The Penguin

Sails! Yes, I'm talking about the tall vertebral fins running across the backs of, most famously, Spinosaurus aegypticus and Dimetrodon ssp. These weird structures have driven paleobiologists crazy for years: what were they for? How did they work? What benefit did they impart to the creatures that used them? Two interpretations of Spinosaurus. From the excellent blog Mesozoic Archives. The picture is complicated by the fact that Dimetrodon and Spinosaurus could not have been further apart, taxonomically speaking: Dimetrodon was a synapsid - like mammals - while Spinosaurus and other dinosaurs belonged to the archosaur supergroup, like crocodiles. Their last common ancestor was some kind of primordial lizardy thing, and since then they had nothing to do with each other. They were also separated by 207 million years, which is three times as long  as the span separating dinosaurs and us. Source: Wikimedia Taking an even broader view, things get weirder. Just after Di...

[ Disclaimer:  I don't often discuss political or societal issues on this blog. If I do, I try to parse the nuance of an issue, to view it from a different angle, rather than automatically flying to the right or the left. Naturally, I heavily moderate any comments on my blog...I delete, rather than argue. My aim here is not to add to the parakeet squawks of pro- or anti-, but instead to muse, rationally and with as much objectivity as possible, on the implications of the issue at hand. In reading these posts, I only ask that you set aside any preconceived notions you have on the topic. If I can spark some deep thoughts about an issue, I will consider these posts successful.] Our controversial topic for today is the so-called "Snowflake Revolt" occurring on college campuses across America (apologies if this is a partisan term, but I couldn't find a better name for it). This particular sobriquet comes from the dictum, heavily inflected with contempt, that "ever...

I'm no influential writer or editor, but I have been around the block a couple of times in both departments. Several obstacles to good writing seem to pop up, over and over again. I've made a quick catalog of the rookie mistakes I've seen, and hopefully my analysis is edifying: 1. Writing Genre The claim: "I don't write [insert genre here]. That's not where my imagination goes." It's all well and good to characterize yourself by the story you prefer. The problem comes in when you're so stuck in a genre rut, and limited by the confines of your particular hobbyhorse. I think the problem here is that writers forget that they write stories,  not genre.  In other words, they confuse the medium with the message. Think of stories as tetrapods - birds, mammals, or reptiles: they might have some huge differences between them, but as you dig down through their anatomy, you'll see that they have all the same basic parts. Whether swine or lizard, th...

I was just going back through my blog archive and happened to stumble across this post I wrote way back in June 2015, in which I profiled Boy's Life artist Tom Eaton. Mr. Eaton wrote and illustrated "Pedro" and "Dink & Duff" for the magazine, as well as illustrating numerous puzzles and gags, beginning sometime in 1984. I received wonderful responses from several Tom Eaton fans, who pointed me to collections of old Boy's Life ; at the time, I was kicking around the idea of collecting Mr. Eaton's work into a single document, if only for my own amusement. As far as I know, there is no definitive "Collected Tom Eaton", which is a shame. Having revisited the post, I decided to Google Tom Eaton and his work, wondering if new material had been uploaded since I wrote the original post. This is when I found out he'd recently passed away, on December 11, 2016. You can read the Scouting magazine obituary here. Tom Eaton was a big influe...