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29 Apr 2008 THE DESERT WITHIN
Talking about fatherhood, I suggest you the novel "The Road", by Cormac McCarthy. Father and child stumble across a nuclear desert avoiding contact with what remains of humanity. The landscape is gray, ashy and oppressive, colors survive only in dreams, or on the surface of a coke can skipped by looters. And from landscape, McCarthy lyrically diverts to hallucinated concerns on mankind. Occasionally I had to shut down the book, due to the anguish and pity overwhelming me: protect the child, because if he dies, life has no meaning at all.
 
24 Apr 2008 CRACK! INTERNATIONAL COMIX FESTIVAL
Illustration: Anna Ehrlemark.
 
18 Apr 2008 THE SILENCE OF THE BASS GUITAR
Finally I saw "The Future is Unwritten", a documentary by Julien Temple on Joe Strummer, leader of The Clash. As a fan, the movie often touched my heart, as a man it made me question: "Where am I at?" But one thing, maybe more than Joe Strummer's loss, left me highly disturbed: the silence of the bass player, Paul Simonon. I've always admired him, because he was handsome, cool and tender, clumsy in his first performances, classy later on. A hard worker, a classmate rather than an elder brother like Strummer. His absence in the movie seems to endure the hostile atmosphere that poisoned the backstage as The Clash disrupted. Beyond death.
I saw Joe and Paul play toghether twice in Rome, mid eighties and mid nineties. Second time they performed "Straight to Hell", one of my favourite tunes (I used it as a lullaby to put my daughter asleep!). In that moment, they were playing for me.
 
06 Apr 2008 SHRINKIKEA
IKEA products are undergoing an interesting shrinking process. A case history of this disturbing phenomenon is described further.
Image shows LAMPLIG, a stainless steel travit purchased in 2001 (boiler is a non-IKEA item). LAMPLIG has 10 ribs spanning 30cm, and it weights 1500 grams.
Same article seven years later. Two ribs disappeared, width shortened to 25.5cm and weight decreased to 600 grams. Rib diameter is constant, while rib interleave slightly increases.
The graph above assumes that shrinking process is linear in time. According to this, LAMPLIG will become weightless during the summer of 2012, and will continue to lose ribs at a rate of two each seven years.
LAMPLIG as shown on the 2029 edition of the IKEA catalogue.
 
25 Mar 2008 SIR ARTHUR C. CLARKE
Last week (19 March) Sir Arthur C. Clarke performed his final lift off and now probably occupies a geo-stationary orbit above the Indian Ocean. He was widely known for writing "2001, a Space Odyssey", but I prefer his early works, rock solid, hardcore sci-fi like "Prelude to Space", "Shadows on the Moon", "Islands in the Sky".
My grandfather bought the italian edition of "Islands in the Sky" in 1954. I can imagine my father (a pre-teenager at that time) reading it, and I imagine his feelings, as the main character of the story was a boy and a space-age enthousiast, just like him. I devoured the same pages about twenty years later, I remember Sir Arthur explaining me the basic physic principles of space travel.
There's another book by Sir Arthur that I consider a milestone of my personal sci-fi addiction, a short tale collection. Among them are some of the pinnacles of his production, i.e. "Rescue Party" ("Spedizione di Soccorso" in italian), "The Star", "The Nine Billions of Names of God", "Summer on Icarus". What left me breathless, reading them over and over, was their final, the last ten words that overturned and gave new meanig to the whole tale. Since then, I stated that a good story should be written beginning from it's end.
Here are some of my drawings from the mid eighties. They are not directly related with Sir Arthur, but they strongly witness my background.
Computheroes was intended to be a serie of short comics. Fellows with jacks sticking from their brain where in direct contact with powerful machines.
An aracno-mobile. A similar vehicle can be seen in "Ghost in the Shell".
Hibernaut. Space travels are something for lonesome folks.
 
10 Feb 2008 COMMANDER
I like homemade carnival disguises. My son wanted a Transformer outfit, he loves the 1986 version of Optimus Prime (Commander in italian).
First we did some research, drew sketches, took measures. The mask proportions were obtained folding a sheet of paper around my son's head.
Elements of the outfit were drafted with CAD and plotted in full scale. Download here the AutoCAD file (64kB).
Paper was spray glued on cardboard (light for mask, heavy for body and other elements), cut and folded.
Below you can see my son proudly wearing his Commander disguise. Check out this site for amazing paper robots!

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