On many SBS bus lines is TV Mobile, a digital-broadcast channel. But since it is a city, despite being digital the signal will occasionally get confused and freeze up. Today riding downtown the TV froze on an image of some woman with Gurmit Singh, a reasonably popular comic actor (and star of Phu Chu Kang Private Limited). On screen, the caption: ``Tips on how to make it in Hollywood -- 5. Get Dandruff.''
There must be a context in which that makes sense, but I'll never know what it is.
In a Times bookstore I noticed the Stephen Baxter book Behemoth, which at 793 pages certainly is. It appears to be a collection of his Woolly Mammoths On Mars novels. I keep looking at this series because ``Woolly Mammoths On Mars'' seems at least audacious even if bad, and then I keep remembering his Titan, which was audaciously bad. It'd actually left me rooting for an ``it was all a dream'' ending. But I have a reasonably firm 400-page rule; only authors with my trust get more than that for their fiction, and Baxter lost mine with Titan and Anti-Ice.
The hobby shop I noticed had a ``Penguin Commando,'' a toy tie-in to Batman Returns. I wonder how, in 1992, they determined the approximate number of Penguin Commandoes that the public was eager to buy, and how close they got to the correct number.
Trivia: Percival Lowell was born 13 March 1855; the discovery of Pluto was announced on what would have been his 75th birthday. Source: The Explorers of Mars Hill: A Centennial History of Lowell Observatory, 1894-1994, William Lowell Putnam.
Currently reading: Pluto and Charon: Ice Worlds on the Ragged Edge of the Solar System, Alan Stern and Jacqueline Mitton. There's water ice on Pluto and Charon? Why don't people tell me these things? Boy these are more interesting rocks than I thought.