Farting through my Fingertips

SCENE: London, this time last week. Snow has fallen across the UK in drifts up to half an inch deep.
Now read on...

I woke, yawned, stretched, showered, got up, dried the bed (note to self: pay more attention to what order I do things in), made myself a cup of tea, and went outside to inspect the day.

HORROR!

I reeled.

SNOW!

There was no denying it; this was no nightmarish phantasm of the mind, no delusion, no sleep-bleared mistake. There it was. A full eighth of an inch of snow covered the garden.

I stared death in the face.

English civilisation tottered.

Near overcome by fear and the crushing realisation that this once-great nation had again been brought to the brink of destruction by outside forces, I reeled again - and crashed to the floor (note to self II: Highland dancing: unwise on slippery surfaces).

I dragged myself back inside in a state of funk and a suit of mud. My god. Weather. Weather. How would I cope? How would the NATION cope? My heart bled for all the traumatised citizens across the wide white land. But just for an instant. My mind turned immediately to my highest priority. ME. Getting to work.

The train was out of the question. Just last week, there'd been an unexpected leaf which had taken 3 days to sort out. Now, with widespread WEATHER, I didn't have a hope in netnanny of finding ANYTHING functioning. What to do, what to do.

I toyed briefly with the idea of driving. But my neighbour got REALLY pissed off the last time I took his car. I must say, I thought all that ranting and emotion was uncalled for. The dent mostly buffed out, and he wasn't using it anyway. Well, I mean, he couldn't have done - I'd had it.

I was stuck. I was… “NO! This is Britain! I won't be beaten! Blitz Spirit!” I cried, slapping the table for emphasis. There was a knock on the door, I flung it open and a policeman said “Morning, sir. Here's your ASBO.”

“What?”

“Domestic abuse.”

“Of a table? Oh, very well, put it with the others in the hall cupboard, would you.”

“Ah,” he said, eyeing the doorstep. “I'm afraid I can't do that. Health and Safety, see? You got a step. Trip-hazard. I'm not allowed.”

PC Plodded away and I stood there, dripping mud and gritting teeth, England grinding to a halt around me in o-so-many ways, and I decided to call in apathetic today.

-- submission last week to a Send In Your London Story! site.
400 word limit. 400 words precisely.
I've heard nothing, but it looks like they're not going to use it so it seems a shame to waste it.
And the snows are receding swiftly in people's memories...

I woke bright and early on the Sunday and I'm sorting the second cup of tea of my Sunday Papers ritual as G. thuds downstairs and goes for the espresso machine on the stovetop.

"Moaning!"

"Uh. Sal-o-tron. How's it. Goin'." I twist and take a closer look. G's eyes are puffed half-closed and his hair's going in a lot more directions than his conversation. He's a morning person. To an degree that's energetic to the point of distressing. This is alien.

"Jeez mate, you look a bit rough. You OK?"

"Nuh. I feel like crap. I think I'm coming down with a cold or something. I'm completely fucked."

"Speaking of fucked, you seen the lounge room floor?"

"No." With a little alarm. Friday night had been "organised" late and fast, at G's energetic instigation, and most of our friends were already booked or couldn't be arsed trekking all the way across town at the last minute in near-zero degree temperatures to "celebrate" something they had no emotional connection to. But most of G's friends are walking distance, as is his work, so the place filled up and nearly everyone was via G.

"Take a look."

He looks blankly anxious and heads into the next room as I go back to filling the kettle.

Quietened and lightly muffled by the doorways comes a moment of bewildered half-exasperation followed by the dawn:

"What? I don't se...

FUCK.

Ho-oooo. Lee.

Jesus, what the fuck? What IS thi..."

I walk in to the room, the room with the beautiful beautifully ugly original wood floorboards, hardened by age not varnish, dried by the years, the decades, so that 2 and 3mm gaps have pulled open between them, the wood's vertical glimpses showing black with age in this 150 year old house.

"Looks like someone's worked it over with a nail-punch, doesn't it?"

And it does.

There's a pause while he flounders. "What IS it?" he says.

"Stilettos." I say shortly.

