Since I was very young I've realised

I never wanted to be human size.

PS - I never wanted to be tall, tall, tall, big as a wall, wall, wall, though.  I always wanted to be small, small, small, small as a ball, ball, ball.  Like, gnome-sized.

It’s So Hard to Move On

Where Somebody Died:

The self  refuses to appear

         in this bare place.

It fears that mute chair

         and the still window.

The sunlight scares it.

There might rise up a sound.

The door doesn’t like to move,

         and the crow out there

         hesitates; he knows

         a hole flown into by mistake

         would make a bite of   him.

What was sits standstill in the chair,

         hangs, stunned, against the dry-eyed light.

Nobody in sight.

Inanimate things, still  lifeless.

This room’s so empty

         I doubt I’m standing here;

         there can’t be room for me

         and total emptiness.

Only some far-off sounds persist.

The brute truck

         over the interstate.

The flames in the incinerator

         chewing his old vests.

Eleanor Ross Taylor.

Ἀμαθίην κρύπτειν ἄμεινον

Figured that instead of focusing on the launch of Apollo 15 on this date in '71, I'd take a look at one of the pivotal events in exploration and science from the mission.  Chaikin described it thus:

Scott and Irwin’s attention was riveted to the strange, white rock Irwin had seen earlier. As they approached, they strategized about the best way to collect it. Irwin suggested lifting it off its dusty pedestal with the tongs. Scott did so, and he raised it to his faceplate to inspect the find, which was about the size of his fist. It looked fairly beaten up, and it was covered with dust, but as he grasped it with his gloved fingers some of the ancient coating wiped off, and he could see crystals: large, white crystals. Suddenly— 

“Ahhh!” 

“Oh, man!” 

—both men realized what they had discovered. The rock was almost entirely plagioclase. Exposed to light for the first time in untold eons, its white crystals glinted in the sun, like the ones they had seen in the San Gabriels. This was surely a chunk of anorthosite, a piece of the primordial crust. Scott radioed the news. 

“Guess what we just found. Guess what we just found. I think we found what we came for.” 

“Crystalline rock, huh?” prompted Irwin. 

“Yes, sir,” said Scott. 

“Yes, sir,” repeated Joe Allen, like a brother at a revival meeting. After describing the rock in detail, Scott placed it in a special sample bag by itself. Of all the rocks brought back from the moon this one would be the most famous. To the geologists, it would be sample number 15415, but to the world it would be known by the name bestowed upon it by a reporter covering the mission at the space center: the Genesis Rock. 

In time, probing the treasure with electron beams in their laboratories, the geologists would peg the rock’s age at 4.5 billion years. If the moon was any older than that, it wasn’t much older; the solar system itself was thought to have formed only 100 million years earlier. 

Scott couldn’t hear the geologists’ ecstatic reactions in the back room, but he didn’t need to. And Spur had even more to offer.

Kids in a candy shop:

As they made their way along the crater rim they happened on one remarkable find after another, poking out of the dust. Scott sounded like a rare-coin collector who had stumbled across a treasure chest in the attic. “Oh, look at this one!” Scott told Allen what was already clear: “Joe, this crater is a gold mine!” 

“And there might be diamonds in the next one,” said Allen, a gentle reminder that Scott and Irwin could not linger here. They were getting close enough to their immutable walkback limit that Allen was telling them to press on. Now Allen radioed that Irwin’s sample bag was about to come loose—everyone in mission control could see that on the big screen, and they worried that all those priceless samples might tumble into Spur crater. 

Precious minutes were lost as Scott cinched it up. With less than 15 minutes remaining, Scott and Irwin looked hopefully at a boulder that lay perhaps a dozen yards farther along Spur’s rim, the only large rock in sight, and therefore the only rock for which the geologists could be sure of its place of origin. Undoubtedly it had been torn from the floor of Spur. 

Just now, Allen passed up word from the back room: forget the boulder; they wanted them back at the Rover, using the rake to collect a bunch of walnut-sized fragments. Scott eyed the boulder. He told Irwin to go ahead and start raking; in the meantime he went into high gear. A short run along Spur’s rim brought him to his quarry. Working on stolen time, he clicked off Hasselblad pictures of it from every angle. 

There wasn’t time to hammer off a piece, but he spotted a small fragment in the dust—obviously knocked loose from the big rock—and got his sample after all. He hoped the geologists would be able to figure out where it came from by studying the pictures. Scott turned and ran back to join Irwin in his work. He hated to leave. It was a frustration he would feel again and again on the moon, just as he had that first day in the Orocopias with Silver: there was never enough time.

This is one of my favorite missions ever.  Looking forward to seeing astronauts getting dirty again on the lunar surface, lighting new fires in our imagination and expanding our understanding of the cosmos.

