by Garth Sundem
THE 10 MOST VALUABLE COMIC BOOKS
Without intrinsic value (such as being made out of a valuable raw material) or the backing of a major governmental reserve (perhaps the Marvel defined in relation to the dollar), technically a comic book is worth what you can sell it for. Meaning that the whims of eBay dictate comic book value. As of this book's printing, generally held Internet wisdom estimates the following comic book prices:
Action Comics 1 (1938)—$1,560,000: first appearance of Superman
Detective Comics 27 (1939)—$1,470,000: first appearance of Batman
Superman 1 (1939)—$702,000: first comic devoted to Superman
Detective Comics 1 (1937)—$654,000: Slam Bradley vs. Ching Lung
All-American Comics 16 (1940)—$486,000: first appearance of Green Lantern
Marvel Comics 1 (1939)—$461,000: Human Torch vs. Namor the Sub-Mariner
Batman 1 (1940)—$337,000: first comic devoted to Batman
Flash Comics 1 (1940)—$323,000: limited printing
More Fun Comics 52 (1940)—$312,000: first appearance of the Spectre
New Fun Comics 1 (1935)—$299,000: first publication with all-original content
THE QUOTABLE CHE GUEVARA
Ernesto Guevara de la Serna—Che—is cool. Why, exactly, he is so cool is hard to pinpoint. Certainly the whole Motorcycle Diaries thing has the ring of a mad, idealistic, South American On the Road, and you gotta like the combination of scraggly-ass sideburns, a cigar, and a submachine gun, but really—is Castro's “supreme prosecutor” a role model? Popular opinion doesn't care. Like Bruce Lee, JFK, and Yoda, Che—through the hazy filter of popular memory—can do no wrong. Besides, we like the shirts.
“I know you are here to kill me. Shoot, coward, you are only going to kill a man.”
“If Christ himself stood in my way, I, like Nietzsche, would not hesitate to squish him like a worm.”
“Cruel leaders are replaced only to have new leaders turn cruel.”
“Better to die standing than to live on your knees.”
“It's a sad thing not to have friends, but it is even sadder not to have enemies.”
FIVE BRILLIANT RUSSIAN NOVELISTS YOU'VE NEVER HEARD OF
Vasily Zhukovski (1783–1852): The illegitimate son of a landowner and a Turkish slave, Zhukovski is known as the father of Russian romantic literature. He was Pushkin before Pushkin was Pushkin. (The preceding is, to date, the only published example of a seven-word sentence that uses the word “Pushkin” three times.)
Mikhail Artsybashev (1878–1927): As might be expected from his surname, Artsybashev was an artist first and a novelist second. The protagonist of his little-known masterpiece, Sanin (1907), roams the countryside seducing innocent country girls (proto-Nabokov? proto-Kerouac?).
Nikolai Semyonovich Leskov (1831–1895): Considered by many to be the most Russian of all Russian writers (something to do with divested family land, work as a clerk in the bureaucracy, battles with the church, and other assorted suffering). Among his many little-known works is The Tale of Cross-eyed Lefty from Tula and the Steel Flea (1881).
Vsevolod Vyacheslavovich Ivanov* (1895–1963): After running away to be a circus clown, Vsevolod joined the Red Army, fighting in Siberia during the Civil War. Accordingly, many characters in his stories are very, very cold.
Konstantin Paustovsky (1892–1968): In 1965, Paustovsky was nominated for the Nobel Prize in literature. Admit it—you haven't heard of him! Much of his work describes wandering the Soviet countryside, where he worked odd jobs ranging from fisherman to law professor to boiler fabricator.
* Name implies potential vampirism.