"No," he says, "it's someone just's got something stuck in their shoe. Has to be. Something like that."

"Nope, stilettos" I say. "Here. Look." And I squat down and point. Lots of the holes aren't clear, and a lot have overlapped each other and blurred both, but most are separate and vertical. And they show a clear cylindrical punch. A little vicious circle about 3mm (eighth of an inch) across.

"It's all one girl, wearing needle stilettos. Every hole's the same size.
...
She was dancing on the wooden floor even though she knew she was wearing needlepoint shoes."

"When were they dancing?"

"Loungeroom was packed with girls dancing for a while there. The DJ started playing dancey stuff for a bit."

He gives a half-sick half-cockcrow laugh. "I completely missed that! I had no idea. I must have been out the back."

"Yeah, they were going for it." Lights turned off, music turned up to hearing damage. Fairly normal girls. Complete disregard of the consequences for other people. Fairly normal girls.

There's a long pause.

"Fuck."

"Yeah."

"I mean, the only way to fix this is to sand it down."

"Yup."

"And it's pretty deep. I mean, we'd have to take a couple of millimetres off across the whole floor."

"Yup."

That's at least a couple of weeks' work with industrial belt-sanders and furniture shifting and levelling and varnishing and waiting to find out if we needed to do it all again. Major disruption, major mess. MAJOR unlivability for the house. And still no guarantee we'd be able to get it back to good condition afterwards.
There's a long pause.
Worse. This HAD been an essentially unblemished house, renovated neatly if sparsely. And what was now seriously damaged...

"That's, uh, pretty, uh ... that's old hardwood, isn't it...
That's good hardwood.
How old d'y'reckon that is?"

"Not sure. Pretty sure it's original, though." This house goes back at least to the 1840s (though the address goes back at least another 200 years -- I've picked this house out on a hand-drawn building-by-building map of London dated early 1700s). Most of the floorboards show 50 odd years' worth of growth rings, and they've been rock solid and unscratched for the 6 years I've been here.

A long pause.

"Fuck."

"There's no way she didn't know she was wearing stilettos, mate."

"Yeah, but..."

"It's unbelievable arrogance to walk into someone's house wearing stilettos and not give a shit about what you do to it. I mean, come on. There's NO WAY you wear a pair of needle-point stilettos and NOT expect to have to be careful. She's either an imbecile or unbelievably arrogant."

"Yeh, you're right." He's still staring at the floor, with a vague spinning horror.

"None of the girls who came out the back had stilettos; it had to be one of the girls who spent the whole night in here."

"Yeah!" He straightens. "It had to be one of them. And there weren't that many of them. So a bit of process of elimination..."

"I think you might want to make a few phone calls, mate."



The floor looks like someone worked it over with a nail-punch.

Saturday, mid afternoon, the morning after the night before. Out on the toasty warm terrace (8°), Sal huddles over the hair of the dog. Well, the second hair. But there were a lot of dogs. And they barked all bloody night. Didn't quite see the sun up, but it was a near-run thing.

A. pops his head out of the kitchen and I turn as he steps up and out.

"Hayullo. How are YOU?" he says in typical brittle Yorkshire faux-vim.

"It's alive! Ma-aate. I'm not too bad, but not real flash. Woke up without any real hangover, as such, but my brain's just wasn't working. Could only think in a straight line.

Startin' to come good now, though.

How 'bout you?"

"Na, I was fine, actually. No hangover at all. I'm fine now. Well, my leg still really hurts." With a little flipper-like wave at the offending limb.

"Ahrhh harhhhrrr, the traditional drinking injury! What did you do to yourself?"

"No, it wasn't me, I didn't do it [the famous Northern warcry]. Someone kicked me. They knocked me over. Didn't I tell you that last night?"

"... Wait, that rings a bell. I remember you saying something, now. Sorry, I can't remember properly -- what actually happened?"

"It was up on the corner. This guy just kicked me. No reason, knocked me down. Started screaming at me."

"What was he saying?"

"'Fuck off you white bastard, go home, you don't belong here', that sort of thing."

"Bloody hell.
...
'White', eh? What was he -- black? Asian?"

