Lazy Day

Today is Sunday. Sitting around in my grubbies watching tv and pretending to concentrate on my class that starts on Tuesday. I have papers to grade, grass to cut, a dog to walk, Church to attend, naps to take. Naps. That's what I'll do.

I have been working on a kid's book series. I love teen and young adult literature, because I never really grew up. My wife tells me I'm still a ten year old, and I tell her that as soon as I get my jet pack up and running, I'd show her! Actually, being a perpetual ten year old is pretty cool, except if you slip and act that way in public. I remember walking down the hall of the university singing "Ooh Wah Diddy Diddy Dum Diddy Do" to myself and turning a few heads, but not in a positive way. And then all the administrative types at Kean think that I'm a "problem." "Not a team player." The Jesuits used to tell me that I was not attentive to the vow of obedience. I thought ok, as long as they don't tell my Mom.

The series I'm working on is a fantasy series. Thank God for JK Rowling bringing fantasy back. I love fantasy and science fiction because I can go to cool places in the universe, or invent cool magic things like psychodelic lawn grass or cookies that make you a genius for ten minutes at a time.

Michelangelo

I just had a book come out from Palgrave McMillan, titled Last Judgment: Michelangelo and the Death of the Renaissance. It's a cool book about Michelangelo's most controversial fresco, painted on the altar wall of the Sistine Chapel. Everybody knows about his famous Sistine Chapel ceiling, but I think that the Last Judgment is the most powerful painting I've ever seen. One of the things I discovered about it is that Michelangelo encoded the Copernican Universe in the fresco, and he did this at the request of the Pope, Clement VII, the last of the true Renaissance popes. If you look at the painting closely you can see it. Jesus, depicted as the sun god Apollo is in the middle, damning the sinners, with the souls of both saints and sinners revolve around him in elliptical orbits. This was not an accident, because the pope had received a special briefing on Copernicus a few months before Michelangelo began painting.