Here we are in the strange, surreal, no-man's-land between Christmas and the start of the New Year, and 2013 is on death row. There will be no last-minute reprieve from our 400-year-old, hatchet-faced governor, nor a last-minute phone call from Amnesty International. 2013 sits in its dank little prison cell, marinating in melancholy, and dejectedly gnawing on its bitter last meal of broken dreams and unfulfilled promises. So, when the prison chaplain shows up at the door with his Big Black Book of Contradictory Nonsense to make one last-ditch effort to redeem the soul of this year before it gets marched off to the electric chair and be plugged into eternity, 2013 will spit in his face with cheerful defiance and blurt out, "Stuff it, Padre! I apologize for NOTHING!" There were some good things in this year, some bright spots of greenery in a desert of bland mediocrity, and we're going to remember some of them:
The WELL, BUTTER MY BISCUITS AND CALL ME SCREWED Award goes to the redoutable Paula Deen. Paula was the nation's Buddha of Bad Eating, the Princess of Pork Belly, the First Lady of Fricasseed Funk, and a Southern-Fried Cracker Queen whose toothy, perfect smile graced dozens of magazines every time I stood in a grocery store checkout line. She was like a lowbrow Martha Stewart, but without all the murderous psychopathic qualities and barely-concealed hatred for the people who buy into her house-of-mirrors media empire. In Paula Deen's world, there was no problem that could not be fixed with a couple of pounds of butter and a big ole mess of possum skracklings, or a hundred other things I would never consider putting in my mouth. Well, maybe except for the problems that will arise from injudiciously dropping the N-word at a court deposition, seemingly tolerating an atmosphere of sexual harrassment at the restaurant she co-owns with her brother Earl "Bubba" Hiers, or letting plans slip out about a "plantation-style" wedding with black waiters in white jackets. Fancy white jackets are apparently one of the many wonderful perks slaves enjoyed during their working vacation, I mean, servitude to white people, if that old Duck Dynasty scumbag is to be believed. For the national media, it was Thanksgiving Day and Paula was the biggest, fattest turkey they had ever layed eyes on, and they went after her with a vengeance usually reserved for mass murderers or child molesters. Paula immediately went on an I-so-sorry tour of morning talk shows and seemed genuinely repenitent for her gaffes. But Our Lady of Perfect Gravy is nothing but resilient, and as recently as this month was spotted cheerfully visiting a bunch of backyard chickens in Savannah. Hang in there, Paula! Redemption is yours for the asking, just don't say the N-word out loud anymore. And yes, I don't mind if I have another one of your delicious crescent dinner rolls.
The CRAP HIT THE FAN, THEN HIT IT AGAIN 90 MINUTES LATER award goes to the movie "Gravity." According to BoxOfficeMojo.com - the Careless Whispers preferred resource for movie statistics - the highest grossing film of 2013 was "Iron Man 3," which earned over $400 million in its US release. Pretty impressive, when you consider that the third installment of a film franchise featuring a second-tier Marvel Comics character can pull down nearly a half-billion dollars worth of scratch. I'm not sure why that is, but I'm thinking it has something to do with the appeal of its star, Robert Downey Jr., who seems to be very talented and a good person, and not as grubby and unkempt as Johnny Depp. But this item truly moves into WTF? territory when you consider that "Iron Man 3" made TWICE as much in foreign release, bringing its total worldwide gross to nearly $1.25 BILLION! Well played, Buena Vista Pictures, for a $200 million investment. It's been a very nice Christmas for you, indeed. I haven't seen 95% of the major movies of 2013, but one I did see and enjoyed very much was "Gravity." This movie had EVERYTHING! Sandra Bullock in her underwear! Authentic looking space hardware! Mind-twisting special effects! George Clooney's GHOST! A cloud of hypersonic satellite debris ripping the crap out of a space station, and then doing it AGAIN ninety minutes later as it circled the earth! Oh, my inner science nerd was having a field day with this movie! A number of other people agreed, because "Gravity" made $254,592,000 domestically and $653,292,000 worldwide, on a production budget of $100 million. Not as much as Robert Downey Jr. in an aluminum jump suit, but still nothing to sneeze at. Contrast, if you will, the number 54 movie of the year, "Ender's Game," based on the novel by homophobic garden gnome Orson Scott Card. That resounding flop of a movie had a worldwide gross of $88 million on a production budget of $110 million, costing Lionsgate Pictures over $20 million, more if you factor in the advertising and promotion money the studio had to spend publicizing that stinker.
The IT'S COMING! IT'S COMING! IT'S... NOT COMING! award for 2013 goes to Comet ISON. We astronomers are a prickly lot. Some might even consider us dour; spending endless nights when normal people are sleeping, freezing to death while peering morosely into tiny glass eyepieces attached to big metal tubes, hoping to spot a dim smear of gray light from an object impossibly far away. People just don't grasp the awe and excitement we feel when we do see that tiny bit of fuzzy light, knowing that it took 50 million years or more to travel to our earthbound retinas and register in our tiny mammalian brains, and that it, in fact, represents an entire galaxy composed of hundreds of billions - if not trillions - of stars, with many billions of planets circling them, and many millions of intelligent civilizations with sentient beings very different from humans, who may be looking right back at us with the exact same sense of astonishment. We get really excited about stuff that happens up in the sky, and a whole lot of stuff does happen. But, ironically, we are bound by our gravitational attachment to Earth, and being able to see many astronomical events depends on exactly where we are on Earth and what time zone we're in.
For instance, by all accounts the most amazing, mind-blowing astro-event you can witness is a total eclipse of the sun, but the path of totality - which is the only place to be, really - is a tiny little strip of land often 50 miles in width or less, and almost always in the most remote, desolate, god-forsaken location possible, such as the Antarctica, sub-Saharan Africa or the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Even if, through the greatest of luck or the most expensive of efforts, you find yourself in the VIP seating section for a solar eclipse, you are still at the mercy of a passing weather front, which can most surely obscure your much-sought-after vantage point and basically ruin your life. I lucked out majorly in May 2012 when I was able to see a very rare annular eclipse of the sun, and I only had to drive 5 hours to northern Arizona, which was totally worth it.
