Most of the “supermoon” effect is illusion and expectation (the full moon at perigee is a little bit bigger in the sky than at other parts of its orbit, but not that much), but it’s a great reminder to get out and look at — or photograph — the full moon.
The strict shuttle arrives exactly every 17.5 minutes.
I think my biggest disappointment with the New 52 is that they didn’t go far enough.
They had a chance to completely reinvent the DC Universe to an extent that we haven’t seen since the dawn of the Silver Age. Instead, we have the same basic characters: Superman is still Clark Kent, Batman is still Bruce Wayne, Wonder Woman is still Diana, Flash is still Barry Allen, Green Lantern is still Hal Jordan (and John Stewart, and Kyle Rayner, and Guy Gardner), etc.
They could have tried to recapture the sheer creativity that made the Silver Age such a success. (What if instead of a guy with a magic ring, we make him a space cop? What if instead of a small guy who’s really strong, he actually shrinks to microscopic size?) Instead, they tried to recapture the success of the post-Crisis DCU. That’s still ambitious, but it has nowhere near the same level of potential, and I think that’s thrown a wet blanket over the past two years.
But the New 52 seems to be this weird combination of top-down heavy-handed editorial mandate and throw-things-at-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks. The post-Crisis on Infinite Earths universe felt a lot more open and creative, like almost anything was possible.
Then again, I’m thinking of the first five years or so after COIE (before it accumulated enough complexity that they started doing things like Zero Hour and all the gimmicks we now think of as exemplifying the 1990s), and we’re only two years into the New 52, and I do remember there being a bit of a shakedown period — and I’ve had 20 years to forget the stuff that didn’t work in the late 1980s in favor of what did. So I could be seeing it through nostalgia-colored glasses.
Edited together from a pair of comments I originally posted on Reddit
Point Fermin Lighthouse in San Pedro, California, at the southern tip of Los Angeles.
The Victorian lighthouse is surrounded by a city park, and the park is lined with a walkway along the top of the cliffs by the sea. Off to one end is the infamous sunken city, a suburban development that was abandoned when the land started sliding into the ocean. I took a whole slew of photos as I walked along the clifftop, and you can see the seven best on Flickr.
This is one of three lighthouses in the area that I considered driving to over the weekend for Instagram’s weekend hashtag project (theme: lighthouses), figuring it had the best chance of clear weather. No such luck. (Update: I have since been to Point Vicente many times, but I can’t remember what the third one was. Maybe the one in Long Beach by the aquarium?)
Strangely, the phone picture I chose for the project turned out to be more striking than the better shot taken with my camera. I was trying to keep the lamppost separate from the house, but it turned out I shouldn’t have.
I’m always surprised when that happens, even though it’s not that uncommon an occurrence.
Photo Challenge (Instagram): Lighthouse
I learned three nice things about the Kindle movie tie-in edition of Les Misérables today:
This will be great for times that I don’t want to lug around the brick, or that I’m out and about and want to work on my next article, or that I planned on reading something else and changed my mind.
