Just last week the National Geographic Society unveiled the discovery of a new dinosaur. (Well, it’s new in that it’s the fossilized skeleton of a dinosaur 110 million years old.) Discovered by Paul Sereno, it’s called Nigersaurus taqueti, after the country of Nigeria, where it was hiding out and paleontologist Phillippe Taquet. The thirty foot long skeleton is interesting in that it suggests the herbivorous animal sucked up its food like a vacuum cleaner, kind of like a cross between a large-mouth bass and an anteater, (the latter being my personal favorite of the animals at the zoo, by the way.) What fabulously efficient construction! I wonder why every dinosaur didn’t work this way!

Marvel is doing a – pardon the pun – marvelous thing… They are going to start publishing their older comics online. See the CNN article.

This can’t be anything but good for everyone-the proverbial win-win. But really – it’s about time. The world wide intra webs have been around now for at least forty years or so since Big Al invented them in college. And a lot of folks had access to their favorite comics online anyway, just not in the most “legal” way, if you know what I mean.

Through my friend’s misfortune I was the lucky recipient of a free trip to Fabulous Las Vegas. Here’s a recap of my time in the greatest city Nevada has to offer:

Our flight arrived a little after Midnight on Thursday. After a taxi ride to our hotel and a quick change of clothes we were off to see what the strip had to offer. Famished, our first stop was Fatburger where by 1:30 I wolfed down a big ass burger with egg, cheese and bacon on it. It was so good I didn’t mind the month or so it shaved off my life expectancy.

We saw a guy in Fat Burger who looked just like former Buffalo Bill Thurman Thomas. He had the right build and his face was a perfect match. I don’t think it was him, though, since he wore no jewelry and the lady he was with was about 20% as pretty as his wife.

A few months ago I was blown away by a movie, and not a recent one, although this year has produced some very entertaining films. And after seeing it again a few weeks ago, a mere sixty seconds just won’t do,

So this go around, an essay about The Taking of Pelham One Two Three.

Not a very catchy title, is it?

Pelham is a 1974 film based on the novel of the same name with an ingenious premise. Four criminals who seem to be strangers to each other and have colors as names, (gee, I wonder who ripped that idea off……), take a subway train and its passengers hostage. They demand $1 million in one hour. And they will kill a passenger for every minute they don’t get it. The film stars Walter Matthau, Robert Shaw, Martin Balsam, Hector Elizando, and Jerry Stiller.

There are four strokes of genius in this film:

Imagine a world…

Before there were Hogwart’s and Harry and a whole host of humorously literary hijinx…

It’s the late 1800s in rugged Utah. The small town is Adenville, populated by regular, pleasant people. Nary a one of them can perform mystical, Latin-sounding spells, but there are plenty of quaint little adventures and amusing events revolving around the life of one pre-teen kid, Thomas D Fitzgerald, aka “The Great Brain.”

John D. Fitzgerald wrote a series of seven books in the late sixties and early seventies that, philosophically, were a precursor to the Harry Potter books. With titles such as The Great Brain at the Academy and The Great Brain Does It Again, they were a rare achievement in that they were stories of childhood that kids could read and not be talked down to by the author.

I read The Great Brain at the Academy when I was in third or fourth grade, just discovering the wonderful world of books and bookstores, and decided to revisit the entire series just to appease the child inside and I can tell you from experience there is a little bit to think about in these books as an adult as well.