GREAT CARS IN 007 FILMS
HOW TO MAKE AND USE A QUILL PEN
There is nothing—nothing—like a love letter written in calligraphic quill pen to get a geek off the couch in the garage. (Note: the calligraphic love letter requires the ability to manipulate a non-keyboard writing utensil and expertise in a nonprogramming language—both skills lost to many geeks. Therefore, instead of actually writing with a quill, consider laying it on parchment stamped with a red wax heart somewhere she will see it, to imply romantic intent.) For those requiring a functional quill pen for romantic, reenactment, or role-playing use, follow these directions:
Purchase or pluck goose or turkey feather (craft store, online, or drive toward low light density and look for “coop”).
Buy or gather enough sand to fill a baking dish and heat it in oven at 375 degrees until hot throughout. Remove from oven.
To temper quills, place them tip down in hot sand until sand cools.
Cut off tip, diagonally. If you're feeling ambitious, further shape nib to look like the tip of a fountain pen.
Purchase and use ink made for dip pens.
POLTI'S 36 DRAMATIC SITUATIONS
Think all good ideas have already been written? Georges Polti would agree (if he hadn't died in the early twentieth century). His book 36 Dramatic Situations—in print since 1917—continues to help screenwriters from Hollywood to Bollywood to Nollywood meet deadlines. With the thirty-six situations listed below, you, too, can plot a blockbuster.
Supplication Deliverance Crime pursued by vengeance
Vengeance taken for kin upon kin Pursuit Disaster
Falling prey to cruelty/ misfortune Revolt Daring enterprise
Abduction The enigma Obtaining
Enmity of kin Rivalry of kin Murderous adultery
Madness Fatal imprudence Involuntary crimes of love
Slaying of kin unrecognized Self-sacrifice for an ideal Self-sacrif ice for kin
All sacrificed for passion Necessity of sacrificing loved ones Rivalry of superior vs. inferior
Adultery Crimes of love Discovery and dishonor of a loved one
Obstacles to love An enemy loved Ambition
Conflict with a god Mistaken jealousy Erroneous judgment
Remorse Recovery of a loved one Loss of a loved one
FIVE USEFUL PHRASES IN KLINGON
Klingon is the official language of the Klingon people and the first language of Shakespeare (via time travel; see remark by High Chancellor Gorkon in the documentary Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country—“Shakespeare is best read in the original Klin-gon”). Just as the Inuit language includes many words for snow, so too does Klingon include many ways to describe weaponry and warfare, as well as many curses. (In fact the Athabaskan language family that encompasses Inuit is phonetically the closest terrestrial approximation to Klingon.) In general, extreme use of glottal stops and starts best approximates the pronunciation of native speakers.
Everyone encounters Tribbles occasionally.
Rot yittmey ghom Hoch.
Do I need to sleep on the floor? rauDaqj IQongn ISq’'a’?
Where is the bathroom? nuqDaq ‘oH puchpa’'e’?
Today is a good day to die. Heghlu ‘meH QaQ jajvam.
Your mother has a smooth forehead!
Hab SoSlI’ Quch!
TEN SOMEWHAT ARCANE DIAGRAMS OF PULLEY SYSTEMS
WINE VARIETALS: GET SNOOTY QUICK
THE BASICS OF GEOCACHING
If fly-fishing is a good excuse to stand in a river at sunrise, then the GPS-dependent sport of geo-caching is a good excuse to wander everything from city streets to country roads to backcountry trails to your neighbor's backyard. Geocaching also connects with the primal side of geeks who never quite stopped seeing themselves as Jim Hawkins searching for buried gold. To geocache, first purchase a GPS unit (and learn to use it). Then, go online to find the coordinates of caches in your area (www.geocaching.com). When you find a cache, sign the logbook. If you take something out of a cache, replace it with something of like value. Most caches include items remarkably similar to a historical collection of every white-elephant gift you have ever received at an office party.
botanist Carl Linnaeus was the first scientist to use the Celsius scale, known then as centigrade. He swapped the temperatures of Celsius's original scale, making freezing 0°C a
nd boiling 100°C.