Other celestial events are more widely observable, such as the aurora borealis (or the southern hemisphere counterpart, the aurora australis), but they are best viewed in high latitudes, above 50-60 degrees. Here in Phoenix, at 32 degrees north latitude, we never see the northern lights, and if we did, it would probably mean big trouble, since the earth would have to be blasted with an epic, historic radiation storm to see them down here. Other astronomical sights are very widely viewable, such as meteor storms, or total lunar eclipses, which are visible over entire hemispheres with clear skies. Another such event is a comet. The appearance by Comet Hale-Bopp, a number of years ago, was a world-wide event which sparked huge excitement and interest in these dirty snowballs which cross our path every so often.
When Comet ISON was discovered, immediately the hype started. Portrayed as the incipient "Comet of the Century," lots of people painted vivid word pictures about the "Christmas Comet," which would grace the skies in December, make a close encounter with our sun, and (remember these words ==>) if it survived, would continue on a path which would take it even closer to our planet. It would then put on a spectacular show in January, with some people saying (be still, my heart) that it could be as bright as the full moon. Many astronomers (myself included) dreamed many, many dreams of a brilliant comet hanging suspended in a clear winter twilight sky, gossamer tail extending almost to the horizon, and being there for weeks if not months on end.
Astronomers tracked ISON with pain-staking precision, and the expectations grew faster than the comet did in telescopic photographs. Things started to unravel a bit in September when some Debbie-Downer-type astronomers said ISON wasn't brightening quite fast enough as it plunged through the outer solar system toward the sun. But we didn't care because comets are notorious non-conformists and will do whatever they please, light-curve predictions be damned. We watched in breathless anticipation as satellite-based solar observatories saw ISON cruise in past Mercury, getting bigger and brighter as it approached our central star, finally disappearing in the harsh glare of the sun, an Icarus with white wings soaring into the light and heat.
Now, those three words I asked you earlier to remember: "if it survived"? This is where they come in. ISON swung around our Sun, barely a million miles above its searing surface and then.... broke into a bunch of pieces. Scientists the world over expected to see a big, brilliant cometary body with a long, bright tail sweeping in front of it, but instead saw a small, indistrict bright patch with a tiny tail, which eventually got smaller and smaller until there was nothing but small pieces left. It was officially declared dead a couple of weeks later. Thus, Comet ISON, the "Comet of the Century" became Comet ISON - the DUD of the century, leaving us astronomers severely disappointed and demoralized. But we went right back to scanning the skies in hopes of being the first person to spot the next incoming Great Comet Hope, which would again be granted the mantle of Comet of the Century, and this time maybe will actually fulfill that promise, instead of breaking all our astronomical hearts.
The ALL THINGS MUST END... SOMETIMES BADLY award goes to the series finale of Dexter. The Showtime series finished up its eight-season run earlier this year, not in a blaze of glory, but a resounding THUD, reminiscent of the sound your head makes when it hits the side of the toilet as you rush to puke into it. When it was firing on all cylinders, Dexter was a stylish, intelligent, and well-written tour de force through the labyrinthine mind of a serial killer. His "dark passenger," as he called his murderous alter-ego, alternately surfaced and retreated in the ever-changing facade that Dexter presented to his family, friends and the outside world. But things really derailed for the last season, and in the climatic episode, Dex was shown carrying the dead body of his sister Deborah Morgan out of the hospital in the midst of massive hurricane evacuation through crowds of police and public-safety officers onto his boat, and NO ONE STOPPED HIM. After dumping Deb into the ocean, the last we saw of Dexter was him driving his power boat directly into the swirling maelstrom of the approaching storm. Well, "the last" until he surfaced inexplicably somewhere in the Pacific Northwest, where he labored as the Unhappiest Lumberjack Ever (or stunt double for a post-apocalyptic Bounty paper towel commercial), living in numbing isolation in a dreary, decrepit boarding house, with only his memories of his previous life in Miami. I can't remember another series finale that was so thoroughly and universally condemned and reviled by fans and critics alike, with levels of hateful derision and virulent contempt normally reserved for Republican presidential debates. Sorry things ended so badly for you, Dex, but it could have been worse. You could have been one of your fans.
QUICK TAKES:
TV Shows I Like: Boardwalk Empire,
Homeland, True Blood, Breaking Bad, Live From Daryl's House, Later with
Jools Holland, Real Time with Bill Maher, Sons of Anarchy, The Rachel
Maddow Show, Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell, Nurse Jackie, House of
Cards (on Netflix).
Things I Love: Rabbits, animals in general, my dear friends (both local and Facebook), Brambley Hedge Rabbit Rescue, hiking, secret crushes, sunsets and sunrises, astronomy, sushi, my friend Meme's homemade Chinese Seafood soup, chocolate, writing, photography, artwork, dinners with friends.
Here's hoping 2014 is a turning point for our country, and we can get back to being the great nation we truly are. Sometimes it's very hard to see that potential. I wish there were no unwanted and unloved children and animals, everyone had a decent standard of living and health care, and a decent place to live. I wish people in power weren't so evil and hypocritical and dishonest and deliberately ignorant. I wish people would mind their own damn business and stay out of the lives of others with whom they have no reason to meddle. I hope people continue to turn away from religion and other stifling, suffocating poisons of the human spirit. Most of all, I wish for peace, love and continued health for my friends. I hope I never lose the sense of child-like wonder I feel when I look up into the night sky, or into the eyes of a beloved rabbit. I also hope I never lose my belief in angels and miracles. If I die tomorrow, it will be with the knowledge and satisfaction that I have lived my life exactly as I wanted to live it, and I have no regrets.
Showing posts with label astronomy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label astronomy. Show all posts
Sunday, December 29, 2013
Thursday, September 5, 2013
Running Down The Clock
Summer in the desert is starting to wind down, on this, the first week of September. You wouldn't know it just from the temperature, because it was 110 degrees today. It sure felt hot outside and the next couple of days are predicted to be moderately cooler, maybe all the way down to 108 degrees. Summertime kind of quietly weasels its way into your life during the month of May, but it always needs to be dragged out - kicking, screaming and clawing the ground - all through September and half of October.
