Agent Palmer

Every major city in the world has a talented writer. Every city in the world has a travel guide of some sort, but what City of Glass: Douglas Coupland’s Vancouver does is marry the talented writer with the travel guide glued together with a passion for one’s own hometown, to create not just a travel guide, but a glimpse into local life.

I read the 2006 Revised Edition, but originally published in 2000, this book is Vancouver’s ABCs, a local tourism perspective, the likes of which you’d need to find a very good local blogger to get from anywhere else.

Garden State examines the cloud of one’s self. There are moments of varying length where we spend a ton of time in our own world; meanwhile, to the world at large, we’re just going through the motions.

This film is about that, and how one person, at one time, pulls himself out of that cloud.

It’s also very much an art film. The first few minutes establish that well, and Zach Braff’s vision of the film as a piece of art is beautiful.

I recently sat down and built the LEGO Ideas International Space Station (ISS). Like the Saturn V and Lunar Lander before it, the release of this set coincided with an anniversary.

Released in 2020, the set marks 20 years since the station helped start a continuous human presence in space. LEGO pays another wonderful tribute to the station that orbits Earth 16 times a day and is the work of five different space agencies: NASA (United States), Roscosmos (Russia), JAXA (Japan), ESA (Europe), and CSA (Canada).

“NASA wasn’t created in a vacuum and suddenly tasked with the Moon landing,” writes Amy Shira Teitel in her debut publication Breaking the Chains of Gravity: The Story of Spaceflight before NASA.

Without historians and authors, of which Teitel is both, it would appear as if NASA did just appear on the scene ready, able, and willing to start Projects Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo. But the truth is much more intriguing and far less polished than pop culture and general history would have you believe.