there's water at the bottom of the ocean or someone has been lying in my bed

Just a few short months ago, the Kepler satellite opened its eyes on a postage stamp sized area of the heavens and nearly instantaneously seven hundred candidate planets popped into view. A parallel European Space Agency project was also hunting for stars possibly harboring planets using an alternate method of measuring slight gravitational perturbations caused by an orbiting body, as compared to Kepler's gauging the twinkling that happens when a planet partially eclipses its host star. Discoveries, I think, will be exploding like firecrackers from here on out. This excitement relegates mundane worries like the economy and manic power-grabs to the domain of petty Astronomers are planning to reexamine candidate sites to see if alien oceans or atmospheres can be detected by looking for glints of sunshine, like off of sunsets at the beach. There was no chance to test that method, however, before Gliese 581 g, as Reuters reports, was discovered slinking about the so-called habitable, Goldie Locks zone of a star some twenty light years away. It is a bit chauvinistic to think only life as earthlings know it is out there, but hoping that life, in all its creativity and super-abundance, might at least be familiar on a chemical level is comforting. The exo-planet in the constellation Libra has been unofficially called "Zarmina" after co-discoverer Steven Vogt's wife, and I think that's a perfectly spacey name for it.

the other shoe or mit schmähungen

Though obscured by wiry, frantic reports of a pandering and vacuous variety of that in no certain terms a terror-plot, kicking it Bombay style, may happen some where in Europe or America, or not--it sounds as if the Grand Poobahs at the Department of Homeland Security have been honing their vagaries by reading their Nostradamus, the Associate Press, via the Huffington Post, had an important dispatch.  A special court has been invoked in order to seek to prosecute Iceland's ex-prime minister for dereliction of duty when it came to minding the country's treasure.  The former government certainly had a role in the financial collapse and resulting ripples and though it could be agreed that the people's greed was on par with any duping or unscrupulous conduct and had their come-uppance by being summarily voted out, or that the charges will never stick or make up for squandered funds.  It is important, however, symbolically that a responsible individual does not escape punishment or is even rewarded for bad behaviour, because the perception and reality is that current and former leaders are immune from justice and summonses, whether from a kook wanting to sue the Queen or legitimately from the International War Crimes Tribunal, are toothless and too timid.  It is too bad the breaking news palette was too full to follow these develops--besides, the old terror bug-a-boo would be overcome, in Europe at least, by all the threats of transportation strikes.

ahoj-hoj

My parents are treating their house guests with a road trip to the Czech Republic with a posh stay in Prague. They took off this morning, and in a pretty nifty coincidence, it is the country's national holiday, St. Wenceslaus Day. I am excited for their travels and hope they're having a lot of fun, and it's definitely time for us too to re-visit that area.

doubleplusungood

Salon contributor Glenn Greenwald has a very important analysis of the US government's petition for internet omnipresence, drawing dangerous and uncomfortable parallels to totalitarian regimes in the Mid-East and China. Of course, this has repercussions that mean spillage far beyond US borders and for US citizens of interest. Internet utilities, the load-bearing beams of the architecture, like bookFace and voice-over-IP services, which have been conveniently embraced by the American government and military to enhance recursive meetings about meetings, will put the activities and opinions of people world-wide squarely in the hands of American benevolence. If one is not careful, nothing will be private or temporary any longer with archives made enduring, and neither will the flavor of the month, popularity be without a heavy yoke.