Neil deGrasse Tyson Gives Direction to Richard Dawkins

I stumbled across this video this afternoon, and I thought Neil deGrasse Tyson makes his case beautifully. In his friendly rebuke of Richard Dawkin's scorched-earth tactics in arguing with (really at) atheists, Tyson makes the useful distinction between teaching and just putting the information out there.

I've long been impressed with Tyson, and I've heard him speak twice already at The Commonwealth Club of California in San Francisco in recent years. He fills the auditorium each time he comes here, and I'm sure he does the same when he speaks in other forums. Pertinent to this discussion, he does a great job of teaching, of explaining, of persuading, and even entertaining his audience even as he discusses complicated scientific concepts.

Dawkins' response, nonetheless, is priceless (and gracious).

Henry Hargreaves' Planet Hoth New York City

Following the shellacking New York City took in the recent snow storms, should we start calling it New Hoth City?

Well, as a former Manhattan resident who grew up in Green Bay, Wisconsin (home of "the frozen tundra of Lambaeu Field"), I'm not sure the recent storm amounts to a "snowpocalypse," but New Yorkers do love to complain. Luckily, Nerdcore notes that NYC is also the home of incredibly talented Henry Hargreaves, who created some collages of NYC and the ice planet Hoth from Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back. You can see more at Gothamist. And check out Hargreaves' own web site.

R2D2 on Magazine Covers: A Gallery

For no other reason than inspiration from watching the umpteenth rerun of Star Wars IV on TV last night, I decided to see how many magazines I could find over the years that featured the droid R2D2 on the cover. I expect this to be the most important blog post you'll read all year (followed, perhaps, by my Tron/Tron Legacy covers collection).

Studies: Magazines Remain Widely Popular

Nearly 190 million American adults read print magazines, and the magazine landscape is beginning to recover from the vicious recession, two new reports show. That might not be good news to the digital villagers seeking to drive a stake through the heart of print periodicals, but it should hearten the rest of us.

More than 188 million American adults read at least one print magazine, according to the American Magazine Survey from Affinity. Men slightly outnumber women among readers – 84 percent to 80 percent – and the average American adult reads 6.1 different magazines.

The Affinity study involved interviews with 34,000 adults in 2010.

Luckily, they’ll have plenty of magazines to read, at least judging from the demolition derby that has been the magazine publishing industry in recent years. After taking a big hit in 2009, when 596 magazines closed up shop, only 176 magazines ceased publication in 2010, according to MediaFinder, a database for the magazine industry.

Matt Kinsman, writing on Foliomag.com, notes that during that same time, there were 193 new magazines launched. There were 28 new food titles produced in 2010, with regional and health magazines also producing many new launches, with 15 and 10, respectively, Kinsman reports. Niches that did not do well this past year included home magazines, which lost 13 titles, and the large business-to-business sector, where 47 titles ceased publication while only 34 launched.

First Penguins, Now Cats and Rabbits: The Santa Dress-Up Continues

One can learn many things by visiting the web site of Xinhua, the official Chinese news agency. It's an often eye-opening look into how that government reports the world – sometimes much fairer than you'd expect, other times depressingly to form (such as its coverage of the recent Nobel Peace Prize brouhaha).

I noted a while ago a photo feature on the Xinhua site about penguins dressed as Santa. Now, Xinhua comes back with not one but two photo features on Santa-clad animals: rabbits and cats.

So go ahead and click through to those features for your holiday cute-overload.

As to why officially atheist China is paying so much attention to Christmas, your guess is as good as mine.

Republibot Remembers Fantastic Films, Sci Fi Universe, Starlog, & More

Sorry this is so late, but I only today discovered this post on Republibot, a conservative science-fiction web site. The post remembers what I call the last golden age of science-fiction magazines, the late 1970s, early 1980s – if you define such magazines not as the fiction mags but the splashier, flashier movie/TV/book media magazines that made Kerry O'Quinn and Norman Jacobs rich over at Starlog Group.

