Ten Years of Weird

I'm interrupting our regularly scheduled programming for a quick anniversary acknowledgment.  This blog passed its official ten-year anniversary more than a year ago (the first post was on January 2, 2011), but I assert that today is an even more special day.  Exactly ten years ago today, I began my first April A-Z challenge.

Even though that wasn't even my first month-long blog challenge, I still see it as the birth of the true voice of this blog.  Prior to that, I had been focused much more narrowly on the two original topics of the blog: old-school D&D and Hermann Hesse's Glass Bead Game.  I think I even tried to always "pay the Joesky tax" (does anyone even remember what that means?!) on RPG posts, too.  But on April 1, 2012, I began to mentally remove those fetters.  That's when things really started to bloom.

To be clear, there's nothing at all wrong with my original topics.  I keep pondering & writing about them quite a bit.  But I think I really needed the freedom to more completely follow my weird, as they say.  (Note this internal blog link is from December 2011, so I think these juices were stewing prior to that fateful day exactly a decade ago.)

In April 2012, and over the next few years, I met quite a few fascinating people, one of which I count as one of the most important people in my life despite having never met in person.  I've gone through a lot in the last decade -- a new job, moving across the country, loss of a parent, hitting my 50s -- and this blog & its people have been lifelines at times.

I can't promise a return to super-active blogging over the next decade, but I still value this place and the chance it gives me to, well, be Cygnus!

Noctology

Okay, I know the worst thing you can hear from someone is "Hey, let me tell you about this dream I had last night."  But in this case, I hope you'll indulge me.  If anything, it's given me some cool stuff to think about.

In the dream, I was at a middle-school reunion.  That in itself probably seems kind of odd to many readers, since those don't seem to be common.  In the late 1970s, I think some administrators in my school wanted to out-Montessori the private schools or something, so they created a weird experimental class for some of the 5th and 6th graders.  Lucky me.  That first year, our teacher looked and acted like Annie Hall.  The second year, our teacher was an ex-priest who yelled at us a lot about our apathy.  We didn't really learn a whole hell of a lot, but I'm still great friends with many of those weird kids.

Okay, the dream.  I could name the four classmates I was sitting with at this imagined reunion, but I won't.  In that bit of subconscious reality, we had all become scientists of some kind, and we had just (in an hour or two of chatting at the reunion) made a major collaborative discovery about how the human brain works.  We managed to prove, conclusively, that the brain actually does make a permanent record of everything it experiences -- both external perceptions and internal trains of thought -- and that aging does not degrade that record in any way.

Unfortunately, we also proved that it's completely and utterly impossible to retrieve those records past a certain point.  Something about the brain carefully laying down layers of cells on top of one another, and you'd have to destroy the brain to peel them back.

But still, we showed (somehow!) that nothing is ever really lost.

The actual first moments of my dream were maybe just 10 or 20 seconds of happy chatting about the fame and fortune that would soon be coming our way, once we published our amazing discovery.

I didn't mention that the reunion wasn't just for our little nerdy group.  There were hundreds of people there from many other classes and years at the same school.  Jocks, too.  Dreams can be very cliched, can't they?  The jocks mounted a kind of mock "attack" on the nerds.

It was actually just a jokey pantomime of an attack; nothing truly dangerous.  Although it was meant in good fun, it still impelled our group to laugh along for a second or two, then grab our drinks and find some more peaceful place to chat.

Dreams being what they were, we found ourselves in a much older and decrepit part of the building hosting the reunion.  It essentially was a huge rickety barn filled with junk.  Have I been watching too much American Pickers?

Ever the nerd, I sought out the piles of old books.  In waking life, I've been working a lot on my teaching, so in the dream I found all kinds of useful resources.  Old textbooks.  A module for teaching the stuff that I'm teaching right now, but with the theme of the Netflix show Stranger Things.

I also found a set of astronomy books, but they were filed alphabetically under the letter N.  The reason is that some of them had the title "Noctology."  The study of the night.  I swear to you that I had never heard that word before, and a Google search tells me that not many other people have, either.

