The Little Tank That Just Couldn't.

     From a news story sent out by A Professional news service, written (or rewritten) by A Professional news writer, professionally:

"...gave it another try, and the tank it rolled backward again through another guardrail and down an embankment."

     Then the little tank cried and cried.  "Oh, try harder, little tank," Jeffrey said. The little tank roared and road and spun its treads, but went nowhere.  The little tank, it just couldn't.  The little tank was sad.  Jeffrey patted it and sat beside it until the Sheriff came to help.  He dried off its tears so it wouldn't rust.
     The Sheriff was a big, happy man, like Santa Claus without a beard.  "Oh no, little tank," he said.  "You've got yourself in quite a pickle.  Why were you playing so close to the freeway?  You might have been hurt!"
     He was right.  The little tank and Jeffrey had rolled backwards all across the freeway, down an embankment and nearly into a cold, wet ditch.  Then they had climbed out, the treads of the little tank going "clank-clank-clank," and tried to climb the big hill again.  They crossed the freeway three times and never looked both ways.  Or even one way.  And there were cars and trucks zooming right past!
     The little tank started to cry again. Jeffrey cried, too.  Their Mommies had told them to never, ever play near the freeway.
     The Sheriff was nice.  He told them they were very lucky, and not to cry because they were safe now.  He gave both of them hankies that had a star and the word "SHERIFF" on them in big, gold letters.  The Sheriff got on his radio and called their Mommies and a big, big wrecker. Jeffrey and the little tank were going to okay.

     The text of the original story, filed by one of those scribbling, barely-literate hacks at a local newspaper, far from the lofty heights of A major wire service Provider, seems remarkably free of such child-like distortions.  A gem among those poor, benighted savages who eat raw meat and type using only the index fingers of both unwashed hands. Isn't that amazing?

     Yahoo link. Be sure to read the ads, lest you make the baby Mammon cry!  Can't find the story on A Professional wire service's site, or I'd give them a link, too, free for nothin'.  Here's a screencap, edited down to the minimum.
  (Note to A--- P---'s legal department: do a search on "parody" and "fair use," mmmm-kay?)

     (N.B. In the old days, a story like this, sent over a teletype circuit at a blazing 50 Baud, would have broken out in "BUST IT BUST IT BUST IT" a few words after the glitch, followed by a resend under a slugline that included "RESENDING."  'Cos you don't want to send stuff like that to the paying customers at newspapers and broadcast stations.)

Does Their Reach Exceed Their Grope?

     Or is it just their hubris?  In the wake of revelations about the Feds spying on, well, everyone, an NRO spysat just went up with this mission patch:

     Yeah.  We don't have an Orbital Hilton or a tourist lodge on the moon and Pan-Am can't run you up there on a shuttle -- in fact, they're struggling to make the trains run on time while NASA astronauts have to bum a lift from the Russians.*  But our .gov can bigawd tune in every cel-phone call, walkie-talkie and baby monitor everywhere, and read everyone's e-mail and web-browsing history to boot.  China plans to put a missile base on the Moon and this country's space program is all about listening at keyholes and peering in windows.

     It makes me as proud as the protagonist  in a Greek Tragedy, it does.  And I lurves me some Big Brother, especially when he dresses up like Cthulhu and looms.  Just gimme a minnit to urp neatly into my shirt pocket first, 'kay?
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* Russians are to spaceships as Cubans are to classic cars, as near as I can tell.

No.

     Just "No."

     It doesn't help saying it but hey, at least I did something?  Gotta git out and shovel.

     There's another 3" or more on the way during the day.  And the trash has to go out.  And Tam-of-the-injured-shoulder has the stubborns, and swears she can haul the cans out front.  "Can" and "should:" not actually synonyms.  So, laters; I gotta boot up, glove up, lay hold and heave.

     ETA: Photo is from last night.  There's another 1.5" - 2" on top of that and the forecast calls for another three or more by the end of the day.

Project A119: Nuke The Moon

          Not another chapter in I Work On A Starship.  Not the IMAO Moon-nuking-for-world-peace proposal, now over a decade old.  Nope, the very real USAF Study of Lunar Research Flights, Project A119 from the late 1950s.

     "According to one of the leaders of the project, physicist Leonard Reiffel, hitting the moon with an intercontinental ballistic missile would have been relatively easy to accomplish, including hitting the target with an accuracy of about two miles."

     Okay, then.  That'll put a scare in them Rooshians aliens.

     (The Wikipedia article says the USSR thought about it, too.  Luckily both sides had better sense, 'cos you know, if one had, the other would want to do so, too and next thing you know, the Moon would be totally unrecognizable and the Apollo astronauts would've had to wear lead longjohns.)

Harmonious Folk

     I'm told Dylan did a version of this--

     Yeah, well.  'Druther have this one.

     Is there any darned thing left that some sick weasel -- corporate penny-shaver or green-weenie or regulator run amok -- isn't trying to replace (or already has) with some ersatz edition made out of cheap, biodegradable plastic slathered in bright colors, all misinterpreted, bendy and useless, and destined to end in tatters along the side of a crumbling road?  Anything at all, except maybe the human voice?  And they'll try'n sell you a chopped-up, cut-rate digitized version of that, too, and claim the tinny simulacrum droning in your earbuds is "just as good as the real thing."

     It ain't.

