Wyrd Universe 7.23.08

With the nationwide exodus for San Diego under way, this week is a slow one in my other universe, so for your entertainment and edification, here's some sfnal overflow from the semiregular news feature at my comics blog:

• The end of humanity . . . has a beginning. The very first Caprica trailer is up at SF Wire! (If you want to give the commercials a miss, I’ve also got a lower-res YouTube version up, for as long as the link lasts, at TM3B.)

• "If I were sitting in a Tube train and all the people opposite me were reading 'Mein Kampf' with obvious enjoyment and approval it probably wouldn’t disturb me much more than if they were reading Heinlein, Tolkien or Richard Adams." Michael Moorcock’s late-1970s essay "Starship Stormtroopers" is quoted in Dave Itzkoff’s NYTBR article on Elric: The Stealer of Souls.

• "One of the reasons girls are jumping on this trend is you put on a corset and bustle and you can be 10 lbs. overweight or thin as a rail, and you will look good in it." SFGate takes the steampunk phenomenon mainstream. But is it really all about the clothes?

• It's not exactly breaking news, but the discovery back in April of what appears to be the world’s only full-length cut of Fritz Lang’s silent classic Metropolis (1927) languishing untouched in the archives of the Museo del Cine in Buenos Aires is too cool for me to leave out.

• Not to be confused with Wyrd: Paul Di Filippo and his co-conspirators' Weird Universe "explores every aspect of a human and natural cosmos that is not only 'stranger than we imagine, but stranger than we can imagine.'" As you might expect, they’re dishing up some, yes, weird stuff over there, for instance: how many megabytes is your brain?

More items like this at TM3B. Really, you don't want to miss out on the world's only caffeinated lip balm.