DS104.mp3

Welcome everyone. I’m Christopher DeFilippis and this is DeFlip Side.

Fifty years ago this month, Astronomer Frank Drake decided to point a radio telescope at the stars Tau Ceti and Epsilon Endrani, determined to find a radio signal from another world. Drake called his experiment Project Ozma, a nod to the character Princess Ozma in L. Frank Baum’s Oz books. And thus was an entirely new science born, from nothing more than the tools at hand, a little optimism and a penchant for the fantastic. Within a year, the first SETI conference was held and the true search for intelligent life in the universe had begun.

In the half century since, SETI—an acronym for Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence—has become a collective endeavor the world over. But just what are the odds of finding anything? Well, Frank Drake laid that out during that very first SETI conference in 1961, and his Drake Equation and has been touted as the most famous equation since Einstein’s E=mc².

You are familiar with the Drake Equation, aren’t you?

Okay, I couldn’t resist a shout-out to Big Bang Theory, but it’s really not as complicated as Sheldon makes it seem: Here’s how the Drake Equation works:

First take the total number of stars in the Milky Way. Slash that down to the number of stars with planets. Slash that by the number of planets that can support life as we understand it. Slash again by the number of planets on which life actually arises, then slash yet again by the amount of life that achieves intelligence. Slash by the number of intelligent species that communicate like we do (say by radio waves). And then slash that by the time such a species is in existence.

Phew… So taking ALL of that paring down into account, what kind of number does the Drake equation leave us with? Well, according to Drake himself:

“The number of detectable civilizations in the galaxy is in the thousands. That’s very exciting. There are thousands of civilizations to detect. But it doesn’t mean the search is easy. Because even with thousands, the distance to the nearest civilization is more than a thousand light years. And it means that we much search perhaps tens of millions of stars before we will hit on one which is transmitting to us in a detectable signal.”

Just thousands? That kinda takes the wind out of the old solar sails, huh? Especially when you consider how freaking huge the galaxy is. But despite these ridiculous odds, on August 15, 1977, SETI scientists heard just what they had been listening for:

What you’re hearing now has since become known as the Wow! signal, a strong narrowband radio frequency, unlikely to occur naturally—in other words, potential proof of alien intelligence. So it’s no wonder that Dr. Jerry R. Ehman who detected the signal, circled the audio spike on the computer printout and wrote one word next to it: “Wow!”

Proof of the Wow! signal

The signal came from somewhere beyond and to the east of the constellation Sagittarius and lasted 72 seconds. And in the 33 years that have followed, multiple attempts to detect it again have turned up bubkis.

Speculation on the signal’s origins abound, running the gamut from a freak amplification of a naturally occurring signal to conjecture that it could have come from a passing spaceship. But the Wow! signal has remained the Holy Grail of SETI research.

And after fifty years of ceaseless hunting, this persistent lack of any concrete proof of intelligent life among the stars had naturally led many to invoke the Fermi Paradox. As postulated by Physicist Enrico Fermi in 1950—ten years before the Drake Equation—taking into account the number of stars that currently or ever have been able to host habitable planets, chances for the existence of extraterrestrials are high. And given the vast cosmological timescale involved, somebody should have swung by Earth for a visit by now. So where the heck is everyone?

SETI scientists have acknowledged this lack of progress, and there’s a move afoot to re-examine how they’re conducting their search. And, fitting to SETI’s Oz-inspired origins, this new direction is based largely on the speculations of a best-selling Science Fiction writer—Gregory Benford, author of some 20 books, including the Nebula award-winning novel Timescape.

Benford also happens to be an astrophysicist at UC Irvine and along with his brother James Benford, another physicist, has floated the idea that we might be listening in the wrong place, both in terms of stellar location and radio frequency.

Their argument goes like this: if there are any aliens out there intentionally transmitting signals, those transmissions would be expensive. So to achieve maximum efficiency with minimal resources, they wouldn’t be broadcasting willy-nilly. Instead, they’d probably focus their transmissions as pulsed, narrowly directed signals—“more like Twitter and less like War and Peace” to quote James Benford. Somewhere in the 1-10 gigahertz range, whatever that means. The Benfords also say that SETI scientists should turn their ears inward, toward the center of the Milky Way, where the galaxy’s oldest stars are, and therefore more likely to harbor advanced alien civilizations.

These “Benford Beacons” as they have become known, have intrigued many other scientists, and the new approach is gaining traction in the SETI community. And so the search continues.

This willingness on the part of the SETI scientists to reassess their methods and move on may seem like a no-brainer, but it’s actually quite laudable when you consider how entrenched any scientific bureaucracy tends to become, especially one that’s been around for decades.

In fact, the SETI community seems more optimistic than ever, judging by attitudes at the recent SETIcon—a 50^th anniversary convention held earlier this month to honor Professor Frank Drake and his pioneering work. Seth Shostak, senior astronomer at the SETI Institute in California predicted that we would likely hear an alien transmission within the next 25 years. How can they remain so positive, given their failure to find a single credible blip out there in the vast darkness?

Drake himself helps put this seemingly futile endeavor into perspective, describing how he felt at various times over the years when he thought he’d heard something alien emanating from the stars.

“It’s a very powerful emotion because you sense that what you’re seeing is going to change all of history, and I think for the better.”

And what nobler cause is there to keep going than that?

And to you aliens out there, hundreds of light years distant, whose entire civilization is probably changing for the better upon hearing this DeFlip Side broadcast long after I’m dead: We DO exist, and you’re welcome.

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DS103.mp3

Me at Montauk, February 2010. Camp Hero is to the right, out of frame.

Welcome everyone. I’m Christopher DeFilippis and this is DeFlip Side.

It’s summer on Long Island, and you know what that means: star-studded Hamptons galas, North Fork winery tours, top secret government mind control and time travel experiments out on Montauk Point. You know, the usual stuff.

As many Science Fiction enthusiasts already know, Montauk has long been a Mecca for conspiracy nuts. Time travel, aliens, psychic soldiers, mind control, secret military/industrial cabals in league with Neo-Nazis—all of it focused on nefarious activities that supposedly occurred at Camp Hero, an abandoned Air Force base nestled in the shadow of Montauk’s famous lighthouse.

