Category: Sci-Fi/Fantasy

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A few years ago I lived in the city of Lake Forest (formerly El Toro) for a bit. One of the interesting things about Lake Forest is its collection of streets named after characters and places in Lord of the Rings. (And yes, these were around long before the movies were made.)

I still drive past Gondor Drive on my way back from the comic store, and I’ve been meaning to get a picture of the street sign for a while. It turned out to be too hard to shoot without actually aiming, so I turned onto a smaller street where I knew I could catch Elrond Lane:

Corner of Elrond and Ridge Route

Other Tolkien-inspired streets include: Buckland Lane, Bywater Road (and it is at least near water), Rivendell Drive, Shadowfax Drive and Brandywine Lane.

While checking the Thomas Guide for some of the ones I missed, I just discovered a neighborhood with Sesame Street, Muppet Lane, Big Bird, Oscar, Grover, and Cookie Monster. And Kurmit [sic], though I suppose that could be a typo.

And then there’s Dana Point, which has the Street of the Green Lantern. Of course, it has about 20 named Street of the fill-in-the-blank Lantern — Blue, Amber, Golden, Silver, Violet, etc. [Update: Here are some Green Lantern Street photos.]

Update Sep. 24: Here’s a blurry picture of the Gondor street sign:
Gondor Street Sign

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Since we’ve started showing Babylon 5 to a new group, I’ve been surfing the Lurker’s Guide and other sites. I came across an interesting tidbit about the spinoff series Crusade that I had forgotten.

At the point that TNT cancelled Crusade (13 episodes into filming, and months before it aired), Warner Bros. tried to sell it to the Sci Fi Channel. SciFi was interested in picking it up — and they actually did buy the rights to show reruns of B5 — but they had already committed their original-programming budget to several new shows. No mention of what shows they were, but…

Something jogged my memory. “What year was this?” I checked; it was 1999. “What year did Farscape start?” Sure enough, 1999.

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We went to see the director’s cut of Donnie Darko last night. (Somehow we had missed it the first time around.)

All I can say is, I walked out of there wishing The Philosophy of Time Travel was a real book. I’d love to get a copy of it.

Interestingly, when I checked Amazon to price the DVD, I discovered a companion book, The Donnie Darko Book, which features the script, interviews… and pages from the fictional book. Hmmm….

Update (August 2, 2006): It seems people aren’t reading through all the comments. Just to be clear, The Philosophy of Time Travel is not a real book. It would be a fun read if it was, but it isn’t.

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A couple of weeks ago, the landscaping wonks for my work building ripped out all the hedges in the parking-lot divider islands and heavily mulched the ground. They didn’t put anything new in until the middle of last week, when I noticed a slew of newly-planted birds of paradise on the exit side as we were driving out on Thursday night. This morning, the islands on the entrance side were stocked with nursery pots awaiting transplant. I’m wondering if I should start being even more suspicious of the lawyers in the building, or if I should wait to see if the thermostat starts creeping up…..

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I’m about halfway through The Illuminatus! Trilogy, and the most apt description is, if you’ll pardon the language, a mindfuck. Once the writing settles into a coherent structure (or perhaps once the reader is attuned to it), the mind starts noticing connections. Everywhere. It’s as if it was written specifically to induce apophenia.

The most insidious part of the book(s) is the frequent use of historical or other authors’ fictional sources. “Oh, there’s Emperor Norton.” “OK, we’re back to Buckminster Fuller again.” “Hey, that’s right, ‘Tekeli-li!’ does show up in both Lovecraft and Poe.” And this constant mixing of fact with fiction, familiar with strange, and things known to be true with things which seem implausible does make you wonder: how much of this did they make up on their own, and how much did they stitch together out of real events, prior works, and creative synthesis?

After all, if you had never heard of Joshua Norton, and one day heard the story of a man who declared himself Emperor of the United States, Continue reading →