Hot on the heels of the Holiday of Closeness, an apartment building-sized asteroid called 2012 DA 14 will make a pass at us and it has already got our attention. The experts assure us there will be no impact, which is good news since the archeological record suggests that a small rock going very fast can have a lasting effect on living things when it hits.
Today’s near miss is the closest encounter ever detected with a space object this size. For some reason the unusual proximity of this rock has me thinking about a favorite old song.
If a boulder from outer space
drew a bead on your place
You’d avoid an asteroid
close to you
If a chunk fell out of the sky
would you stop to ask why?
You’d avoid an asteroid
close to you
One thing about asteroids that’s very disconcerting,
And the dinosaurs found out that this is true.
If a rock from space collides with Earth
there isn’t very much that you can do!
That is why, when some space debris
vaporizes the seas
‘Cest la vie. That’s when I’ll be
toast to you.
So far, our scientific advances have done little more than improve the chances that we’ll know about the next asteroid impact at least a few days ahead – just enough time to panic, say goodbye, or organize a sing-a-long.
What songs are in your asteroid apocalypse playlist?
Today’s post comes from perennial sophomore Bubby Spamden
Hey Mr. C.,
I don’t know how everybody else feels, but I sure don’t like Valentine’s Day. It’s nothing but a big chance to do the wrong thing. When I try to say words of love I get all tongue tied and clumsy and it never sounds right.
So this year I had this cool idea that I would try to tell my girlfriend something romantic in French, instead. Just like this old dead guy Maurice Chevalier did when he put on his straw hat and did a bunch of singing and dancing in the movies. I’ll bet you’ve heard of him because you’re about that old too – just short of the dead part, I’m guessing.
So anyway I found this video on You Tube where he sings some kind of Valentine song.
I know that because it’s called “Valentine”.
It has, like, a whole minute of warm-up music too, which my friend Willy says girls like because then you’re not jumping directly to the mushy stuff – you’re showing you have patience and class. And when you’re doing a performance with a warm-up it gives them a chance to compose themselves so they can pretend to be impressed.
So last night I was over at her house and we were studying for a school assignment and I said “I have a Valentine’s present for you”, and I played the video for her, and did this really cool (to me) dance that was not at all weird (to me) while I lip-synched the words to the song as best I could (like Beyonce).
Did I mention that my girlfriend speaks French really “bon”?
Well she does. I mean she did. She still does speak it, I mean. French. And she also did when she was my girlfriend, which was yesterday but I don’t think she is today, anymore. My girlfriend, that is. Because it didn’t go over very well. At all.
I’m not sure if there was something wrong with my dance, or the words. Since I was only lip-synching, I’d like to think it was Maurice Chevalier’s fault. But it might be that my girlfriend doesn’t understand the language as well as I think she does, and she mis-heard it. I really don’t know, and might never find out. So I decided to look up the words to the song, especially that catchy part with all the cute rhyming sounds.
Here’s how it looks in French:
Elle avait des tout petits petons, Valentine, Valentine
Elle avait des tout petits tétons
Que je tâtais à tâtons, Ton ton tontaine
Elle avait un tout petit menton, Valentine, Valentine
Outre ses petits petons ses petits tétons son petit menton
Elle était frisée comme un mouton
So then I had it translated by one of those automatic online translator engines, and here’s what came out:
It had very young tiny feet, Valentine, Valentine
It had very young nipples
That I touched with touch, your tone tontine
It had a very small chin, Valentine, Valentine
In addition to its small tiny feet, its small nipples and its small chin
It was curly like a sheep.
Anyway, that’s when it became pretty clear that we were done studying. I guess even in French I’m kinda clumsy, romantic-wise. And what’s more, the studying that we were supposed to be doing didn’t get done, at least for me, because I kind of had a stomach ache when I got home.
So I extend my flexible arm and take a series of shots with the Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI). Gad, do I hate acronyms! Call it a mirror, why don’t you? That’s what I’m doing – looking myself over, or letting them look me over. And it’s not even accurate! I position the arm so it’s out of the picture and then stitch the shots together so it appears the camera is floating above me.
Flattering? Hardly.
I’m a drab pile of bolts on a dried up, rocky beach at a resort no one has been to in a billion years. And I’m sorry, but my front wheel is not that big. Can’t we take this from an angle that emphasizes my sleekness – the economy with which I was assembled? There’s not an ounce of me that isn’t functional and critical to the mission, but “lean” is not the word that comes to mind when you look at this conglomeration. Anything but. With an emphasis on the butt. Get a load of that thing back there – it’s like a small town, complete with it’s own municipal water tower. Ghastly.