Day of Remembrance

Not long before we left Vermont.  (June '17)

Silver Falls, Oregon.  (Sept '17)

I got a question

Is you really down to pop or what?

PS - This appears to have been performed in 1972, which I guess is why I count only 4 women in the orchestra.

But Still There Is Much That Is Fair

A Farewell:

Good-bye!—no, do not grieve that it is over,

   The perfect hour;

That the winged joy, sweet honey-loving rover,

   Flits from the flower.

Grieve not—it is the law. Love will be flying—

   Yes, love and all.

Glad was the living—blessed be the dying.

   Let the leaves fall.

Harriet Monroe.

I’ll Show You How God Falls Asleep on the Job

One of the most famous examples of pareidolia ever.  (1976)

RIP, Percival Lowell, you would have hated the Viking (and Mariner) missions:

Cydonia was first imaged in detail by the Viking 1 and Viking 2 orbiters. Eighteen images of the Cydonia region were taken by the orbiters... 

In one of the images taken by Viking 1 on July 25, 1976, a two-kilometre-long (1.2 mi) Cydonian mesa, situated at 40.75° north latitude and 9.46° west longitude, had the appearance of a humanoid face. When the image was originally acquired, Viking chief scientist Gerald Soffen dismissed the "Face on Mars" in image 035A72 as a "trick of light and shadow"... 

After analysis of the higher-resolution Mars Global Surveyor data NASA stated that "a detailed analysis of multiple images of this feature reveals a natural looking Martian hill whose illusory face-like appearance depends on the viewing angle and angle of illumination". Similar optical illusions can be found in the geology of Earth; examples include the Old Man of the Mountain, the Romanian Sphinx, Giewont, the Pedra da Gávea, the Old Man of Hoy, Stac Levenish, Sleeping Ute, and the Badlands Guardian.

Also RIP, Old Man of the Mountain.

<exits singing, I've just seen a face, I can't forget the time or place...>

Turn the track up

I don't think this shit is loud enough.

Ipomoea alba

Moonflowers:

It was the moonflowers that surprised us.

Early summer we noticed the soft gray foliage.

She asked for seedpods every year but I never saw them in her garden.

Never knew what she did with them.

Exotic and tropical, not like her other flowers.

I expected her to throw them in the pasture maybe,

a gift to the coyotes. Huge, platterlike white flowers

shining in the night to soften their plaintive howling.

A sound I love; a reminder, even on the darkest night,

that manicured lawns don't surround me.

Midsummer they shot up, filled the small place by the back door,

sprawled over sidewalks, refused to be ignored.

Gaudy and awkward by day,

by night they were huge, soft, luminous.

Only this year, this year of her death

did they break free of their huge, prickly husks

and brighten the darkness she left.

Karma Larsen.

Everyone here is a work of art

Material Girl's still got it.

Ceci n'est pas un poème

René Magritte:

Released silhouettes

flow incessantly like water,

flow between mountains

swiftly like a kaleidoscope.

The solitude of  the North Pole

bustles with human silhouettes.

Endless transmission of  ABC.

On the shredded shore

a silk hat burns

like a mirror trick,

like a human echo

burns a silk hat endlessly.

Then the flames

were received like ABC.

On the night of a beautiful lunar eclipse

the silhouettes smiled.

Shuzo Takiguchi.

#throwbackthursday

I still use this antique Ericka got me as a coffee mug.  (2017)

She's got style, she's got grace, she's a winner

I, uh...sometimes sing the next line as "chicken dinner."

Peace and Trust Can Win the Day

Immigrant Song:

All birds—even those that do not fly

—have wings

 

A constant confession

Admission of omission

 

This is your punctuated equilibrium

And everything in between

Slow it down

 

The moment of extinction

The death of the last individual of a species

(Let’s put it aside for now)

Stay with it

 

This is our gene flow

How do you like our genetic drift

A riff, a rift, a raft…

Too rough for the second half

 

Take us under, take us downhill

Paint pangenesis all over your dancing body

The new party god

Keep the beat going, don’t stop, you can’t stop

 

Crick & Watson

Evo-devo

This is your mother’s local phenomenon

 

If this is racial hygiene

Why do I feel so dirty?

 

Microcosmic soul

It’s an involutionary wonderland

This living matter

A modern synthesis

4.6 billion years of biology

Can’t stop the ideology

Graduate from meet/mate

To fitness landscape of sexual selection

 

From land over sea

It’s a hard lyric

The impression of a key in a bar of soap

A transitional fossil

 

Keep camping

Plant the flag

Bury the burial mound

Put the pop in popular

And the sigh in science

Sun Yung Shin.