I exploit you, still you love me

I tell you one and one makes three.

PS - Never been a major concert goer, but I've seen these guys twice.  At Bowdoin, and Lollapalooza '91.  The only other band I've seen twice is Blues Traveler.  Yes, I've only seen Yes once.  Crazy.

I Can’t Hold You Down If You Want to Fly

To the Skylark:

Ethereal minstrel! pilgrim of the sky!

Dost thou despise the earth where cares abound?

Or, while the wings aspire, are heart and eye

Both with thy nest upon the dewy ground?

Thy nest which thou canst drop into at will,

Those quivering wings composed, that music still!

Leave to the nightingale her shady wood;

A privacy of glorious light is thine;

Whence thou dost pour upon the world a flood

Of harmony, with instinct more divine;

Type of the wise who soar, but never roam;

True to the kindred points of Heaven and Home!

William Wordsworth.

Skylab

Happy Skylab Launch Day to all who celebrate!  Weird to remember that it happened, as did all the Apollo missions, with Vietnam as backdrop.  Anyway, 53 years ago today:

Skylab was launched on May 14, 1973, by the modified Saturn V. The launch is sometimes referred to as Skylab 1. Severe damage was sustained during launch and deployment, including the loss of the station's micrometeoroid shield/sun shade and one of its main solar panels. Debris from the lost micrometeoroid shield became tangled in the remaining solar panel, preventing its full deployment and thus leaving the station with a huge power deficit.

Immediately following Skylab's launch, Pad 39A at Kennedy Space Center was deactivated, and construction proceeded to modify it for the Space Shuttle program, originally targeting a maiden launch in March 1979. The crewed missions to Skylab would occur using a Saturn IB rocket from Launch Pad 39B.

Skylab 2, the first crewed mission, was supposed to launch the following day, but the damage caused delays:

The Skylab station suffered significant damage on its May 14 launch: its micrometeorite shield and one of its primary solar arrays had torn loose during launch, and the remaining primary solar array was jammed. Without the shield which was designed to also provide thermal protection, Skylab baked in the Sun, and rising temperatures inside the workshop released toxic materials into the station's atmosphere and endangered on-board film and food. 

The first crew was supposed to launch on May 15, but instead had to train practicing repair techniques as they were developed by the engineers. Ground controllers purged the atmosphere with pure nitrogen four times, before refilling it with the nitrogen/oxygen atmosphere for the crew. The secret National Reconnaissance Office used a KH-8 Gambit 3 to photograph the damaged station.

On May 25, Skylab 2 lifted from LC-39B, the first Saturn IB launch in almost five years and only the second-ever launch from Pad 39B. 

Pete Conrad, who was CDR on Apollo 12, commanded the mission.  Here's some of his perspective from Chaikin's A Man on the Moon: The Voyages of the Apollo Astronauts:

When Pete Conrad looks back on his spaceflight career, the high point isn’t his lunar landing: it is the rescue of the Skylab space station in 1973. The station’s outer shield, which protected it against heat and micrometeorites, was torn off during launch, taking one of its power-producing solar panels with it. Getting power to Skylab depended on freeing the remaining wing, which was lashed down by debris. 

Conrad’s crew, who had been preparing for a month-long mission aboard Skylab, was now faced with carrying out a demanding repair. Arriving at the stricken station, they sweltered in desertlike heat for days until they could erect a makeshift sunshield. Two weeks into the flight, Conrad and his crewmate Joe Kerwin made a space walk and, with some difficulty, freed the stuck solar wing. Today, Conrad looks back with a healthy appreciation of the risks he took. 

“My life was a lot further out on the line . . . on Skylab than it was on the moon,” Conrad says. “That taxed me personally, put everything that I had spent my whole life . . . learning how to do, on the line . . . . Going to the moon was basically a nice, routine flight after the lightning. We didn’t have any trouble after that. On Skylab we didn’t know whether we [would leave] or stay for fourteen days.” In 1978, Congress recognized the success by awarding Conrad the newly created Space Medal of Honor. 

“Everybody thinks I got the Space Medal of Honor because I went to the moon. I say, ‘No, it was for Skylab.’ They say, ‘Oh, Skylab. Yes. What was Skylab?’ ” It’s the moon that people want to hear about, and like all his colleagues, when Conrad is introduced as one of the twenty-four men who went there, the question he is almost always asked is, What was it like? And he gives the neat, two-second answer he developed long ago: “Super! Really enjoyed it.”

Pete really enjoyed the space shower, too, I guess.

