Old and New - Mostly old, unless it slipped under your radar:


Movies: Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai

- Gangsters, Bushido, Forest Whitaker, awesome soundtrack - Full of all the weird quirky stuff that made Dead Man almost work (Another really good film, starring Johnny Depp - but the sound on all the versions, DVD or VHS I've seen so far is horrible, grating, and can't seem to decide whether to whisper dialog or blare guitar riffs at 'eleven' ... )

Hobos

When bein' homeless is coool. Well, okay, not really, but wiki Hobos sometime - there's a lotta neat little trivia about them - secret waysigns, famous authors, books, ex-hobos (such as Woody "This land is your land" Guthrie, and even one who ran for US Senate in Utah), Hobo Stew (aka Mulligan Stew, Stone or Nail Soup) using primarily vegetables, ketchup or tomato soup, and browned hamburger. In Iowa, there's a Hobo museum and cemetary, and every summer there's a Hobo Convention.

Underwater Lakes

Or brine pools. Not a lotta stuff on these on the web yet - you gotta poke around. You'll really have to get Blue Planet to get the whole 'oh effing WOW factor' - but basically these are areas of super high salinity on the ocean floor that when you come across them in a submarine, appear to be lakes underwater, complete with waves and reflective surfaces. These things function as oasis well beyond the reach of any light from the surface where evolution has 'found a way'. Crabs, bloodworms, fish, plankon all have adapted to a lightless, but methane rich environment around the 'shores' of these lakes.

Like the bizarro 'alien' life around deep sea thermal vents, no one was expecting to find such thriving biomes under all that pressure - and indeed, several feet away from the shores of these 'lakes', you're back on the surface of the moon for all the activity there is. How'd these colonists (crabs/worms/corals etc.) adapt to such bizarre locales when they're so far removed from the safety zone their cousins find anywhere near comfortable? We've only scratched the surface of the science of these little hotspots of life - lots to learn, but it gives one clear hope that if -familiar- life can adapt to such extreme environments, if even single celled organisms can arise from a biological 'stew', the universe might be teaming with life ... at least everywhere there's a fluid medium to move about in.

****

Back's better - starting to draw again to spite it, but healing is slow - Just when its almost gone it seems to want to flare up again, or some stupid activity at work or at home, aggravates it all over again.