Celebrities and their moms

Just a simple picture gallery for Mother's Day, courtesy of FlavorWire. (It took me a minute to sort out Divine and his mother, but at least now I know where he got his hair inspiration.)

Hollywood auction

Bring your wallet. The big one. There's an auction next weekend in Beverly Hills. A hoverboard from Back to the Future Part 2 is set to go for a mere $2000-$3000 (but, sadly, it doesn't actually hover). A blaster from Forbidden Planet is expected to go for upwards of $30,000 (and no, it doesn't blast, which seems like a defect at that price). The car from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang is fully operational, on the other hand. It probably doesn't fly, but for a minimum bid of a million bucks, it ought to at least get you cruising down Hollywood Boulevard.

Read the full article: ‘Aliens,’ ‘Battlestar Galactica’ items among Hollywood memorabilia going up for auction

Dick Van Dyke

One day when I was a kid I had never heard of Dick Van Dyke, and the next day there was a television show called "The Dick Van Dyke Show." I never did figure out how he came out of nowhere to get a show named after him, but that didn't seem to stop him. At age 85 he's published an autobiography that makes you think he's probably as personable and down-to-earth as you always imagined. How else could he have pulled off that horrible English accent in Mary Poppins?

Here's what Van Dyke has to say about reality TV: "Yes I do hate it I must say. I know it's inexpensive to do but I don't think it's entertainment. We watched Donald Trump's 'Apprentice,' whatever it is, I've never been so bored in my life! That's not entertainment. Those shows encourage bad behavior."

Read the full interview at PopEater.com.

"A spaceship that will take you to the farthest reaches of the universe."

I'm seriously in love with the Letters of Note blog that I talked about yesterday. Listen to this. When a new library opened in Troy, Michigan, in 1971, the children's librarian solicited letters from notables extolling the virtues of such a place. One letter was from Isaac Asimov:

"Dear Boys and Girls,
Congratulations on the new library, because it isn't just a library. It is a space ship that will take you to the farthest reaches of the Universe, a time machine that will take you to the far past and the far future, a teacher that knows more than any human being, a friend that will amuse you and console you---and most of all, a gateway, to a better and happier and more useful life."

For more letters from more extraordinary people, including Dr. Seuss and E.B. White, check out the article, A library is many things

Essential viewing for the weekend

I discovered this set of videos via Open Culture. There's a channel on YouTube called Behind The Sounds, breaking down the recording of the classic tracks of Pet Sounds, probably the most important and influential—and, by me, the best—of the Beach Boys albums, song by song. Watch this video, and then, if you're at all a fan of Pet Sounds or the Beach Boys or Brian Wilson, I dare you not to watch the rest of them.

Maps of the mind

The Kingdom of Wisdom? The Isle of Knowledge? An Englishman's brain (where Total Concentration is not far from Ice Cold Beer)? There's maps of all of these? There sure are.

Maria Popova, a dedicated map-lover from Brain Pickings, presents seven interpretations of the human condition, "using the visual vocabulary of classical maps to interpret various facets of the human psyche--a genre that came of age during the late Renaissance, when it became known as 'sentimental cartography.' "

The article is at Human Cartography: Maps That Define the Mind.

Letters of Note

This is a plug for a whole website, Letters of Note. What the editor, Shaun Usher, does, is find real letters by famous people that are worth sharing, and posts them in his blog, often with images of the original. These are great fun to browse. For instance...

"Dear Mother,

As Easter rolls around each year, I think of how you have helped me face all the many hardships in my life. I only wish I could put on paper how much I appreciate the help and love you have given me through my life.

Love, Jim"

That's Jim as in the late Jim Morrison. Even Mr. Mojo Risin had a mother, I guess.

There's plenty more where this came from, like the letter from fourteen-year-old Stephen King that we noted recently, where he submits a story to a magazine and, coincidentally, explains how his favorite section of the magazine is the obituaries.

Check it out.