Some of his many words of wisdom:
“If you want to write, if you want to create, you must be the most sublime fool that God ever turned out and sent rambling. You must write every single day of your life. You must read dreadful dumb books and glorious books, and let them wrestle in beautiful fights inside your head, vulgar one moment, brilliant the next. You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads. I wish you a wrestling match with your Creative Muse that will last a lifetime. I wish craziness and foolishness and madness upon you. May you live with hysteria, and out of it make fine stories — science fiction or otherwise. Which finally means, may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world.”
And...
"Stuff your eyes with wonder," he said, "live as if you'd drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It's more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories. Ask no guarantees, ask for no security, there never was such an animal. And if there were, it would be related to the great sloth which hangs upside down in a tree all day every day, sleeping its life away. To hell with that," he said, "shake the tree and knock the great sloth down on his ass.”
You can watch/listen to my favorite tribute to Bradbury—for adults ONLY—here.
RIP also to professional limey-among-us Richard Dawson, veteran of Hogan’s Heroes, Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In and, of course, years of gratifying Yank women’s anglophilic fantasies as the host of Family Feud, departed at 79, as well as to Pedro Borbon, the mad Dominican middle reliever of the Cincinnati Reds, departed at 65. Borbon was immortalized in a throwaway gag in Airplane!: “Pinch hitting for Pedro Borbon…Manny Mota…”
Still more RIPs: to actress Kathryn Joosten—Mrs. Landingham on The West Wing—at 72, and to Russian singer Eduard Khil, of “Trololo” fame, at 77.
Finally, RIP to Tempe Improv partner Mark Anderson, found dead in a Buckeye hotel room. Here is an interview I did with Anderson for New Times in 2000, not too long before I went to work as a publicist for the Improv myself. I never got to know him well, but my boss there, Dan Mer, credited Anderson with helping to launch his own comedy-club management career at the time.
In honor of this week’s historic transit of Venus…
Monster-of-the-Week: …let’s give the nod to the title character, a three-eyed bat-person with a morel for a head, of Zontar: The Thing From Venus, Larry Buchanan’s riotous ultra-low-budgeter from 1966.
The movie is actually a remake of Roger Corman’s It Conquered the World, and by comparison it makes It Conquered the World look like Citizen Kane, but if you have time to squander, you can watch Zontar in its entirety here.
Wasn’t “Transit of Venus” a book by Henry Miller?
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