The experiments have become known as The Montauk Project, and are related in a book of the same name by Long Islander Preston Nichols, who claims to have been intimately involved. But how could something so big have happened in the sleepy hinterlands of Long Island? Well if the legends are to be believed, the story goes back a long way…

In the wartime America of 1943, a top secret experiment is unfolding in the Philadelphia Naval Yard.

Naval personnel have thrown a switch aboard the U.S.S. Eldridge, sending an electromagnetic surge through specially designed equipment that’s supposed to render the ship invisible to radar. But the experiment is more successful than anyone intended. Observers on the shore are blinded by a blue flash, and the U.S.S. Eldridge… vanishes.

The now infamous Philadelphia Experiment not only turned the Eldridge invisible, but by some accounts transported it in both space and time. When the ship reappeared, some crew members had melded right into the bulkheads; many had gone mad; and some disappeared. And hence were the seeds planted for the Montauk Project.

Fast forward to Long Island, 1971. After extensive work with psychics, electromagnetic specialist Preston Nichols claims to have discovered telepathic waves. But these waves would get inexplicably jammed for two hours each day. He traced the jamming frequency to the then-active Camp Hero on Montauk Point. When the base shut down ten years later, Nichols returned to try and figure out why. There he met a stranger claiming to know him from experiments at the camp. Shortly thereafter, a man named Duncan Cameron barged into Nichols’ home lab, also claiming that Nichols had led various Montauk experiments.

Cameron claimed to be on the U.S.S. Eldridge during the Philadelphia Experiment. He jumped overboard when the ship was invisible, and somehow landed in Montauk forty years later, in 1983. Nichols soon began to regain his memories of working at Montauk, and he and Cameron—who also happened to be psychic—pieced together this history of the mysterious Montauk Project.

Camp Hero's Mind-Bending Sage Radar.

As suburbia was growing on post war Long Island, something more ominous was growing at Brookhaven National Lab. Philadelphia Experiment scientists came to BNL to research why events onboard the Eldridge were so harmful to its crew. They found that once inside the electromagnetic bottle that encased the ship, the sailors entered something called Zero time, which exists outside of our reality. Without any normal time reference, they broke. These mental effects implied that electromagnetic energy could be used for mind control, and the equipment at Camp Hero in Montauk met all the technical specs necessary to continue these experiments—especially the unique Sage radar dish that you can still see today, which operated at the proper electromagnetic frequencies.

Different Sage radar frequencies caused various emotional responses, and they refined it until specific pulse-frequency patterns could implant specific thoughts. They also discovered that a series of random frequency hops could bend time, further explaining what happened in Philadelphia.

Now if you think this sounds crazy so far, brace yourselves, because here come the aliens.

The next phase of the Montauk Project was to get hold of some German mind-reading technology developed in World War Two with the help of extraterrestrials from the Sirius system. The German/alien mind-reading computer enabled a trained psychic to project a pseudo-reality, which the Sage radar could then beam into the minds of people inside a magnetic invisibility field so Zero-time wouldn’t drive them nuts.

So let’s recap: Invisible Navy ship leads to Zero-time, which leads to mind control which leads to German/alien psychic broadcasts. Got it?

To facilitate these thought broadcasts, psychics would sit in a contraption called the Montauk Chair—think Bill Bixby in the open of The Incredible Hulk. By 1979, a Montauk Chair psychic could remotely brainwash anyone. And chief among them was Philadelphia Experiment refugee Duncan Cameron!

Lighthouse from Camp Hero grounds. White structure in foreground is part of the old camp complex.

A nifty side effect of the Montauk chair was spontaneous creation. Anything the psychic thought about would just pop into existence. (Remember this—it becomes really important later in the story.) So with mind control cinched, researchers began to work on time travel.

With the help of more aliens from the Orion constellation—not to be confused with the Sirius aliens who gave the Germans the mind-reading gizmo—Montauk Project scientists developed the Orion Delta T antenna, giving Montauk Chair psychics the power to create time vortexes. They eventually linked to the time-shifted U.S.S. Eldridge in 1943 and created a stable master vortex—which is how Duncan Cameron wound up in Montauk after jumping ship. The master vortex allowed Montauk Project leaders to travel anywhere in space and time.

Supposed Photo of Montauk Project Beast

And this is when Preston Nichols and a group of like-minded colleagues felt that the tampering had become too dangerous. At their word, Cameron fired up the Montauk Chair for the last time.

With a thought, Cameron created a giant, hairy, beast—30 feet tall by some accounts—that rampaged across Camp Hero, destroying the facility. Nichols cut power to the Montauk Chair, collapsing the time vortex for good. The project shut down, memories were wiped and by 1984 Camp Hero was deserted. But it doesn’t end there.

Nichols claims the Montauk Project used unwilling test subjects for time experiments, mainly homeless men who never retuned. He also says they sent multiple groups of blond-haired, blue-eyed children to a strange city in the year 6037, alluding to the Nazi interests which funded the project. Talk about your lebensraum! In all he estimates that anywhere from 3,000 to 10,000 people were lost, killed or abandoned in time. But that’s nothing.

He also says Montauk Project teams used the time portals to visit underground chambers in the pyramid complex located near the giant face on Mars. Listen, I know there’s no giant face on Mars, but after this insane story you’re going to call me on that? Just be thankful that I left out all the really crazy stuff that’s just too complicated to go into, including UFOs, body-swapping, mind transference, biorhythms, switched timelines, and weather manipulation.

I’d kill for solid evidence of time travel, and I’d love to play the role of the intrigued skeptic who has investigated the mysteries of Montauk and must reluctantly admit that they raise too many intriguing questions to write the whole thing off. But I can’t. It’s all nonsense with absolutely no evidence to back it up, the mutually reinforced delusions of two men in a backyard workshop.

Nichols himself says that many of his book’s so-called facts aren’t provable and that the reader is welcome to read it as Science Fiction. I don’t see how they could read it as anything but. But the Montauk Project has flourished in conspiracy theory circles—so much so that Nichols has written follow-up books, each one longer and even more outrageously convoluted than the last.

You can find links to his books, as well as a good one on the Philadelphia Experiment posted here. I’ve also posted some pictures I took out at Montauk earlier this year—including the mind-controlling Sage radar dish. And it obviously didn’t have any effect on me. I’m still fully… ummm… hmmm.

What were we talking about again?

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Forget you ever read this and look at the pretty seals off Montauk bluff.

You can now follow DeFlip Side on Facebook!