CONVERSION: CELSIUS TO FAHRENHEIT TO KELVIN
In 1724, when Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit proposed his temperature scale, the lowest temperature he could consistently replicate was that of water mixed with ice and salt. This became zero on his scale. By 1742, many people realized that the Fahrenheit scale was rather arbitrary and nonintuitive. These people included the astronomer Anders Celsius, who proposed an alternative, with zero being water's freezing point and 100 being the boiling point. (In fact, Celsius initially had these exactly switched, with 0°C being boiling and 100°C freezing.) The Kelvin scale, most useful to scientists and people living north of Minneapolis, moves zero another 273 Celsius degrees lower, to the temperature known as absolute zero. At absolute zero (0°K), matter, which Einstein showed to be another form of energy, would cease to exist (mull that one—which law of thermodynamics would it contradict?).
Below are equations for conversion.
Celsius = 5/9 (Fahrenheit − 32)
Fahrenheit = 9/5 (Celsius − 32)
Kelvin = Celsius + 273
A SAM LOYD LOGIC PUZZLE
The boys in this class were asked to say their names and were photographed just as they started to pronounce the first letters. Their names are Oom, Alden, Eastman, Alfred, Arthur, Luke, Fletcher, Matthew, Theodore, Richard, Shermer, and Hisswald. Match the names to the correct boys.
HOW TO MAKE A LASER
There are many types of lasers, very few of which focus enough energy to destroy a planet the size of Alderaan. Basically, a laser squeezes energy into a defined visible wavelength (i.e., red or green), concentrating this energy into a low-divergence beam. The three primary parts of a laser are an initial energy source (pump source), a medium that, when excited, spits out photons of defined wavelength (gain medium), and a way to jack the power of these photons (optical resonator). In most lasers—like the helium-neon laser shown on the next page—electrical energy (pump source) passes through a tube of gas (gain medium). This energy is trapped between two mirrors, one that reflects all the light and one that reflects most of the light. Thus, the energy bounces back and forth in the gas, exciting photons, before finally leaking out through the semi-transparent mirror and totally annihilating anything in its path (or providing a nifty way to highlight areas of a PowerPoint presentation).
SPEED READING MADE EASY
Sorry: there is necessarily a trade-off between reading speed and comprehension—the faster you read, the less you will understand. Even by practicing the techniques herein described, it's unlikely you will reach the same level as Howard Stephen Berg, the self-proclaimed world's fastest reader (whose book-slinging website opens with “Dear Friend, Today marks the turning point of your life!!!”). On Live with Regis and Kathie Lee, Berg memorized the two-hundred-page book Going to the Movies and scored 100 percent on a comprehension test given by the author. Berg claims to read twenty-five thousand words per minute.
of laser technology range from barcode readers to industrial cutting to guiding military munitions. There would be no CD or DVD players without lasers, which reflect off a disc's LP-like system of minuscule bumps. And how would anyone survive his or her teen years without the edifying experience of late-night Laser Zeppelin at the local planetarium? (Rock on!) We all know what happens to the spy with the red dot on his chest (or to Bill Duke playing Sergeant Mac Eliot in Predator when three red dots appear on his forehead). On the less destructive side, laser technology corrects vision, whitens teeth, removes moles and tattoos, and is instrumental in many new surgical techniques. Lasers can even drive nuclear reactions by blasting a pellet of deuterium-tritium from all angles at once, thus compressing it, heating it, and leading to inertial confinement fusion*
SPEED READING STRATEGIES
• Define your information goals before reading: What do you need? What don't you need? By preplanning what you are looking for, you can separate the wheat from the chaff (and could have avoided reading the preceding sentence).
• Practice visualizing larger chunks of text. In first grade, your chunks were letters, later they were words, now these chunks may be clauses or sentences. Aim for paragraph-size visual chunks.
• Use your finger to guide your eyes in an even, rhythmic flow across the page.
• Do away with sounds. Try not to subvocalize, or listen to the word in your mind. Go straight from letters to meaning.
