Space, the Final Frontier

I just started a new book—Interesting Facts About Space by Emily Austin. The main character, Enid, is socially awkward and has some not insignificant mental health issues. She works at a “space agency” as an information architect (which I think means she collects and organizes assorted data). I want to like this tale but there’s too much focus on Enid's various anxieties and not enough about her obsessions with space and true crime podcasts.

So far, the writing itself, the construction of sentences and paragraphs, is competent if not filled with quirky humor as publicized. The overall story just isn’t grabbing me. I can identify with Enid’s interpersonal gawkiness (maybe a little too much) but I don’t need to read an entire book about it. At this point the novel seems like a long, unnecessarily drawn out character study.

More talk about planets, black holes, stars, and more humor would be a better fit for me right now.

NEXT!

Remember Duck Dodgers in the 24½th Century? That was one of my favorite cartoons. It was spoof of the Buck Rogers in the 25th Century comics. Duck Dodgers, looking at the stars with my father, Neil Armstrong’s 1969 moonwalk, and Star Trek got me all wild about space.

Did you see? Another of Space Karen’s ships blew up yesterday.

“Starship experienced a rapid unscheduled disassembly during its ascent burn. Teams will continue to review data from today’s flight test to better understand root cause. With a test like this, success comes from what we learn, and today’s flight will help us improve Starship’s reliability,” SpaceX said via X this evening. (source)

“Rapid unscheduled disassembly,” a great euphemism for Christ almighty, we fucked up AGAIN!

The spacecraft’s six engines appeared to shut down one by one during ascent, with contact lost just 8 1/2 minutes into the flight.

The spacecraft — a new and upgraded model making its debut — was supposed to soar across the Gulf of Mexico from Texas on a near loop around the world similar to previous test flights
     ~~~
The 400-foot (123-meter) rocket had thundered away in late afternoon from Boca Chica Beach near the Mexican border. The late hour ensured a daylight entry halfway around the world in the Indian Ocean. But the shiny retro-looking spacecraft never got nearly that far.
     ~~~
It was the seventh test flight for the world’s biggest and most powerful rocket. NASA has reserved a pair of Starships to land astronauts on the moon later this decade. Musk’s goal is Mars. (source)

Yeah dude, good fucking luck getting to Mars when your “starship” can’t even make it out of the Gulf of Mexico without exploding. According to Reuters, dozens of commercial flights had to be diverted to other airports or needed to alter course to avoid the flaming debris. I wonder how many sea creatures died for Musk’s incompetence.

Meanwhile, same day, the other billionaire rocket boy (Bezos) successfully launched his newest supersized rocket. Not only did it reach orbit on its first flight, it placed experimental satellite thousands of miles above our blue planet. 

Space, the final frontier. I don’t expect we’ll get there as long as the Space Nazi’s in charge.

FYI

I’m off to physical therapy. There's just one thing I wanted to mention before I go sweat my booty off in an effort to become more mobile.

Boner pills and boob augmentation jobs? That’s gender affirming care. I wonder if any of the transgender trashing Republi/Fascists ever put that together.

Ivanka, Nancy, and Melania’s surgical enhancements? Those little pills that incoming Prez Leon, Homan the Hater, and the decrepit Brainworm Boy undoubtedly use?

Yep, gender affirming care.

Just thought I’d throw that out there. You’re welcome. 'scuse me now‚ I gotta go shower in my my gender neutral bathroom.

PT and Unrelated Horror

Really now, I’m truly done with this practically zero degree, dry as the Mojave, Wizard of Oz house-lifting wind speed days. Just getting from the Y parking lot to my physical therapy appointment needs to count as a serious workout.

By the by, yesterday’s session went great. Though she’s having me do many of the same exercises I’ve done after my previous five surgeries, Amy’s really challenging me (in an effective and crackerjack way). She explains the why and how of each routine so I understand which muscles I’m strengthening, how my endurance is being increased, and how it all effects my balance. The more I understand, the more motivated I become. Also, she’s a great cheerleader.