Join the DeFlip Side fan page on Facebook and get all the latest site updates, including announcements on new and upcoming DeFlip Side episodes, a heads up on new book reviews and everything else DeFlip Side.

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DS102.mp3

Welcome everyone. I’m Christopher DeFilippis and this is DeFlip Side.

A very wise man once wrote:

“In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.”

Those words, of course, sprung from the wit of the late, great Douglas Adams, just one of the many memorable passages that can be attributed to his wholly remarkable creation, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

It’s been nine years since Adams died, and 18 years since the final Hitchhiker’s book Mostly Harmless, in which the Vogons permanently removed the Earth from the Whole Sort of General Mish Mash, resulting in the apparent death of most every main Hitchhiker’s character.

But author Eoin Colfer has come swooping in at the 29^th second, rescuing Arthur, Ford, Trillian and Random from oblivion, and continuing their adventures anew in the Hitchhiker’s trilogy’s sixth novel, And Another Thing…—another creation that many Hitchhiker’s die-hards may regard as a bad move.

The title “And Another Thing…” is taken from a passage in the fourth Hitchhiker’s book So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish and speaks volumes about Colfer’s pragmatic approach to taking up the Hitchhiker’s mantle, a respectful and self-deprecating hedge against negative backlash from fans who’d argue whether anyone but Adams is worthy of writing a Hitchhiker’s book:

“The storm had now definitely abated, and what thunder there was now grumbled over more distant hills, like a man saying ‘And another thing…’ twenty minutes after admitting he’s lost the argument.”

Unfortunately, Colfer does lose the argument for the most part. And Another Thing… isn’t particularly bad, but it’s not particularly inspired either. To put it in Hitchhiker’s terms, it’s Mostly Unnecessary.

Picking up right where Mostly Harmless left off, And Another Thing… has Arthur, Ford, Trillian and Random improbably rescued from the final destruction of Earth by none other than Zaphod Beeblebrox and the Heart of Gold. But Zaphod (being Zaphod) botches the rescue, forcing them to seek help from Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged, who just happens to be passing by Earth to deliver some more insults. Wowbagger reluctantly saves them, and the story spirals out from there.

It’s a farfetched opening, even taking into account the residual effects of the Infinite Improbability Drive.

“So okay. Ten out of ten for style, but minus several million for good thinking, huh?”

—Zaphod Beeblebrox, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

Despite this, it’s easy to reason why Penguin and Hyperion decided to bet on a new Hitchhiker’s book and why the Adams estate sanctioned it. Money, sure. But who can resist a smile at the prospect of getting reacquainted with the characters that most every Science Fiction fan (me included) has loved for decades?

Unfortunately, once this initial rush has subsided, and you get on with the task of actually finishing the book, its shortcomings become apparent. Not to say that the novel isn’t enjoyable at times; many of the individual character bits are dead on, evoking more than a few laughs. But in the end, And Another Thing… suffers from two key failings.

The first is in its treatment of Arthur Dent. Colfer does a fine job with Arthur’s characterization. Arthur acts and sounds like the Arthur we know and love. But that actually winds up working against Colfer as the novel progresses.

In Arthur, Adams created the ultimate passive protagonist. He is a character who essentially does nothing but react—oftentimes poorly—to the mayhem unfolding around him, yet he somehow remains the focus and driving force behind the plots of five novels. That Adams was able to successfully perform this narrative sleight of hand time and again illustrates his considerable writing talent.

“Very deep. You should send that into the Reader’s Digest. They have a page for people like you.”

—Arthur Dent, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

Colfer clearly understands that this inherent, fatalistic inactivity is what makes Arthur tick, and he appropriately has Arthur doing very little and expecting the worst. But as a result, he can’t think of anything to do with Arthur, and Arthur kind of stays in the wings, moping about on Wowbagger’s ship and pining for Fenchurch.

Into this narrative void steps the book’s true main character, Zaphod. Zaphod’s schemes give And Another Thing… its narrative drive, and Colfer once again writes him very well. But Zaphod’s lunacy is most effective when it’s juxtaposed against the comparatively rational behavior of the other Hitchhiker’s characters. Colfer’s choice to make him the book’s lead borders on fannish overindulgence—like Zaphod’s ego, too much of a good thing.

“If there’s anything around here more important than my ego, I want it caught and shot now.”

—Zaphod Beeblebrox, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

The second of And Another Thing…’s key failings are the Guide entries themselves. From its inception, the Hitchhiker’s Universe has been presented through the narrative lens of the Guide, which paints the cosmic backdrop through which Arthur and Ford tramp, and explains the strange things that they encounter along the way. As a result, the Guide acts as an omni-present narrator, and its entries are an organic and crucial element in the storytelling (with the additional benefit of being hilarious). It once again points out the narrative complexity that underpins Adams’s seemingly simple comic romps.

Colfer brings none of this subtlety or cohesiveness to his Guide entries. Instead, they are literal asides, dropped into the text wherever he thinks they might make for a good joke. As a result, his Guide entries are more distracting than enlightening, blurbs that sit on the page like narrative speed bumps.

Still, the absence of Adams’s masterful panache isn’t a deal breaker. Taken on its own terms, And Another Thing… is a fun book packed with plot and fully steeped in Hitchhiker’s lore. Colfer clearly holds the source material in reverence and doesn’t introduce anything apocryphal to Adams’s creation in an attempt to put his own stamp on it, yet neither does he try to out-Adams Adams. As he said in this interview on the Hyperion website:

“One thing I didn’t want to do in this book is try and imitate Douglas. I wanted this to be in my voice. But having said that… you have to keep the spirit of the book. There’s a certain style and a certain rhythm that I wanted to still be there.”

So if you’re an open-minded Hitchhiker’s fan, it can’t hurt to give And Another Thing… a try. If the worst happens, and you hate it, it still doesn’t take one iota away from Douglas Adams’s legacy. And if the infinitely improbable comes to pass and you love it, you’ll be heartened by the fact that Colfer leaves room at the end for the story to continue.

However, I feel pretty confident that most readers will emerge from the final chapter in a state of utter ambivalence, which is still a kind of win for Colfer, since they likely wouldn’t be adverse to trying further sequels.

