Pawprints From Space

On the eve of a holiday weekend regardless of whether or not a person has to work at least part of the darned thing we cast our eyes to the sky and plead: Rain, rain go away come again some other day. Yes the parched ground needs it. Yes, the lawn is crispy, the crops are thirsty and the well is a little low.... But for pity's sake! There is work to be done outside in the yard, windows and a garage door to be painted. Heck, a lawn to mow (okay the weeds grow without water, grass apparently does not). If nothing else there are fading summer tans to perk up. I wanna be outside. Not inside. Hey, couldn't have the silly hurricane Ernesto fizzled out a little more completely so that we wouldn't have this much rain? This is OHIO for cryin' out loud. Damn it, this means I have to read those five chapters and write that paper you know. Rain, rain go away.....

I was thinking this morning that it was not fair that I had to work on Labor Day. My co-workers do not after all but I have an event to promote at a certain function held on Labor Day so for 4 hours I have to work. Then I really got to thinking. Who else will be working? People with dead-end jobs, thankless jobs, lousy jobs: the hotel cleaning crews, the restaurant workers, the retail workers - those folks who are all but invisible to the rest of us. People we do not tip well even though we can afford it and they are barely scraping by. The unseen, underappreciated, hard-working folks will all be out there Labor Day is just another Monday for them. The lucky ones will get "holiday pay" but most won't. If Labor Day is to honor the Working Man, an acknowledgement to those who toil and sweat and who "made this country what it is today" why are we asking those who today toil and sweat and get sworn at to work on a day that should be honoring them? Why would they hav...

Okay it is official. Pluto is no longer a planet. Personally I think this is a cop out since if the international astronomers kept it as a planet they would then have to agree that three other recently found objects were also planets (especially since "Xena" is larger than Pluto and its orbit is occasionally closer to the sun than Pluto's). They are now calling our friendly neighborhood ice ball a "dwarf planet". Hello? Do you not see the word planet in the name? White dwarfs and brown dwarfs are still types of starts are they not? Why then wouldn't a dwarf planet still be a type of planet and therefore (ta da) a planet???? According to the story on the Reuters by Alan Crosby web site the newly standardized definition of a planet is: "... to be called a planet, a celestial body must be in orbit around a star while not itself being a star. It must be large enough in mass for its own gravity to pull it into a nearly spherical shape and have cleared the ne...

The privatization of the space "industry" has officially begun. Yup. NASA has picked two companies to take over supplying the International Space Station (ISS) once the shuttle "fleet" (can you really call so few craft a fleet?) retires in 2010. Not too shabby that the companies will share a $500 million contract over five years as "seed money" for their troubles. Oh yeah and a new acronym has joined the ranks of the oh-so-many out there: COTS. Stands for Commercial Orbital Transporation Services. Which apparently is a program now. In phase one of the COTS program the companies have to demonstrate four capabilities: unpressurized cargo delivery; pressurized cargo delivery; internal cargo delivery and return and an option for crew transportation (well, gee that would be helpful - hard to run the ISS without a crew after all). The contract is to develop a cargo ship to serve the ISS and went to Space Exploration Technologies Corp (also known as SpaceX) and R...

Okay, this is annoying. I'm watching the Sci Fi Channel enjoying Stargate: Atlantis and they have this new "code" thing where you go to the Sci Fi Channel Web site and enter this code. I have been trying to get online for the last half hour. Most of the time I can't even get to the homepage. On the rare occasions that I do, the screen stalls when it reaches for the page in question and BAM locked out. So I say: if the server can't handle the traffic then you have no business putting these codes etc out there. I also have not been able to log in for the annual Get in the Gate sweepstakes. It'll let you set up a new membership account but not log in and yet you have to log in as a member in order to enter the sweepstakes. So you end up going in circles with screens stalling as they try to load and "page not found" error messages etc. You'd think that Web site for the Sci Fi Channel (or any channel for that reason) would be able to handle the traffi...