That's essentially the dream.

And I'm absolutely entranced by the idea of being a full-on Noctologist.

Sure, I've always been a stargazer.  Readers of the blog have seen plenty of sci-fi fandom here, and a bit of actual astronomical musing, too.  It's under the stars, and only under the stars, where I feel an immediate emotional sense of divinity. I look up, remember what it is I'm looking at, and I think "Oh yeah, that's right. I love you. How could I have forgotten since the last time I was out here?"

But noctology isn't quite the same as astronomy, is it? About 25 years ago, I was introduced to the folk singer John Gorka, and saw myself in "Good."

I am good at night
I am good at night
Sun don't fit me right
I tried with all my might
I am good at night
I am good at night

There are plenty of other musical paeans to the dark side like this.  One that I think is kind of interesting is inserted subtly in just a single line of Poison's hair-metal ballad "Every Rose Has Its Thorn."  You remember the line, don't you?  "Every night has its dawwwwn..."  For years, that line just passed over my head.  I assumed it was just conveying that old saw about it always being darkest before the dawn.  But look again, in context with the rest of the verse.

Every rose has its thorn
Just like every night has its dawn
Just like every cowboy sings his sad, sad song
Every rose has its thorn

Each line begins by talking about something good, then says how it can be ruined by one little flaw.  The night is the good thing, and the dawn is the flaw!  Good old Bret Michaels... closet noctologist.

I wonder how much more I should explore noctology as a frame of mind.  I kinda sorta started already a few years ago, with some thoughts on cosmicism.  There are traditions -- both real (Judaism) and fictional (Tolkien's elves) -- that start the new day at sunset rather than sunrise.  There's Mozart's star-studded Queen of the Night in The Magic Flute.

Technically, she's the villain, but she's also enough of a force of nature to snag the only slot for opera on Voyager's golden record that was sent out into the darkest reaches of space.

Nocturnes and aubades.  Night owls and early birds.  Nuit and Hadit.  Cherry red and midnight blue.

There's a lot there to ponder, and I don't have a crisp ending to bring it all together.  Maybe coming up with the perfect words is a concept more appropriate for the stars.  The night is okay with letting stuff happen, then layering it over with other stuff.  Nothing is ever really lost, after all.

Holiday Roundup

Ever since my new job started in 2015, this blog has definitely taken a back seat.  I'd like to try to reverse that a bit, and maybe by posting a quick list of highlights (from 2018) and wishes (for 2019), I can kick things into gear.  Anyway...

HIGHLIGHTS

1. A few months ago, I was hugely flattered and humbled to receive blog comments from one of my favorite authors.  The wonders of the internet...

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2. This year, an old classmate of mine from 5th & 6th grade (roughly ages 10-12 for non-US readers) joined Facebook, and we spent a few weeks over the summer reminiscing over the groovy late 1970s.  Digging into old boxes from that time revealed something else that I had forgotten:  As a kid, I once wrote to sci-fi author Arthur C. Clarke, and he wrote back!  It was just a form letter, but he added a few flourishes at the top and bottom...

For the life of me, I don't know why I didn't remember this when I wrote this post.

By the way, I'm not sure what the "P.T.O." at the top meant.  Clarke's letter came from his home in Ceylon... now Sri Lanka... so, maybe "Pacific Theater of Operations?"  Doesn't sound right.  "Please turn over?"  I think the sheets were typed on one side only.  Any ideas?