My best feature is my ivory coloring against the red backdrop, but would it hurt to have a little more dazzle in the package? Something that glitters? A bit of whimsy? And no, I’m not a fan of the markings they put all over me. Imagine waking up with tattoos you never agreed to – and they’re all so technical! Why can’t I have something cool, like a mermaid?
The other thing I hate about “mirror time” – it reminds me that I’m out here all alone on this bleak landscape, and I’m never, ever leaving this planet.
Sigh.
I’m perfectly fine if we never do this again. Let’s put this shot in the scrapbook and get back to drilling holes in stuff. Please?
CR
I’m sure it’s a miserable feeling for the Curiosity Rover when every glance in the mirror is a major disappointment. But what does he expect, a Ferrari? Trying to live by unrealistic and inappropriate beauty standards is a quick pathway to despair. The mirror doesn’t lie, but our expectations can mislead us.
Today’s guest post comes from Congressman Loomis Beechly, representing all the water surface area in the State of Minnesota.
Greetings, Constituents!
Tonight marks the umpteenth time I will have attended the President’s annual State of the Union address.
Many times I have wondered about the appropriate way to behave in such an historic setting, and each time I come away with the feeling that I’ve somehow missed the boat. I sit when I should stand. I stand up when I should remain seated. It’s very confusing. Then as soon as the president is done speaking, the word spinning starts and when I look at my newspaper the next morning I’m surprised to see what the speech was really about, even though I was there!
As your congressman, I try not to be starstruck by all the famous people. They’re completely ordinary – right up to the president himself! A lot of Representatives will fall all over themselves anyway, jockeying to be on the aisle so they can shake his hand as he goes by and possibly get their picture in the paper. I can assure you – you won’t see me making such a spectacle out of myself. I don’t have the seniority to get that close to the aisle. And anyway, I’m not some giddy teenager. I’ve been to the dance a few times now.
Tonight, I expect the president will make a strong case for his proposed new policy on guns. He’ll present it as a measure to improve safety for our most vulnerable citizens, and his opponents will fight him on the grounds that holding powerful firearms insures the safety of those who disagree with a vindictive and too-powerful government.
Some people would say these differences can’t be bridged, but I say “Hey, at least they agree that everyone is threatened to the point of needing to take deadly action against a stranger!” That’s a start, even if it’s make-believe. Perhaps somewhere down that contentious road they will find a compromise. Or settle it with a shoot out at twenty paces. In a violent culture, anything is possible!
I, for one, don’t care much about guns. I just hope the president doesn’t listen to his power hungry advisors who want him to extend his safety compulsion to fishing lures. That’s a touchy subject for me and my constituents. A rumor went around the other day that he was going to require that everyone use Safety Lures – not just children.
That’s insane! Imagine not only the expense but the great inconvenience for people like myself who already have a tackle box full of pointy things! All I can say, is, the president can have my exposed-hook lure when he is willing to pull the rusty barb out of my cold, dead finger.
And if he’s willing to do that, it means he’s probably in my boat with me. Imagine, me and the president, fishing!
I hope he’ll have a few beers and spend the afternoon!
Your Congressman,
Loomis Beechly
Name a safety measure or device that has spared you some amount of pain.
Today’s guest post comes from perennial sophomore Bubby Spamden.
Hey, Mr. C!
I think I found my career, finally.
I know I’ve said that about some other things, like being a planet hunter, and watching things blow up. But this time I think I really mean it because the job I have in mind is a real one that people actually do every day, and I already have some experience with it.
I want to be a Forensic Electrical Engineer.
In case you’re wondering what that is, I didn’t know either. Not until I saw this article about why the lights went out at the Super Bowl last Sunday. It turns out the blackout was caused by this very expensive electrical relay that was put in to keep a blackout from happening.
I think that is so cool! Mostly because it is totally ironic.
And now people are arguing about whose fault it was, really. The power company says it wasn’t their fault, and the New Orleans city leaders are kind of hoping it wasn’t the fault of anybody in Louisiana. They’re hoping it can be blamed on the company that made the relay. But the company that made the relay says their relay worked fine – it was the people who messed up.
So there!
And here’s the best part – Forensic Electrical Engineers are going to be really important in deciding who to blame. That’s why I’d like to be one – you get to be the finger pointer instead of having the finger pointed at you all the time, and believe me, I’ve been on the receiving end a lot! So having an important job in the blame placing industry would be great.
I found this job description online – the most important part is highlighted – by me!