"Asian." With an 'of course' tone. We ARE on the border of Bangladeshi country, after all.

"Did you have a go back at him?"

"No! He was fucking huge!"

"Fair enough.
Lucky that's all that happened then."

"All his friends were holding him back, he was going fucking psycho so they were all yelling at him and holding him down."

"Lucky.
...
Hey! You got attacked by a racialist! That makes you Shilpa Shetty or whatever her name is!"

"Ehh"

"And he's Jade Goody!"

Remember this LEGENDARY Aussie TV ad?


(If you want to understand Aussie culture --its basis, its sinews, its idiots, its parasites, its enginerooms, its majority, its self-mocking ironies, its lack of patience, its tolerance-- you could do worse than spending a minute laughing at this ad, put out by Meat and Livestock Australia. "Budgie Smugglers" -- fantastic.)

Well, he's back, and he's BETTER:

I guess that's a "yes", then.

Check out the (short) quiz and see how you do.

via PreSurfer

Heh:
"Thank you for scoring highly on this quiz, there is sweet hope for the future. If you did not score high, please join the Volunteer for Human Extinction Movement."

A delightful "new" underblogger has come to light.

By "underblogging" I mean the habit or practice of serious regular contributions happening on other people's sites, in Comments or similar feedback mechanisms.

This chap has used Amazon's Reviews to post a periodic stream of sheer delight.

He's a Canadian who seems to be doing it as a private hobby, but he's starting to attract some attention and someone's organised a FeedBurner RSS link here, and here's Amazon's own gathered-page of his reviews.

For example:

Ys
by Joanna Newsom
Price: $14.99
Availability: In Stock
42 used & new from $11.25

6 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

More than thYs. , December 12, 2006

My friend Roger Custom recommended this album to me. I was suspicious, because upon his recommendation I also picked up an obscure album called "Sword Cutting Through Meat" ,the debut by the artist Sword Cutting Through Meat. I can't think of how to describe its content except referring you to the album title. Some time later, Roger Custom played me Sword Cutting Through Meat's sophomore album, "Babies Crying", which is only marginally better than his debut. The third release, "Stepping on Salmon" is an improvement that while sometimes having soothing tactile noises, on the whole is too slippery and falls short of its sporadic promise.

So when Roger Custom recommended this album I felt he no longer had any credibility. Trying to sell me on Ys, he described it as the aural equivalent of barely pubescent girls flying giant swans in heart shaped squad formation across Henri Rousseau landscapes. I listened to it and agreed with him on this, but I'm more a Théodore Rousseau fan which is why I've given Ys 3 stars.

and

L'Occitane - L'Oranger - Spicy Orange Solid Perfume Cubes

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

Stolid Perfume Cubes, September 29, 2006

I have tallied a list of substances that one can easily apply to their body. Liquid is one of these substances. Cream is another. Paste too fits this category, although I haven't had to apply paste to my body for at least 3 years. No matter how much labour I've exerted, cubes are not as easily applied as are other arrangements of substance. I spent most of July trying to apply a perfume cube, tucking it away into my hair, fastening it to my neck with elastic, trying to maintain it in my armpit without dropping it as I moved and lifted crates of asbestos onto a catapault, but none of these methods achieve the ease of liquid; a liquid that cacades onto the body like the flight of a dove, yet one without bones or any membrane, so its particles move freely over one another. Liquid.

This is why this product receives only 2 stars. How can I apply this solid perfume cube?

and

Burnt Toast: And Other Philosophies of Life
by Teri Hatcher

Sister's Doing it For Themselves, July 3, 2006

While I'm not a single working mom, I actively enjoy the single working mom lifestyle. Reading this book I felt Teri to be a sister to me, and I a sister to her. Our childhood would have been one where I could look back fondly on the time we picked raspberries that one summer; the ambrosial jewels melting on our tongues as we bathed in the summer shade of a sycamore tree, the sun's light ebbing in the East, and our conversation becoming a series of poems dedicated to life's loves and losses. Mother would have corn pone, okra, alligator medallions and a rich heady jumbalaya cooking in the kitchen. The smell would waft through the neighborhood like a spectral madame from the deep South calling out our names. "Teri and her sister Mister Quickly" she would say with her dulcet Southern drawl.

