A wickedly bright green fireball lit the skies over western Canada yesterday, as a meteor streaked to the ground somewhere in the Prairies, near the border of Saskatchewan and Alberta.

According the RCMP in Lloydminster, a meteor fell from the northern skies at around 5:30pm MT on Thursday. It was visible from Edmonton, east from Lloydminister and into Saskatchewan and as far south as the Regina area–which is a helluva big area.

Witnesses said that the meteor crossed the sky for between five and ten seconds, and the fireball appeared alternately white, green, and even rainbow-coloured. Locals at the Red Pheasant First Nation, 100 kilometres northeast of Saskatoon, said the walls of their band office shook when the fireball streaked overhead.

The fireball may have crashed into the ground about 200 kilometres south of Calgary, according one witness. Nevertheless, the search is on.

Your know what’s harder than finding a needle in a haystack? FINDING A METEOR IN THE PRAIRIES! Good luck to whoever has that job. You’re going to need it…

– S.

That’s right, you heard it here first: Czech underwear supermodel Karolina Kurkova is, in fact, a clone. The recently released proof?

She has no belly button.

Her agent’s flimsy denial that “she’s not an alien”, even if true, doesn’t address the fact that she must then be, by default, a clone.

Otherwise known as a navel, the belly button is the rounded, knotty depression in the center of the abdomen caused by the detachment of the umbilical cord that fed you while in the womb. The only reason not to have one? You were grown in a vat!

In an attempt to hide this fact from the public, the military-fashonista industrial complex has gone so far as to Photoshop a belly button on to Ms. Kurkova’s cloned torso in photographs, but we’re not fooled.

What nefarious purposes could be served by the cloning of an army of Victoria’s Secret models? I don’t know, yet, but I mean to find out 😉

– S.

I have a long-standing interest in sound fx and their production, especially since I took a course in university on electro-acoutsic composition, which was all about the production and manipulation of sound. This same interest played a part in my Writers of the Future Grand Prize winning story, “Saturn in G Minor.”

There’s some video available on the BBC website that’s a guided tour of the BBC’s old Radiophonic Workshop by two of the sound engineers. Now, this Radiophonic Workshop is kind of a sound fx candy shop, and where the sounds for Doctor Who and Blake’s 7 were produced. The main clip features a how-to on making your own Dalek voice.

Check it out here, and be sure to watch (and listen!) to some of the other fascinating clips.

– S.

Today I had to very grudgingly admit to myself, and to an editor, that a story I was working on wasn’t.

Working, that is.

So I had to e-mail the very nice editor who’d given me an extension to submit and let him know that I wasn’t going to be able to submit after all. And I hate doing that. Not only was the theme of this anthology and really interesting one–planetary exodus–but I had an idea that was perfect for it and which had been percolating in the back of my mind for some time. And this editor had very kindly made an exception and allowed me to submit this week, and I hate to let down that kindness–because I’ve worked as an editor and I know how much I hate when people ask for special treatment and then don’t follow through.

But when I sat down to actually think about it and write about it nothing was clicking. It was one of those occasions where I had an IDEA but not a STORY, and those are different things. There might indeed be a story in that idea somewhere, and maybe I’ll come back to the idea later, but I’m not at a point where I can see it right now, and the stories I did have that came out of this idea all struck me as really obvious and clichéd.

And the stories I’ve sold, and even those which haven’t sold yet but which I’m most proud of writing, are those ones that have a unique central idea, or at a least a unique take on old themes, and where I’ve felt like I’ve pushed myself and done something new for me. I have nothing against clichés, per se, but when it seems tired and hackneyed even to me…

Now, this was just an extension on submitting for consideration and was by no means a done deal–it wasn’t a sale or a commission, and there was still every chance that the editor would have decided the story didn’t work or didn’t fit his collection and sent it back. But if you don’t even submit the story then there’s zero chance of selling it, right?