• Reduce rereading (skip-back). Practice tracking through material only once.
• Periodically test your speed using one of the many online speed-reading tests.
* Note: high Death Star potential.
THE 10 ALL-TIME GEEKIEST WRITERS
10. Orson Scott Card—His books Ender's Game and its sequel, Speaker for the Dead, are required reading on any geek list. Card is especially notable as one of the few sci-fiauthors to have attended BYU and served as a missionary for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.
9. Arthur C. Clark—Clark was knighted and nominated for a Nobel Prize for his work on satellite communication systems. We know him as the author of 2001: A Space Odyssey (as well as Rendezvous with Rama and The Fountains of Paradise).
8. Joe Haldeman—Teaches writing at MIT. Enough said, though it's also worthwhile to note his B.A. in astronomy and his novels The Forever War and its follow-up, Forever Peace.
7. Neal Stephenson—Stephenson wrote the seminal virtual-reality book Snow Crash, along with what is perhaps the geekiest novel of all time: Cryptonomicon (1999). He also writes about nanotechnology and pop-sci, and in 2008 published a space-opera (Anathem).
6. Robert A. Heinlein—Stranger in a Strange Land, Starship Troopers. With Asimov and Clark, considered one of the Big Three sci-fiwriters.
5. Frank Herbert—Dune is the bestselling sci-finovel of all time.
4. Isaac Asimov—You know his books (Foundation and I, Robot), but did you know he was also the longtime vice president of Mensa International?
3. Anne McCaffrey—Perhaps the first (and certainly the most read) author to posit kicking ass while sitting atop a dragon. Massively prolific.
2. J. R. R. Tolkien—An obscure author of limited imagination; author of a few little-read novels.
1. Ursula K. Le Guin—As of this writing, there are 580 Amazon entries listing Le Guin as author. Seriously. She's written sci-fi, sociology, poetry, translations from French, kids’ books, young adult, and pretty much anything else you can think of (including the Earthsea novels and the Hainish Cycle). Though, what lands her in first place on this list is her very, very cool name.
SOMEWHAT ABSTRACT EMOTICONS
ARE YOU FAT? DETERMINING BODY DENSITY THROUGH HYDROSTATIC WEIGHING
Fat floats and muscle sinks, so by comparing your underwater weight to your dry weight you can accurately determine your body composition.
Weigh yourself. Write down the number. Don't cheat.
Place a scale on the bottom of a hot tub or pool.
Stand or sit on the scale. If needed, use a weight belt to make yourself sink, and then subtract the weight from your total.
Submerge yourself completely. Blow the air out of your lungs. Holding air will make you seem fatter, so blow it all out.
Read your underwater weight. Write it down. Don't cheat.
Plug your numbers into the following equation: DryWeight / (DryWeight / WetWeight) = BodyDensity
Convert body density to percentage of body fat using the following equation: %BodyFat = (495 / BodyDensity) − 450
In the United States, women average 22–25 percent body fat, while men average 15–19 percent. The ideal range is 20–21 percent and 8–14 percent for women and men, respectively, with over 30 percent for women and 25 percent for men considered obese.
THE FINGER CALCULATOR TRICK
Have trouble multiplying the numbers six through ten? Looking for an abstruse way to accomplish this task that is likely much more difficult than passing yourself off as a third-grade student for the couple of weeks needed to relearn b
asic multiplication skills? Read on, dear geek, read on….
Assign the following numbers to your fingers: thumb = 10, index finger = 9, the bird = 8, ring finger = 7, pinky = 6.
Place your hands palm up in front of you, as if you were a Rockbiter wondering why your powerful hands failed to keep the world of Fantasia from slipping into the Nothing.
Choose a problem using the numbers 6 through 10, for example, 8 × 9.
Touch the fingers that represent these numbers (i.e., middle finger left hand, index finger right hand).
