A few weeks ago I cited a piece about the new genre of books that take one object and investigate its Meaning down to the subatomic level. Here's an example. If you were unaware that the waste-paper basket presents an existential conundrum, you can claim ignorance no longer:

The zeitgeist is not preoccupied with garbage cans. Some people are preoccupied with it, and have made their preoccupations mandatory. Even if you are intent on proper garbage sorting, chances are it is not a preoccupation, but an internalized routine.

More:

At first I read "jellied temporality," which sounds like some awful Dr. Who dessert. Same thing, really. Try this the next time someone asks if you want that wastebasket emptied. I don't know. It's under the desk and I can't see it. I don't know if it's empty or full. It might contain Schrodinger's cat. I prefer to keep it in a state of temporality, jelled, fixed in amber, caught in the transition between utility and abandonment.

GEEK You know there's anticipation of ten tons of quality Star Wars when i09 readers feel confident debating the need for a Boba Fett movie.

Why the unending fascination with the character - especially after his backstory was revealed? One comment notes that he was cool "by cultural consensus," which is exactly right.

As with so much of Star Wars, it was the things fans invested in the movies that made them expand in the imagination. Fett's a perfect example, even though at the time his bumbling topple into the Sarlaac maw was underwhelming. We all thought the Sarlaac was cool, though. Never occurred to us at the time that it was a ridiculous thing. A desert planet has a gargantuan immobile worm in the sand, waiting for prey to fall in? And then it would take 500 years to digest it? Something that big would not wait half a century. It would digest whatever it had like Orson Welles surviving on one Tic-Tac a day. While we're on the subject of desert planets, with their shifting, unstable surfaces:

Yeah, that's not going to tip over, ever.