Scintillations

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All right, here's your damn flying car: the Terrafugia Transition "roadable aircraft" is now in beta testing, with availability expected in 2011. Just enough time to go and get the sport pilot license which you'll need to operate the thing.

To the rigors of space travel, you can now add the newly identified "space headache", a migraine-like phenomenon previously believed to be part of space adaptation, but now discovered to occur without any of the associated nausea, vertigo, etc by Dutch researchers who questioned current and former astronauts. (What is it with the Netherlands leading the world in space sickness research, anyway?)

The Baltic Times reports that just as Dorado, the Vilnius sf fan club, which runs Lituanicon, is about to celebrate its 30-year anniversary, it's losing its clubhouse. Over the years, it has survived ongoing Communist Party investigations and amassed a library of 7,000 books. Publication of their fanzine Dorados Raganos has already had to move to Sweden.

And for those of you getting bored without any Harry Potter legal maneuvering to watch, here comes the estate of Adrian Jacobs, who died in 1997 after writing The Adventures of Willy the Wizard, which apparently has such clear parallels with Rowling's work that the estate has filed a $1 billion lawsuit. Particular weight is being given to the claim that Mr. Jacobs invented the concept of a wizard tournament, which obviously means that the entire shōnen tournament genre should be expecting to be served any day now.

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