But there are subtle indications that the wheel of the seasons is beginning to turn. It is becoming noticeably darker earlier these days. When I left the gym yesterday at 6:55 pm the sun had already set, the first time that has happened since last April. I read something where the sun's position in the sky doesn't change much from the summer solstice on June 21st through Midsummer Day (this year on August 6th). After that date, the sun begins to move more swiftly in its southerly journey to the autumn equinox and then the winter solstice.
In the nighttime sky, when it's not full of monsoon clouds, the stars are starting to belie the passing months. Scorpio the Scorpion is beginning to slink away toward the southwest horizon. For just a couple of weeks, you can spot two beautiful crowns in the sky - Corona Australis, the Southern Crown, a little below the scorpion's glittering stinger, and Corona Borealis, the Northern Crown, low in the western sky not far from the sparkling orange Arcturus, one of the brightest stars in the sky.
The Great Square of Pegasus is starting to vault its way up the eastern sky. A large, nearly perfect square, it's easy to spot and is a sure sign of autumn. A little less obvious is the constellation of Andromeda, hanging on to one of the corners of the Great Square for dear life and trailing it as it rises in the sky. With binoculars, it's not hard to spot a smudge of dim gray light in the boundaries of Andromeda, and the multi-million-year-old light which finally has made its way to your retinas after crossing a gulf of 12 quintillion empty, frigid miles. This is the Andromeda Galaxy, an island universe of billions and billions of stars, similar in shape to our own home galaxy, the Milky Way, but even larger.
The two galaxies are part of what's known as the Local Group, a collection of dozens of galaxies bound together gravitationally in our own little neighborhood in space. Astronomers are pretty sure Andromeda and the Milky Way are speeding toward each other, and will most likely collide in a couple of billion years. Surprisingly, they also think the two galaxies will just pass through each other, the distance between individual stars being vast enough so that the probability of a star running into another star is extremely low. But the collective gravitational tidal forces will be more than enough to bend and warp the two galaxies into very distorted shapes, and invariably millions of stars will be cast off into intergalactic space, to wander the deadly cold vacuum as rogue stars, in desolate solitude. Over even more billions of years the two galaxies will dance and loop around each other, colliding over and over again. Eventually, in the far distant future, the galaxies will merge into a super-galaxy and probably even the supermassive black holes in the two galactic centers will merge into one ultramassive black hole.
In fact, astronomers have spotted a couple of galaxies, 30 times farther away than Andromeda, which are in the process of colliding. This ultra-slow train wreck of galactic proportions has been going on for hundreds of millions of years and will continue on for many more millions, leaving a huge mess of stars, gas, and dust strewn over an impossibly vast area of space:
So, sometimes I think about our home galaxy being on an unavoidable collision course with an even larger galaxy, and I dream about what that might look like, assuming Planet Earth is still in one piece and there will be humans living on it in a couple of billion years. No matter who or what is around at that time, it will be the greatest show in the entire universe. For now though, I have to be content with dreaming about the cool, crisp autumn mornings which are also slowly, inexorably inching their way to us, and the dramatic cranberry-colored sunsets which give way to dark, deep and chilly nights. And the 110-degree summer days will be a distant memory.
But there are subtle indications that the wheel of the seasons is beginning to turn. It is becoming noticeably darker earlier these days. When I left the gym yesterday at 6:55 pm the sun had already set, the first time that has happened since last April. I read something where the sun's position in the sky doesn't change much from the summer solstice on June 21st through Midsummer Day (this year on August 6th). After that date, the sun begins to move more swiftly in its southerly journey to the autumn equinox and then the winter solstice.
In the nighttime sky, when it's not full of monsoon clouds, the stars are starting to belie the passing months. Scorpio the Scorpion is beginning to slink away toward the southwest horizon. For just a couple of weeks, you can spot two beautiful crowns in the sky - Corona Australis, the Southern Crown, a little below the scorpion's glittering stinger, and Corona Borealis, the Northern Crown, low in the western sky not far from the sparkling orange Arcturus, one of the brightest stars in the sky.
The Great Square of Pegasus is starting to vault its way up the eastern sky. A large, nearly perfect square, it's easy to spot and is a sure sign of autumn. A little less obvious is the constellation of Andromeda, hanging on to one of the corners of the Great Square for dear life and trailing it as it rises in the sky. With binoculars, it's not hard to spot a smudge of dim gray light in the boundaries of Andromeda, and the multi-million-year-old light which finally has made its way to your retinas after crossing a gulf of 12 quintillion empty, frigid miles. This is the Andromeda Galaxy, an island universe of billions and billions of stars, similar in shape to our own home galaxy, the Milky Way, but even larger.
The two galaxies are part of what's known as the Local Group, a collection of dozens of galaxies bound together gravitationally in our own little neighborhood in space. Astronomers are pretty sure Andromeda and the Milky Way are speeding toward each other, and will most likely collide in a couple of billion years. Surprisingly, they also think the two galaxies will just pass through each other, the distance between individual stars being vast enough so that the probability of a star running into another star is extremely low. But the collective gravitational tidal forces will be more than enough to bend and warp the two galaxies into very distorted shapes, and invariably millions of stars will be cast off into intergalactic space, to wander the deadly cold vacuum as rogue stars, in desolate solitude. Over even more billions of years the two galaxies will dance and loop around each other, colliding over and over again. Eventually, in the far distant future, the galaxies will merge into a super-galaxy and probably even the supermassive black holes in the two galactic centers will merge into one ultramassive black hole.
In fact, astronomers have spotted a couple of galaxies, 30 times farther away than Andromeda, which are in the process of colliding. This ultra-slow train wreck of galactic proportions has been going on for hundreds of millions of years and will continue on for many more millions, leaving a huge mess of stars, gas, and dust strewn over an impossibly vast area of space:
So, sometimes I think about our home galaxy being on an unavoidable collision course with an even larger galaxy, and I dream about what that might look like, assuming Planet Earth is still in one piece and there will be humans living on it in a couple of billion years. No matter who or what is around at that time, it will be the greatest show in the entire universe. For now though, I have to be content with dreaming about the cool, crisp autumn mornings which are also slowly, inexorably inching their way to us, and the dramatic cranberry-colored sunsets which give way to dark, deep and chilly nights. And the 110-degree summer days will be a distant memory.