But there is undoubtedly a contingent of hardcore Hitchhiker’s fans out there who refuse to read And Another Thing… because of what they perceive as Colfer’s most glaringly unforgivable sin: he is not Douglas Adams. To that Colfer says:

“I’m not finishing it off and I’m not trying to carry the torch for Douglas… But I’m presenting you with a possible ending in a possible alternate universe which you may find amusing.”

I’ll vouch for Colfer’s sentiment on this one. But if you still refuse to take his word for it—or mine—and insist on ranking And Another Thing… on the spectrum of Hitchhiker’s disappointments, then you probably won’t find it any more offensive than Mostly Harmless.

Lest we forget, no matter how much we may want to, the series ended on a fairly dismal note. So we shouldn’t judge Colfer’s writing too harshly. Sometimes even Douglas Adams himself couldn’t manage to make six times nine equal 42…

“I’ve always said there was something fundamentally wrong about the universe…”

—Arthur Dent, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

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Long, long ago, in the days before radio, DeFlip Side was a brash, free-wheeling Internet column featured monthly in the E-Zine First Light, unfettered by FCC standards and shackles. These original 25 articles have become collectively known as DeFlip Side Volume 1.

Tool around the archives and you’ll find things like cursing and the occasional booby. You’ve been warned!

START YOUR JOURNEY HERE

DS101.mp3

Welcome everyone. I’m Christopher DeFilippis and this is DeFlip Side.

The spectacular success of Iron Man 2 has once again confirmed that Marvel reigns supreme in the comic book film adaptation arena. Spider-man, X-Men, even Edward Norton’s enjoyable though less-than-profitable take on The Incredible Hulk have catapulted the Marvel hero lineup to popular heights that allow it to transgress occasional turkeys like Fantastic Four, or Ang Lee’s dismal Hulk movie.

So how do they do it? How can Marvel take a second stringer like Iron Man and make him into a box office superstar while DC can’t even make a good film about Superman, the most popular and beloved superhero of all time? Why is Marvel getting it so right and DC getting it so wrong?

Well, there is Marvel’s grand plan to build an interconnected movie universe that will eventually culminate in a multi-character Avengers film. But this is mainly fanwank stuff the average moviegoer really doesn’t care about. In the end, this big picture thinking can only guarantee some measure of storytelling focus. It’s no guarantee of success. I think the real reason the Marvel films have been so successful comes down to something much simpler:

They’re cool, and fun.

Iron Man 2 screams into action from the first frame, with Robert Downey Jr’s Tony Stark leaping out of a plane to AC/DC’s Shoot to Thrill. I have to admit that this got my heart racing, immediately putting me in a great mood. Director Jon Faverau is no fool. Being a fortyish-year-old fanboy himself, he knows that this is the music we grew up on and that most of us will eat it up. It’s the same reason he used Back in Black in the open of the first Iron Man film. It may seem insignificant, but the fact that Tony Stark is working in his lab listening to the same music I listen to when I’m working in my garage draws me into the Iron Man universe much more readily than any sweeping dramatic score ever could because I immediately identify with the character on a visceral, personal level.

The same goes for the real world setting of Iron Man 2 and Marvel movies in general. Having the Stark Expo take place on the site of the old World’s Fair in Queens, with the Unisphere and New York State Pavilion front and center adds another layer of plausibility. It’s the same with Spider-Man web-slinging his way through Manhattan. The real world backdrops ground these otherwise fantastic films, making the fantasy elements at once more credible and more fantastic.

DC, on the other hand, appears determined to take its comic book film adaptations in the complete opposite direction.

Look no further than Batman Begins and The Dark Knight. You can’t have any discussion about the state of modern superhero films without acknowledging the runaway success of these two movies, both critical and financial. They have unquestionably raised the bar on what a superhero film should be and have lent the genre unprecedented mainstream credibility.

But I maintain that while the Batman films may be technically superior, the Iron Man and X-Men films are just better. A lot of this has to do with the charisma of Robert Downey, Jr., and Hugh Jackman as opposed to Christian Bale. But that’s not saying much since a mannequin in a Batman cowl would have more charm than Bale.

(Sound bite—Bale: “I’m Batman.”)

Yeah, yeah, we know. But you’re also a walking cardboard cutout with zero screen presence.

What it really comes down to is character versus story. The Marvel movies are about characters first, with stories growing organically out of their conflicts. In the DC films, characters take a backseat to plot and universe building.

Now before you disagree with me, consider: every character in Batman is a direct byproduct of Gotham City. The Joker, Jim Gordon, Rachel Dawes, Harvey Dent and the Caped Crusader himself wouldn’t exist—would have no reason for existing—without Gotham City. Half the characters spend the film plotting to destroy it, and the other half use their screen time spouting mordant soliloquies on the importance of saving it. About the only exception to this is Alfred, which is probably why his scenes stand out as bright spots in an otherwise bleak cinematic landscape.

Director Christopher Nolan is apparently under the impression that bleakness equals realism, going out of his way to cast Gotham in a nourish pall that emphasizes its corruption and urban decay. But paradoxically, the grittier and dirtier he made it the more surreal it seemed, rendering fantastic characters like Batman and the Joker less believable.

And heavy thematic elements aside, The Dark Knight is just too long, too fretful and too fraught with its own self-importance. And here we get back to the importance of amping up the cool/fun quotient. Which billionaire would you rather hang with? Tony Stark or Bruce Wayne? Which movie are you likely to watch over and over again? And let’s put my Batman prejudice aside. How many times have you sat through the equally heavy Watchmen again, despite its faithful adaptation or how much you liked it in the theater? Or Superman. Which did you enjoy more? Brian Singer’s heavy-handed messianic allegory or Richard Donner’s spirited origin story?

When it comes to their future comic book movies, DC and Warner Entertainment would do well to heed the Joker’s quandary:

“Why so serious?”

The good news is that they have a ton chances to get it right moving forward, starting with the Green Lantern movie in 2011. Granted, their choice to go with the Hal Jordan Green Lantern makes this a bit of a challenge since he’s one of DC’s most notoriously humorless characters, but when your hero’s primary weapon is a ring that creates green light constructs bound only by his willpower and imagination, you’d have to try really hard to make that not work on some cool, fun, creative level.

And DC should also swipe Marvel’s approach of introducing its signature characters in stand-alone films that clearly exist in the same universe as a build up to an eventual Justice League of America team-up movie. Internet columnist Devin Faraci of the CHUD website even offered the perfect opening salvo, suggesting that Morgan Freeman’s Lucias Fox character from the Batman films make a cameo in Green Lantern. Similar crossovers could easily be included in the Flash and Green Arrow movies currently in development.

