Should I have twittered that?

It’s perfect for homeschoolers, kids who are interested in biology, and grown-ups who dig surgery.

Here’s an odd companion for Froguts — The Guardian has an amazing photo gallery of portraits done before and after death by German photographer Walter Schels and his partner Beate Lakotta.

It’s very haunting stuff that raises plenty of questions about the nature of our being — and tugs at very personal emotions about your own mortality.

Here’s a pretty good video by a Mass MoCA intern who scoured the streets of my town to answer the very important but entirely diversionary question “What is art?”

Nick Abadzis’ excellent graphic novel “Laika” now has an informational Web site if you want to further explore the creation of the novel, as well as the topic it covers. Abadzis provides lots of material covering the book’s conception and creation, and also includes some of his research into the material. Cool stuff that’s another good resource for homeschoolers interested in teaching about graphic novels.

Oddee has a good rundown of the 20 Most Fascinating Prehistoric Paintings. If you have an interest in art history, why not start at the beginning, you know? And then you can cross reference this introduction to the lovely and haunting ancient form with the excellent book 30,000 Years of Art  and the intense and riveting series How Art Made the World.

The first new release by Minx this year, “Burnout” by Rebecca Donner and drawn by Inaki Miranda, grabs your attention fairly well without being anything special character-wise. Danni is a teenage girl who moves with her mother from the city to the middle of nowhere — bummer, nothing to do, as well all  know — after her father bolts on them. Mom ends up in the arms of an abusive lout while Danni ends up starry-eyed for her future step-brother. Meanwhile, her outrageous rock and roll best friend — is there any other type in these books? — feels their friendship is slipping.

Oh, add in there some intrigue involving eco-terrorism.

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There are all sorts of bits and pieces on YouTube, but I felt it was my duty to point out that there is one complete Rocket Robin Hood adventure up, Part One and Part Two.

The episode itself is apparently some sort of cult item among . . . somebody . . . because of its whacked out psychedelia. I was watching a documentary about William Castle the other night and thinking out it’s fun to rediscover something odd, but it’s pretty glorious to have experienced it firsthand.

And so it is that Rocket Robin Hood is not only one of my earliest TV memories, but one of my earliest memories entirely. Bits of the show and the music have stayed with me almost 40 years, even though I haven’t seen a damn bit of it until tonight.

So it’s odd to not only see this thing again that has lurked in the shadows of my consciousness for decades, but also . . . kind of enjoy it. Seriously, I sat through all 15 minutes of it and thought it was pretty cool. Actually, in comparison to what I had suspected all these years about the quality of the show, it was downright brilliant. Well, I mean, it didn’t make a lot of sense, but it was clever in a weird way and fun and it kept my attention and I liked it a lot better than Torchwood.

Since I tend to focus on reviews of things that I like rather than things that I don’t, what ends up happening is a rather long version of “This is really neat, I really like this, it makes me tap my toes and I don’t skip past it when it comes on the iPod.”

Sometimes there are tricks to a music review, the sort of arsenal that a writer calls on to go through the motions of writing something when they’re not passionate about writing it. If there’s some sort of history or context or cultural thingamajig that’s important to the music, then that’s always fun to write about. But if it’s just a review of the CD itself, in a vacuum with nothing else to talk about . . . ugh.

So in that spirit, I just wanted to jot down some of the most interesting things that have crossed my iPod wheel lately and the stuff I keep returning to most frequently.

The Wilders — good stomping bluegrass with some stylistic diversions

Babylon Circus — another fun French band, this time with a circus background

The Decemberists — after watching the performance DVD, I find myself going back to the original songs and beyond. They’re definitely a band to be re-absorbed and continually studied.

They Might Be Giants “Cast Thee Pod to the Wind” — it’s the fun and more experimental bonus disc to “The Else” and it’s  got the fabulous song “Brain Problem Situation” on it, as well as a gorgeous live version of “Metal Detector,” a catchy updated version of “I’m Your Boyfriend Now,” and the herky jerky synth number that’s the third in a trilogy, “She Was a Hotel Detective in the Future.”

