“You can’t live on amusement. It is the froth on water, an inch deep and then the mud.”¹

Geek Out

Amuse yourself. Head to the Cyclone Exhibition Center under the roller coaster of the same name at Coney Island for the Astroland Archives: Back to the Future exhibit. The display of photos and memorabilia commemorates a time when the word “Astroland” really meant something: a future of glass-bubbles gondolas, shiny jumpsuits, and hot dogs—hot dogs in space! As you browse the exhibit, you’ll surely wonder why they tore down awesome stuff like the Mercury Capsule Skyride and the Diving Bells. I guess the future turned out to be less amusing than we’d imagined.

Geek In

Make your own Extra-terrestrial Vegetation Evaluator. A couple of weeks ago, my wife and I went to see The Dark Knight, but it was sold out, so we saw WALL-E instead. I’m happy we did, as (flamebait alert!) I ultimately liked WALL-E much better than Dark Knight, which I thought was just fine—aside from the Joker, pretty boring, actually.

But back to WALL-E. The film had a smart message, but some negative nancies have argued that it’s a touch hypocritical to make a movie about the human race drowning in junk and then promote it with a slew of plastic junk. Not a bad point. If the cognitive dissonance makes you uncomfortable, there’s a great Instructable on making your own EVE robot. The likeness of the pattern is spot-on.

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1. According to a spoilsport. ↑