Moment of Wonder: Up Close With a Monster of the Deep

On Christmas Eve, a Japanese diver caught the most recent — and what may be the most vivid — video footage of one of Earth’s monsters of the deep: the giant squid.

Akinobu Kimura swam alongside the 12-foot creature after it was spotted in Toyama Bay, northwest of Tokyo. The footage below captures what the New York Times poetically describes as the massive invertebrate’s “ballet of pink and white tentacles.”

The giant squid, or Architeuthis, can grow more than 40 feet in length, so this specimen — impressive as it is — is merely a runt. Until 2005, no one had even captured still photos of the elusive cephalopod in the wild. Kimura’s footage is courtesy of Reuters.

Please, please, make it stop

Pride, Prejudice and Enough Already!

Pride, Prejudice and Enough Already!

Just spotted at Bill Crider’s Pop Culture Mag: LOCUS is reporting that Sherri Browning Erwen “sold JANE SLAYRE, a literary mash-up in which Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre is a vampire slayer.”

This, of course, comes on the heels of Pride, Prejudice and Zombies; Sense, Sensibility and Sea Monsters; Emma and the Werewolves; and Mansfield Park and Mummies.  While a Austen/Bronte-meet-ze-monster book may have been a clever idea at one point, I just can’t imagine that the concept is worth sustaining a whole speculative fiction cottage industry.

Funny how literary types like to bash their Hollywood brethren for recycling tired tripe yet…