The Eye of Sauron

photo source: NASA/AFP/Getty

Looks like something out of Peter Jackson's concept art department for The Lord of the Rings trilogy, doesn't it?  Nope...this is a photo of a fading white dwarf star at the center of the Hourglass Nebula taken by the good folks manning the Hubble Space Telescope.  And it's looking directly at your soul, so you had better be good, for goodness sake.

I literally could spend days just gazing at the incredible pictures being taken by the Hubble.  Stuff like the Pillars of Creation, or Cosmic Dust Bunnies or the Cone Nebula.  These images are like the fantasy creation of some sci-fi geek/artist that might go into a wall calendar or something.  Or the cover of a sci-fi magazine.  No way they can be real.  Except they are.  There for those of us who are really into space porn.

The best thing about space porn?  You don't get embarrassed when your girlfriend catches you enjoying it.  Until she calls you a geek, and then you do.  Sigh.

EDIT: Seems as if Pearl Jam used this image or one similar to it for the cover of one of their albums back in 2000.  News to me.  I stopped listening to Pearl Jam after Ten. - Earl

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Note: Remember to play the Badgerdaddy Trivia Challenge every day. My space suit pants are tight!

The Future Sucks

Sunday night before I went to sleep, I read that the shuttle Discovery would be making a launch in the pre-dawn hours of Monday morning. It had been a real long while since I watched a shuttle launch live so I told myself "Self, if you are up for some reason between 5 and 6AM, tune into the NASA website to watch the launch live."

And I did. Still impressive after all these years.

I'm almost positive that the last shuttle launch I watched live was the doomed Challenger mission in 1986. I was a sophomore in college and I was in between classes doing school work with the TV on in the background. Back then they interrupted programming to show shuttle launches live on the major networks. I remember hearing the announcer say "explosion" and I looked up and saw the smoke trails on the television. I sat there in shock as they replayed the event over and over and over again. No one else was around. Maybe they were in class or at lunch, but it remains an eerie and awful memory for me to this day.

Anyway, I also read that the shuttle program is to be scrapped in September of this year. To be replaced by something else, I guess. They haven't figured that out yet. There is a bill in Congress to extend the program, but I don't think it will pass. Maybe they will retire the International Space Station as well at the end of the year. How else are they gonna re-supply/fix it? I dunno.

The future that is our present sucks.

It's been over 40 years now. We should have a space station on the Moon. Manned missions to Mars and beyond. Flying cars. Sexbots. You know the drill. All the stuff we were promised on those episodes of The Jetsons. C'mon...you thought Rosie wore that maid outfit just for cleaning the house?  Puh-leeze!

At this rate, I don't think I will ever see a manned mission to Mars in my lifetime. And that sucks. Because Mars is what's next. But apparently we as a species no longer care about that.  At least our government doesn't.

Horace Greeley would certainly disapprove.

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Note: Remember to play the Bug-Eyed Trivia Challenge every day. Nice buttons, Rosie.

Weekend Mission

Your weekend mission, should you choose to accept it, is to do the following:

1. Take a look at the blogs over there on my Bloglist. C'mon...you know you wanna do it.
2. Give me a holler-back about a cool blog that I'm maybe not currently reading. Something new and exciting. Or something old and dull (if you are into that, you freak!). Anything that might pique my interest.
   

The last time I did this back in January I wound up picking up 4 or 5 really great blogs to read. And I'm way too lazy to actually do the work myself, so...

Shock shock, horror horror, shock shock, horror.

Random Wiki: Markovian Parallax Denigrate. Yeah, I said it. Apparently there were a bunch of articles posted on Usenet back in 1996 that may or may not have been coded messages. Something to do with a Susan Lindauer, maybe. She was charged with espionage in 2004. All I know is that I was really drunk when I wrote that crap back in 1996. I hope no one ever finds out!