Now Teri and I have all grown up. I find it easy to relate to the anecdotes about her being a busy mom, and also being single, because Lord help me - I know what that's like! While I don't have children in the traditional sense, I do have an active imagination and spend a lot a lot of time trying on women's perfume and scrubbing the tub with Comet, something I'm sure Teri knows all about, because as sisters we love our perfume; yet we are also nagged with domestic responsibilities, like bleaching things and using ajax.

My favourite passage is on page 112 where Teri writes "No" at one point. To me that word sums up the point of this book: "No (to men that try to hold us back from being fabulous and doing it for ourselves)."

Mr. Quickly, you are a god.

I mean, this Makoto Nagano chap is all well and good, as near-superheroes go. But can a 33 year-old fisherman from Japan SERIOUSLY compete with Angelina Jolie in a wetsuit?



And when exactly did video games become real life?

This is my favourite movie EVER. EVER!
I thought it was confined to late night Australian TV but now, thanks to the miracle of the internet (patent pending), I can bring it to you all for a purely nominal fee (payment pending).



You'll laugh, you'll cry -- it'll become a PART of you.

Marv Newland, you're an absolute legend.

No, I'm not talking about post-curry mornings; I mean real live actual rockets' exhausts.

See, they come out as a surreally stationary glowing helix, filled with transparent plasma, twisting around on itself and tightening up to form a glowing node then twisting out again, then in again, then out again. And so on.. From a distance it looks like pearls in a plastic tube. Up close it looks supernatural.

It's beautiful.

"In a press release submitted today, XCOR Aerospace announced that their innovative new rocket engine, the 5M15, [the first of its kind ...methane-oxygen (a fuel-oxidizer combination superior to those currently in use today)...], has been tested successfully.
...
The benefits of methane-oxygen are many. As opposed to kerosene-oxygen, it has a higher specific impulse, and the combination is less flammable due to a higher oxidizer-to-fuel ratio. Methane and hydrogen are unique in that they can be pressurized greatly, eliminating the need for complicated pump systems. And while hydrogen-oxygen may have a higher specific impulse, the storage of hydrogen requires much more expensive cryogenic storage equipment and is more hazardous. Hydrogen is also less dense, requiring larger, more massive tanks to store. Finally, methane-oxygen will be the method of choice for future Mars explorers, as they will be able to utilize indigenous resources (the atmosphere) to create a great deal of methane from a small hydrogen feedstock. Robert Zubrin, founder of The Mars Society, has proven this feasible (study)."

This took me a moment to twig...

thanks to Avatar

"I say forget all that, just use a vampire bat -- It's eco friendly and it's got wings"!

lyrics, from his song:
"Why I Only Sing the Chorus":

I'm a bad cook, but I'm a much worse driver
Last night I crashed my kitchen into a tree
The power steering on my fan assisted oven
Went Weird

I'm a bad son, but I'm a much worse father
Because my children never get any treats
They're diabetic, though to tell the truth they're not
I only say that cause it saves me on sweets

And this is why
This is why
This is why I only sing the chorus

I'm a bad man, but I'm a much worse woman
Because I really don't understand sanitary things
I say forget all that, just use a vampire bat
It's eco friendly and it's got wings

And this is why
This is why
This is why I don't do much television

{GUITAR SOLO}

And that is why
That is why
That is why Mick usually does all the solos

Will you have my children?

seelet :

the frat house down the road doesnt even have wep* on

seelet :

wtf

HaLLuCiN0 :

maybe they are to busy drinking beer, smoking weed, and fucking chicks

seelet :

:(

via bash.org

* WEP, Wireless Encryption Protocol. Normally switched on for ALL WiFi networks unless the person installing it is extraordinarily generous or, more usually, clueless.

I picked up a copy of yesterday's freebie "TheLondonPaper" and read it over lunch today.

There's a small article in it announcing new research. Essentially, they've discovered that people with low IQs in childhood go on to have a much higher than normal chance of having repeated serious accidents as adults.