I certainly didn’t expect things to turn out this splendidly after that unfortunate session in mid-December. I’m glad (of fucking course) that it has.

In the news...I expect you’ve heard or read the latest about Neil Gaiman. It’s bad—disgustingly so. If you’re not a New York magazine subscriber, you can read the article here. I’m not sure this is the full piece but, honestly, I did NOT need to read any more of the heinously ugly details.

My takeaways?

1)  Gaiman was raised in the Scientology cult and was severely damaged by it. He hasn’t worked through all (any?) of his trauma and, combined with his celebrity power position, became a significant abuser. Apart from the fact that Gaiman has actual talent, I’m reminded of a certain abusive waste of oxygen who will shortly be the first felon president.

2)  Gaiman’s main victim isn’t perfect. That is, she’s human. She came from a background of neglect and abuse making her his perfect prey. People who were abused as children are more likely to be abused as an adult.

If the connection between abuse and "love" is made early in life, the feelings of shame and anger, which naturally happen as a consequence of the abuse, can become mixed up with sexual feelings, leading to confusion in the person who experienced the abuse. (source)

I sincerely hope she’s found peace and is healing.

3)  What about Amanda Palmer? I’ve seen multiple comments on Threads and Bluesky saying that she was as bad as Ghislaine Maxwell. While there are myriad reasons to dislike Palmer I find this comparison reductive, lazy, and a mammoth example of hyperbole. She could have and should have done things differently but she's nowhere near Maxwell's villainous level.

The New York Mag/Vulture article mentions that Palmer declined to speak with New Zealand police after Gaiman’s main victim filed a report. That’s bad (the case couldn’t proceed without Palmer’s cooperation) but I imagine she had some serious reasons. I just hope she, not Gaiman, has custody of their 10 year old son. That kid should get some expert therapy so he doesn’t grow up to be like dear old dad.

If nothing else, the Gaiman horror story took my mind off the incoming democracy destroyers—the kleptocratic, totalitarian, utterly incompetent, oligarchic plutocrats.

Frozen

Okay, I’ve just about had it with winter.

• My sinuses are in full revolt. My nose is all “thanks but it’s January and time for me to be more clogged than the Tip O’Neill tunnel during evening rush hour.”

• I’m running through moisturizer like RFK Jr. eats through roadkill. Seriously, I drink a ridiculous amount of water and have a humidifier going 24/7, yet my skin still has a texture that makes Death Valley jealous.

• Though it MIGHT reach as high as 39º fahrenheit today (versus last week’s sub-zero horseshit), there’s still a ton of snow and ice along the seawall path. MAYBE it’ll all melt so’s I can walk outside this afternoon but I kind of doubt it. I’m quite keen on staying upright—not slipping, sliding, and falling on my delicate fucking head.

Luckily, I’ve a recumbent elliptical so I can do my cardio exercising inside BUT that does fuck-all for improving my wonk-ass balance and building up the muscles around my ankles and calves. Sure, I could go down to the mall for a walk BUT most people go around unmasked. The chance of catching the flu, COVID or pneumonia doesn’t thrill me in the least. I have enough health obstacles without adding those into the mix. I could do laps of the house BUT my home is small. “Tiny” would not be a descriptive stretch.

Wollaston Beach in ice

What to do? Extra PT exercises, the elliptical, and Ten will check the melt sitch on the seawall at noon.

A lot of people like snow. I find it to be an unnecessary freezing of water.
~ Carl Reiner

If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?
~ Percy Bysshe Shelley, Ode to the West Wind

In the winter she curls up around a good book and dreams away the cold.
~ Ben Aaronovitch, Broken Homes

Sounds excellent but reading all day in my comfy chair doesn’t rebuild my surgery banjaxed physical strength and endurance. Otherwise, that’d be totes awesome. The other problem is that I finished my good book—Redshirts by John Scalzi. The next library book (currently on hold) isn’t due to hit my Kindle for another two weeks. Woe-as-hell is me!