Republibot's comments on the various magazines are entertaining. I don't agree with him on a number of things; if Republibot thinks Starlog's journalism was bad, I don't know how Fantastic Films could rate higher on that writer's favorites list. To put it in right-wing terms Republibot might understand: A wag once labelled New Criterion editor Hilton Kramer the "poor man's Norman Podhoretz," which is a terribly nasty thing to say. But funny. Well, I always thought of Fantastic Films as the poor man's Starlog; it wasn't as good, it had fewer readers, its design was a mess, and its writing was at times laughable. It is a sad comment about the world of genre publishing that Fantastic Films was arguably the best of Starlog's competition (until the early 1990s, when new American and British publishers launched genre titles).

But to each his own. Despite my obvious bias, I also enjoyed a number of issues of Fantastic Films during its brief lifespan, and I obviously enjoyed Starlog's sister magazine, Future Life, which Republibot remembers fondly. However, I definitely don't share Republibot's love for early Sci-Fi Universe magazines. Published at first by the Larry Flynt family of publications (around the same time it launched Film Threat magazine), Sci-Fi Universe is the only magazine I know of to have published an interview with Harlan Ellison that was boring. I mean, you have to try to make him sound boring, something SFU managed to pull off.

But quibbling about films and politics and magazines is what makes genre life so much fun. That also makes me happy to have discovered Republibot.

Fangoria #300 - Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed, Something Red

Chris Alexander, editor of horror magazine Fangoria, posted the cover of issue #300 on Facebook a few days ago, and it's already the talk of the internet (if, by "the internet," you mean the dozen or so people who have commented on the page). Even former editor "Uncle Bob" Martin weighs in.

What has people talkin' and squawkin' is the return of the logo used in the mag's earliest years, beginning with issue #2. Hey, they even threw in the "Monsters, Aliens, Bizarre Creatures" tagline that adorned the first couple dozen issues or so of the magazine until Martin was able to give it the old heave-ho.

Frankly, I always liked this version of the logo; I thought it stood out on newsstands and it was clean yet had depth. I particularly did not like the logo that replaced it and which lasted for decades until a recent redesign which, oddly, made it look great. I don't know if this is a permanent change or just a 300th-issue homage. I also don't know if the tagline will remain. It's all up to the mag's publisher, editor, and designers. And newsstand feedback, no doubt.

But, as I hinted when I noted the inaugural issue by editor Alexander seven months ago, I think it's great that he's confident enough to make changes to the magazine. The mag is arguably more interesting than it has been in many years, and I find myself reading far more of each issue these days than I did when there was an overload of teen-torture films previewed inside. The magazine's smart, quirky, unpredictable, energetic, and sorta gross – exactly as Fango should be.

Fangoria #300 goes on sale in January.

What's Wrong with Advent Calendars?

No, I'm not getting on board with the "war against Christmas" fake controversy ginned up by the Fox political apparatchiks.

But consider this: On a trip to Walgreen's today to pick up some more wrapping paper, I noticed some advent calendars. You remember them: You open a little window or box on the calendar for each day leading up to Christmas. I have one on the wall outside my office. Open up each day and you get a little piece of chocolate.

But mixed in with the advent calendars and even outnumbering them at Walgreens were a bunch of Disney-themed "Count-down to Christmas Calendars" which were, of course, advent calendars, just sans anything Christmasy and just promoting some Disney movie property. Forget about the fact that you don't need to hyphenate most of the words in the calendar's title. I suspect this renaming of the calendar was probably done not out of an anti-religious bias, as some would claim. It was probably done out of misguided sensitivity to religious folks, so that Disney wasn't in the business of selling The Little Mermaid in a religious calendar setting.

Still, buy your kid a real advent calendar, with real chocolate, and not some overpriced Disney movie advertisement. They'll thank you some day.

The Science of Food Reviewers: Photographing the Photographer

When you go to a nice restaurant these days, it is not unusual to see people take out their cell phones and take a photo of their food before they begin eating. The explanation is probably that there are so many amateur food bloggers out there, pretending to be professional restaurant reviewers.

So I thought I'd snap the above photo at a recent meal when we were taken out for dinner by a professional wine and food editor. The first thing she or he (gotta be anonymous if you're a real restaurant reviewer, if at all possible) did when each of our plates arrived at the table was to snap images on his/her cell phone.

Consider it a behind-the-scenes look at the food writing business.

If You Like Starlog ...

From WEIMAR WORLD SERVICE

By the way, if you've been following my Starlog posts here and on my web site, might I suggest you join us on Facebook? Go to Facebook and look for the Starloggers group, and join it.