“… forensic electrical engineers have investigated the causes of events such as the 1979 accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant and the widespread blackouts across the Northeastern United States and Canada in the 1960s and in 2003. They also work on smaller scale incidents such as an individual being electrocuted by her toaster. They are usually called in when death or injury has occurred, or a large sum of money is at stake.”
Imagine that – I’d get to cast blame on other people in cases where there’s a dead person, or tons of money, or both! I know I’d be great at this because I’m really good at being exasperated at things other people have done, so I could work on my tut-tutting, my eye rolling and my heavy sighing, especially when one person has really, really screwed up.
Please tell me this is a great idea!
That way, if it turns out that I don’t like it or am not very good at it, I can always say you pushed me into the field!
Your Pal,
Bubby
I told Bubby there is a lot of math involved in being an electrical engineer, and that the people he would be dumping blame on would have their own lawyers with sharp criticisms of himself and his methods. When it is your job to find responsibility in cases where there has been a death or “a lot of money is at stake,” you are not allowed to pass through unscathed, and if your testimony winds up costing someone money, a counter-suit is possible. Blame placing has its own risks.
I suggested it might actually be safer for him to look for a dull career in the Blowing Up Things Industry.
When you place blame on someone other than yourself, how’s your accuracy?
Astrology is a bunch of hooey. There’s no way the position of the stars in relation to the Earth on a particular day has any influence at all over the sort of person you become. All you have to do is look at any one day’s host of birthday people – artists who launched themselves into a certain form of expression and ultimately wound up in very different places.
Like today’s birthday people in music. February 9th boasts:
If astrology had any truth to it, these three different performers would fit this description from astrology.com.au
You are a zesty individual, having tremendous amounts of energy. You are determined and forceful in how you deal with people. You want to express your ground-breaking spirit in everything you do but unfortunately you won’t always able to break free of the limits that are imposed upon you. Some Aquarians learn through their family life that before you can be the master of your own destiny, you have to serve. In some extreme cases Aquarians are controlled and dominated by others throughout the formative period of their lives which is why it’s so difficult for them to submit to others.
Most of that could apply to anyone. But in the case of these three, it’s not true at all. Well, OK. Maybe the “zesty” part. And all three had great chart-topping success for a time in the music business. Each eventually found some disappointment in the limitations of the entertainment industry and the fickle nature of stardom.
Two of them are always seen wearing hats. Two were listed among the most creatively and financially successful women of their time.
But only one of them attempted to shoot a music producer in a hotel lobby. And only one had a heart attack on the Jimmy Durante show and died the next day.
See? Very different.
Astrology: Is it charlatanism, quackery or just pure hooey?
A new data-crunching effort has examined thousands of mammal measurements (including ours) to conclude that everything from elephants to Lindsay Lohan sprang from a common Hypothetical Placental Mammal Ancestor. The numbers suggest this happened sometime after the demise of the non-flying dinosaurs, when the coast was clear at last for our stompable forebears to gain a foothold rather than being flattened in a footprint.
There seems to be a lot of excitement and chatter about this latest bit of evolutionary news, as if it is some kind of a surprise. I, for one, have always known that at least one of my relatives was a furry, bug eating, shrew – not quite a rat but definitely more kick-ass than a mouse.
Several fit that description, actually. No need to name names.
But of course all this is still controversial, and will remain so for thousands, maybe millions of years. Or until the next major asteroid provides a clean slate for another robust species to start its journey from dining on available insects to computer-assisted speculation about the family tree.
But just in case this turns out to be true, we should take advantage of our position in time to be the first to write a greeting to our freshly imagined progenitor – the Hypothetical Placental Mammal Ancestor.
Here are three, in haiku form:
Oh shrew-like fur ball
Good thing you ditched the long tail
Before there were doors.
Hypothetical
Is a bad first name for one
lacking confidence.
Mother of us all
Eating a bug for the team
It tastes like chicken.
I can’t seem to get my pacifist niece to like me, even though I’m really a gregarious, lovable guy.
OK, it’s true that I have lined the perimeter of my property with barbed wire, own more guns than some third world countries, and will expound at length about why jack-booted government thugs are planning to surround the house to take away my freedoms.
But that doesn’t mean I’m not a nice person. I laugh. I’m kind to children. And I like puppies and Disneyland, just like every other proper American. So why doesn’t she warm up to me?
I will admit that some people who feel the same way I do about certain things have committed terrible acts, and they can be kind of scary, especially when you get them going on the Second Amendment. But if you could see me the way I see me, I’d seem perfectly reasonable to you.
