Recent Links, Taking-a-Break-from-Primaries Edition

Some non-primary links, since I, at least, am a bit primaried-out for right now -- I'm finding the Clinton-Obama attacks too depressing for words. So first -- and mostly -- some non-political links, and second a few political, but not-involving-the-primary, links.

Non-Political

• The BoingBoing-Did-You-Click-Through?™ link of the day is this video of the various instrumental and vocal tracks of Sgt. Peppers' separated out and played individually. The third track (about the third quarter of the video), which is more-or-less an a cappella version of Sgt. Pepper's, is wonderful and eerie.

• During my recent excursion into Swanwick nonfiction, I found that this wonderful Swanwick essay, 'A Nettlesome Term That Has Long Outlived Its Welcome', is online. The term, incidentally, is "fix-up", a technical term in genre literary criticism for... well, read it and see.

• In genre criticism of a very different sort, here is an interesting John Barnes essay on science fiction as a reaction to what he calls "the seventy-five years war".

• Explaining Tintin scientifically.

• Sleevefaces.

• "How to Survive Writing a Graphic Novel" by Grady Klein.

• Playing Waiting for Godot in New Orleans. (Borderline politics in this one.) If you're a Wire fan, you'll recognize one of the actors as Wendell Pierce -- who plays Bunk Moreland -- and who is, it seems, a New Orleans native.

Political

• Watch out - The Invaders are coming. (Also only borderline politics, but unlike the previous link, I've decided that this one falls on the other side of the border; hence my placement of it...)

• Our wretched health care system is getting (at least comparatively) worse -- we're falling behind other industrialized countries at a regular rate. Ezra Klein calculates that if we'd kept pace, we'd have saved 101,000 people who died but who should have been saved with a decent health care system.

This is getting to be a damn dangerous country to live in.

Worth remembering the stakes as we wade through the muck of this primary system: politics is about real people's lives. And when the bad guys win, people die. It's that simple.