Winter is not a season, it's an occupation.
~ Sinclair Lewis

Andrew Wyeth—Winter Carnival

It’s work—hard fucking work. I want spring NOW, goddammit

No animal, according to the rules of animal-etiquette, is ever expected to do anything strenuous, or heroic, or even moderately active during the off-season of winter.
~ Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows 

This as it should be.

The problem with winter sports is that - follow me closely here - they generally take place in winter.
~ Dave Barry

To appreciate the beauty of a snowflake, it is necessary to stand out in the cold.
~ Aristotle

Thanks, I’ll just take your word for it. There are 66 more days until spring.

Words to Know

This is a short vocabulary list to help me understand and follow along during the next four years.

Kakistocracy
     noun
government by its least suitable or competent citizens.

Just look at the sleeping toddler’s nominees—alcoholic, rapist Pete Hegseth, long time heroin addict and roadkill connoisseur RFK Jr., Russian asset Tulsi Gabbard, snake oil salesweasel Mehmet Oz, fossil fuels hero Doug Burgum, etc.

Plutocracy
     noun
government by the wealthy

That’s be Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg, and more.

Totalitarianism
     noun
government that is centralized and dictatorial and requires complete subservience to the state.

Project 2025

Despotism
     noun
oppressive absolute power and authority exerted by government : rule by a despot

Did I mention Project 2025 already?

Theocracy
     noun
a system of government in which “religious” assholes rule in the name of their god.

Project 2025 would serve to further crystalize and federalize the Christian nationalist agenda. The 900-plus page “Mandate for Leadership” book of policy proposals includes multiple concerning elements from a religious freedom perspective. Project 2025 would expand upon the Trump administration’s efforts to expand religious exemptions and gut civil rights protections for people of minority faiths, women, and people who are LGBTQ, which CAP documented with the ACLU and Movement Advancement Project in 2020. (source)

Charlatanism
     noun
The act of making usually showy pretenses to knowledge or ability : fraud 

The lying sack of warthog feces continues to lie and lie and lie.

Faustian bargain
a pact whereby a person trades something of supreme moral or spiritual importance, such as personal values or the soul, for some worldly or material benefit, such as knowledge, power, or riches. Also called a deal with the Devil.

Has Fetterman made a Faustian bargain? Is he the new Manchin/Sinema? Pretty much looks like it. Who else will sell their soul, bend the knee, and turn against their constituents for Captain Crazypants and his illegal immigrant co-prez, the Space Nazi.

America is the only instance in history of a nation which has passed from barbarism to decay without passing through the stage of civilization.
~ attributed to Ogden Nash, Oscar Wilde, a French newspaper columnist, and others

Recently Deceased Befouled Croutons

How do you befoul a cube of stale bread? All you need do is douse it in a bit of feral cat piss, leave it in the hot July sun for a day—et voila, you now have a stinky, soggy, ruined crouton.

Here in this country of the damned (formerly known as the United States of America) we now have a few freshly dead befouled croutons.

1) Remember the Pizzagate idiot—Edgar Maddison Welch? He’s the gun-humping, gullible imbecile who shot up a restaurant because he’d heard they were running a child abuse ring in the basement (a basement they don’t have). Welch got out of jail but *oopsie* pulled a gun on a cop at a traffic stop. Yep, idiot boy is now a smelly, dead crouton.

Welch went into the Comet Ping Pong brandishing a three-foot-long rifle with a loaded revolver on his hip. Numerous children were in the facility at the time, and both customers and employees ran from the pizzeria as Welch looked around, at one point firing into a closet and damaging a computer. No one was injured and he eventually surrendered to police. (source)

2) Anita Bryant, the bouffant headed, anti-human rights campaigner, faux “christian,” Florida orange juice shill, much deserved pie-in-the-face recipient, and frequent butt of jokes died in December. She was 84.

