• GREAT BALLS OF FIRE: Did you miss the Perseid meteor shower peak-hour blowout that happened back on August 12? We went camping up on Mount Pacifico here in the Southern CA San Gabriels the weekend after and caught a couple fleeting shooting stars, but the main event was completely obscured by the impenetrable orange-grey dome that covers the Los Angeles sky each night. Luckily this “Jeff Sullivan” guy on Flickr recorded a good portion of the night with his HD camera. [via Bad Astronomy/Discover]

• PACIFIC SCI-FI: We are slowly working our way through Simon Sellars most recent contribution to Ballardian, a website “exploring tropes and motifs found in the work of J.G. Ballard.” Sellars’ essay — “Extreme Possibilities: Mapping “the sea of time and space” in J.G. Ballard’s Pacific fictions” — is an in-depth look at themes of dystopia/utopia in works such as “My Dream of Flying to Wake Island” and Rushing to Paradise, tales set on uninhabited Pacific islands. Sellars brings anarchist philosopher-poet Hakim Bey (aka Peter Lamborn Wilson) and literary critic Fredric Jameson into the discussion, along with a variety of photographs and video documenting the nuclear testing that gives much of these works their apocalyptic tint. [Ballardian]

• TO DEET OR NOT TO DEET: Last week a bunch of people picked up the story that the noxious insect repelling chemical was maybe bad for you, as in neurotoxically bad. O RLY? That shit melts plastic and “stained” the frames of my spectacles — of course it’s bad for you. But you know what else I think is bad for me? Having mosquitos and no-see-ums eating my eyeballs alive when I’m up in Tahoe, exploring high altitude bogs in the Desolation Wilderness. And also BUG GIRL says that maybe these studies aren’t that useful anyway: “The results in this paper are preliminary, need to be confirmed, and even IF confirmed, remain irrelevant to the average person who might want to use DEET.” Whatever: DEET ‘em if you got ‘em, I guess. Or better yet let’s see what NANCE has to say about hexing them skeeters … [Bug Girl's Blog]

• ON YARD EGGS AND CITY CHICKENS: The urban homesteaders at Homegrown Evolution are talking chicken at their newly launched L.A. Urban Chicken Enthusiasts online forum. And if you’ve got an extra 20 bucks burning a hole in your pocket, you can go hang out with them at Project Butterfly in downtown Los Angeles TODAY (that’s Tuesday, August 25, 2009) and they’ll teach you how to make sauerkraut and a “self-irrigating pot.” [Homegrown Evolution]