Noble, even.
I tried to convince my niece that I’m not insane, but she says if the government really wants to come after me, my arsenal will be useless. But in my mind I am George Washington – the leader of a popular uprising that will prevail against overwhelming odds and become a beacon for the world before it morphs into a merciless tyrant that will try to crush another brave someone exactly like me more than 230 years from now!
That would make me incredibly famous forever – and she’d be famous too because she’s my niece! But she just doesn’t get excited about it in the same way I do.
It’s not that different from those who imagine being the winning quarterback in the Super Bowl or a global singing star by impressing the judges on The Voice. These are harmless fantasies that people need to help them face another day.
I sometimes hear my niece say things like “follow your bliss’ and “be the most authentic version of you you can be”, which I think she picked up from Oprah. Not my thing, but I’ll defend to the death her right to watch it.
So why does she scoff at my dream?
Intensely,
Gregarious Uncle Needs Niece’s Understanding To Survive
I told G.U.N.N.U.T.S. his dream is unsettling for his pacifist niece because its realization relies so heavily on firearms, which are the opposite of harmless and much more frightening than football or singing. Everybody wants to be celebrated, but perhaps if he wants to win over his niece, he needs to construct a more benign hero fantasy for himself.
But that’s just one opinion. What do YOU think, Dr. Babooner?
We speak, by far, the language with the most words in it. The Germans manage to converse precisely, thank you, with something like a fourth or a fifth of our lexicon.
We have lots of words we do not use, and a few I could do without. Ampallung has now become an English word, but we could do without that word in all languages. (I was going to provide a link to an explanation of this, but everyone I found is too graphic.) It is a piercing through the penis. Everyone say “Ewwww.”
Some words we do not give their full and proper due. Coprolite, meaning a fossilized turd, is a word of which we could make much greater use. Start naming, to yourself only please, all the people you have known who are living coprolites.
But I still think some words are missing. We need a word for:
That stuff, ragged, messing stuff, that is left when you tear a page out a spiral notebook. It is the bane of teachers. I required kids to cut off the ragged edge of such pages before they turned them in and to be careful not to drop that stuff, ragged, messing stuff around the room. I always wanted a word for it. I called it froo-froo, but that’s a stolen word. I used to hold contests to name that stuff, ragged, messing stuff. It never worked. My turkey-drawing contests worked but not that one.
That stuff, stupid, cliched, never-dying stuff that gets sent to you over and over again in emails. Or at least between women. I have only rarely received such stuff, stupid, cliched, never-dying stuff from a male friend. My wife gets 4-5 a week, and everyone sending to her knows she does not like them and that I throw them all out before she opens her mail every 4-6 weeks.
A tree standing alone isolated from other trees. Why, you are asking, do we need that word? I am not sure. I have just always wanted it. Any tree standing alone draws my eye, evokes some response from me.
Here are some solitary trees, uncharacteristically clumped together:
The Witch’s Tree
This one was near our house
The Honking Tree
A grand-daughter’s depiction
It is trees all alone in a field which have a power over me. I used to watch for the half dozen of them in the too-often-repeated drive from the Cities to Two Harbors. The only famous one of those is now gone, cut down by vandals, the Two Harbors Honking Tree, which was actually in Larsmont. This picture is by one of my very favorite students.
(We could use a word to describe the soul of the person who cut it down.)
Apparently in the right circumstance, I am not alone in being drawn to solitary trees. I have drawn many such trees. And my grand-daughter has my obsession. She draws this picture over and over again.
Share your ideas for words that should be added to or removed from the English language.
Far better than anything coming out of the Super Bowl was Sunday’s news that the Brits have discovered the bones of Richard III under a parking lot.
Lovely.
There were no parking lots when the hunchbacked king died on the battlefield in 1485. He was buried in a church but the church was later razed and the parking lot put over him. So it goes. But having an intact skeleton may help to rehabilitate Richard’s image, tarnished by Tudors, Time and the Theater, most notably that reputation-killer, Shakespeare.
But it does put an exclamation point on the notion that once dead, you are no longer in the driver’s seat. You could be under it. And it’s up to those who follow you to honor your memory – or not.
Ultimately, does it matter where the remains land? Here are three songs making last requests about final arrangements. Short of drawing up legal papers that say essentially the same thing as your lyrics, I don’t think putting your internment instructions in a song brings any hope of success, and certainly no guarantee.
You just don’t get to call the shots after you’re gone.
You can ask for one place NOT to be buried. Maybe we will listen.
Trail Baboon 