Well, this sounds good to me, but I’m not Christopher Nolan. And he has publicly resisted the idea of a shared DC film universe. This is especially problematic, since he’ll be helming both the next Batman sequel as well as the Superman reboot projected for 2013. Bats and Supes would be two-crucial-thirds of any JLA movie. And the third lead member, Wonder Woman, has problems of her own. The Wonder Woman movie remains in development hell. For all intents and purposes, it’s a dead project.

This is just baffling, because the DC hero lineup is the most iconic and recognizable in the world. Everyone knows these characters. You’d think that Warner Entertainment would spend less time on no-name properties like Jonah Hex and The Losers and focus all its energy on the big guns.

Well, there is a ray of hope moving forward. Now that the Harry Potter franchise is coming to an end, Warner Entertainment honcho Alan Horn has announced that the DC Comics roster will be tapped to fill Harry’s tentpole-blockbuster shoes. So these iconic characters may just make a big splash on the big screen yet, culminating in the team movie to end all team movies. But as I said before, a collective, big picture approach is no guarantee of success. It still remains to be seen whether the Man of Steel will take a lesson from the man of iron.

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DS100.mp3

Welcome everybody. I’m Christopher DeFilippis, and this is number 100!

(CUE: Sousa Music/cheering)

Okay. That’s enough of that.

Yes, this is DeFlip Side’s 100^th episode. And, yes, I’m very proud to have come this far. But is it a cause for celebration? I’m not so sure. One hundred is an extremely relative milestone, especially in radio. Destinies is celebrating its 27^th year on the air tonight, and knocked off its hundredth episode more than two decades ago. And daily radio programs do hundreds of shows a year. So when you look at it that way, 100 DeFlip Sides isn’t all that many.

But, radio realities aside, my main hesitation to look back in celebration ironically stems from the big plans I had cooking to commemorate my 100^th show; more on those plans later, but suffice it say that carrying them out involved listening to every one of my previous DeFlip Side shows, which made a couple of things readily apparent: first I’m not so in love with the sound of my own voice that even I won’t get sick of it after a while; and second, and more importantly, my immersion in this aural history has made me realize that I’m only just now learning how to do this DeFlip Side thing right.

An odd statement from someone who has a degree in broadcast journalism and formal radio training up the whazoo, but to my critical ear it’s only fairly recently that DeFlip Side has consistently sounded like a true radio show instead of some glorified oral report. Listening back now, to those first fledgling years, I have to scratch my head and wonder, what was I thinking? Few soundbites. Few ambient effects. Almost no theater of the mind. Just me, me, me, talking, talking, talking. It wasn’t even until my 40^th episode—after I had been doing this for more than three years—that it occurred to me to mention my own name at the top of each segment. I just have to slap my head.

Which isn’t to say that I’m not proud of many of my earlier pieces—on the contrary, the cringe-factor was much lower than I was expecting, and there are a handful of superior episodes—but the only thing that kept going through my mind was how much better they could have been had I been producing them from the start as I would have any other journalistic radio feature.

I’m half tempted to go all George Lucas on myself and recut them with new and improved effects. But that way lies madness. And Science Fiction is about looking forward.

And for DeFlip Side, that means letting your fingers do the walking.

As now for those grand plans I mentioned earlier, the DeFlip Side elves and I have been typing away industrially on that Internet thingy and we are very proud to present you with the new DeFlipSide.com website. Just type it into your favorite Internet browser or search engine, and be prepared to experience all things DeFlip Side, including every segment ever produced, complete with streaming audio for most every show, and more to follow as we digitize those old tapes.

Among other content, I’ve devoted an entire section to my favorite thing: books and all of the book reviews I’ve ever done, both written and recorded. And real hardcore fans will find a complete archive of DeFlip Side Vol. 1, featuring the original 25 DeFlip Side columns as they first appeared in the e-zine First Light, before becoming a radio feature.

DeFlipSide.com is fully searchable, so you can type in any term you like and see what I’ve had to say about it. Or you can search shows by topic. You want all my Halloween episodes? You got ’em. You want to hear every thought I’ve ever had about Star Trek? Boom! Right there. That address once again is DeFlipSide.com.

As proud as I am of being a part of Destinies: The Voice of Science Fiction, I’ve long wanted to create a place where DeFlip Side could take center stage. And since one of my main goals in creating DeFlipSide.com was to give older shows a chance to shine again, I’ve set it up so that the front page features the latest episode, and five related shows on the same or a similar theme. So episode one could be in rotation with episode 101.

To accompany this, my 100^th episode, I’m going to feature my five favorite DeFlip Sides. So log on and see which ones I’ve picked. I’ll give you a hint: one is about a little Russian dog, and another takes place in a cemetery.

I have to say that seeing every DeFlip Side episode gathered in one place makes me unapologetically proud of the body of work I’ve built. I’ve been able to create a site with an unbelievable amount of diverse and interesting content practically overnight. And I owe it all to Howard Margolin and the home he’s given me on Destinies: The Voice of Science Fiction for almost nine years now. He’s been there since the beginning, providing me with a forum to spout off on just about anything I feel like, and meticulously editing my rants so that they’re as listenable as they’re going to get. It’s thanks to him that DeFlip Side has come as far as it has.

And taking stock of that progress has made me realize just how far DeFlip Side has yet to go. So what’s on the horizon? Well for starters, how about a podcast? And it’s just as easy for me to feature video on DeFlipSide.com as it is audio. Can anyone say webisodes? The frontiers are limitless. And that’s why I hesitate to celebrate tonight by looking back. Because if 100 episodes of DeFlip Side signify anything, it’s that the best days are yet to come.

Thanks for listening!

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Welcome everyone. I’m Christopher DeFilippis and this is DeFlip Side.

Tranquility Docking: “I do see it, it looks really good, nice and smooth coming in there…”

That’s the crew of the Space Shuttle Endeavour working with the crew of the International Space Station during a spacewalk last month to attach the new Tranquility Module, making the ISS 90 percent complete, and laying the final groundwork for a new era of space research, made possible through international cooperation.