I will never forget when Skylab came crashing down.  I was visiting my grandparents in North Carolina, breathlessly waiting for the teevee news to announce when it actually hit the planet, hoping it didn't land on us (narrator: it didn't, Chicken Little).  And now we've had continuous occupation of ISS for 25 years.  

Progress is not linear, but we do often learn...

#throwbackthursday

Hard to believe how not gray my beard was at one time.  (2014)

In the fields, the bodies burning

As the war machine keeps turning.

五月雨

"May rain falls
as if falling into
a sleep" Shiki Masaoka

(images: Hasui Kawase / Hisako Kajiwara) pic.twitter.com/LvCQqi69ZJ

— Kazuko M. (@EstherHawdon) May 13, 2026

End of passion play, crumbling away

You know I will almost always follow a Tull track with Metallica (or vice versa).

Where’s the Dreams That I’ve Been After?

This World is not Conclusion:

This World is not Conclusion.

A Species stands beyond - 

Invisible, as Music -

But positive, as Sound -

It beckons, and it baffles - 

Philosophy, dont know - 

And through a Riddle, at the last - 

Sagacity, must go -

To guess it, puzzles scholars -

To gain it, Men have borne

Contempt of Generations

And Crucifixion, shown -

Faith slips - and laughs, and rallies - 

Blushes, if any see - 

Plucks at a twig of Evidence - 

And asks a Vane, the way - 

Much Gesture, from the Pulpit -

Strong Hallelujahs roll - 

Narcotics cannot still the Tooth

That nibbles at the soul -

Emily Dickinson.

I Feel Bad For Us

https://t.co/5lUrlkywSC pic.twitter.com/sRn4x8DEgb

— NTodd - Antifa IT Support 🇺🇦🐸 (@ntoddpax) May 12, 2026

The great thing about his increasing disinhibition as he stumbles further down Dementia Lane is that he just says the quiet part out loud all the time now.  Won't change the completely lost cultists' minds, but maybe it'll help to peel away enough of the voters who brought us this nightmare so we can overcome racist gerrymandering and all the other structural constraints we're up against.

Then maybe someday we won't have to think about this fascist rapist criminal asshole any more...

Old Charlie stole the handle

And the train it won't stop going, no way to slow down. (spirited upbeat music continues)

erwachen allein mit dem Wind

Strangers:

Our ship

without flag

belongs to no country

never arrives

water citizens

we travel 

day and night

spy land

on the horizon

waveland

our mirage

Sometimes

we dream

a ship sails

in the opposite

direction

awakening

alone

with the

wind

Rose Ausländer.

G-d Is in the Rain

Remember when everyone was saying AI would replace/displace script writers and prose authors, and it was all over the news...then suddenly nobody was talking about it and it never happened? Here's part one of why...and why that was deliberate. https://t.co/gYsqcS8oBo pic.twitter.com/jP5LXnqIrm

— J. Michael Straczynski (@straczynski) May 11, 2026

The nub:

Everything created by AI is inherently objective and exterior. Upload a photo, ask for variations, and the process begins: exchange red hair for blonde, check; put the hands here instead of there, check; swap one visual background for another, check; integrate elements from an assortment of visual styles that can be, and very often have already been, explained, quantified and thus easily replicated, check-check-check...

Every aspect of that creation is culled from already existing, external sources, viewed in an objective fashion, providing examples of precedent, style, and visual presentation. The process is inherently exterior.

Writing, on the other hand, is inherently interior, and ridiculously subjective. Director Mike Nichols once said that every scene in a story is either a negotiation, a seduction or a fight. I’m not sure that’s entirely true in all cases at all times, but the core of it is right... 

AI characters populate the scene with words announcing what they want, without asides or genuine conversational give and take. Writers write for the subtext, the character insights, the profound or revealing silences.

Along those lines:

This reader comment on a NY Times column where Ross Douthat ponders that maybe God is speaking to us through A.I. is an absolute fastball on the corner with movement, and deserves a column. "Lightening was once mysterious too; mystery did not make Zeus correct" is perfect. pic.twitter.com/TseQe8Rnbi

— Kevin Van Valkenburg (@KVanValkenburg) May 11, 2026

The Douthat piece might or might not have been mischaracterized, which determination I leave as an exercise for the reader's Inner Light.  Regardless, I need to ponder a bit more about whether G-d is in the gaps, in the AI, or in the rain.

Selah.

Fighting and free, got your world in my hand

I'm here for your love and I'll make my stand.

Just Carry On, Don’t Mourn

When I Am Gone:

When I am gone what will you do?

Who will write and draw for you?

Someone smarter—someone new?

Someone better—maybe YOU!

Shel Silverstein.