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.

All Dogs Go to Heaven

Dogs in spaaaaace:

On 22 July 1951, after six months of training, two small dogs nicknamed Tsygan and Dezik were launched from the site of the first Soviet cosmodrome in a region called Kapustin Yar. At a height of 110 km, the head of the rocket containing the dogs separated and began to free-fall back down to Earth. 

They experienced intense G-forces during descent, but after a heavy jolt from the parachute, the cabin containing the two four-legged pilots slowed and touched down safely. The trip, which lasted 15 minutes from start to finish, made Tsygan and Dezik the first animals to experience space flight and to emerge from the craft unharmed...

Chief Designer Sergei Korolev decided that the Soviet space programme would...work with dogs. The choice of dogs, ‘man’s best friend’, over monkeys, among our closest genetic relatives, was based on rational reasoning springing from emotional attachment. The Russian scientists believed they could build stronger bonds with the animals and so ensure their obedience. They also believed that the dogs eking out an existence on the harsh streets of Moscow would possess a survivalist temperament. 

There were strict criteria for scouting the first-star squad of dogs. They had to be female because the specialised clothing and toilet technology was easier to tailor to them. And they needed to be small in size: 6 to 7 kg each to accommodate the strict weight limit for the rocket. These dogs also needed to have light-coloured fur, in order to show up clearly in front of the onboard camera. The scientists had even attempted to bleach the fur of one of their favourite darker dogs without success.

It is left as an exercise for the reader to look more into the less-than-happy outcomes of subsequent flights...

She's so fine, there's no tellin' where the money went

I do know where the money went, in point of fact.

Sadly, No Rain Forecast This Week

summer rain
the roof
learning music

Ogawa

— Basho Society (@BashoSociety) July 20, 2026

We’re Always Going to Feel Somehow Strangers to These Men

Naturally planned to watch First Man yesterday, but did not finish.

Not atypical for the ADHD squirrels in my head, especially when the WNBA is on, but I don't think I've ever watched this one all the way through in one sitting.  It is not your big space spectacle, but rather an emotional journey, and I have difficulties these days when it comes to stuff that gets me in my feels, especially involving grief.

And actually, that's a big part of what I love about the movie.  Don't get me wrong, I obviously enjoy real rockets and sci-fi explosions and whatnot, but I really appreciate the lens Damien Chazelle used here.  Astronauts are just as human as the rest of us, and deal with life and loss in their own ways.  There are times that I wish I could compartmentalize the way Neil apparently did.

Anyway, the final is scene is a perfect punctuation mark.  It doesn't show up in Hansen's book, so I went looking to see if the filmmakers had said anything about it.  Here's the screenwriter, Josh Singer:

Look, in point of fact, Neil and Janet didn’t get divorced for another 20 years. They were both strong-willed individuals who were going to muddle through regardless. In the first version of that scene, we didn’t have them touching hands. On the page, it was just them looking at each other through the glass. Then there was a subsequent scene where Neil is told he’s not going to fly in space again and he comes home and looks at his house and he can’t quite bring himself to go in because he’s a stranger in his own home.

We actually got feedback from Janet who was like “Well, it wasn’t over. The seeds were there, but we kept trying for a long time.” And ultimately we also decided we’ve got to leave you with a little hope. They’re still reaching for each other. So we re-wrote it and that’s where we wind up.

Not an exclamation point, but...yeah, I guess an ellipsis is what it is.

Selah.

Endings Are Beginnings

The final Shuttle mission, STS-135, ended when Atlantis touched down on this date in 2011.  It wasn't originally going to fly, but:

During an address at the Marshall Space Flight Center on November 16, 2010, NASA administrator Charles Bolden said that the agency needed to fly STS-135 to the station in 2011 due to possible delays in the development of commercial rockets and spacecraft designed to transport cargo to the ISS. "We are hoping to fly a third shuttle mission [in addition to STS-133 and STS-134] in June 2011, what everybody calls the launch-on-need mission... and that's really needed to [buy down] the risk for the development time for commercial cargo", Bolden said.

The first commerical re-supply mission, CRS-1, launched in October the following year.  We wouldn't have American crewed flights resume until late 2020 with Crew-1, and relied on 27 Soyuz missions to ferry astronauts up to ISS in the meantime.

Exactly 50 years earlier, Ole Gus went up (and down) in Liberty Bell 7:

The addition of the large viewing window was a result of a change requested by Mercury astronauts. This window allowed the astronauts to have a greater viewing area than the original side port windows. The field of view was 30 degrees in the horizontal plane and 33 degrees in the vertical. The window is composed of an outer panel of 0.35-inch thick Vycor glass and a 3-layer inner panel.

That ended up being the final suborbital mission, with John Glenn's being changed to an orbital flight using the Atlas rocket:

August 18: NASA announced that analysis of Project Mercury suborbital data indicated that all objectives of that phase of the program had been achieved, and that no further Mercury-Redstone flights were planned. 

Speaking of suborbital missions, Thursday might see Starship Flight 13 finally launch (rescheduled after an abort last week):

The planned flight profile builds upon previous test flights. Starship will fly on a controlled suborbital trajectory designed to fall just short of orbit, while the Super Heavy booster executes a high-precision, controlled splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico.

Ostensibly, the big rocket will get into orbit for a prop transfer demo later this year, although I remain skeptical.  That will involve multiple launches - not sure we've done anything like that since Apollo-Soyuz in '75 -  but least they won't be using the finicky Agena Target Vehicle.

Our baby steps continue...

Leave me lying here

'Cause I don't wanna go.

Like an Ogre or a Parfait

The Layers:

I have walked through many lives,

some of them my own,

and I am not who I was,

though some principle of being

abides, from which I struggle

not to stray.

When I look behind,

as I am compelled to look

before I can gather strength

to proceed on my journey,

I see the milestones dwindling

toward the horizon

and the slow fires trailing

from the abandoned camp-sites,

over which scavenger angels

wheel on heavy wings.

Oh, I have made myself a tribe

out of my true affections,

and my tribe is scattered!

How shall the heart be reconciled

to its feast of losses?

In a rising wind

the manic dust of my friends,

those who fell along the way,

bitterly stings my face.

Yet I turn, I turn,

exulting somewhat,

with my will intact to go

wherever I need to go,

and every stone on the road

precious to me.

In my darkest night,

when the moon was covered

and I roamed through wreckage,

a nimbus-clouded voice

directed me:

“Live in the layers,

not on the litter.”

Though I lack the art

to decipher it,

no doubt the next chapter

in my book of transformations

is already written.

I am not done with my changes.

Stanley Kunitz.