This makes perfect sense to me. And I have a theory as to why this is so.

It's because they're stupid.

Just a quick London rant. The rest of you lot can probably tune out. Unless you want a moment of smugness.

Remember how Transport for London, our introduced über-manager of tube [dear foreigner: the underground railway] & busses, introduced with much fanfare the phenomenal Oyster Card? Not only did it cure cancer and all known diseases, but it let you avoid the ticket machines and simply swipe it at the entry&exit gates.

So far, so good.

Then, some bright spark got it into his tiny little head that this hailed the World Of The Future. And therefore anyone using the previous facilities, known in the ancient arcane lingo as "tickets" (ask your parents), was a carbuncle on the arse of society and Should Be Punished.

Accordingly, they jacked the fares up for anyone foolish enough to use a, what do you call it, a ticket. It's currently £8 for me to travel 1 mile in any direction and return, which where I come from will buy you a 3 course dinner for two and a small block of land on the beach.

To soothe the outcries re the punishment tax, and re the rapidly growing concerns re belatedly discovered privacy issues with TfL making it difficult to use an Oyster Card normally WITHOUT giving them your credit card or bank account details, home address, phone number, etc., TfL claimed it would automatically calculate you the Cheapest Fare Possible.

Essentially, this means that if you travel sufficiently in a day, it will switch your multiple tickets to a single Unlimited Travel ticket: the "TravelCard". So you should be able to just swipe it during the day and then after a few legs, you are effectively carrying a TravelCard and travel for free from then on.

Not a bad idea, no?

It doesn't work.


See, I tested this on Saturday. I'd stored up a range of chores around London to squeeze all the hassle into one day and to save a few quid on tube fare. But I had some spare brain so it occurred to me it might be interesting to actually check what I was being charged as I went. You might not have noticed, but when you swipe out at the exit, the machine's little green LCD panel shows on the bottom line what you've been charged and how much money you have left. On the card, that is, not the train. So I'd just keep an eye out as I left each station and check when the per-leg cost dropped to £0. By my estimates, I should have hit TravelCard cost about lunchtime and the afternoon wouldn't cost me any more.

At the start of the day, my card had ~£19 on it.
At the end of the day, my card had ~£6 on it.
The cost never dropped below £1.50 per leg.

It doesn't work. We've been bullshitted.

Email sent today to a headhunter whom I'd never met in person before but whom I've had a LOT of phone and email contact with over the last few months. She took me out for lunch last week, the day after her client had grilled me for over 4 hours:

Subject: RE: CONFIRMED: interview XXX Inc. @ Wed. 11am

hi g
i just wanted to say great to meet you on thursday for lunch. and to extend that through to 6:30... and that you were wise to bail on the offer of the extra bottle on the roof terrace. a mate of mine rang on the walk home, we went out for a quick glass of red or three near bricklane, then went back to mine for what turned out to be a further 3 bottles of red on the terrace and rather a late night.

keeee-RIST

friday didn't happen.
saturday was detox.
sunday turned into retox.
arg

anyhoo, just wanted to say hi and thanks for lunch and a great afternoon's blithering (sorry if i ranted a bit) and that it was a pleasure meeting you at long last!

cheers
sal

Unemployment has its occasional advantages.

This is brilliant. Go Frog, go!

French marchers say 'non' to 2007

Hundreds of protesters in France have rung in the New Year by holding a light-hearted march against it.

Parodying the French readiness to say "non", the demonstrators in the western city of Nantes waved banners reading: "No to 2007" and "Now is better!"

The marchers called on governments and the UN to stop time's "mad race" and declare a moratorium on the future.

The protest was held in the rain and organisers joked that even the weather was against the New Year.

The tension mounted as the minutes ticked away towards midnight - but the arrival of 2007 did nothing to dampen their enthusiasm.

The protesters began to chant: "No to 2008!"

They vowed to stage a similar protest on 31 December 2007 on the Champs-Elysees avenue in Paris.

Apple announced this week its new iPhone, to much acclaim from analysts and public alike.

