| Space Race Heats Up in Asia
I'd even venture to say our Mars pipedreams are closer to reality than anything Asia is actually doing. Give them a couple of years to decades and maybe we can talk. And what's wrong with an Asian space race? Sounds like all mankind can benefit from the results with less strain to our taxpayers. I'm not advocating less NASA spending, I'm just saying other governments throwing in their chips isn't necessarily bad for us. We need more choices of governments and private industry that can get man and materials into space. Heck, maybe the real space race hasn't even started yet. Maybe history will see the cold-war space race as a prelude to the real global space race that lead to actual markets and residents of space.
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Blot on a magical landscape? That's your lookout
There ought to be a name for them: those structures that are meant to provide sights for sore eyes, but which turn out to be eyesores themselves. They are the oxymorons of the travel world - tourist un-attractions, the man-made attempts to enhance beauty spots that blot the very landscapes they are supposed to embellish. The irony is that the only reason they are there is to improve the view - but the view from them, not of them. To ignore how they look is to adopt the logic of children who think that by hiding their eyes they become invisible. These constructions satisfy man's greed to see more than nature intended. Far from content with merely peering over the rim of the Grand Canyon, we now apparently need to step out over it into notional thin air. That this should require something looking like the tube of a low-voltage light bulb to be bolted to the canyon wall seems neither here nor there.
Organic gardens' seeds of success
1 Soup up the soil. The key to gardening more naturally, Tyson says, is to build the nutrients in your soil and boost its organic matter. You can do this by making your own compost or buying a premade organic soil builder.
It's easy to make compost in a free-form pile or in an outdoor container in your own yard. Just find a sunny spot, use lawn clippings and tree leaves as the foundation, and then add your daily kitchen vegetable scraps, a handful of soil and occasional water to the pile.
Once the compost has turned into rich, fertile soil (about four to six months), add it to your garden. Don't have the time or the inclination to compost? Allison Palmer of Palmer's Garden & Goods suggests using a low-cost soil builder such as Greenleaf mushroom compost to enrich soil or mix it with your own compost to repel bugs.
beyond the multiplex
It's surprising to find, then, that "The Taste of Tea," which he wrote and directed, is in fact a quiet, slice-of-life tale about an extended family living in rural Japan. Each member has his or her own eccentricity (Mom is working on her animated manga, for instance) and there are flashes of visual zaniness, but it's mostly a gentle tale. Too gentle, in fact, to warrant a running time of nearly 21/2 hours. It does get wearying after a while, even though the two youngest members each have a charming subplot: The son joins his school's Go team to pursue a crush on the new girl, while his younger sister tries to figure out why she's frequently shadowed by a giant version of herself. (Opens Friday at Hollywood Theatre.) "THE TREASURES OF LONG GONE JOHN" -- Warhol underestimated: In the future, everyone will be the subject of a feature-length documentary.
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