Wednesday, December 26, 2012
2012 Year End Review: Part 1
2012 was a year dominated by politics, from beginning to end. The batshittery started early, like on January 1st, and did not let up through the November elections and beyond. 2013 looks like it's going to do much the same, as scary as that sounds, but for right now let's review shall we - Why 2012 Sucked:
Theatre of the Damned (Presidential Election Edition): The Presidential election this year was a galaxy-class train wreck, populated by the creepiest characters this side of a zombie apocalypse. It was like someone loaded up your DVR with the most badly-written, incomprehensible, nonsensical, parallel-universe, bad-LSD-induced, four-month-long psychodrama imaginable. Possibly the zenith (or the nadir, if you prefer) of that whole passion-play-from-hell was the Republican National Convention. Almost derailed at the beginning by a hurricane, even devout atheists like myself knew that was a big "thumbs-down" from the Old Man Up In The Clouds. It most certainly did not disappoint when it came to utter, total disappointment. Spectacularly boring, this celebration of fat, old, white people had something to offend and annoy everyone. The most unbelievable thing of the whole convention was aging, grizzled movie icon Clint Eastwood having some sort of bizarro-world conversation with a chair. Once revered as the ultimate big-screen tough guy in edgy, stylized westerns (like High Plains Drifter or The Outlaw Josie Wales) and shoot-the-uppity-minorities cop potboilers (the Dirty Harry series), it was more than a little disconcerting seeing him degenerate into a disheveled, wild-eyed, crazy old man who could easily be mistaken for a deranged old coot having a political shouting-match with his dish of lime Jell-o in any cafeteria in this country. It showed once again that mental illness is not at all pretty, and I can only hope when I turn into an unkempt, babbling, glassy-eyed old geezer, I can hopefully get caught talking back to a radio or something. At least THAT would make a tiny bit of sense.
2012 Douchebag of the Year: Hands down, the leader in this sorry category has to be Willard Mittens Romney, The Asshole That Roared. Republicans have this uncanny talent for choosing the most repellent, unattractive and unelectable candidates for national office, and we didn't think they could do any worse than John McCain, the goofy, senile old dickhead they nominated for President in 2008, or the execrable Queen of the Inbred Sarah Palin, but damned if they didn't top themselves this year. Apparently they base their choices on the highly questionable premise that if you stick around on the political radar for years and years, losing more primary elections that you can count, eventually that will make you look supremely qualified for the highest office in the land. Romney's candidacy was its own worst enemy, and it was very entertaining to watch him torpedo his own chances at every turn - the leaked "47%" comment, his disastrous European visit - the list goes on. At nearly every instance he came across as a creepy, awkward, socially inept douchenozzle with a very unfunny sense of humor, and I think a lot of Americans decided early on that they did not want to put up with his weirdly stilted persona and scary, sexual-predator smirk for four long years. Dishonorable mention in this category has to go to anyone who participated in the Republican primary debates, a veritable smorgasbord of everything that's wrong with American politics, but the mildly-surprising runner-up to Mitt is his own wife, Ann. Ostensibly brought into the campaign to "humanize" her husband to wary, unfamiliar voters, she managed to hammer the last couple of nails into the coffin of his candidacy by coming across as nasty, imperious, short-tempered, sharp-tongued, condescending, bitchy and elitist. I find it endlessly amusing that Ann Romney turned out to be the one who needed "humanizing," and I'm just waiting for all the tell-all post-election books that will document her sloppy-drunk (I wouldn't be surprised if she has a drinking problem, Mormon or not), profanity-laced, behind-the-campaign-scenes tirades. You just know she used the N-word a lot.
Welcome Back My Friends To The Show That Never Ends: Gun violence is like a big ugly wound across the heart of America. Gun violence in this country left its mark in a big way on 2012, most horribly on December 14th when 20 young children and 6 adults lost their lives to one deranged, monstrous murderer with a semi-automatic rifle. Earlier this year another psychotic loser shot up a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado. There was also a smattering of mall shootings and workplace violence incidents and incredibly, on Christmas Eve, some scumbag shot to death two firemen responding to a building fire. But, the 20 dead children in Newtown, Connecticut, seem to have really set people off, maybe because of the sheer immensity of the horror or the fact that it has happened so close to the holidays. Not surprisingly, the NRA held a news conference in which they blamed everyone and everything in the world for what happened, without even touching, however tangentially, on the fact that some of the blame just might be due to the easy availability of ridiculously powerful assault weapons and high-capacity ammunition delivery systems. Even for a bunch of ignorant douchebags like the NRA, it was an astonishingly stupid, arrogantly defiant, self-serving, tone-deaf non-response to a really critical national problem. Their "solution" is to place armed guards in every school in the United States, at an estimated cost of nearly $7 billion a year. Yeah, I'm sure the Republicans in Congress are going to pass THAT appropriation. According to the NRA, the answer is guns, guns, and more guns. It's really amazing that the NRA can't see what everyone else can - what hopeless, pathetic assholes they are, and what spineless, evil cowards the members of Congress are who buckle under it like wet cardboard.
Death We Regret The Most: Lots of notable people passed away this year (Michael Clarke Duncan, Neil Armstrong, Whitney Houston, Phyllis Diller, Donna Summer to name a very few), but one passing hardly anyone noticed was the death of representative democracy. We learned this year that Congress does not give a single crap about doing its job - which is representing their constituents and working to, you know, get stuff done and accomplish things. Instead, we learned that they prefer to spend their time manufacturing financial-Armageddon events in order to scare themselves into doing something (i.e. THEIR JOBS), and then when they do nothing and the contrived financial-Armageddon event actually begins to draw near and - much to their surprise and horror - MIGHT ACTUALLY HAPPEN, what do they do? Bail out of town on a Christmas break, leaving the rest of us to peer over the edge of the so-called "fiscal cliff" they created and wonder how the hell we got into this situation. It's pretty easy to understand - Congress is utterly and totally devoid of integrity and courage, does not give a rat's ass about what's best for this country, and would much rather postpone uncomfortable decisions so they can screw stuff up not only in the present but in the future, too.
More vicious slander and blatantly biased criticism in 2012 Year End Review Part 2, coming up next!