But what many people missed was the much lower key announcement of its sister product, the iPhone Shuffle.

From the Newton discussion list:

It's an all-white rectangle with a little green light to show that a call is in progress. While the iPhone Shuffle superficially resembles the iPod Shuffle, its user interface is even more spare. In place of the familiar round iPod "wheel", the iPhone Shuffle sports a single square button. When pressed, the iPhone Shuffle dials a random number from its phone book.

"Our research showed that people don't care who they call as much as they care about being on the phone," said Jobs. "We also found that most cell phone users hate routine, and prefer to be surprised. That's just as true for people answering calls as it is for people making them. It's much more liberating, and far more social, to call people at random than it is to call them deliberately."

Everyone must immediately go to this on-line story from a local newspaper a few miles south-west of London's heart. The story itself is standard, but the comment trail is pure gold.

Surrey Comet:
Marksman called in to kill Kingston’s pigeons

A specialist marksman will carry out a "humane cull" of pigeons in the Memorial Gardens, Kingston's Town Centre Management announced this week.

The cull will be done by a private pest control contractor from Cobham as part of a three-year programme to reduce Kingston's pigeon population.
[...]

Posted by Martin Wildoat on 10:56am Wed 29 Nov 06
I agree with this action. Pigeons carry all manner of diseases like AIDS, malaria, rabies and mad cow disease to name but a few. They are also very aggressive and I can vouch for this as I was attacked by a flock and pecked severely while on my way home from flower arranging classes. In fact I would be more than happy to help in the killing of these evil creatures. Well done Kingston council keep up the good work.
...
Posted by: Norman Ski on 10:13pm Wed 29 Nov 06
This is preposterous! Pigeons performed a vital role in assisting communications in both World Wars and should therefore be encouraged to breed in higher numbers in order to remind us that we must never forget. Perhaps the money would be better spent erecting a large memorial of a Rock Pigeon or perhaps a Feral Pigeon - I'll leave that decision to the council. I don't think a Wood Pigeon memorial would be particularly appropriate because I don't think they did too much for us during the war. Other than food.
...
Posted by: Fancy Coo-Coo on 12:57pm Thu 30 Nov 06
I'm horrified at the very idea anyone might want to harm these gentle creatures. I myself was raised by pigeons after being abandoned in Trafalgar Square as a young nipper. Therefore I know how noble and generous a species they really are. If anyone were to kill a pigeon in this way, it would be as though they are slaughtering one of my own family. It's murder, I say!

Posted by: Free Willy on 3:24pm Thu 30 Nov 06
I know what you mean, reader. I was raised by yaks but I'm sure the experience was similar. How about a council worker cull instead.
...
Posted by: Mrs Dallinger on 5:18pm Thu 30 Nov 06
Dear Margaret. As you can see I've finally mastered this email thing! Sue and John came to visit today, which was nice, and it was Sue who taught me how to use the email. I shall be writing to you often now that I have figured it out. Please send my love to Helen and the boys. See you soon Love Mum xxx
...
Posted by: Hugh Jarvis on 9:46am Dec 1
Can I just say that this letter column is rapidly degenerating into a farce, a French one with bedroom doors opening and closing and men running around with their trousers round their ankles and fancy women pottering about in high heels. And what's that got to do with pigeons? Nothing! That's right! NOTHING! NOTHING! NOTHING!

via bsag

Gas them like badgers!

I just ran across this old post of mine accidentally in the midst of Googling for something completely different. And since yesterday's post was Astronomical, I thought: this could do with un-Earthing.


I get a physical thrill running up my spine on considering almost any of the phenomena of this universe which are different from our desperately tedious monotony of single gravity well and sun and atmosphere and tiny temperature range and so on. And on considering just how tiny and weird is this whole world even in the tiny context of this one sun, let alone the sweeping concentrated awe of galaxies and their cluttered dazzling cores, let alone the slow swinging dance of galaxies around each other, dragged and dragging, let alone the awesome vastnesses of emptiness which the superclusters wrap around and squeeze through like the membranes in a soapy bubbled foam.