     Maybe this is a little reminder, a glimpse of memory of a description of a sniff of a full Sunday dinner that's been cooking all day, laid out in the fair-to-middling best china on a freshly-launder tablecloth on a cool Fall afternoon.

Glowing Wind Blows In Lunar Solar Power?

     Vast amounts of (electrical) power and a Moon colony by 2030?  Count me in!

     It's an ill wind that blows no good and the "hot" wind for Fukushima has left Japanese engineers and futurists wondering how they'll keep the lights on.  One idea reboots an old notion: solar power from orbit, beaming down microwaves or lasers.  Inefficient?  Sure, but with the Sun on the other end of the line, who care?  Atmospheric losses are low and you let the beams spread and pick them up on huge "rectennas" or broad, floating solar collectors.

     But where the original concept called for solar power satellites in orbit, Shimizu takes another approach: "paving" the Moon in solar cells and transmission facilities in a broad ring around its equator.  Crazy?  Maybe; but it does avoid the tricky parts of trying to build really big structures in orbit, and keep techs around to work on 'em.  Mind you, it's on a scale that makes damming the Strait of Gibraltar and lowering the Mediterranean Sea look like a Science Fair project, but the payoff would be even bigger.

     ...Look for it to get shouted down by the same idiots who don't understand RF field strength that doomed the original SPS, but if Japan gets cold enough, they'll try something and I sure hope this is still on the table.

Riding A Soyuz Back To Earth

     "The 'soft landing' isn't really soft..."  Yeah, but it works:

Bunnami?

     Bunnami!

     (Careful poking around, some other images are NSFW.)

Opinion: Savages.

      You do not put milk in Earl Grey tea.  Not ever.

     Outrageous.  Unacceptable.  Do these ignorant barbarians on the Internet not know what a dad-blasted bergamot is?

     No.   Most of them do not and would not even if one landed on their head with a label pinned to it, reading, "Behold, the bergamot."

     I lay the blame for this outrage directly at the feet of the decline of Great Britain.  They have Let Their Side Down and now English-speaking tea drinkers outside that island-bound nation are pouring milk into Earl Grey and drinking it (actually drinking it!), thinking, "Yes.  Yes, this is how tea should taste."

     Ugh.  If the Brits were capable of making an acceptable cup of coffee, the asymmetry would be unbearable.  Thankfully, they cannot -- for whatever happens, we have got the Chemex, and they have naught.*

     Now, if we just had a nice plate of arrowroot digestives.
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* "Whatever happens, we have got/The Maxim gun, and they have not" --Hilaire Beloc; sadly, he also wrote, "Is there no Latin word for Tea? Upon my soul, if I had known that I would have left the vulgar stuff alone." He was by birth French and never fully gave it up, just as one might expect.

I May Not Know Art

...But I guess I have figured out what people don't like -- or at least won't comment on.

     Edited to add: See, it's a joke, like?  I wrote about books and writers, and people got wordy; I wrote about art and artists, and they sat there quietly picturing things.   It's hard to type a painting; you can do it but it really calls for a monospaced font.

So We Went To See Matisse

    Or some of his oeuvre, really, and don't let the French fool ya; he did actual work with his actual hands and though you may picture canvases bright with primary colors and primitive-looking images, the artist was well capable of capturing a model's likeness with a bare minimum of lines--

     --which seems only fair, considering.

     He moved between mediums quite fluidly:

     And by now, the boys are all wishing they'd studied Art, too.

     (Color?  You wanted color?  They have all of Jazz on the wall!  Photos don't really do it justice, or mine don't; try these.)

     It wasn't just Matisse-- here's Europa, takin' it on the lam (or being pitched the ol' bull, depending on how you want to read it).

     Even the working walls are Art:

     "Day seven, -- or is it eight? -- trapped in William Gibson's mind.  My partner swears she keeps catching glimpses of a gigantic and terrifyingly cerulean Formicidae but it can't be real.  At night, we sleep in flimsy boxes, swaying high over water; by day, we search these sterile, well-lit corridors.  Is there no way out?  The ceilings are all the color of a television tuned to a dead station or an Amtrak engine pulling into one, fuzzily gray or a horribly flat, glowing blue."

     Tam got into the spirit of the thing, and over a late lunch, did her own impression of a Picasso:

     A fun day spent with Tam and the Data Viking at the Indianapolis Museum of Art.  There may be many museums like it, but this one is ours.

M-I-C, K-E--  no, wait, wrong hat!

I Survived Family Thanksgiving

     Almost didn't go.  Almost didn't find the house even when I did go.  Brought Tam along for moral support.  Came home exhausted after two and a half hours and simply crashed, out like a light, entirely wrung out.  Woke three hours later with a blinding headache, took Vitamin I and slept deeply again until morning.

     This level of emotional reaction, unconscious though it is, is in some ways unfair of me.  There usually aren't any majorly dreadful scenes at these events (just repercussions after, sometimes months after, over innocent remarks or who one did or did not speak to).  On the other hand, I was once again reminded that even one two-year-old is a crowd.  (And my sister's poor tomcat feels the same way only more so, and will complain about it to anyone who will listen. He's a good cat and has been around children before, so he simply evades -- and registers his objections with the grown-ups.  For his part, the two-year-old loves, loves, loves the kitty, and would happily express his affection by hauling the critter around like a dishrag.)

     Anyway, survived. General, if cautious, goodwill all 'round. One can scarcely ask for more.