It’s another one of those grab-bag days here at Simple Tricks when I’ve got a whole mess of items that I want to write about, including celebrity deaths, human achievement, human striving, and stuff that’s just plain cool. Some of these have been kicking around my brain pan for a couple of weeks now, so my apologies if this is old news to some folks.

First off, I was saddened to hear that Julia Child, possibly the most famous TV chef of all time, passed away over the weekend, only a few days shy of her 92nd birthday. Child was a physically imposing woman (she was over six feet tall) who made it her mission in life to help Americans appreciate — and dare to try preparing — a fine meal. At the time she embarked on this quest, American cuisine was, to phrase it politely, less than appealing. (If you need proof, check out James Lileks’ collection of ’50s-vintage gastronomical horrors in the Gallery of Regrettable Foods). Julia’s warbly delivery and utter lack of self-consciousness when she screwed up became so well-known that she was parodied by stand-up comedians, most notably by Dan Ackroyd in a notorious skit on Saturday Night Live.

TV cooking shows come and go, but Julia seemed to be some kind of Energizer bunny that was always on the air somewhere. Anne and I both greatly enjoy Cooking at Home, the show she did in recent years with French chef Jacques Pepin. Julia was becoming frail by the time this one was recorded, and Jacques sometimes got impatient with her — in one particularly funny segment it seems to be all he can do to not go after her with the butcher knife in his hand — but it was always obvious that underneath the curmudgeonly irritation he held a deep reserve of affection and respect for her. I can recall one heartwarming moment in which she was having trouble with a heavy pan and Jacques, who had been grumpy with her only a moment before, suddenly becomes very gentle and warm as he helps her lift it. This simple gesture illustrates the core appeal of this show, and of Julia herself: it isn’t merely the food, it’s the humanity of the people preparing it. I don’t cook much myself, but watching Julia always makes me feel as if I can if I’d only try. (I’m not the only one who feels this way, either — a blog called The Julie-Julia Project chronicles one woman’s quest to make every recipe in Julia’s groundbreaking book, Mastering the Art of French Cooking. It’s a fascinating journey, but if you go to this site, be warned. Julie is a New York City girl, and she sometimes expresses herself in ways that wouldn’t go over well in Salt Lake.) I’m glad Julia Child will live on in re-runs.

Moving on, it was also a bummer to learn that Rick James is gone. James recorded only one song that means anything to me personally, “Super Freak,” but that one song was a doozy. Anyone who has ever heard it (or M.C. Hammer’s “Can’t Touch This,” which shamelessly sampled “Super Freak”) knows the tune — the word “infectious” was invented for this funky, bass-driven ode to uninhibited sex. Of course, I didn’t know it was about sex when I first heard it in 1981. Back then, I just thought it was really catchy. I still do. I heard it recently for the first time in years; it set my toes a-tapping and put a smile on my face. It also amazed me how the lyrics could be so raw, so blatantly sexual, and yet, paradoxically, so innocent. These days, I rarely hear songs that are unambiguously about sex, and when I do they always seem to make the subject into something dark and unsavory. “Super Freak” was dirty, yes, but it was fun. It seems to me that we have more sex in our culture than ever before, but we’ve lost the fun part. Ah, maybe I’m just turning into an old man who doesn’t like what the kids are listening to these days…

Turning to matters a bit more upbeat, it looks like Kuala Lumpur’s Petronas Towers are no longer the tallest buildings in the world. The title of “tallest building” now belongs to Taipei 101, a descriptively (if unimaginatively) named skyscraper in Taipei, Taiwan. (It has 101 stories, if you’re wondering about the name.) Commentators have described it in fairly uncharitable terms, but it doesn’t look too bad to me. It’ll be interesting to see how long it’s able to hold the title of tallest, though. Architects and investors all over Asia are in a race to top one another, and of course the replacement for the World Trade Center is on target to reach the same goal.

Meanwhile, there are some people who are planning to go even higher. This news is now weeks old but I don’t think it was too widely reported: Burt Rutan and the SpaceShipOne crew has announced that they’re going to try for the X-Prize on September 29. I’ve been following this story for a while now — just in case you’ve forgotten, SpaceShipOne was the first privately-funded, manned vehicle to reach space — and this news thrills the hell out of me. I think Rutan has a good shot of succeeding; most importantly, I think his work may actually lead somewhere. Other efforts to win the prize strike me more as dead-end stunts instead of genuine attempts to open the final frontier. For example, the da Vinci Project‘s plan is to carry their rocket vehicle aloft beneath a helium balloon. That may work to get them the prize, but it’s wildly impractical for any future commercial applications.

Another space-related idea that may or may not turn out to be practical is the solar sail. If you’ve seen Tron or Attack of the Clones, you’re familiar with the concept: a spacecraft propelled by particles of the solar wind striking a gossamer-thin “sail.” As science-fictiony as this sounds, there are scientists experimenting with the idea, and they’re having some degree of success with it. Recently, a Japanese group successfully launched a pair of sails and got them to unfurl properly in space. The next step will be to see if the solar wind will really cause them to move as they’re supposed to.

Back here on Earth, in the “Cooooollll” department, I’ve recently learned that there are computer enthusiasts out there who do the same thing my father and his buddies do to their cars: they make hot rods out of them. To use the proper parlance, the computer guys like to do “casemods,” which means they create custom-built housings for their machines. Some of these are based on standard PC towers while others are built into more exotic objects. The website Boing Boing often links to photos of particularly interesting casemods; the neatest one I’ve come across so far is a computer contained inside an antique Philco television set, which was one of the more unusual TV cabinets ever designed. I wouldn’t mind having one of these babies myself…

And finally, a story that I find endlessly fascinating is that of Koko the Gorilla, the ape that has learned American Sign Language and uses it to express surprisingly sophisticated concepts. In the latest development, Koko essentially asked for dental help by complaining to her keepers of pain in her mouth. It never fails to amaze me how human this animal is. Personally, I find it comforting to see that human beings aren’t the only creatures on this planet capable of thought and emotions; it makes our species seem far less alone in the universe.

Well, that’s enough for today, I think. There are a number of political stories that have intrigued me in recent days, but I’ll save them for another time. Hope you folks out there in Internetland have found some of this interesting…