It’s a remarkable shift from the days when space advancement was spurred not by cooperation but competition, with achievements in space exploration flaunted like badges of honor, marks of superiority in the growing Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union. This month marks the 45th anniversary of one of those flaunted achievements: On March 18, 1965, Cosmonaut Alexei Leonov pushed free of the Voskhod 2 spacecraft and took history’s first spacewalk. It was a major Soviet coup–one that almost didn’t happen and nearly ended in tragedy.

The run-up to Leonov’s stellar accomplishment was marked by frenzied competition between the U.S. and Russia, egged on by President John F. Kennedy’s vow to put a man on the moon by the end of the 1960s. But despite America’s vaunted determination, the Russians had been outpacing us from day one, bolting out of the gate with Sputnik, the first orbiting satellite; Sputnik 2 carried the first living passenger—a dog named Laika, who died in orbit. And they soon followed that up by safely returning two more dogs from orbit—all of it culminating with the development of the Vostok 1 and the ascent of Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, the first human in space; a feat soon surpassed by Cosmonaut Gherman Titov, who orbited the Earth 16 times in Vostok 2.

There seemed no end to the relentless march of the Russian space program—a feat rendered all the more remarkable by the fact that there really was no Russian space program in any practical sense. It was all a series of grand stunts, engineered by Russian space agency chief Sergei Korolyov, who managed to use his meager resources time and again to pull off ever-escalating missions at the behest of Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev. Khrushchev was obsessed with international oneupsmanship and his directives were both a blessing and a curse, spurring grand-seeming advances that enabled the USSR to successfully posture to the world, but which kept the Russian space program in complete disarray.

This stood in stark contrast to the focus and methodical progress of the American space program, which, despite its lagging and setbacks, was headed inexorably to the moon. By mid-decade, the Gemini missions were imminent, designed to carry two astronauts into orbit, and hammer out the technical details necessary for making the lunar trip. When Khrushchev got wind of this, he ordered Korolyov to halt work on the successful Vostok program, and come up with something that could carry three cosmonauts into orbit.

Faced with yet another stunt mission and almost no resources, Korolyov had no choice but to work with materials at hand. He reengineered the existing one-man Vostok capsules into the three-man Voskhod spacecraft, which required a number of risky innovations. Since cabin space was so tight, the first things to go were the bulky spacesuits, followed by the ejection systems. That meant that the capsule had to be airtight and contain a breathable atmosphere. And since they couldn’t eject, the cosmonauts would have to remain in the capsule through reentry all the way to landing, no matter what. But, despite the risks, the first Voskhod flight was a resounding success, sending three cosmonauts around the Earth 16 times. No one was more amazed than Korolyov, but even so, he knew the Gemini missions would inevitably lead to the first spacewalk. So he had to up his game yet again.

His team slapped another Voskhod together, modified with an inflatable rubber airlock that would theoretically allow a cosmonaut to exit the capsule while in orbit. But the initial unmanned test fight was a disaster. The capsule exploded and took all the flight data with it. They couldn’t figure out what went wrong, or even if the airlock had functioned properly. And there were only parts enough left for one more capsule.

So the morning of March 18, 1965, found Cosmonauts Alexei Leonov and Pavel Belyayev rocketing skyward in an unproven ship to make history, one way or another. Much to everyone’s relief, the launch went off without a hitch, and the Voskhod 2 achieved a stable orbit. Once there, Leonov donned his spacesuit, wormed his way into a successfully pressurized airlock and floated out into infamy. This is actual sound from that historic excursion, broadcast live to millions of Russians watching on TV.

“I feel perfect,” Leonov said at one point, as he played himself out on an 18-foot tether, soaring above the Earth at more than 17,000 mph. He stayed out for about 12 minutes before Belyayev recalled him back to the ship. That’s when things started to go wrong.

When he got back to the airlock, Leonov discovered that his suit had inflated while in vacuum, internal pressure stretching it to the point where his hands and feet had slipped out of the attached gloves and boots. Essentially trapped in a big, stiff balloon, he had to abandon plans to reenter the capsule feet first, forced instead to bull his way back into the airlock head first. But his ever-expanding suit soon had him stuck in the shaft like a cork. He was no longer feeling so perfect.

Doctors monitoring Leonov’s quickening heartbeat grew concerned, but he was eventually able to bleed enough pressure from his suit to move again. Then came the difficult maneuver of turning around in the tiny airlock, fighting against the slack fabric of his deflated spacesuit so he could reseal the hatch. By the time he finished and regained his seat he was exhausted. He later learned that he had lost 12 pounds in the course of the emergency maneuvers.

But the ordeal wasn’t over yet. The exit hatch was no longer airtight, and the capsule was losing pressure. Ship systems pumped in pure oxygen to compensate, and a stray spark could cause the ship to explode. And if this wasn’t bad enough, the guidance system had gone down, meaning that the cosmonauts had to manually pilot their way back to Earth.

The cramped quarters made it almost impossible for Belyayev to get himself into position to orient the ship properly for reentry, and by the time the cosmonauts had gotten resituated and strapped in, they missed their firing mark by 46 seconds. To compound matters, the landing capsule had failed to cleanly separate from the instrument module, causing wild gyrations that were throwing them further off course. They were soon plummeting Earthward at pressures upwards of 10 g’s. That’s when mission control lost contact.

Korolyov and his team spent a frantic four hours before reestablishing communications. The firing delay and reentry complications had caused the Voskhod 2 to overshoot its landing site by 1,200 miles. But the landing equipment worked fine and Leonov and Belyayev alit on a snow bank deep in the frozen Siberian forests, their capsule hatch jammed up against a birch tree. They forced their way free, sending out distress signals in Morse code. But when help failed to arrive, they retreated back to the safety of the ship as nightfall bought with it a pack of wolves literally howling at their door. It was two days before recovery crews could get to them. But despite all the setbacks, the cosmonauts had made it home—and into the history books—further cementing Russia’s seeming space superiority.

It wouldn’t last. Soviet political upheaval, along with Korolyov’s death in 1966 gave the U.S. space program the breathing room it needed, and NASA’s accomplishments in manned space flight eclipsed all Soviet efforts from that point on—and also robbed Leonov of another Russian first. He was supposed to be the first Soviet to set foot on the moon. But Armstrong beat him to it, and his mission was scrapped. He remained active in the Soviet space program until 1991, and now at age 75, Leonov is still a fixture in the international space community.