Something I don’t have: this comp CD of obscure Kid Creole produced projects. But I will, I will.  I already have the Cristina stuff, but Gichy Dan? Don Armando? Oddly, it doesn’t include Elbow Bones.

And then there’s this fake video for the real new Madness song, which is off an upcoming album.

In the first book, over three short stories, Sfar told how the cat won and lost its power to speak, how the rabbi’s daughter met the man she would marry and what happened when the rabbi visited Paris. In this new volume, Sfar adds two more stories to the cycle — in “Heaven on Earth,” we learn more about the rabbi’s cousin, Malka of the Lions, a legendary, desert-wandering lady heart throb who travels with his own pet lion, and in “Africa’s Jerusalem,” the rabbi makes a new Russian friend and begins an adventure across Africa.

As seen through the eyes of the family cat, everyone’s motives are known – after all, no one hides much from an animal — but the interpretations of this openness is saddled to the cat’s limited experience with the breadth of human emotion, as well as the cat’s own desires in life. In perfect feline form, the cat can be haughty and act on extreme displeasure, and yet the proper attention, vigorous stroking and a warm body to curl up with at night is enough — its a sensual creature and its reality is defined by those standards. At the same time, the cat drops all sorts of insight to the rabbi, his daughter and all the other characters that swirl through the stories.

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And if “Lost” couldn’t get cooler in my eyes, Popular Mechanics uses the article to point out the unmistakable design similarities between the Large Hadron Collider in Cern and the Dharma Initiative Insignia.

In this accompanying question-and-answer session, producer Carlton Cuse says, “we’ve been very interested in these physicists who have been building this particle accelerator in the Alps, and there’s been a lot of debate and concern about what’s going to happen when they start smashing these particles into each other. People who are following that will probably enjoy some of the stuff that we’re doing in the upcoming run of episodes.”

Here Kaku speculates on the scientific possibilities of having to move the island, which was alluded to in the last episode — in fact, Popular Mechanics does a fun service in checking the science of “Lost” each week — as well as other shows and movies.

Obviously, the show uses real theories for entertainment purposes and adjusts them if needed for fiction — I’m just appreciative that the show actually takes this stuff seriously and works for some level of credibility in this area. I haven’t seen this much attention to real detail since — quite frankly — the original “Land of the Lost.”

There is another side to Ellison that is not evident in so many people who do make their name in the glib smart ass strata — he is a perfectionist on his creative side, a superior craftsman with the written word, a man who walks on the literary side as well as the critical one. He takes storytelling very seriously.

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With warm weather comes kayaking season . . . finally. This is actually our second of spring, but our first really great one, off the Connecticut River near Brattleboro, on the Vermont/New Hampshire border.

We have realized that kayaking in nature is delightful, but we also love sites with a bit of industrialism. This one had lots of bridges — seriously, kayaking under bridges is just an awesome thing to do, a simple pleasure in which you can really appreciate what’s usually just under your wheels — as well as some old, crumbly structures. Oh, and plenty of wild life. And an old insane asylum on one side.

But it’s the signs of man that are sometimes the most excellent part of a good kayak. It provides proof that they never seem to overtake nature, which is reassuring, and also allows the mind to daydream a little that you’ve landed on the “Planet of the Apes” or escaped from a domed city or something. It’s a little bit of urban exploration in rural surroundings.

In the last 10 years — if you’ve been paying close attention — it’s become very apparent that the ephemera of 50 years ago is more influential to our modern visual style than any fine or gallery art. In many cases, a visual idea may start with the boys in the berets, but it’s the commercial artists who take these and run, apply them to outlets in our daily lives and bring them to popular recognition, make them easy on our eyes and our brains, help us accept new ideas. As a result, brilliance crops up in the strangest places.

Like very old children’s books.

Two decades ago, Little Golden Books still had a reputation for the same level of ironic cheese that was reserved for Gumby and “Leave It to Beaver,” but that ended quickly once many of my generation started taking a second look at the line and realizing the artistic power behind the illustrators who created them. The stories run the gamut from charming to educational to odd dispatches from another era — with some timeless exceptions — but the artwork that graced these tales were often of such a high standard that they influenced generations of graphic designers, cartoonists, commercial illustrators and, yeah, children’s book illustrators.

