Meanwhile, on Mars....

I hope NASA doesn't mind me cleaning this one up a bit, to make a better image for the Desktop. This is their composite of Curiosity's tracks after it crossed a little sand dune in this gap. John Wayne would probably have loved to see this.... It's a whole other 'Painted Desert' but a desert nevertheless. All this beach, and no ocean! What a shame!

This is now one of the images in a new Curiosity Mars Windows 8 Theme I've just made. When I was a kid reading those Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon comics those many years ago, I never dreamed that one day, I'd be looking at real images from the planet Mars, and even using them as 'wallpaper' on my computer. I never dreamed of computers back then either. Isn't technology really wonderful? And one day, we probably will figure out where the ocean went from Mars. And I'd bet you there was one....

And here, for Tommy, is a picture just to reassure him that the rover is still there and still roving, in case he doubted that. Those Martians hiding in the cave over behind that hill haven't grabbed it yet, because they can't figure out if it's animal, vegetable, or mineral, nor which end is the head.

Staying informed...

Wrong kind of job...

These guys ought to be driving tractors on a collective farm instead of trying to get their asses blown off. It would be a lot safer, and the world needs more potatoes and more Vodka. The world needs more Moskovskaya, tovarishch, and don't let Petulant Putin tell you otherwise. You make more friends with good Vodka than you do with Avtomat Kalashnikova. Would I lie to you?

"Those who refuse to learn from history..."

"Diplomacy is the art of saying 'Nice Doggie' until you can find a rock."

                                                                      - Will Rogers (1879-1935)

More Benny Goodman

Now, some real Culture....

Speaking of 'culture', something we don't hear often...

A little culture -

Radioactivity 101

Helpful Hint:

Monday morning trivia....

Bill Gates leads the pack, as co-founder of Mighty Microsoft, and the kicker is they still haven't got Windows working worth a shit... The freebie PC-BSD can do everything Windows 8 does, and it boots up and shuts down faster. Go figure.

A little music break....

Some of the best and most memorable music comes from the 1920s, like this one by Vincent Youmans. You may already have heard the Latin version of this by Xavier Cugat on an earlier post here. I enjoy them all...

And this medley may be a little Schmaltzy (blame Lawrence Welk) but these are also popular Vincent Youmans tunes. Reminds me of the Golden Age of Radio, and the old wind-up Victrola and my second-hand CCM one-speed-fits-all bike I used for delivering the morning papers before breakfast... I knew half the people and their dogs in our little town before I was ten years old.
That's why I couldn't hardly wait to get the hell out of there. 

And it's Carnival in Rio !

I mirrored the left-hand image, to get the right-hand side, then spliced them, and that's why the center of it looks a little less than perfect. That's where it all comes together...but you really wanted a look at the real thing, didn't you?

What kind of chickenshit army is this?

Fun with Theme-making...

Here's some images from the latest Windows 8 Theme I've just made....

It's another Sunday...

It's another Sunday morning, early here yet, this being my 3:30 A.M. 'let's make sure the bathroom's still here' time, and yes, it is - so now a cup of coffee, and see what's what in the world.... Yesterday, while surfing, I got onto a Catholic Forum website where they were debating the new Pope's words about divorcees and the sacraments, and some of the comments were quite interesting.

I was interested, because I'm a Catholic, and I've been divorced and remarried, and therefore unable to participate in the Church's official sacraments such as Confession, Communion, and etc. - and that bugs me!

'Why should it? You know the rules...' you say. Yes, I know what the Church says, and what the Pope says, and they say 'we can't forgive you while you remain in a state of sin, because we cannot approve of your wrong-doing.'

I think the real problem here is that the Church and our Pope have taken over God's task of making the rules, and not only that, but they haven't been getting the real message from God's words on the subject of Forgiveness.
Some of those words may be found in the book of St. Matthew, Chapter 18, Verses 21 to and including 35. Without bending that too much, the message would seem to me to be saying 'unless you forgive one another for your sins, the Father in heaven will not forgive you for yours.'

It doesn't get into a lot of hair-splitting over the degree of sinning, nor the numbers of times the sinning has occurred. It simply says that unless you and I can forgive one another for our various sins, then the Father will not forgive us for our own sins, and we will then suffer the consequences rather than receiving a heavenly reward. And this was told to us by Jesus while he was explaining in a parable to Peter about forgiveness.