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3. This blog has gone into some oddball territory, but I'm not sure if I've ever talked much about my love of coins.  I never really amassed a huge collection, but I've always liked the history, symbolism, and lore.  I also have had a sweet spot for the pre-decimal coinage of Britain... you know, pounds, shillings, pence, farthings, and so on.  At two different times this year, I took a deep dive and constructed some interesting graphical images.  First, some nice visual examples of the classic types, with their amounts laid out clearly:

Next, after finding an auction catalog of weights of silver coins -- listed by monarch from the Dark Ages to the 20th century -- it was interesting to tabulate and plot how British silver money has been "debased" over time... i.e., how the amount of silver needed to make up one "pound sterling" got smaller over the centuries.  Here's the data:

Click on any of these to enlarge

Note the gradual drift downward from 1400 to the late 1600s... until Isaac Newton came in (as master of the mint!) around 1700 to bring together perception and reality!  There's also a mini-history of metal-working technology in this plot, too.  The spread of weights gets narrower over time, as mass production became more accurate.

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4. What do the following songs have in common?

The Who's Baba O'Riley, Slade's Run Runaway, BTO's You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet, and Rush's The Necromancer (final part: "Return of the Prince").

I'll attempt to hide the answer on your screen... just highlight the text to see it:

The majestic I-V-IV-[V]-I chord progression!  (That second [V] in square brackets is optional; just lengthen the IV if it's missing.)  I don't know why, but that particular progression does it for me every time.  Finding quasi-universal patterns like this is a fun side-quest in my search for a playable Glass Bead Game....

WISHES

1. Believe it or not, I'm still working on a piece of short fiction that I first got excited about in 2014.  The first draft is about halfway done, and I've gotten some feedback on that half from the best writer I know.  I've got my fingers crossed that I'll grab enough time to finish it this year.

2. Yes, I'm also continuing to add notes to my corpus (corpi?) of thoughts about: (a) the Glass Bead Game, and (b) my own D&D retro-clone Homebrew '82.   Low low priority these days, but still going.

3. I've been slowly working my way through the 33 short stories in Dangerous Visions, the ground-breaking book edited by the late Harlan Ellison and published the year I was born.  This anthology exemplified the "New Wave" of the time, and it was only this year -- after collecting Harlan's works for the past few decades -- that I found a copy at a used bookstore.  As I read each one, I'm writing spoiler-free mini-reviews, and ranking the stories into 3 groups (skip, okay, wow).  I'll publish them on the blog when I'm through the whole thing.

4. I'm kinda sorta still doing tumblr, even after the controversial purge of NSFW content earlier this month, but I'm mainly just collating and reblogging stuff I find cool.  I'll occasionally scan images from old comics or magazines that I haven't found online, or maybe post some of my numismatic musings (see above), but I'm not a super-user by any means.

I hope everyone who got to the bottom of this post has an awesome 2019!

Second star to the right...

Should I start a category of posts for "tropes that get me every time?"  For some reason, this well-known line from Peter Pan provides instant feels.

There's something ineffable -- especially to this person who's thought a lot about the equations that govern the physics of the stars -- about setting such a whimsical course into the boundless, impossible ether.

Weirdly, I don't think J. M. Barrie ever wrote the line the way everyone quotes it.  When I searched through the text of his original plays, all I could find is

"Second to the right, and straight on till morning."

Peter gave this as his address, and I'm sure the star was implied.  I just can't find direct mention of anyone saying "second star" prior to the Disney movie.  Did the star get added somewhere on the stage during the decades between 1904 (first production of the play) and 1953 (the movie)?

The line crops up in the strangest places.  At the end of the movie Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, Captain Kirk seems to set a course for Neverland...

I guess nobody on the Enterprise cared too much that the original "undiscovered country" (in Hamlet's original "To be or not to be" speech) was actually a reference to death.  Still, Captain Kirk was known for flouting no-win scenarios...

Another place where I hear echoes of this line are in the lyrics of Bruce Springsteen.  First, in 1973's Blinded by the Light,

Well, I jumped up, turned around,
Spit in the air, fell on the ground,
Asked him which was the way back home.
He said, "Take a right at the light,
Keep goin' straight until night,
And then, boys, you're on your own."

Not an exact quote, mind you, but I see it hiding in there.  Then he followed it up, later that same year, with Rosalita (Come Out Tonight),

Well, hold on tight, stay up all night,
Cause Rosie, I'm comin' on strong.
By the time we meet in the morning light,
I will hold you in my arms.

