A Bit More Detail

• Citizen Science Salon highlights Australian Michelle Neil, here.


• Ingrid Robeyns argues at Crooked Timber that the idea of punitive taxation of the superrich is hardly blasphemous.


• The Crux looks at the ongoing debate over the age of the rings of Saturn.


• io9 notes the sad death of Aron Eisenberg, the actor who brought the character of Nog to life on DS9.


• JSTOR Daily shares a debate on the ego and the id, eighty years later.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money notes how Mitch McConnell may have started the movement of Elizabeth Warren towards the US presidency.


• The Map Room Blog takes a look at the credible and consistent mapping of Star Wars' galaxy.


• The NYR Daily looks at Springsteen at 70 as a performer.


• Peter Rukavina shares a photo of a New England forest in fall.


• The Volokh Conspiracy notes a sticker that straddles the line between anti-Muslim sentiment and misogyny, trying to force people to choose.


• Window on Eurasia notes the strong anti-Russian sentiment prevailing in once-independent Tuva.

• Lawyers, Guns and Money recently took a look at the way the great author Catherynne M. Valente made use of culture as a force in her briliant Space Opera.


• I quite enjoyed this oral history of Babylon 5, over at Syfy.


• MEL Magazine hosts this great article arguing the strength of The Last Jedi is that it does not give in to the wishes of fans.


• Vox's exploration of the Afrofuturism of Janelle Monáe's work really laid out these influences on her for me.


• James Nicoll recently asked an interesting question at Tor: Where is all the science fiction dealing with depopulation, with population decline?

• At Apostrophen, author 'Nathan Smith shares some of his favourite LGBTQ reads from the past year.


• At the Broadside Blog, Caitlin Kelly asks her readers where their deepest roots lie.


• Missing persons blog Charley Ross celebrates its 11th anniversary.


• At Crooked Timber, Corey Robin takes issue with some attitudes of Democrats post-Alabama, especially regarding African-American voters.


• D-Brief notes that the icy rings of Saturn apparently influence that planet's ionosphere.


• Imageo shares satellite photos of the Thomas wildfire in California, apparently worsened by climate change.


• JSTOR Daily links to ten beautiful poems of winter.


• Language Hat links to an interesting-looking thesis examining non-Indo-European words in proto-Indo-European.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money takes a look at the underlying cycles leading to the speedy extinction of the passenger pigeon.


• Lingua Franca takes a look at the modern use of the word "even" as a sort of intensifier. Tina Fey's Mean Girls seems to be the source.


• In the aftermath of the "Oumuamua scan, Marginal Revolution takes a look at the Fermi paradox. Where is everyone?


• Neuroskeptic examines the universe of papers lacking citations, apparently only 10% of the total published.


• Drew Rowsome shares some ideas for last-minute Christmas gifts, some naughty and some nice.


• The blog Savage Minds is dead, long live its successor anthro(dendum)!


• Starts With A Bang's Ethan Siegel shows readers ways they can pick up traces of the quantum universe safely at home.


• Towleroad has a queer take on the new Star Wars. (No spoilers, please--I think there are spoilers in the link.)


• Window on Eurasia suggests language issues in Gaugazia, a Turkic enclave in Moldova, might trigger another bout of separatism there.


• Yorkshire Ranter Alex Harrowell has a new take on the cloud of bizarre videos that is #elsagate, introducing readers to the idea of algorithmic kitsch.

That, of course, is Mark Hamill, Luke Skywalker from the Star Wars movies, photographed in the late 1970s. (The image composite is by me; the photo on the left is by Allen Light, the photo on the right a publicity still from Star Wars). Almost every Star Wars geek, and a fair number of other people, have heard the legend of Mr. Hamill’s horrible car crash in the late 1970s. It was one of the first things I ever learned about the actor. Supposedly he had a terrible car wreck that somehow injured his face, but beyond that fact, exactly what happened–and how bad the accident was–seems to change depending on who and when you ask.

The legend repeated most often in my childhood was that Mr. Hamill’s wreck–invariably said to be a sports car, usually a Corvette–did such damage to his face that doctors had to rebuild his nose using cartilage from his ear. It is also often stated that Luke’s encounter with the ice monster at the beginning of The Empire Strikes Back was intended, in part, to explain the facial scarring that he shows early in that film (or, alternately, to explain why he looks “different” in Empire than he did in Star Wars). I also read somewhere on the Internet that the accident occurred shortly before the filming of the Star Wars Holiday Special, and the injuries accounted for his strange appearance during that truly awful show (and/or the painkillers given to him account for his woozy, phoning-it-in performance).

I’ve had “Mark Hamill’s car crash” on my list of potential blog topics for months now. After doing some research on this, it appears that the actual truth of the episode is somewhat difficult to pin down. Let’s take it step by step.