So those 'wannabe lawyers' in the back rooms of the Vatican ought to take another look at the Bible, the original 'rule book', and get over themselves.
The word of God ought to trump the mumblings of the Pope, I'd say... or let's put that another way: 'Who's running this show....God, or some mere mortal?'
And if God can forgive me, why can't my Church?

Do The Hustle...

Not the same Hustler.... but this one made it into 'American Hustle' the movie.
I wonder why? Any suggestions?  I also wonder if she's had her Flu Shot... or maybe the one for Pneumonia. That leather's cold without a shirt...

Let's face it - There's only one Hustle, and it's by the Armada Orchestra.....

NASA News...

About that title - was 'Collide-a-scope' already taken? What about 'Happy Higgs Hunting' possibly with Tom Hanks, as Handsome Harry Higgs...

So, is the Higgs Boson a part of our universal radioactive decay? Is radioactive decay more fun than the regular kind? Is it really better to burn out than rust? Yes, it probably is... but we're still testing this theory. So far, I'm able to report that it didn't affect me - affect me - affect me - hardly at all.

After the fact...

Putin asking for approval for troops to occupy parts of the Ukraine is just window-dressing after the fact - he's had troops in there for days, with their units insignia and rank badges removed to avoid positive identification - but really, who else could they be? Who did he think he was kidding? He's been riding his horse shirtless in the sun too long I think...

For a long time, this former KGB has been looking for ways and excuses to put the old Soviet Union back together, with or without the approval of the other participants, and this smells like 'Act One' in that play... Putin evidently hasn't learned a goddamned thing from history. He probably can't even spell the word.

I think China and India should divide the Russian Federation between them, and the sooner the better.

Meanwhile, on Mars....

Everything we look at is still broken into pieces....like a cosmic rock-crusher was at work. And three-and-a-half or four billion years ago, it was - very briefly. But long enough to destroy a formerly-habitable planet in the outer region of our ecosphere around our sun, or 'Sol' as NASA prefers to call it.  Whatever you call it, it's a self-contained thermonuclear reactor approaching its midlife crisis...

Here's another example of what I mean about a 'rock-crusher' - everywhere we look, close-up or far away, we're seeing material that's been broken. There aren't any rounded stones, polished that way by glacial actions, as on Earth. It is all showing evidence of some massive destructive force. And we know why.

Originally, perhaps, Mars was intended to be this solar system's Intelligent Planet, with a nicely developed civilization, temperate climate, pleasant vacation spots, and an active scientific community - and Earth was to be the primitive relative, with those massive dinosaurs, and weird flappy flying creatures, and animals. Lots of animals, amongst which the most evolved would be the apes and horny monkeys.

Then, along came that massive meteoroid from deep space, striking Mars near its beltline, and essentially destroying its environment. Away went its outer skin of land masses and oceans, its atmosphere, and even its magnetic fields, which disappeared because of the severe impact. Severe impacts tend to unmagnetize things. And after the smoke cleared, what we see now was pretty-much it.

That meant that if this solar system was to have any intelligent life at all, it would have to develop from those hairy-assed apes and horny monkeys on that other inner planet next to Mars - the one called Earth. And sure enough, over time, a lot of it, that's more or less what happened. We're still working on the 'intelligence' part of the picture, but at least we weren't destroyed from the inside out, like Mars. 

And now for a little digression.....yesterday, I was speculating about where does the material go which gets sucked into black holes. So let's take another look at what we call our physical universe...and all of it that we can see involves these bright 'stars' or 'suns' at the center of planetary systems clumped together into huge conglomerations we call 'galaxies'. Maybe someone else in another dimension might call them 'cells' perhaps. But whatever, all these bright objects are basically thermonuclear reactors, emitting radiation. X-rays, Gamma Rays, 
Photons, and let's not forget all those cute little subatomic particles that can whiz right through you without you even knowing it, because they're so small they can fly right through between whatever else is there. You wanted an 'alternate universe'? Try that one.

So all these bright objects are emitting radiation. That means it's all radioactive. Radioactivity always involves radioactive decay. Particles - components - are emitted or cast off from their sources. Where do they go? In our case, with our black holes at the centers of all these galaxies, possibly into those black holes and out of our sphere of influence, to be dissipated in  someone else's atmosphere. I don't have all the nuts and bolts to hold this theory together just yet, but I'm working on it....so stay tuned. Meanwhile, remember there's a reason for everything. We only have to find it. So let's keep looking.