Maybe that's even a more distant echo of the original.  Am I hearing it whenever people rhyme "night" with "light?"  I don't know, but two years later, Bruce explicitly takes on the role of Pan himself in Born to Run, in which he addresses his girl by her true name,

Wendy let me in, I want to be your friend,
I want to guard your dreams and visions.

You know the rest, and you know the name of that place those tramps go, where they can walk in the sun.

Pop Head Canon

You're familiar with this "headcanon" thing, right?  It's just the idea that there are some stories and characters that we love so much, we can't resist filling in the gaps a bit.  Who among you doesn't have your own private little story about what Luke Skywalker was doing between Cloud City and Jabba's palace?  Or what Kermit and Miss Piggy's kids might look like?

For as long as I can remember, I've done this for pop songs.  They pack so much emotion into 3 or 4 minutes, but not a lot of detail.  I heard an old song today that reminded me of this, because sometimes the headcanon takes over the reality.  In all my desire for a happy ending, I forgot that Dave Loggins' Please Come To Boston doesn't end with him going back to Tennessee like he really, seriously, oughta.

Other times the headcanon is just me imagining specific people (real or fictional) as the protagonist of the song.  Tom Petty's I Won't Back Down came out around the same time as some other stirring world events, and the two are linked in my head.  On a lighter note, I can't help but thinking about fictional Al & Peg Bundy whenever Meatloaf's Paradise by the Dashboard Light is on the radio.  More recently, I realized that that the lyrics to that silly "cups" song is actually the perfect accompaniment to Clara Oswald's departure from Doctor Who last year... even including the "long way round."

Sometimes the stories from songs and TV shows are explicitly intertwined.  I'm sure virtually nobody will remember Christopher Cross' Swept Away, but it always makes me wonder whether, after the final episode of Growing Pains, Mike Seaver eventually fell out with whats-her-name and got on a plane back to Hawaii.

Then there are the ones that I'm convinced have some secret backstory, but I don't know what it is.  Do you know there are 2 seemingly unconnected songs, released 11 years apart by completely different artists, that both: (1) mention the River Seine in France, (2) are sung in an admonishing way to a listener who better stop doing something bad, or else, and (3) are positioned as the second to last track on the B side of their respective albums.  So, were Billy Joel ("Somewhere Along the Line") and Don Henley ("Drivin' with Your Eyes Closed") sending out a coordinated message to the same person, across the years?!

There are some songs, of course, into which I have to put myself as the protagonist, but no need to mention those.

Assyrian Ancient Astronauts?

Once again, I'm caught between two conflicting desires.  On the one hand, I want to write about something weirdly oddball and unique -- something special to me, something that seems to have no other home on the internet that I can find.  On the other hand, I don't want to make it look like I'm making fun of this strange little cultural artifact.

(Above, I said "once again" because I've done this dance before.  I'm still not sure I should have written about the infamous Alphabet of Neptune.)

Sigh.  I'll proceed, hopefully with enough caveats to show that I don't want to belittle anyone's beliefs or put down the creativity of a hardworking writer.

What's this all about?  The UFO craze from the 1950s to the 1980s led to some interesting publications.  As a teen growing up in northern New Jersey, we saw a lot of colorful pulp magazines from New York City that I'm not sure made it to other parts of the country.  I couldn't get enough of "Official UFO," which often contained long-form treatises about how to spot hidden aliens, Elvis' posthumous life in hiding, and all forms of visitations and abductions.  But something in the April 1980 issue of spinoff magazine "Ancient Astronauts" caught my eye...

See that blurb at the bottom?  "Cosmic mystery of the Assyrian poem!"  The article inside talked about a recently discovered clay tablet, translated by esteemed archaeologist Irwin Wilson (of whom the internet has no memory), and which proves beyond the shadow of a doubt that the ancients had astronomical knowledge only obtainable from contact with space-faring beings.