I only mention it but yesterday was The Amazing Bob’s birthday. Had he lived, he would have been 83. How in fuck’s name were TAB and Anita from the same generation? While he was protesting with Vietnam Veterans Against the War she was singing "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" during the half-time show of 1971’s  Super Bowl as well as viciously promoting discrimination against gay people.

I’m surprised this failed pool of shellacked demon spooge made it such to an advanced age. I would’ve thought that all the hate and hypocrisy flowing though her veins would have taken her out much earlier.

Her reputation all but synonymous with intolerance, her show business career evaporated, and by the late 1990s she had filed for bankruptcy. (source)

GOOD!

3) Not an American but still a vile racist, a Holocaust denier who promoted putting people with AIDS into concentration camps—Jean-Marie Le Pen. He was 96. Fer fuck’s sake, why does such a disgusting, rotted example of humanity get to live so long when good people like Rachel Corrie, Tomas Young, Rev. George Washington Lee, and so many other proponents of peace and justice don’t?

In the hours after his death, hundreds of people took to the streets in cities across France to celebrate his demise, singing, letting off fireworks and making toasts with champagne. (source)

Just imagine the worldwide celebrations when Trump kicks the bucket. It may become our next national holiday.

Water Worlds

Do you remember the movie Waterworld? It came out in 1995.

In a future where the polar ice-caps have melted and Earth is almost entirely submerged, a mutated mariner fights starvation and outlaw "smokers," and reluctantly helps a woman and a young girl try to find dry land. (source)

His mutation? Gills and webbed feet. Evolution happens—maybe he was born that way.

Essentially, it's Mad Max with the opposite problem: too much water instead of a barren Earth. (source)

The critics were absolute savages. Yes, the flick was flawed BUT it was damned entertaining. What brings this up today?

Scientists say we should look for three key ingredients that make life possible: liquid water, chemistry, and energy. I came across an article (from 2022) on NASA’s site about a couple interesting planets.

A team led by researchers at the University of Montreal has found evidence that two exoplanets orbiting a red dwarf star are "water worlds," where water makes up a large fraction of the entire planet. (source) 

The two planets are in the Kepler-138 planetary system. Kepler-138 is a red dwarf star (not to be confused with Red Dwarf the British teevee series) which is about 218 light-years from us. I only mention it but, if anyone wants to go find out if Kepler-138 c and Kepler-138 d are in fact water worlds, they better pack a lot of snacks and a few changes of underwear.

Closer to home, Saturn’s moon Titan.

This mammoth moon is the only moon in the solar system with a dense atmosphere, and it’s the only world besides Earth that has standing bodies of liquid, including rivers, lakes and seas, on its surface. Like Earth, Titan’s atmosphere is primarily nitrogen, plus a small amount of methane. It is the sole other place in the solar system known to have an earthlike cycle of liquids raining from clouds, flowing across its surface, filling lakes and seas, and evaporating back into the sky (akin to Earth’s water cycle). Titan is also thought to have a subsurface ocean of water. (source)

There’s Jupiter’s moon Ganymede:

NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has found the best evidence yet for an underground saltwater ocean on Ganymede. The ocean is thought to have more water than all the water on Earth's surface. Ganymede’s ocean is estimated to be 60 miles (100 kilometers) thick – 10 times deeper than Earth's ocean – and is thought to be buried under a 95-mile- (150-kilometer-) thick crust of mostly ice. Identifying liquid water is crucial in the search for habitable worlds beyond Earth, and in the search for life as we know it. (source)

We also have Callisto, Jupiter’s second largest moon.

Once thought to be a dead, inactive rocky body, data gathered by the Galileo spacecraft in the 1990s indicate Callisto may have a salty ocean beneath its icy surface. More recent research reveals that this ocean may be located deeper beneath the surface than previously thought, or may not exist at all. If an ocean is present, it’s possible the ocean is interacting with rock on Callisto, creating a potential habitat for life. (source)

Also, a paltry 100 light years from good ol’ beleaguered Earth is TOI-1452 b. Astronomers think it could be an ocean planet—all water, all the time.