Theatre of the Damned (Presidential Election Edition): The Presidential election this year was a galaxy-class train wreck, populated by the creepiest characters this side of a zombie apocalypse. It was like someone loaded up your DVR with the most badly-written, incomprehensible, nonsensical, parallel-universe, bad-LSD-induced, four-month-long psychodrama imaginable. Possibly the zenith (or the nadir, if you prefer) of that whole passion-play-from-hell was the Republican National Convention. Almost derailed at the beginning by a hurricane, even devout atheists like myself knew that was a big "thumbs-down" from the Old Man Up In The Clouds. It most certainly did not disappoint when it came to utter, total disappointment. Spectacularly boring, this celebration of fat, old, white people had something to offend and annoy everyone. The most unbelievable thing of the whole convention was aging, grizzled movie icon Clint Eastwood having some sort of bizarro-world conversation with a chair. Once revered as the ultimate big-screen tough guy in edgy, stylized westerns (like High Plains Drifter or The Outlaw Josie Wales) and shoot-the-uppity-minorities cop potboilers (the Dirty Harry series), it was more than a little disconcerting seeing him degenerate into a disheveled, wild-eyed, crazy old man who could easily be mistaken for a deranged old coot having a political shouting-match with his dish of lime Jell-o in any cafeteria in this country. It showed once again that mental illness is not at all pretty, and I can only hope when I turn into an unkempt, babbling, glassy-eyed old geezer, I can hopefully get caught talking back to a radio or something. At least THAT would make a tiny bit of sense.
2012 Douchebag of the Year: Hands down, the leader in this sorry category has to be Willard Mittens Romney, The Asshole That Roared. Republicans have this uncanny talent for choosing the most repellent, unattractive and unelectable candidates for national office, and we didn't think they could do any worse than John McCain, the goofy, senile old dickhead they nominated for President in 2008, or the execrable Queen of the Inbred Sarah Palin, but damned if they didn't top themselves this year. Apparently they base their choices on the highly questionable premise that if you stick around on the political radar for years and years, losing more primary elections that you can count, eventually that will make you look supremely qualified for the highest office in the land. Romney's candidacy was its own worst enemy, and it was very entertaining to watch him torpedo his own chances at every turn - the leaked "47%" comment, his disastrous European visit - the list goes on. At nearly every instance he came across as a creepy, awkward, socially inept douchenozzle with a very unfunny sense of humor, and I think a lot of Americans decided early on that they did not want to put up with his weirdly stilted persona and scary, sexual-predator smirk for four long years. Dishonorable mention in this category has to go to anyone who participated in the Republican primary debates, a veritable smorgasbord of everything that's wrong with American politics, but the mildly-surprising runner-up to Mitt is his own wife, Ann. Ostensibly brought into the campaign to "humanize" her husband to wary, unfamiliar voters, she managed to hammer the last couple of nails into the coffin of his candidacy by coming across as nasty, imperious, short-tempered, sharp-tongued, condescending, bitchy and elitist. I find it endlessly amusing that Ann Romney turned out to be the one who needed "humanizing," and I'm just waiting for all the tell-all post-election books that will document her sloppy-drunk (I wouldn't be surprised if she has a drinking problem, Mormon or not), profanity-laced, behind-the-campaign-scenes tirades. You just know she used the N-word a lot.
Welcome Back My Friends To The Show That Never Ends: Gun violence is like a big ugly wound across the heart of America. Gun violence in this country left its mark in a big way on 2012, most horribly on December 14th when 20 young children and 6 adults lost their lives to one deranged, monstrous murderer with a semi-automatic rifle. Earlier this year another psychotic loser shot up a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado. There was also a smattering of mall shootings and workplace violence incidents and incredibly, on Christmas Eve, some scumbag shot to death two firemen responding to a building fire. But, the 20 dead children in Newtown, Connecticut, seem to have really set people off, maybe because of the sheer immensity of the horror or the fact that it has happened so close to the holidays. Not surprisingly, the NRA held a news conference in which they blamed everyone and everything in the world for what happened, without even touching, however tangentially, on the fact that some of the blame just might be due to the easy availability of ridiculously powerful assault weapons and high-capacity ammunition delivery systems. Even for a bunch of ignorant douchebags like the NRA, it was an astonishingly stupid, arrogantly defiant, self-serving, tone-deaf non-response to a really critical national problem. Their "solution" is to place armed guards in every school in the United States, at an estimated cost of nearly $7 billion a year. Yeah, I'm sure the Republicans in Congress are going to pass THAT appropriation. According to the NRA, the answer is guns, guns, and more guns. It's really amazing that the NRA can't see what everyone else can - what hopeless, pathetic assholes they are, and what spineless, evil cowards the members of Congress are who buckle under it like wet cardboard.
Death We Regret The Most: Lots of notable people passed away this year (Michael Clarke Duncan, Neil Armstrong, Whitney Houston, Phyllis Diller, Donna Summer to name a very few), but one passing hardly anyone noticed was the death of representative democracy. We learned this year that Congress does not give a single crap about doing its job - which is representing their constituents and working to, you know, get stuff done and accomplish things. Instead, we learned that they prefer to spend their time manufacturing financial-Armageddon events in order to scare themselves into doing something (i.e. THEIR JOBS), and then when they do nothing and the contrived financial-Armageddon event actually begins to draw near and - much to their surprise and horror - MIGHT ACTUALLY HAPPEN, what do they do? Bail out of town on a Christmas break, leaving the rest of us to peer over the edge of the so-called "fiscal cliff" they created and wonder how the hell we got into this situation. It's pretty easy to understand - Congress is utterly and totally devoid of integrity and courage, does not give a rat's ass about what's best for this country, and would much rather postpone uncomfortable decisions so they can screw stuff up not only in the present but in the future, too.
More vicious slander and blatantly biased criticism in 2012 Year End Review Part 2, coming up next!
Friday, August 31, 2012
Surf's Up
The month of September is at my doorstep, but the summer is still trying to suck every last drop of life blood out of us, like a crazed vampire who doesn't know when to stop draining its victim. Almost imperceptibly, the great wheel of the seasons is turning with tantalizing slowness, and the sun continues its languid, snail-like journey towards the south part of the sky. I leave my weekly aerobics class at approximately the same time, 6:50pm, and I can tell it's getting a tiny little bit darker each time. Used to be I would walk out of the gym into the bright sunlight of an early evening, but now the sun is hovering just above the western horizon, sinking a little more each day. The equinox is about three weeks away, and before long I will exit the gym to a sky devoid of sunlight..
