Giant Freakin Robot

Art critic Camille Paglia wants American culture to embrace the story of art, which is why in her new book — Glittering Images: A Journey Through Art from Egypt to Star Wars — she contends that George Lucas’ Revenge of the Sith is the greatest work of art created in the last 30 years.

We’ll give you a few moments to let you process that. Maybe she watched Revenge of the Sith with the sound off?

In an interview with Vice.com, Paglia says:

The long finale of Revenge of the Sith has more inherent artistic value, emotional power, and global impact than anything by the artists you name. It’s because the art world has flat-lined and become an echo chamber of received opinion and toxic over-praise. It’s like the emperor’s new clothes — people are too intimidated to admit what they secretly think or what they might think with their blinders off…

I had considered using Japanese anime for the digital art chapter of the book, but it lacked the overwhelming operatic power and yes, seriousness of Lucas’s Revenge of the Sith.

One of the most important things to keep handy when you’re working in any kind of journalism is a nice big salt lick, just so you’ll have plenty of grains around anytime somebody reports something that seems far-fetched, too good to be true, or just plain unlikely. Case in point: last week John Grotzinger, the principal investigator for the Curiosity mission, told NPR that they had discovered Something Interesting in a Martian soil sample, something that was going to be “one for the history books,” but of course they couldn’t say what it was just yet. Naturally, this news soon spread across the interwebs, leading to speculation that they might have, maybe, just possibly, found some sort of life up there on the Red Planet. Well, here we are a week later and NASA has downgraded their announcement from “earthshaking” to “interesting.”

One of the biggest science stories of the year, if not the biggest, has been the Curiosity rover touching down on the surface of Mars and exploring the Gale Crater. And now a beautiful new video pays tribute to the mission, showing how it is so much more than a scientific exploration, but a true endeavor of love and passion.

There’s not a whole lot to say that the images in this video don’t express in a much more elegant manner.

Are you tired of people creeping up on your unattended computer, writing stupid messages on your open Facebook account, and hiding random swear words in your most important documents? You could take measures to increase your security, but that’s boring and takes too much time. What if you could just get one of Doctor Who’s greatest enemies to hang out around your desk and exterminate all of those lurkers?

That’s right, now you can use this Dalek Desk Defender to stand guard over your computer when you’re not around. Whether at home or the office, this little guy senses motion from six to nine feet away, and, depending on the setting, will light up and yell at the intruder. See it in action below.