IF there's life on these moons and planets, do they look like octopuses and squids? Are they smarter than humans? Yeah, I know, that wouldn't take much.

I strongly believe we should send Musk, Bezos, and Zuck out to the Draco constellation and the Kepler-138 system to investigate. If they’re pressed for time, Saturn’s a mere 943.99 million miles from us. Better yet, Jupiter is only 397.38 million miles away. Hell’s bells, a walk up to my neighborhood packy would take longer (maybe that’s just me though).


Speaking of water (and we most certainly were), Trump said he wants to rename the Gulf of Mexico after himself. Unfortunately Bay of Pigs is already taken.

So, You Wanna Be Friends

Most of us want/need friends. I sure as hell do. It’s necessary to have one’s needs, wishes, and rules in place though. It’s not enough to just work in the same cube farm, attend the same yoga sessions or take the same classes.

Some of my rules and stipulations:

1) If you make food you are required to share. This especially includes:

• Sweet potato fries
• Cookies (chocolate chip, peanut butter, gingerbread, snicker doodles, ANY kind of frosting filled sandwich cookie, etc.)
• Roasted brussel sprouts
• Falafel
• Black bean burgers
• Spanakopita
• Guacamole
• Spinach and feta scones

…did I mention cookies yet?

2) Must be comfortable with long stretches of hanging out together whilst doing nothing in particular.

3) You need to be in possession of a deep love for our feline overlords or, at least, a finely tuned respect and appreciation.

 4) Having the same taste in books, music, movies or art is not essential but overlaps certainly don’t hurt.  

5) A fully developed creative conversational sense is absolutely necessary.
     Fer instance:

• If you could be a god of something, what would it be? I’d be torn between music and visual arts. Maybe I could be Apollo on even days and Minerva on odd days?

•  You’re starting your adult life over again. This time out you’re financially supported by a wealthy benefactor (with no strings attached). What would you do for work? Me? I’d move to Vermont—maybe just outside Brattleboro—and start an alpaca farm. I’d eventually open a shop where I’d sell alpaca yarn as well as locally created alpaca yarn creations—sweaters, full body suits, spaceships…you know, the usual knit products.

• Remember An Elderly Lady Is Up to No Good by Helene Tursten? If you could, who would you Dexter and why? No, of course we’d never actually do this—that’s not the point. Having an imagination is. 

I've never wished a man dead, but I have read some obituaries with great pleasure.
    ~ Clarence Darrow 

6) Sense of humor—gotta have it. Friends don’t need to be a reincarnation of Robin Williams or Dorothy Parker. It can’t hurt though. If you can’t be funny, be verbally imaginative. 

7) Kindness is required in your honesty. Yes, you can be blunt as fuck without being thoughtless or cruel. Don’t be an empathy devoid dick. 

8) If you vote for anyone in the Republican Party, we’ll never achieve more than a nonviolent, nodding acquaintanceship. Why not? You’ve voted against my ability to exist as a free, equal, human on this Earth. I’m not happy about that to say the very least.

Likewise, if you’re so far Left that you refused to vote for the Black woman because something, something, PALESTINE…come back when you’ve grown up and understand reality more fully. I may fully support your cause or point of view BUT protest votes or not voting have given us four more years of Hell, minimum. Also, you’ve not done the Palestinians or Ukrainians any favors with your purity protest.

 

9) You don’t have to love science fiction but, honestly now, with John Scalzi, Martha Wells, Philip K. Dick, Charlie Jane Anders, Margaret Atwood, Catherynne M. Valente, etc., etc. how could you not?! Okay, we don’t need to read the same books but being able to appreciate (on some level) and discuss each other’s literary indulgences is a good thing.

10) Remembering my birthday isn’t important but my surgery dates are. More precisely, knowing about and acknowledging my battles with this stupid, tumor riddled skin suit is important.

Witty or otherwise fun pre-op encouragement is WAY better than wishing this old, beleaguered broad a happy birthday.

I suppose that's my top ten rules for friends. What are yours?