In “Golden Legacy,” author Leonard S. Marcus offers decades-long company history of Golden Books, embellishing the behind-the-scenes revelations of business and editorial decision making with a lush and much deserved document of the company’s output — the work of legends like Richard Scarry, Garth Williams, Tibor Gergely, Leonard Weisgard, Alice and Martin Provensen and ground-breaking author Margaret Wise Brown. It’s part biography, part business history and — most importantly — part gorgeous art book.

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The program also likes to call itself the “Center for the Recently Possible.”

In other words, it’s a gathering of mad scientists, coming up with crazy and wonderful contraptions that sometimes help you in unexpected ways, other times make you think unexpected thoughts, and still others just give you a good giggle.

A number of these folks have had shows at the nearby Greylock Arts, a gallery in Adams, MA (helmed by former Shuffleboil contributor Marianne Petit and her very good buddy Matthew Belanger) and I’ve had the pleasure of speaking to and writing articles on several of them. I’m putting up the interviews in order to give people a chance to really get to know what goes on at ITP and what sorts of cool folks are doing it.

I’m starting with Leif Krinkle, a man of astonishing energy and imagination, with an eye towards sustainability.

SB: The Krinkl-O-Tron expands the notion of collaboration to include the audience.

LK: It came more from a theoretical perspective, when I first created it, I started making, when I came to ITP, the first question I had was ‘I make these big interactive installations and performance pieces, what kind of space do you have?’ ‘None.’ For about a year and a half, I made really small prototypes. With the Krinkl-O-Tron, even with these small propotypes I had been making with scan imagery and large multi screen displays, so I wanted to make an installation that was able to not only create but display these large format medias in real time and in doing so create some sort of physical interaction with them. That’s what the carousel was and I realized that I was trying to push the boundaries of what new media and electronic media had to offer and I thought that one of the boundaries is obviously power consumption, so I thought ‘Well, let’s see if we can figure out some way to offset the consumption of power or at least bring that to discussion. That’s where the sustainable aspect of this came in.

Different crowds interact differently, it’s more of the culture that you display it in. Interactive art is pretty new and people don’t really come to a gallery or an art show thinking that they’re going to interact or break a sweat or do something in order to fully experience the art.

Coming from a burning man background, where there are no spectators, you all have to participate, a lot of the people I’m around influenced me and inspired me to create things that require effort and group participation, so around here, there’s definitely a lot of people who hop on and start going. Marianne can’t keep off the thing. In Greylock, they’re around Mass MoCA and I imagine the east coast is a little more progressive on the coast than where I grew up in Michigan, so I found it. There was a 90 year old woman jumping on it and kids love it — kids use it way better than adults. I think adults are more concrete in their ideas of what is proper to do in a group of people and riding around on scooters doesn’t figure as one of them, so I think the adults take a little more coaxing.

SB: Adults get far too hung up on naming something art instead of just this cool thing.

LK: I think it’s the context that you put it in. I’ve never really considered myself an artist, so I think of it more as a carnival ride or just a kitschy thing. My background’s in record production and I do all this tech back-up to a lot of more traditional art, so I’ve never really considered myself an artist. As far as what adults would think . . . I’m still riding the fringe of what really is mainstream,  galleries are a venue, but I see it more at festivals. It’s almost like a sideshow attraction. I think that’s just me and my concrete thing, because in galleries there are a lot of proper things and etiquette and bureaucracy and, again, this question of is it art or is it not, and I really just forgo those.

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Eric, the Half A Bee

“Caution is a virtue. What? What?”

Lt. Col. Tawfiq Zacharya (Sasson Gabai) brings the Egyptian police force band for a performance at an Egyptian cultural center, the language difference quickly leads to confusion and the band ends up in the wrong town. Stranded and with no hotel nearby, several locals agree to put up the band for the night — and as the night progresses, some band members find themselves dropped smack dab in the middle of other people’s lives with little preparation.

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