He has since called the Cold War an era of insane mistrust, but not without benefit:

“It showed that our country was capable of making a scientific discovery of global importance,” he said.

And there’s no better testament to that lesson in global discovery than the nearly completed International Space Station soaring overhead, and the astronauts who routinely glide around its exterior, following in Leonov’s pioneering footsteps.

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DS98.mp3

Welcome everyone. I’m Christopher DeFilippis and this is DeFlip Side.

And it’s time for more Tales From the 21st Century-our occasional look at the scientific and technological advances that are raising the bar on reality, turning science fiction into science fact. Tonight we’ll delve into microscopic black holes, the creation of exotic matter called strangelets and indirect evidence of time travel. Yes, time travel, as we highlight some quantum leaps in quantum physics that are uncovering the very nature of reality itself.

And it all begins right here on Long Island, at Brookhaven National Laboratory. In a history-making experiment, scientists whizzed gold atoms in opposite directions around BNL’s Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, just a hair shy of the speed of light. The resulting collision was hot-like, 4 trillion degrees Celsius hot, or about 40 times as hot as ground zero in a supernova hot-so hot that the protons and neutrons in the gold nuclei melted, liberating the quarks and gluons that compose them, creating a hot liquid soup called a quark gluon plasma.

This is a scientific first. No one has ever done this before. And they found that “bubbles” which formed within this hot soup may internally disobey the so-called “mirror symmetry” that normally characterizes the interactions of quarks and gluons. So why do we care?

Think of symmetry in terms of handedness, with quarks-for example-being right handed and gluons being left handed. It’s this symmetry that allows some chemical interactions and prevents others. The presence of the soup bubbles support the theory that quark/gluon symmetry was thrown off in the violent moments after the big bang, accounting for the prevalence of matter over antimatter-resulting in all of the ordinary visible matter in the universe, including you and me and the radio you’re hearing me on. So scientists have actually taken a significant step in explaining our very existence.

As BNL’s Dr. Steven Vigdor said in a recent New York Times article about the breakthrough:

“A lot of physics sounds like science fiction. There is a lot of speculation on what happened in the early universe. The amazing thing is that we have this chance to test any of this.”

Amazing indeed, because another test involving another collider designed to achieve another breakthrough in quantum physics isn’t going nearly as well-namely the quest to find a fabled particle called a Higgs boson, which has been predicted to exist and would help further explain the origin of mass in the universe. It has since been dubbed “the God Particle.”

Proving the existence of the Higgs boson is such a big deal to physicists that they built the world’s largest and highest-energy particle accelerator to find it, the Large Hadron Collider—or LHC-in Switzerland. Physicists are really jazzed about this machine. I mean REALLY. Just listen to everyone’s favorite pop-scientist, Michio Kaku:

“God, by whatever signs or symbols you ascribe to the deity, this machine will take us as close as humanly possible to his or her greatest creation, Genesis. This is a genesis machine. This machine will recreate some of the nuclear fire that gave birth to the heavens and the earth.”

Well, those modest expectations were apparently too much for the LHC, because shortly after they juiced it up in September 2008, an energy surge vaporized some cables coupling two of the machine’s enormous electromagnets, shutting the thing down. They got it going again in December of ’09 for a brief test run before another scheduled shutdown, and it went back online again just this week, though only at half power to accommodate continued repairs.

These problems come as welcome news to many people who fear that the collider is nothing more than a doomsday machine, threatening to kill us all by creating microscopic black holes and some neat-sounding things called “strangelets.” But others see these setbacks as indirect evidence of nothing less than time travel.

Let’s start with the black holes. The reality is that the collider COULD potentially create black holes, as many as one a second. But they would be infinitesimally tiny-one thousandth of a proton big-and emit more radiation then they could consume, evaporating within a billionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second. And even if that isn’t the case, and the teeny suckers are somehow stable, most would be traveling fast enough to escape the Earth’s gravity. Of those trapped here, they would be so small that they could travel through a solid block of iron wide enough to cover the distance from the Earth to the moon and not hit anything. And even if they did, the universe would come to its natural end before these tiny black holes could suck in even one milligram of Earth. As far as I’m concerned, that classifies as “no danger.”

As for “strangelets,” they’re weird little hypothetical quarks that could conceivably co-opt surrounding particles, causing a chain-reaction that converts the Earth and everyone on it into a ball of equally strange matter-kind of like the Genesis Wave from The Wrath of Khan, only without the benefit of a messianic Spock for your troubles. The problem is that strangelets are more likely to form at energies lower than those created by the Large Hadron Collider—so, if it was going to happen, one of the existing, weaker colliders would have turned us into strangelet food long ago.

Now what about the claims of time travel? Well, those possibilities are intriguing.

About a year before the LHC went online, physicists Holger Bech Nielsen and Masao Ninomiya floated a series of papers about the collider’s quest to find the Higgs boson, saying things like this:

“Since LHC will produce particles of a mathematically new type… i.e., the Higgs particles, there is potentially a chance to find unseen effects, such as on influence going from future to past.”

They go on to write:

“It must be our prediction that all Higgs producing machines shall have bad luck… One could even almost say that we have a model for God, (and) He rather hates Higgs particles, and attempts to avoid them.”

In trying to wrap your mind around this, it’s tempting to think of God or Fate or Time or Whatever leaping Sam Beckett back to September 2008 to sabotage the Large Hardron Collider, stopping the hubristic fools from throwing the switch that will trigger non-reality. But that’s not quite it. In this scenario, the nature of reality is the chief inhibiting factor, and needs no human help.

Instead the physicists posit that nature so detests the Higgs boson that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the collider before it could make one-time traveling do-gooders need not apply, thank you very much.

And so far these predictions seem to have panned out. The collider has not managed to work right since day one. And though it’s running now, current plans won’t have it operating at full power until 2013. So it’ll be a while before we’re all reduced to lumps of strange matter.

In the meantime, consider this: If Nielsen and Ninomiya are right, and the future IS influencing the past, then what that means is that every time the Large Hadron Collider fails, it could mean some future force is skewing us into an alternate reality where the Higgs boson particle was never created. Which is kind of unsettling, but fine by me, considering the alternative.

Antimatter, traveling in anti-time, working together to keep reality real. Science Fiction? NO LONGER! Now, it’s just one of the many miraculous Tales From the 21st Century!

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Welcome everyone. I’m Christopher DeFilippis and this is DeFlip Side.

