the ritual flipping

Time for the ritual of flipping my office's calendar to the new month. July's art, taken from Thrilling Wonder Stories's June 1942 issue, involves no display of feminine pulchritude. Instead, one of two men in armored suits is aiming a blowtorch at a chunk of ice in which three WW2 Navy officers are encased, tied *and* gagged. Whoever did this to them was not taking any chance that they could escape.

“Atomic Robo and the Flying She-Devils of the Pacific”

“My tombstone will say ‘Put guns on the prototypes!’”

Thus begins the first issue of “Atomic Robo and the Flying She-Devils of the Pacific”. This story set in 1951 finds the robotic son of Nikola Tesla flying an experimental jet plane for Howard Hughes way away from everything over the Pacific Ocean. Not quite everything actually. He comes under attack by rocket-powered foo fighters, and survives only due to the providential appearance of jetpack-endowed guys. Except that...

“A girl?!”
“Yeah, sometimes that happens.”

Before you know it, Hazel the Sky Pirate introduces him to the rest of the gang, all of them ladies who had refused to go back to their old lives when the War ended. That includes Lauren, a genius of mechanical stuff who, because the others didn’t have planes to go around, improvised jetpacks from what was lying around.

Typical loony stuff from Brian Clevinger and Scott Wegener. I’m looking forward to the 2nd issue, in which the Pirates’s uncharted She-Devil island will probably become a bit more charted than its inhabitants would like, due to the mysterious and quite bellicose foo fighters.

what it needs

"What does the team need from me?"

That's what I said to my new boss when we talked over the phone last week. He'll be in the Bay Area, where the rest of the team works, on the week of July 16, so of course I'm flying there that week, at my own expense. Hopefully what the team needs is what *I* need. If not, I'll try to meet a few people from other groups to show them what a great asset I'd be.

This reminds me that I haven't seen the Twilight Zone's episode "What You Need" in a long time. Did you know it was very loosely based on a story by Henry Kuttner and CL Moore?

roundabout

( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Tdu4uKSZ3M )