LA Times: “Salman Rushdie in L.A.”

During a few hours he spent near the Kings Road apartment he once shared with model and actress Padma Lakshmi, Rushdie did not come across as either a distinguished literary figure — Rushdie’s swirling 1981 Booker-winner, “Midnight’s Children,” is arguably the greatest British novel of the last few decades, and he was recently knighted — or a man who’d once had a price on his head. He was more like a good-humored, slightly star-struck visitor to L.A., happy to be back among old haunts.

He also enjoyed being in a place where the paparazzi are distracted by more glamorous figures. “Here, there’s Hollywood,” he said, a balding man with wire glasses and a Cheshire cat grin. “You know, they want Lindsay Lohan — they don’t want me.”

Speaking of Rushdie, he was on the Colbert Report earlier this month:

Ray Bradbury visited the closing Acres of Books in Long Beach

“Libraries are better than schools. You can’t go to a University and get a diploma. It doesn’t mean a goddamn thing. You’ve got to go to a bookstore and a library and educate yourself. You go to a bookstore and find yourself. The surprises that you find on the shelves are you, represent the things that you need, not that the teachers need…”

(via L.A. Now)

I still haven’t posted about my getting to meet him last year at an event in San Berdoo — ASAP. Speaking of Bradbury, Redlands has chosen Fahrenheit 451 as the 2009 choice for their citywide book reading program.

LA Times Jacket Copy: “John Muir, nature man of Yosemite”

The man who championed protecting natural spaces — especially in what is now Yosemite National Park — was born in Scotland, moved as a boy to Wisconsin and later hiked from Kentucky to south Florida; there, he got sick and headed to California to recuperate. Once he found the wilds of Northern California in 1868, he was smitten. He climbed rocks, cursed the sharp hooves of sheep that tore up wildflowers and even snuck President Teddy Roosevelt away from his handlers and into the backcountry for three nights of camping.

He also wrote like a fiend.

And if your fiendishness is lacking at any given moment, check out this big Think Simple Now article to take care of the problem: “Connect with Your Creative Writer”:

Although, the term writers block is popular, this feeling of blockage and mind blanking is not specific to writing, but of any creative feats. Other examples include, brainstorming for a new business, dancing, musical performances, music composition, painting or photography. I’ve personally experienced this during my photography work, blanking out as I stand in front of a client waiting for me for direction. I call these Creative Blocks, where your mind just comes up empty and you feel lost. It’s purely mental.

Through practice and observation, I’ve gotten pretty good at getting past these blank moments, and this article shares some insights for unlocking your creativity. Throughout the article, I will be using writing as the example, but keep in mind that it is equally applicable to any creative activity.

Today is the birthday of A.A. Milne, creator of the much-beloved Winnie-the-Pooh.

Reading up on Pooh at Wikipedia, I came across this wonderful note.

The origin of the “Poohsticks” game is at the footbridge across a tributary of the River Medway near Upper Hartfield, close to the Milne’s home at Posingford Farm. It is traditional to play the game there using sticks gathered in nearby woodland. When the footbridge required replacement in recent times the engineer designed a new structure based closely on the drawings (by E H Shepherd) of the bridge in the original books, as the bridge did not originally appear as the artist drew it. There is an information board at the bridge which describes aspects of how to play the game there. Periodically the water authority has to come with an excavator and remove the large mass of stalled Poohsticks which can build up in the river bed downstream of the bridge over time, to the extent of causing some localised flooding.

Did you know there’s a World Pooh Sticks Championship?

[They] take place annually at Day’s Lock on the River Thames near Dorchester-on-Thames, Oxfordshire, England. The event was started in 1983 as a fund-raising event for the Royal National Lifeboat Institution. The lockkeeper put out a box of sticks and a collection box and it soon became an annual event. It originally took place in January but in the icy weather of 1997 it was moved to March. It is now organized by the Rotary Club of Sinodun, based in nearby Wallingford. The championships feature individual and team events. A member of the team from the Czech Republic which won the team event in 2004 explained the winning technique to Jonathan Hancock in an interview on BBC Radio Oxford: he looked to see which part of the river was fastest, and threw the stick in there.

Dr. Evil: You know, I have one simple request. And that is to have sharks with frickin’ laser beams attached to their heads! Now evidently my cycloptic colleague informs me that that cannot be done. Ah, would you remind me what I pay you people for, honestly? Throw me a bone here! What do we have?
Number Two: Sea Bass.
Dr. Evil: [pause] Right.
Number Two: They’re mutated sea bass.
Dr. Evil: Are they ill tempered?
Number Two: Absolutely.
Dr. Evil: Oh well, that’s a start.

Undoubtedly to fight the deadly menace of Sharks with Frickin’ Laser Beams Attached To Their Heads, the fishing industry is countering with high-tech weapons of its own: Laser-Based Lures.

C. Douglas Nielsen (“Yes, I see Douglas Nielsen…”) writes in the Las Vegas Review-Journal:

Bruce Young is an inventor who believes the key to catching more fish is all about lighting up.

I could have guessed that there would be some “lighting up” involved with this story, but let’s continue. ;)

For the past 10 years, Young has been working on a way to put laser technology to work in a fishing lure, an idea that came about by accident.

It began when he pointed a laser sight at his fish tank full of African cichlids and peacock bass.

“Every fish in there chased and would bite that dot. I could get ‘em to bite rocks, and I could get ‘em to bite each other,” Young said. “Six months into it, I thought, ‘What if I put a hook on that dot?’ Ten years later I’m introducing the first laser lures in the world.

“Fish chase it. Cats chase it. Dogs chase it. I can’t tell you why, but they simply do. If it eats meat, it’s going to eat the laser light.”

Which gives me an idea for my next trip to the local steak house.

Unfortunately, the folks who need to understand this, won’t.

(Via “A Blog Around The Clock”)