And where other people see shooting stars, I see huge chunks of alien rock, dust, and ice, each one having looped around another chunk (itself so massive that its own weight is squeezing its component atoms into and through each other, for gods sake), both of them falling towards each other and missing for god knows how many millions of years and just this once, this one microscopic flicker-instant of its multi-billenia existence, its lonely cold immortal black path strays near another chunk, this one big enough to hold layers of gas above its core. And in one shatteringly brief suddenness, it dies. Long slow stillness suddenly reveals itself to be astronomical speed and in immortality-shattering seconds this chunk's gases strip away its ice and dust then boil its rock, literally boil its rock, in a flash flare of death agony.

And then its component parts spray down into the gas, a cooling cometary mist, to slowly drift into and onto the world, to form a part of every breath.

We breath space dust every day, you and I. It enters our cells -- we are each of us part comet.

I want to walk under other suns, to see a pink sky, to feel alien gravity drag at my spine and my outstretched arms of alien lead, to stand in 500mph winds too thin to more than shriek at me, to crouch and stare at life based on a chemistry I can't touch for fear of burning it with my superheated carbon-water self. I want to see the night sky at a galactic core flare and burn as bright as Earth's day. I want to see a star 1,000 times bigger than the sun spinning 10,000 times a second and throwing matter's death agonies out in long universe-spanning lasers. I want to go outside the Oort cloud and find out what it is in the interstellar vastness that stops the solar wind, that constant belch of self's vitals that pours out of our sun in every direction every second of the day, washing over us as a radioactive gossamer torrent. I want... I want... I want to have been born a space animal. Which 1,000 years from now our technology might allow us to imitate.

In the interim, I work on my immortality and watch the work of others working at the universe, worrying at it like a granny eating an apple with one tooth. And sometimes I'm lost in a photo's implications. And sometimes the hair stands up on my forearms. And sometimes I'm simply struck dumb by beauty and wonder. And sometimes I see something that powerfully expresses a little of the sheer triviality of this world and the potential disasters that always tremble incipiently just fractions of one percent away, of just how little a thing is "the whole wide world."

The richest nations on Earth took a decade to struggle up to our nearest neighbour, draining whole economies to land scraps of tinfoil and titanium on a chunk of rock so close we can read by it at night. And they discovered a moon literally blasted by collisions with other chunks of this solar system; so much so that the very dust was as fine and as glassy and as abrasive as our industrial diamond grinding dust. And this moon is right next door, chasing with us along the little corridor we're sweeping out around the sun. It's only our tiny little smearing of atmosphere that wards off the smaller chunks constantly sweeping over us. And the larger ones? Well... Tunguska...

As our sky-monitoring improves, the more aware we become of just how thick our surroundings are with substantial chunks of matter that could raise megaton clouds over random parts of our Earth.

From today's "Astronomy Picture of the Day" comes an animated gif which is worth watching for a hackle-prickling reminder of what the moon's shattered face tries to tell us every evening.

"How often does an asteroid whiz by the Earth? The above time-lapse animation follows the orbit of the Earth around the Sun for two months in 2002 as numerous asteroids, also known as minor planets, approach and pass by. Some asteroids appear out of nowhere as they are plotted only when they were discovered. Most asteroids plotted were discovered only during the previous year. Although none of the plotted objects came inside the orbit of our Moon, our Solar System is filled with objects as small as bits of sand, usually left by a comet, that appear as meteors as they streak into the Earth's atmosphere every day. The only objects displayed are those visible from Earth closer than 20 million kilometers, color coded by three-dimensional distance. In comparison, the Earth is a relatively small target having a radius of about 6,400 kilometers. One significant research area in modern astronomy involves trying to find the majority of asteroids that could pose a future collision threat with Earth."

We don't arc through vacuum but swim through a cloud of lethal midges, bathed in the radioactive wash of the dying fusion reactor we're continually falling towards. A molten core of weird atoms ejected from supernovæ, creatable only by the death of other suns and still spinning within its liquid rock socket at Earth's pre-moon speed, protects us and our lower satellites from the sun. But our protection from asteroids is only our atmosphere.

