the lunatic is on the grass

After the scheduled decommissioning of the fleet of space shuttles this year, NASA will be more or less grounded.  A portion of the funds that were to be allocated for space exploration will go to sponsor private ventures, which is surely exciting but Virgin Galactic does not front the same officiousness as a national space agency.  The US is dropping some of its support missions to the International Space Station and curbing other projects, including the re-commitment for a manned-moon mission.  I understand that there are more immediate priorities and that crown and coffer have evaporated, but it's more than a bit sad that there won't be that sort of spectacle and wonder for the forseeable future.

shah

Apparently Ahmadinejad has accelerated his rhetoric, and the US is responding by deploying more land- and sea-based missile shields for its allies in the Gulf region.  Iran is promising to delivery "a telling blow to global powers," on 11 February, which is the 31st anniversary of the Iranian Revolution that installed Ayatollah Khomeini.

somnambulism

Looking through the archives of the fantastic psychology blog Mind Hacks, I came across this brief on a UK author's book about couples' sleeping positions and what that nighttime arrangement says about their relationship.Different sleeping arrangements had lovely descriptive names, named like yoga positions, but it all smacks of pseudo-science, like phrenology, dowsing or hollow-earth theory.  I doubt whether someone should judge their relationship too harshly if they perfer the one-footed king pidgeon over the downward facing-dog at night.  Besides I am sure no one is frozen in place while they sleep and bed size should be considered too.

padding

Contemplating how casual computer use might shift with the iPad, moving away from something you cannot keep in your pocket or clip to your belt or let it rest on the president's desk, I have images of people lugging big boom boxes on their shoulders in the mid-eighties, even though we had the Walkman.  I also think about those novelty over-sized sunglasses and maybe some of the accoutrements, like 4 foot long giant pencils, that they sold at Spensers Gifts or on the New Facts of Life.

time takes a cigarette

German AP reports that the European Union is extending the push for 100% compliance for a smoke-free workplace and has issued an edict that calls for the dismantling and removal of all ashtrays mounted on building exteriors and in public parks.  One already cannot purchase a new car with an ashtray or an electric cigarette lighter, and the smokers have been banished from restaurants and have been reduced to shivering, loitering in entryways.  Now cigarette butts will just be strewn all over parking lots and stuffing rain gutters.   I like how that's done, rather than just tossing a cigarette on the street--pushing it down the sewer grates, I am sure, keeps the CHUDS appeased and lets them get their fix without attacking humans.  I hate to think of the EU dispatching bulldozers to eliminate the smokers' outposts.  Ashtrays can sometimes be works of art and I think would be nice to keep around, if for nothing but the nostaglia and anachronism, like those antique metal posts sometimes by exterior doors to scrape horse poo from your boots.

reportage

Bad Karma, our fair city, made a unenviable appearance on the national news as part of Siemens' announcement to cut some 2000 production jobs in Germany.  About 850 of those will come from our local plant and sent to a facility in the Czech Republic.  Siemens is not the only comparable, industrial, technical employer here but it will have a huge impact.  American Woman, stay away from me--just let me be.  I have fortuneately not heard of this happening much yet--only when redundant government positions are eliminated (through atrition) when the country unites or when US military bases are mothballed.  A colleague, however, predicted we would be seeing this kind of job flight in response to the bad economy about a year after it began in the States.  My former village, Wicked-Awesome-Heim, was also in the following traffic report--a truck had jack-knifed in the driven snow on the stretch of road running parallel to the village walls.  Fortuneately, no one was hurt. 

anticipation

Of the iPad, Karl Marx summed it up really well--"New thing, desirable, old thing, undesirable."