I so love autumn because it has always been a time of reflection and contemplation, a time to consider what has been done so far this year, and plan for the long cold winter nights. Everything seems richer and more colorful; the air will soon carry a touch of chilliness in the morning, and there will be a fragrance that speaks of the harvest and coming-of-age, of promises fulfilled and lessons learned. The nighttime sky, always an indication of things to come, shows the Scorpion slinking low across the south toward the faintly glowing western horizon, and gallant, regal Pegasus, the celestial flying horse, making a powerful leap into the eastern sky, taking its rightful place of honor in the starry firmament.
In the coming months, the Scorpion will disappear in the west just as Orion the Hunter throws his leg up over the eastern mountains and hoists himself sideways into the sky, his faithful dog beside him and Lepus the celestial rabbit underneath him. The Scorpion and Orion are locked in a death pursuit, each chasing the other but never catching up. Scorpion wants to sting Orion with its glittering tail, and Orion wants to kill Scorpion with his club. They've been doing this for billions of years and will probably continue for billions more. Such is their fate, both of them hopelessly joined in titanic struggle that will never be resolved. Orion will rise higher in the southern sky until around the winter solstice, when Orion will take his rightful place as Lord of the Sky, glistening in the cold, deep winter night, Master of Heaven and Earth, surveying his kingdom. The Rabbit will still be underneath him, right above Columba the Dove. And very late at night, right around the winter solstice, you will spot the star Canopus, the harbinger of spring, skimming barely above the southern deserts and wildly twinkling like an over-caffeinated, multicolored strobe light.
I have been listening to a lot of music from the 1960s recently. XM satellite radio in my vehicle, along with the music channels on DirecTV, serves up an endless stream of great tunes from that amazing decade. Some of the music still sounds incredibly fresh and new, as if recorded just last week. The music and the vocal harmonies of a lot of the groups were startlingly complex and intricate. Looking back over four decades, I have a new appreciation for the achievements of bands like The Mamas and The Papas, Spanky and Our Gang and the glorious "Jersey Boy" pop of the Four Seasons. Even shallow contrivances like The Cowsills, a musical family whose members ranged from youngsters barely out of the toddler stage to the surprising youthful and hip (for the 60s) mother, recorded an amazing song called "The Rain The Park and Other Things." The Cowsills were a manufactured pop group, a precursor to the ubiquitous "boy bands" of the 80s and 90s, and their short-lived success degenerated into a series of acrimonious lawsuits which ended up tearing the family apart. Besides the reign of brash, revolutionary groups like The Beatles and the Jefferson Airplane, the 60s also saw the dawning of the singer-songwriter era with geniuses like Laura Nyro and Joni Mitchell, whose brilliance would continue into the new millennium.
Sure, there was a lot of crap music from that era, something that is inescapable no matter which decade you examine. The "bubblegum" music craze was particularly obnoxious, and unabashedly phony studio groups like "The Archies" and "The 1910 Fruitgum Company" sold millions of annoying records. Reflecting the cultural war at the time, a lot of people snapped up faux-patriotic potboilers like "The Ballad of the Green Berets" by SSgt. Barry Sadler (1966) - and on the other end - whiny, overwrought polemics like "Eve of Destruction" by Barry McGuire (1965). But all that was counterbalanced by Motown, the early Beatles, and the whole San Francisco psychedelic era, and those are the musical genres with real creativity, and real staying power.
Also central to the 60s sound were the Beach Boys, whose music and sophisticated vocal arrangements are still universally regarded as the best of the best. Brian Wilson's perfectly crafted masterpieces such as "Good Vibrations," "Wouldn't It Be Nice," and the shimmering, transcendent "Surf's Up" are unforgettable. The Boys, along with lesser lights such as Jan and Dean, created the entire California youth scene, an eternal playground full of fast cars, surfing and beautiful girls in bikinis frolicking on a golden beach in an endless summer (recently given a garish, playfully hallucinogenic update by Katy Perry in her "California Gurls" video). As someone just entering their teenage years, I was completely captivated by this perfect vision of a happy, carefree world drenched in lemon-yellow sunlight where you didn't have to work, and the biggest problem you had to worry about was catching the perfect wave. Growing up as I did in a gritty steel-mill town near Pittsburgh, life could get oppressively dull and dreary. The nearest body of water was the dirty Allegheny river which absent-mindedly meandered nearby, definitely not conducive to surfing. The "beach" (derisively called the "Polish Riviera") consisted of a tiny strip of land on the other side of the river made up of smooth, round river rock, which was incredibly uncomfortable to walk or lay on. Wintertime could be long, harsh and very depressing, often not seeing the sun for two weeks at a time, the trees devoid of green leaves, and the world locked in a frigid grip of icy, frozen ground and heavy, leaden skies. But gods help me, that was my home, and I loved it. Truth be told, sometimes I miss those incredibly dismal, cheerless winter days.
When conditions outside become difficult or unpleasant, either emotionally or because of the weather, the natural urge is to turn inward for solace. Whether it's 10 or 110 degrees outside, it's the same thing, two sides of the same coin. Memories are important stepping-stones back to a world with which you are intimately familiar, and that can be a very comforting thing. It's endlessly fascinating to me how a song or a piece of music can evoke such rich, detailed memories of who you were and what you were doing when you first heard it. I can remember all the words to songs I have not heard in 40 years, yet I can't remember what I did last week. Funny how such seemingly trivial things make such an enormous impression on you. Memories are funny, precious and remarkable milestones on the journey of your life.
I so love autumn because it has always been a time of reflection and contemplation, a time to consider what has been done so far this year, and plan for the long cold winter nights. Everything seems richer and more colorful; the air will soon carry a touch of chilliness in the morning, and there will be a fragrance that speaks of the harvest and coming-of-age, of promises fulfilled and lessons learned. The nighttime sky, always an indication of things to come, shows the Scorpion slinking low across the south toward the faintly glowing western horizon, and gallant, regal Pegasus, the celestial flying horse, making a powerful leap into the eastern sky, taking its rightful place of honor in the starry firmament.