Now, lean back and think for a moment on just how profound a protection that atmosphere is. Imagine a 6 foot man who put a half-inch (1cm) strip of something on top of his head and stood on a strip the same, and who then declared he was fully protected from the universe. Now imagine that strip of "something" is actually just gas. Gas so thin that you could only breathe the first 1mm of it.

Welcome to the world.

Don't be afraid, be Aware. Revel in Reality.

Have you ever seen those videos of astronauts playing with water inside spaceships or spacestations? Big liquid globules hanging in the air, glinting silverily, held together only by their own surface tension.
And if bumped or thrown, the waves inside the water warp and bend the globe then bounce back inside and through and back out the other side, and the whole lump of water becomes this wobbling mass, constantly and dynamically pulsing and warping in response to and reflecting the overlapping forces within it.

Imagine that blob scaling up bigger and bigger, till it's not only its surface tension holding the blob together in space, but it's starting to have its own gravity. And that gravity gets stronger and stronger as it gets bigger and bigger, to the point where, even if a large internal wave or pulse is so large that when it reaches the surface it actually splits off from the main body (like you can see big water globules doing in the astronaut videos, if they're wobbling too hard), the two torn-apart bloblets won't just drift off into space, drifting away from each other in eternally straight lines, but will be drawn back together again.

And imagine pouring more and more fluid into this blob, till its mass becomes so utterly vast that its own gravity started to press its own matter together. Lightly on the outside, but pressing harder and harder the further and further each molecule moves toward the centre. And eventually the pressure becomes so great that individual atoms are actually pushed through and into each other, two becoming one at an atomic level and shedding the now-excess subatomic "lock" in an explosive burst of energy. And that energy itself can be enough to push two other atoms harder together, hard enough that they themselves burst through and into each other. And their own released energy can tip other atoms over the edge and so on and so on, in a chain reaction sweeping out from the centre.


That's the Sun, that is.

A great big puddle of gas, wobbling alone in space.
The only real influence on it is the constant internal flux of puddle-wide explosion. Constant bubbles and ridges and splashes pushed out of the surface by the torrents of energy pouring out of its centre.
(Sure, two other little puddles of gas have pooled together nearby, and some specks of rock, but their only effect is the long thin threads of gravity and they do no more than slowly, microscopically, sway the puddle from side to side.)

That's the Sun, that is.


In fact, in some younger stars, the entire star changes shape as vigorously and as profoundly as an astronaut's water globule-- warping like a water balloon in a clumsy toddler's fist.


Remember this awesome pic of a solar flare I posted in August 2006 with a to-scale pic of the Earth for comparison?

Well, check out this awesome 1-second movie of the sun, that big soft puddle of gasses held together in space by nothing more than itself.

It shows the surface of the sun rippling like water after a truly colossal explosion in December. Part of the explosion was 100 times as bright as the sun "for a few minutes" (!!). The ripple itself is so big that the leading wave is about as wide as the whole of planet Earth, and so strong that it reaches right round the sun and swamps pockets of "cold" gas on the other side of its visible face.

Dec. 7, 2006: The prototype of a new solar patrol telescope in New Mexico recorded a tsunami-like shock wave rolling across the visible face of the Sun following a major flare even[t] on Wednesday, Dec. 6, 2006, at 18:28 Universal Time (11:28 MST). The shock wave, known as a Moreton wave, also destroyed or compressed two filaments of cool gas [straddling magnetic field lines] at opposite sides of the solar hemisphere.

[click pic for movie]

Details: "Tsunami", National Solar Observatory
via Bad Astronomy
via Jen

A shock wave propagated like the splash from a rock thrown into a pond.

A new year? Where the hell did that come from?

No. Seriously.

Oh-hhh my aching liver.

Sod it...

Welcome to 2007, all! A bold bright new year unfolds and lays bare its possibilities before us and for us! Life is ours for the delectation!

Or as FishBoy would put it:

"Wheee!"


Ooh, right, sorry, that took the last of my energy.
But I'm gra-aaaaadually getting my head&body back together, people (they drifted apart during one or other of the seasonal bottles).
Normal blog service imminent...