Israel's Prime Minister is endorsing a U.N. plan - a mere six hours after he broadened the ground offensive. That has got to confuse the guys on the front lines. "Hey sir, do we go? Stay? Go? Stay?" Cha Cha Cha Of course the cabinet has to approve the thing in their weekly meeting on Sunday. That meeting ought to be loud and interesting. Our local paper's version of the Associated Press story says " Olmert also feared that accepting a deal that does not rein in the guerrillas could lead to another war down the road and hurt him politically." There's the key phrase right there: could hurt him politically. Uh-huh over 800 people dead, Lebanon's infrastructure in tatters, most of the world pissed off at your country and you Mr Prime Minister are most concerned about being hurt politically. Yeah that career is WAY more important than lives. After all, they aren't Israeli lives are they? Well for the most part. No biggie, they'll shoot anything th...

Remember a few years ago IBM had a great B2B commercial with Avery Brooks yelling "Where are the flying cars?" Recalling the heyday of the space program when we all thought that by the year 2000 we'd have flying cars, be living on the moon and all sorts of other great stuff. What do we have? War in the Middle East (pretty much a constant there, been that way since the beginning of time); idiots in Congress; a shaky economy(I don't care what they tell you retails jobs are not true growth) and no one paying much attention to anything let alone the space program. So anyway, Genesis 1 launched last month. It is an inflatable module design for a crew habitat on the international space station. NASA dropped the project and Bigelow Aerospace picked it up. The project's backers are hoping that this mission is a first step for a "futuristic space station that could be fully operational within the next decade". There's a web site for Genesis 1 sightings and ev...

Oh boy. Explosive shampoo? Corrosive cough syrup? Plastic explosives masquerading as toothpaste? Apparently there was quite the to-do at airports today when a terrorist plot was foiled and 24 people arrested before they could blow up 10 planes heading to the US. Apparently the plan was to disguise explosives as ordinary beverages. So now our security folks are not letting any one carry liquids onto planes. And some are banning carry-on luggage. Boy I'm glad I am not flying anywhere this year. Years ago I was going somewhere and had a soda from a snack cart of something. The guard made me drink some to prove it was drinkable. Another guard once asked me to eat one of the cookies I was bringing. I gave him one too. These are simple foils for such things. No panic caused. Oh wait. This is the government saying that they foiled a terrorist plot on the scale of 9/11.... how are we to know this is any more real than those weapons of mass destruction that Iraq was supposed to have? I tell...

Yup. The boys in uniform (and the CIA, oh and the diplomatic corps) have confirmed what the National Intelligence Council said oh... two years ago: civil war in Iraq is possible, even highly likely if all this sectarian violence doesn't stop. The administration Poo-poohed the prediction then they been pretty quiet so far on this commentary. Well gee, imagine that. Leonard Pitts Jr the Miami Herald editoral (and syndicated columinist) had a great "told you so" commentary in today's paper. Gotta love this guy! Check him out at http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/living/columnists/leonard_pitts/ if your local paper doesn't carry his wonderful turns of phrase. I find myself inclined to agree with Anti War.com ( http://www.antiwar.com/lind/?articleid=3120 ) when they say "silly people there already is a civil war going on in Iraq". I mean, what else would you call it? Various factions of Iraq's population are killing each other in serious numbers. Oh su...

Okay I've been lazy. I admit it. It's been quite a while since last I pondered life, the universe and everything on this site. But sheesh! It is too flippin' hot to think, let alone write coherently! And yeah, well work is kinda nuts. Although that might be changing in the next few months. Got a lead, need to cultivate it, could take a while. Keep ya posted. Back to this heat thing. Today in Hartford CT (used to live there, liked it) they expect to break a record, think it'll hit 105. Okay New England is not supposed to get that hot ever. I can just hear the mold jumping for joy as the humidity climbs. People do not have air conditioning in the older homes because they don't need it. It's gonna get nasty. See previous rant on Global Warming. In the Midwest we're supposed to get a break after the "cold front" moves through late tonight. Uh-huh. A "cold front", supposed to break the heatwave and be lots cooler. What part of 85 degrees is so...