But I feel that there has to be a balance: while there’s every chance an editor might not like something you send them, I think the fundamental measure of whether you should send a story out is whether you, as the author, are happy with it. Each story you submit needs to be the absolute best you can muster at that point in your career and with the skills and talents you possess at the time.

It can certainly be the case that a story might still be flawed or just not work even when you get it to what you feel is the best you can do: sometimes you’re just too close to a tale and its telling to be able to look objectively and decided whether it really works. But there’s no point in wasting an editor’s precious time and making myself look like an idiot or (worse!) an amateur by sending along something that even I can see is flat, or clichéd, or just plain crap.

*Sigh*

I’m also wondering whether I’m still in a short story frame of mind at all now that I’ve been working and researching this book. I mentioned to Sean Williams at the Writers of the Future week that I was having trouble thinking of novel-length stories, while at the same time my short stories were getting longer and longer. But having taken a year to get into a ‘novel’ frame of mind, start doing research, thinking of a novel-length idea, multiple interweaving storylines…Well, I don’t know if I can down shift into short stories, which are as hard as writing and researching novels but which are at the same time much more like writing poetry: all about scale and economy, a limited number of characters, focused on a single compact moment (or series of moments).

I think I’m too comfortable with the relative sprawl of a novel, now.

Anyway, just thinking out loud. Back to reading a biography of Mark Twain for that book I’m writing…

– S.

Oh no, wait…Sorry, that’s a star. But you can see how I’d get confused, right?

Apparently, this is the first fuzzy photo of alien planets outside our solar system, as captured by two teams of astronomers. The pictures show four likely planets that appear as specks of white, nearly indecipherable except to the most eagle-eyed experts. All are trillions of miles away — three of them orbiting the same star, and the fourth circling a different star.

None of the four giant gaseous planets are remotely habitable or remotely like Earth. But they raise the possibility of others more hospitable.

It’s only a matter of time before “we get a dot that’s blue and Earthlike,” said astronomer Bruce Macintosh of the Lawrence Livermore National Lab, one of the photographers.

Here’s hoping.

The astronomers used a combination of ground-based telescopes and the Hubble Space Telescope to take the photos.

The Hubble team this spring compared a 2006 photo to one of the same body taken by Hubble in 2004. The scientists used that to show that the object orbited a star and was part of a massive red dust ring which is usually associated with planets — making it less likely to be a dwarf star.

The planet discovered by Hubble is one of the smallest exoplanets found yet. It’s somewhere between the size of Neptune and three times bigger than Jupiter. And it may have a Saturn-like ring.

It circles the star Fomalhaut (pronounced FUM-al-HUT), which is Arabic for “mouth of the fish.” It’s in the constellation Piscis Austrinus and is relatively close by — a mere 148 trillion miles away, practically a next-door neighbor by galactic standards. The planet’s temperature is around 260 degrees, but that’s cool by comparison to other exoplanets.

The planet is only about 200 million years old, a baby compared to the more than 4 billion-year-old planets in our solar system. That’s important to astronomers because they can study what Earth and planets in our solar system may have been like in their infancy, said Paul Kalas at the University of California, Berkeley. Kalas led the team using Hubble to discover Fomalhaut’s planet.

One big reason the picture looks fuzzy is that the star Fomalhaut is 100 million times brighter than its planet.

It’s a bit clearer in this photo with an inset:

– S.

W00t w00t!

A big congrats to my good friend and evil twin Tony Pi, who has just learned he’s sold a story to Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show.

Not only is this his third pro sale–my evil twin beat me to a third pro sale!–but this is the story Tony wrote during the 24hr writing exercise at our Writers of the Future workshop. As I’ve said elsewhere, I was really impressed by Tony’s organization and focus during the writing phase, and this translated into my initial reaction to the story, which I recall was something like: “You came up with all this in just 24 hours!?!”

