Every day, I look at NASA's astronomy picture of the day and wish I understood half of what I'm looking at.

Yesterday's wasn't so hard, though. "The Whale and the Hockey Stick."
See all of them here.

This is what books should still look like, right? Imagine having read Through the Looking Glass as a kid and being lucky enough to get these illustrations and these gilded pages and a list of characters at the beginning! See the whole thing here.

These were done by Peter Newell, an artist who specialized in work for children, and made a comic called "The Naps of Polly Sleepyhead," about a little girl and all the strange things that happened to her during her many naps. Seemingly suffering from narcolepsy, she would fall asleep in the middle of various activities like crocheting and watching over rabbits. These things then somehow make it into her often nightmarish dreams. Again, why don't people make stuff like this anymore?

MKNG FRNDZ are a. our friends, b. cute, c. one of the funnest bands you'll see, and d. punks who love to dance. They've been going around the country for a few weeks now, but they've still got some shows left. GO SEE THEM. (photo by Arturo Cordova)

Here's yet another one of Dali's collaborations, this time with Hitchcock. Gregory Peck describes his dreams as designed by Salvador.

Stop Alien Abductions

I've been sitting here for a while, gathering opinions from others, poking around, and trying to figure out if this site is real. By all accounts (including the testimonials on there), it is. The thought screen helmet, created by Michael Menkin, is a device that makes it so that aliens cannot communicate or control anyone who's wearing it. I guess if aliens cannot do either of these things, they will not take you. Aliens are scary and all (I had a serious phobia of them for a good year in elementary school.), but if you were to encounter one, wouldn't you want to find out their deal?

It's a wormhole for sure, but the section that really grabbed me was the Case Histories. Here is where the fine folks behind the thought screen helmet tell you about some of its users' experiences. It starts off with tales of stolen helmets which already have me asking myself some serious questions. How do the aliens know what it is if they can't communicate? OK, apparently they can read your mind if you're wearing that, they just can't tell it anything. Do they take the stolen helmets back to their extraterrestrial labs to analyze them or do they just destroy them? Are the aliens onto the people that made this website? Do aliens have the internet? Anyway, the case histories are mostly what you'd expect, but the one that really sent me into a black hole of googling was the last one: a story about alien-hybrids (what?) and a woman who, you know, decided to teach them how to drive her SUV. Not once does it explain why she felt compelled to do this, or even what an alien-hybrid is. But, I now know that if I encounter one of them, the helmet won't even help me! "The thought screen helmet still works for people who are being abducted by aliens, not human alien-hybrids." Lame.

Well. Aliensandchildren.org gives me a historical explanation which involves aliens taking eggs/sperm and fertilizing themselves (I think) so they can create alien-hybrids, which will eventually take over the world. They put the fetuses in black boxes and show them to their abductees to prove that ha ha, they're gonna win. Apparently, "Nothing could be more frightening."

It's motherfuckin Shark Week.