Further "RiffTrax" ambivalence

Mystery Science Theater 3000 writer Michael J. Nelson has started a project where he records MST3K-like audio tracks to be synched up to big-budget movies. When I heard that one of the RiffTrax was going to be of The Phantom Menace, I got sort of depressed about it. Now, I hear there's going to be one for The Fellowship of the Ring... and I've proceeded to oscillate between "Maybe it is all a lark," and "Is this one going to be treated with much more respect?" I'm still not quite in the mood to rush out and buy either track. Still, for all that some MSTies I dared check out the latest reaction of to this announcement weren't reacting with "It's gonna get what it deserves!" this time, I'm reminded of an earlier comment to the suggestion that the "Lord of the Rings" movies might ultimately get commentary along the lines of "They wouldn't do a good movie"...

From the Bookshelf: Astronomy 365 Days

A while after I heard about "Creating the Worlds of Star Wars: 365 Days," I happened to learn that Abrams had published a whole series of "365 Days" books in the same thick, rectangular format. It was the sort of thing that you're surprised by because you hadn't realised it beforehand. Eventually, though, I decided to look at another book in the series, and bought "Astronomy: 365 Days," aware that it was a collection of photographs from the long-running Astronomy Picture of the Day site, a daily destination for me. Then, in its introduction, I learned that this book was in fact a sequel to an earlier "365 Days" book also collecting those photographs, "The Universe: 365 Days"...

That fresh surprise aside, "Astronomy: 365 Days" has some interesting qualities to it. Each page is specifically a day from the calendar, although at times they show historical events that didn't happen on the day printed with the explanation. Among its many pictures of photogenic nebulae and galaxies are recent discoveries from Cassini at Saturn and the Mars Exploration Rovers, along with other space-related events of the past few years. It's interesting to see familiar photographs moved from the potentially ambiguous confines of a computer screen to the different format of a printed book (although some of the photos are cropped to fit its long rectangular pages, a few are turned on their sides, and some have bars on either side to leave them square.) The one thing I thought was missing from the book at its end, though, was a list of just when each picture appeared on the original site, so that somebody could go to it and follow the hyperlinks added to the informational paragraphs without having to hunt through its search engine as I did.