In the coming months, the Scorpion will disappear in the west just as Orion the Hunter throws his leg up over the eastern mountains and hoists himself sideways into the sky, his faithful dog beside him and Lepus the celestial rabbit underneath him. The Scorpion and Orion are locked in a death pursuit, each chasing the other but never catching up. Scorpion wants to sting Orion with its glittering tail, and Orion wants to kill Scorpion with his club. They've been doing this for billions of years and will probably continue for billions more. Such is their fate, both of them hopelessly joined in titanic struggle that will never be resolved. Orion will rise higher in the southern sky until around the winter solstice, when Orion will take his rightful place as Lord of the Sky, glistening in the cold, deep winter night, Master of Heaven and Earth, surveying his kingdom. The Rabbit will still be underneath him, right above Columba the Dove. And very late at night, right around the winter solstice, you will spot the star Canopus, the harbinger of spring, skimming barely above the southern deserts and wildly twinkling like an over-caffeinated, multicolored strobe light.
I have been listening to a lot of music from the 1960s recently. XM satellite radio in my vehicle, along with the music channels on DirecTV, serves up an endless stream of great tunes from that amazing decade. Some of the music still sounds incredibly fresh and new, as if recorded just last week. The music and the vocal harmonies of a lot of the groups were startlingly complex and intricate. Looking back over four decades, I have a new appreciation for the achievements of bands like The Mamas and The Papas, Spanky and Our Gang and the glorious "Jersey Boy" pop of the Four Seasons. Even shallow contrivances like The Cowsills, a musical family whose members ranged from youngsters barely out of the toddler stage to the surprising youthful and hip (for the 60s) mother, recorded an amazing song called "The Rain The Park and Other Things." The Cowsills were a manufactured pop group, a precursor to the ubiquitous "boy bands" of the 80s and 90s, and their short-lived success degenerated into a series of acrimonious lawsuits which ended up tearing the family apart. Besides the reign of brash, revolutionary groups like The Beatles and the Jefferson Airplane, the 60s also saw the dawning of the singer-songwriter era with geniuses like Laura Nyro and Joni Mitchell, whose brilliance would continue into the new millennium.
Sure, there was a lot of crap music from that era, something that is inescapable no matter which decade you examine. The "bubblegum" music craze was particularly obnoxious, and unabashedly phony studio groups like "The Archies" and "The 1910 Fruitgum Company" sold millions of annoying records. Reflecting the cultural war at the time, a lot of people snapped up faux-patriotic potboilers like "The Ballad of the Green Berets" by SSgt. Barry Sadler (1966) - and on the other end - whiny, overwrought polemics like "Eve of Destruction" by Barry McGuire (1965). But all that was counterbalanced by Motown, the early Beatles, and the whole San Francisco psychedelic era, and those are the musical genres with real creativity, and real staying power.
Also central to the 60s sound were the Beach Boys, whose music and sophisticated vocal arrangements are still universally regarded as the best of the best. Brian Wilson's perfectly crafted masterpieces such as "Good Vibrations," "Wouldn't It Be Nice," and the shimmering, transcendent "Surf's Up" are unforgettable. The Boys, along with lesser lights such as Jan and Dean, created the entire California youth scene, an eternal playground full of fast cars, surfing and beautiful girls in bikinis frolicking on a golden beach in an endless summer (recently given a garish, playfully hallucinogenic update by Katy Perry in her "California Gurls" video). As someone just entering their teenage years, I was completely captivated by this perfect vision of a happy, carefree world drenched in lemon-yellow sunlight where you didn't have to work, and the biggest problem you had to worry about was catching the perfect wave. Growing up as I did in a gritty steel-mill town near Pittsburgh, life could get oppressively dull and dreary. The nearest body of water was the dirty Allegheny river which absent-mindedly meandered nearby, definitely not conducive to surfing. The "beach" (derisively called the "Polish Riviera") consisted of a tiny strip of land on the other side of the river made up of smooth, round river rock, which was incredibly uncomfortable to walk or lay on. Wintertime could be long, harsh and very depressing, often not seeing the sun for two weeks at a time, the trees devoid of green leaves, and the world locked in a frigid grip of icy, frozen ground and heavy, leaden skies. But gods help me, that was my home, and I loved it. Truth be told, sometimes I miss those incredibly dismal, cheerless winter days.
When conditions outside become difficult or unpleasant, either emotionally or because of the weather, the natural urge is to turn inward for solace. Whether it's 10 or 110 degrees outside, it's the same thing, two sides of the same coin. Memories are important stepping-stones back to a world with which you are intimately familiar, and that can be a very comforting thing. It's endlessly fascinating to me how a song or a piece of music can evoke such rich, detailed memories of who you were and what you were doing when you first heard it. I can remember all the words to songs I have not heard in 40 years, yet I can't remember what I did last week. Funny how such seemingly trivial things make such an enormous impression on you. Memories are funny, precious and remarkable milestones on the journey of your life.
Tuesday, September 15, 2009
Summer Into Autumn
We've started to get the first inklings that the long, hot summer in the desert is finally winding down. This past July was a record-breaker - the average daily high temperature was the hottest ever - and with it record electricity bills to keep the A/C running. The monsoon turned out to be another "non-soon," the eighth-driest on record, with us receiving barely a fourth of the normal rainfall we should have gotten. Violent monsoon thunderstorms were harder to find than Sarah Palin's brain. But we're relatively certain that 110-plus temperatures are behind us until next June and the daytime highs hover at or slightly above normal, which is around 100 degrees for this time of year.
But I've also noticed that it is getting darker a little earlier in the evenings. The sun used to still be up after 7pm, but now doesn't make it past 6:30pm. I leave the gym about the same time every visit and when I pull out of the parking lot, which faces due west, the sun is right there in front of me in my eyes, as it continues its inexorable drift southward.