This was also the story that Tony was working hard on during our flight back from California while I was catching up on my beauty rest. Whose choice benefited them more? (Hint: not me).

Tony was nice enough to let me read the penultimate draft and the story is a knock-out, even better than it was at the WOTF workshop.

Now titled “Tekkai, Exhaling His Soul”, Tony’s story will appear in an upcoming issue of IGMS, likely issue #12.

Nice work, Tony. Great story and a great home for it. I’m thrilled for you!

– S.

Stephen Hawking has proposed that the world should devote about 10 times as much as NASA’s current budget – or 0.25% of the world’s financial resources – to space exploration and the colonization of the Moon and Mars.

He suggests that colonising space is an “insurance policy” against the possibility of humanity being wiped out by catastrophes like nuclear war and climate change. He argues that humanity should eventually expand to other solar systems.

Now, I’m all for all of this. Hell, I want to be one to GO on one of these trips. But this also ties nicely into a story I’m currently preparing for submission to an anthology whose theme is mass exodus of a population from its homeworld. Lunar and Martian colonies (along with tourist resorts in low earth orbit) provide much of the remnant of humanity who survive a meteor impact on Earth.

Stephen Hawking and Stephen Kotowych: great minds thinking alike again… 😉

– S.

AC/DC eat your hearts out: Mexican archaeologists have found the actual Mayan highway to hell.

Legend says the afterlife for ancient Mayas was a terrifying obstacle course in which the dead had to traverse rivers of blood, and chambers full of sharp knives, bats and jaguars.

Now a Mexican archeologist using long-forgotten testimony from the Spanish Inquisition says a series of caves he has explored may be the place where the Maya actually tried to depict this highway through hell.

The network of underground chambers, roads and temples beneath farmland and jungle on the Yucatan peninsula suggests the Maya fashioned them to mimic the journey to the underworld, or Xibalba, described in ancient mythological texts such as the Popol Vuh.

But the best part? Check out the description of the underworld they found:

“It was the place of fear, the place of cold, the place of danger, of the abyss,” said University of Yucatan archeologist Guillermo de Anda.
…
There, in the stygian darkness, a scene unfolded that was eerily reminiscent of an “Indiana Jones” movie – tottering ancient temple platforms, slippery staircases and tortuous paths that skirted underground lakes littered with Mayan pottery and ancient skulls.

The group explored walled-off sacred chambers that can only be entered by crawling along a floor populated by spiders, scorpions and toads.

Now that would have made a much better movie than Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

Read the full article here at the Canadian Press site.

– S.

Hmmm…

As you perhaps can tell, things have changed muchly around here since yesterday.

In my attempt to remove Google’s AdWords from my blog last night I mucked up the Blogger template somethin’ fierce and had to pick a new one. Unfortunately, doing so removed all of the customizations I’d made over the last couple of years, so that’s why things in the right sidebar look so wonky.

I’ve been trying to put things back the way they were but it might take a day or two for me to find the time to do it all, so be patient 🙂

Otherwise, I kinda think this new template is an improvement over the previous one–seems easier to read to me. And the hyperlinks show up more clearly, too.

Thoughts on the new layout?

– S.

A long time ago I posted a side-by-side comparison of the old vs. new cast for JJ Abrams’ STAR TREK movie and it quickly became the most-viewed page on my blog. So I learned my lesson: post more about the STAR TREK movie! 🙂

I see today on the BBC website that footage has been released, including the above still of the bridge crew–sans Spock, though.

Hmm…the fanboy in me can’t help but think that the red-blue-gold uniform sets weren’t in service until sometime after Captain Pike left command of the Enterprise…but this is a re-imagining, so I’ll let it go.

What impresses me most is how much Karl Urban looks like DeForest Kelley with that haircut. But I’m confused by Chekov with curly hair???

I’m still on the fence whether I think they can pull this off or not. I’ll go see it and I hope I enjoy it, but I reserve the right to be horrified if they butcher the thing.

– S.