Christmas On The Good Earth

I stumbled across the Apollo 8 Christmas broadcast on, you guessed correctly, Christmas Eve. I just got back from a trip that included the Air & Space Museum in D.C. I haven't been excited like that in a long time. Which is funny, because the first time I ever went there (8th grade, school trip) I was bored out of my mind.

Here's something I put on Facebook. I'm resisting the temptation to rewrite in more "bloggy" language: 

An astronomer friend once asked me why I love space crap so much. Some of it is how small the scale of the galaxies makes me feel, in the good way where I know it's up to me to make meaning in my life, because the universe is expanding / everything is pulling slowly apart and nothing will last long enough for the time I wasted picking my nose to matter. 

& a lot of it is how much the history of space exploration represents some of the highest levels of hope and optimism in humanity. The Voyager I & 2 missions were some of the craziest things we've ever done. Hey, hypothetical intelligent life, here is a GOLDEN record containing some classical music, a baby crying, and scientific diagrams that can be decoded based on the time it takes for hydrogen to transition between its two lowest-energy states. We'll toss it out of the solar system and maybe some day someone will see it. Come find us if we're still around / maybe don't kill us! 

That's beautiful to me. And so friends, happy holidays, happy solstice, merry Christmas, & may your life be full of far more joy than sadness.

Voyager record replica at the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum

Bears, beets, Battlestar Galactica

Everything that has died in large numbers recently starts with B: birds, bees, bats, bastardfish.

I finished a TV show I've been watching since August. Getting through all four seasons this fast required (though no one really required) that I have at least several undignified evenings of solo TV: TV while washing dishes, TV while doing yoga, TV while putting plastic on the windows. I feel like someone I love has gotten married and moved far away and taken several good friends along with.

I cried a few times in those last scenes. There were things I didn't like, too, but part of love, even TV love, is agreeing to it. And I agreed months ago I was going to see this through to the end.

Now I am covering my TV with a blanket. I want to put together a chapbook manuscript this year.

Where do poems come from?

I'm working my way towards the Hubble Telescope as a poem series, as of a Science Friday last year when someone got to talking about it. Eventually. It's all a mush of incoherent excitement right now. I am vowing to research.

Prompted by offhand remarks like this from an NPR story today tacked onto the end of an otherwise happy summary of the telescope's accomplishments:

"At some point, the telescope will break down. Eventually, NASA expects to deorbit it and send it crashing down over the Pacific."

THE END

Can someone please make a movie in the style of "The Divinci Code" or "National Treasure" in which it turns out that the body of Edwin Hubble (his wife never revealed its fate) is actually stowed somewhere in the Hubble Telescope, and our fearless investigator must act quickly to recover it before the telescope is de-orbited into the sea? The climax will involve a lot of fumbling in a space suit high above the earth, while the telescope's orbit slowly decays into a controlled downward spiral. It'll be a long climax. Also, we'll find out that in the time before the telescope launched, Hubble's body also went to the moon, hung out with Laika, and may or may not have spied on America from a Chinese satellite.

wake up, sun

Residents use welding masks to watch the solar eclipse in Chongqing municipality July 22, 2009. A total solar eclipse began its flight on Wednesday across a narrow path of Asia, where it was expected to darken the skies for millions of people for more than six minutes in some places. REUTERS/Stringer (CHINA)

I still have, somewhere, a newspaper photo of elderly Nelson Mandela wearing eclipse glasses for the partial solar we had in Cape Town. Pretend he is part of the below throng of children:

Cooking with Space: Milky Way goes well with white chocolate, fresh cream.

Astronomers find Milky Way 'could taste of raspberries'

Telegraph.co.uk

Scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn, were searching space for evidence of amino acids: the basic chemicals from which life is created.

They told the Guardian newspaper that, despite failing to locate any such aminos, they did find a substance called ethyl formate, the chemical responsible for the flavour of raspberries.

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