Things are changing up in the nighttime sky, too. The great square of Pegasus, the constellation representing the Winged Stallion of mythology, is large and prominent in the eastern sky around 10pm. Hanging off one side is the constellation Andromeda, the maiden, and a quick look around with binoculars will reveal a smudge of grayish light, which is our neighboring galaxy aptly named the Andromeda Galaxy. The light that enters your eyes and registers in your brain left the vicinity of Andromeda over 2 million years ago, long before mankind made its appearance on Planet Earth, and it traveled 12 quintillion miles to get here. I don't really know how to explain what a quintillion is, other than to say it is the number 1 followed by 18 zeroes. Imagine you have twelve of those lined up end-to-end and that's how far Andromeda is in miles. Scientists believe Andromeda is barreling toward our galaxy and the two will collide in a couple billion years. When galaxies collide they basically pass through each other, the distances between individual stars are so vast, but the immense gravitational forces end up blowing huge streamers and tails of gas, dust and stars out into interstellar space. Eventually our Milky Way and Andromeda will merge into one huge supergalaxy, but that's many billions of years away, about the time everyone will be sick of reality TV and Paris Hilton will finally get some sense.
In the next couple of weeks the stars of winter will gradually make an appearance in the sky, and the stars of summer will disappear into the twilight glow in the west. The first thing to notice will be the tight star cluster of the Pleiades, climbing up the eastern sky barely ahead of the horns of Taurus, the Bull. The large, perfectly beautiful constellation Scorpio the Scorpion is skittering off toward the southwestern horizon, being chased to warmer climates by the advent of autumn. On the other side of the sky, Orion the Hunter is rising sideways over the eastern horizon, locked in a perpetual pursuit of the Scorpion, always trying but never catching up to it. Poet Robert Frost mentioned the rising of Orion in his work, "The Star-Splitter":
You know Orion always comes up sideways.
Throwing a leg up over our fence of mountains
And rising on his hands...
Orion is quite the magnificent constellation and a true harbinger of the winter months. It houses the Great Nebula of Orion, an enormous, relatively close-by star factory where inconceivably large clouds of gas and dust are collapsing under their own gravity and igniting nuclear fires in their cores, giving birth to more stars which will ornament the skies millions of years from now. Underneath Orion is Lepus, the celestial Hare, a humble, unobtrusive collection of stars. As time goes on Orion will rise high in the southern sky, right-side up, and when it does you can finally spot the star Canopus, the second-brightest star in the night sky after Sirius the Dog Star, glittering low in the south. Canopus is so far south as seen from here that it is only above the horizon for a couple of hours each night. It barely clears the southern horizon and is up for a short time before it curves right back down and sets again. That star is a herald of the approaching spring season for me.
I feel that I am only doing what many generations of people before me have done - measure the passing of the seasons by changes in the sky. And it comes so very naturally and easily - almost as if we are genetically pre-programmed to observe what happens up above and correlate what we see to events on Earth. The stars and the planets are my oldest friends in the world, and it's comforting in an odd way to know they will be around long after I have moved on to the next world, becoming lifelong friends and companions to generations of natural-born astronomers yet to be.
But I've also noticed that it is getting darker a little earlier in the evenings. The sun used to still be up after 7pm, but now doesn't make it past 6:30pm. I leave the gym about the same time every visit and when I pull out of the parking lot, which faces due west, the sun is right there in front of me in my eyes, as it continues its inexorable drift southward.
Things are changing up in the nighttime sky, too. The great square of Pegasus, the constellation representing the Winged Stallion of mythology, is large and prominent in the eastern sky around 10pm. Hanging off one side is the constellation Andromeda, the maiden, and a quick look around with binoculars will reveal a smudge of grayish light, which is our neighboring galaxy aptly named the Andromeda Galaxy. The light that enters your eyes and registers in your brain left the vicinity of Andromeda over 2 million years ago, long before mankind made its appearance on Planet Earth, and it traveled 12 quintillion miles to get here. I don't really know how to explain what a quintillion is, other than to say it is the number 1 followed by 18 zeroes. Imagine you have twelve of those lined up end-to-end and that's how far Andromeda is in miles. Scientists believe Andromeda is barreling toward our galaxy and the two will collide in a couple billion years. When galaxies collide they basically pass through each other, the distances between individual stars are so vast, but the immense gravitational forces end up blowing huge streamers and tails of gas, dust and stars out into interstellar space. Eventually our Milky Way and Andromeda will merge into one huge supergalaxy, but that's many billions of years away, about the time everyone will be sick of reality TV and Paris Hilton will finally get some sense.
In the next couple of weeks the stars of winter will gradually make an appearance in the sky, and the stars of summer will disappear into the twilight glow in the west. The first thing to notice will be the tight star cluster of the Pleiades, climbing up the eastern sky barely ahead of the horns of Taurus, the Bull. The large, perfectly beautiful constellation Scorpio the Scorpion is skittering off toward the southwestern horizon, being chased to warmer climates by the advent of autumn. On the other side of the sky, Orion the Hunter is rising sideways over the eastern horizon, locked in a perpetual pursuit of the Scorpion, always trying but never catching up to it. Poet Robert Frost mentioned the rising of Orion in his work, "The Star-Splitter":
You know Orion always comes up sideways.
Throwing a leg up over our fence of mountains
And rising on his hands...
Orion is quite the magnificent constellation and a true harbinger of the winter months. It houses the Great Nebula of Orion, an enormous, relatively close-by star factory where inconceivably large clouds of gas and dust are collapsing under their own gravity and igniting nuclear fires in their cores, giving birth to more stars which will ornament the skies millions of years from now. Underneath Orion is Lepus, the celestial Hare, a humble, unobtrusive collection of stars. As time goes on Orion will rise high in the southern sky, right-side up, and when it does you can finally spot the star Canopus, the second-brightest star in the night sky after Sirius the Dog Star, glittering low in the south. Canopus is so far south as seen from here that it is only above the horizon for a couple of hours each night. It barely clears the southern horizon and is up for a short time before it curves right back down and sets again. That star is a herald of the approaching spring season for me.
I feel that I am only doing what many generations of people before me have done - measure the passing of the seasons by changes in the sky. And it comes so very naturally and easily - almost as if we are genetically pre-programmed to observe what happens up above and correlate what we see to events on Earth. The stars and the planets are my oldest friends in the world, and it's comforting in an odd way to know they will be around long after I have moved on to the next world, becoming lifelong friends and companions to generations of natural-born astronomers yet to be.
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