Must Be Art Weblog

Of my five entries for the International Exhibition of Photography at the San Diego County Fair, only this one was accepted.

The notification letter has a column for “Place” and in that column it says “5″. According to the contest announcement, they award money and a rosette for places 1 through 4. I’m not sure if the 5 really means 5th place. It might just mean that I didn’t place in the top four.

Recently I found Skylark 3 by E. E. ”Doc” Smith in the bookstore. It’s the second book of a series of four space-opera novels. 1948. The other three have been in my library since I stole them from my brother’s library, but I had never seen this one before.

I had forgotten just how awful the writing was. It’s like an episode of The Flintstones, without the humor. The women are all Wilma (even the warrior princess). The “Good” and “Evil” are really “Us” and “Them” — the “Evil” guys are seen threatening to conquer the Universe, but the “Good” guys actually do blow up an entire heavily-populated planet, and feel only a little bit squeamish about it.

I was surprised to find how much of the action I already knew about. Much of it was recapped in the later books. Some of it was even shown again from another perspective. The bad guy you saw blown to smithereens in one book turns out to have been a dummy rigged up by the bad guy to fool the good guys.

We won’t even talk about the exceedingly-pseudo science, or the tacit racism.

Here’s a glimpse of the K1200LT with some of its clothes off, during the installation of the lighting kit.