began to read the Wikipedia article on the house with relish. Imagine my eyebrows, if you will, as I read these words:

“On February 16, 1929, four months after Ned Doheny, his wife Lucy and their five children moved into Greystone, Ned died in his bedroom in a murder-suicide with his secretary, Hugh Plunket.[3] The official story indicated Plunket murdered Ned either because of a “nervous disorder” or inflamed with anger over not receiving a raise. Others point out that Ned’s gun was the murder weapon and that Ned was not buried in a Catholic cemetery with the rest of his family, indicating that he had committed suicide. Both men were involved in the trial of Ned’s father in the Teapot Dome scandal.”

Additionally, the character of Daniel Plainview comes from Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, we learn in the film. Here’s what Wikipedia has to say about the elder Doheny:

“Doheny was born in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin.”

A bit further down the page, in reference to the Teapot Dome scandal reference above:

Doheny faced criminal charges over the incident but was cleared of all charges. The scandal is also the inspiration for Upton Sinclair’s novel, ‘Oil!’, based in part on Doheny’s life.

Although my understanding is that Anderson and his filmmaking team have only loosely adapted Sinclair’s novel, they sought opportunities to closely relate Plainview and Doheny.

Star Trek LCARS Blueprints Database: “There are currently 1,703 Blueprint Sheets Online.”

Apparently, the online world of Trek fandom has sprung up again in the wake of Paramount dropping intimidation lawsuits as a fan-retention strategy. This site is only a partial node of the parent site, which appears to be devoted to making out-of-print Trekanalia available online, as is the case with this really quite incredible collection of Trek blueprints.

Back in the 70s, I had hard-won early editions of the Franz Joseph / Bantam Enterprise blueprints and Starfleet Technical manual, which inspired a limitless array of variously professional and otherwise interpretations of Trek tech as envisioned by your shop teacher.

Still, these documents were among the aspects of Star Trek that drew it closer to me than the Star Wars universe. Star Wars fans made and make obsessively accurate and cinematically detailed costumes; Trek fans produced obsessively detailed and quite uncinematic blueprints. Star Wars fans thought they were creating for the camera; Star Trek fans thought they were creating for a new world.

I wonder what the shift to embrace fan-created and fan-inspired content means for Star Trek? After all, the upcoming film is generally thought to have been greenlit based on the presence of competing fan film projects that used new actors to portray Kirk, Spock, McCoy et al.

I have a hard time imagining that it would result in the fictional world of canonical Star Trek suddenly embracing the anarchy of a copyright-free sci-fi souk. No, the appeal of the series – especially the first series – is specifically authoritarian, and the fan content seen here adopts that rhetorical tone.

These documents are savory precisely because they adopt the voice of authority as camouflage, of NASA technical documents and NORAD strike plans, and the particular thrill of these items was always that they never dropped the pose by inserting the Paramount logo or a special guest appearance by, oh, Lucille Ball into the apparent documentary evidence for a better future.

The pose is, I must admit, something I personally savor and have a bit of experience of.

FSS speaks truth: who or what the hell is FSS? And where the fuck are my editors over here? Geez!