Clear space on your shelves and listen up, because it’s time, once again, for DeFlip Side’s annual Best Reads segment, where I outline the best and worst genre books I’ve read in the past year.

As always, the books featured were not necessarily published in the last year; that’s why I call it “Best Reads” instead of “Best Books.” And some of you may experience déjà vu, since a couple of the books featured have been reviewed on previous DeFlip Side segments. Now, on with the list for 2009!

5) Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut
I’m largely ignorant of Vonnegut’s work, and Breakfast of Champions is his only book I’ve read beside Slaughterhouse Five. I wish I’d read it sooner, because now I want to read everything the guy’s ever written. On the surface, Breakfast of Champions is about an unknown Science Fiction writer named Kilgore Trout and his fateful meeting with Midwest car dealer Dwayne Hoover, who happens to be going insane and takes one of Trout’s stories as literal truth. But it’s so much more than that.

Vonnegut called the book his 50th birthday present to himself, an effort to empty his head of all its accumulated junk. The resulting prose is breezy, chatty and page-turning. But as Vonnegut relentlessly piles seemingly errant thoughts, one atop another atop another, the book becomes a writhing, percolating brew of surreal ideas that somehow distill into a grand catharsis about America. It’s freaking brilliant. But to get the most out of Breakfast of Champions, you MUST read it in one go. If you don’t, you’ll lose some of its cumulative impact.

4) Ghosts of Yesterday by Jack Cady
Cady returns to my best reads list with this posthumous story and essay collection, a beautiful edition released by Night Shade Books. The stories in Ghosts of Yesterday have much the same sensibility as Cady’s previous list-maker, The Haunting of Hood Canal—folkish Americana that explores the murky intersection of reality and the supernatural or unexplained. Standout stories include “The Lady with the Blind Dog,” and “The Ghost of Dive Bomber Hill.” At turns wistful, funny and scary, Cady’s work is a prime example of modern American literature; if there is such a thing as a uniquely American mythology, Jack Cady has tapped into its soul.

3) Shambling Towards Hiroshima by James Morrow
Anyone familiar with Morrow’s work knows that he tackles dark and troubling themes with playful prose and keen satire, and this novella puts his talent and wit on grand display. In Shambling Towards Hiroshima, B-Monster Movie actor Syms Thorley is drafted into a WWII biological warfare program designed to defeat the Japanese with giant fire-breathing lizards. Syms’ assignment: suit up as the lizard monster Gorgantis and stomp a scale-model Japanese city, convincing the Japanese to surrender in the face of actual lizard warfare.

At once a scalding discourse on the dawn of the nuclear age and a loving homage to the classic monster movies of yore, Shambling Towards Hiroshima is utterly smart, utterly original and utterly entertaining; in other words, utterly Morrow.

2) Kalpa Imperial by Angelica Gorodischer
This book is subtitled “The Greatest Empire that Never Was,” and the stories within recount bits of history from a vast and timeless fictional empire, forming a mosaic treatise on the nature of power—primarily the power of the stories that we tell ourselves, and their role in shaping our collective reality.

That being the case, Kalpa Imperial’s prime character is the storyteller herself, a conscious narrator who reminds us again and again that we are reading, and that power lies not only in what happened, but what we say happened.

Angelica Gorodischer is an award-winning Argentinean writer, and this is her first book translated into English—by Ursula K. LeGuin, a good fit, since both authors share similar thematic sensibilities. Stylistically, Gorodischer’s prose reminds me of Gabriel Garcia Marquez; but unlike Garcia Marquez, her stories are actually enjoyable and readable. Upon finishing Kalpa Imperial, I came away thinking that it was the exact sum of its parts. It did what I believe the author set out to do—a considerable achievement—but in no way transcended itself, say, like Breakfast of Champions. Yet it turned out to be the book I reflected on most over the course of the year. So, like the storytelling it celebrates, it’s more powerful that it at first appeared.

Kind of like the protagonist in our number one book of 2009:

1) It’s Superman! By Tom De Haven
Let the fanboy criticism fly, on many levels. There is nothing more inherently genre than Superman, the superhero prototype; and this is De Haven’s third appearance on my best reads list, his second at the top spot. Yet De Haven wins again, yes, because I just really like him and wish he would write more, but also for taking a story that is ubiquitous in American culture and providing a fresh reinterpretation.

In It’s Superman!, De Haven places the Superman mythos squarely within an American historical context and gives us a more realistic take on the life journey of a poor kid from Kansas during the Great Depression. There’s no Superboy in sight, no sudden, glorious instance where Kal-El dons the mantle of The Man of Steel. Instead, we follow a Clark Kent shaped by circumstance, as he bootstraps his way to Metropolis, via the WPA and a brief stint in Hollywood as a stuntman. But for all its realism, It’s Superman doesn’t wallow in the disaffected, antiheroic rhetoric of Watchmen or The Dark Knight. De Haven gives us realism without losing any of the character’s magic. Instead, he gives that magic texture and depth. And he scores extra points for evoking the Fleischer cartoons of the 40s.

Moving on to some Honorable Mentions, I’d like to highlight The Gathering Storm by Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson, primarily for renewing my faith in the Wheel of Time series; and the duo of novels Singularity Sky and Iron Sunrise by Charles Stross, further proof of his mastery of hard yet imaginative SF; and finally, a fresh nod to Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, which I reread in preparation for the film, reminding me why the graphic novel was the best read in 2002.

So that only leaves the Worst Read, awarded this year to Darwin’s Radio by Greg Bear. Yeah, it won the Nebula, but that doesn’t make it any less of a tedious bore. I really dislike stories driven by ideas instead of characters, in this case the idea that human evolution is propelled in spurts by retroviruses encoded in our DNA. And when the characters forced to carry this speculative water are boring and uninteresting—well, you get a book like Darwin’s Radio.

So there are my picks of Best Reads for the final year of the decade, a distinctly and unintentionally American stack of literature. From the Great Depression of the 30s, to the nuclear paranoia of the 40s and 50s, to the anti-establishment attitudes of the late 60s, flavored by a healthy dose of timeless North American folklore and a bit of Latin American flare.

As always, if you read any of these books based on my recommendations, please e-mail me and let me know what you think. The e-mail address is cdeflip@yahoo.com. And if you have any titles of your own to recommend, I’m all ears. There’s always room on the shelf for one more.

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