I'm being snarky.  Apologies.  My teenage brain kind of believed it (i.e., really wanted to believe it), while simultaneously realizing it must be a pure fake.  I kept the hopeful dissonance alive for several years.  As a result, it's been firmly lodged in the back of my mind for three decades.  Seeing it nowhere else on the web, I feel the need to preserve it.  Like a clay tablet buried beneath the shifting sands, maybe?  I won't reproduce the whole article, but I will show a scan of the first page, then transcribe the actual poem with some astronomical commentary on each part.

Click to enlarge

The "poem" is a list of ten children and their characteristics.  The idea is that they're metaphors for the planets in our solar system.  There were things there that ancient humans couldn't have known, but were only discovered "recently" (by 1980).  The kicker would be to find things in the poem that weren't known in 1980, but are now.  Let's search!

The first child, fleet and warped, shall by his mother be consumed in flame.

Mercury is the fastest moving planet.  I don't think it's particularly "warped" in shape, but its orbit is modified by the gravitational warping of spacetime so near the sun.  We're pretty sure that in 5 billion years or so, it will be the first planet to be engulfed by the dying sun.  All this was known in 1980.  :-)

The second child, though known as beauty, shall be found a cursed thing. Poison and strangulation shall lie under her diaphanous gown. Liar is her name.

A little harsh on poor Venus, don't you think?  Sure, its atmosphere turned out to be dense and highly toxic.  But before that, all we had was Edgar Rice Burroughs and his phantastical dreams of a tropical paradise under all those clouds.

The third child, brother to them all...

Interesting choice for Earth to be gendered male, while the Sun is female.  Note that this line tags the word "brother" to refer elsewhere to humanity and its home.

The fourth child, angry eye of war, shall be a disappointment. No kin of kin to brother after long hope. His face is broken, four boils shall wash his face with tears.  Yet, he shall one day be known as hope.

I guess the Viking missions to Mars in the late 1970s were a bit of a let-down to baby boomers, for whom the terms "space alien" and "Martian" were almost synonyms.  The 1970s also saw the first detailed maps of Martian geography, which included the Tharsis plateau and its four huge volcanos (boils).  "Hope?" Nah, he shall one day be known as Mark Watney.

The fifth brother, lost to his brother, was by his mother most joyously born. All blessings and gladness did he receive and he shall be long remembered by _______ (The name or term cannot be translated -- I.W.) He is broken now and his body has been eaten by his kin -- to their delight or despair. His memory shall one day return.

Now it gets interesting.  The fifth brother seems to be the putative progenitor of the asteroid belt, which some used to call Phaëton.  Trouble is, the astronomers have pretty much come to universal agreement that the asteroids were never all joined into a single planet.  They just are remnants of the original "planetesimals" that were there at the start of the solar system.  Maybe asteroid mining will someday help bring all this rapturous joy back to the brother!

The sixth child is father to the mother and will rage like her. His children offer much hope to the brother, a link to _______. In the years he will feed his brother. He shall wear a crown but lightly, a mock to brother next. He apes his mother and so he must burn.

Big burly Jupiter is often thought of as a "failed star," but it's really nowhere near massive enough to "rage" like the sun.  The Voyager probes visited Jupiter in 1979, and found all sorts of surprises on its moons -- from ice floes on top of water oceans (Europa) to the most active volcanos in the solar system (Io).  Voyager also discovered a faint, dinky ring system.  Nothing in comparison to Saturn's crown, of course.

The seventh child, both fat and squat, bears a glorious crown and shall be loved by his brother for his first child. The child is faith to brother and will give up treasures to all. Blessed be the child of the seventh! He shall quench the angry eye of war and melt the tarnished sword.  The seventh keeps his child warm.

Saturn is the most oblate (slightly hamburger shaped) of the known large planets.  But what's all this about its first child, Titan?  Our Assyrian friends heap so much praise on this little moon!  In the 1970s we knew about its thick atmosphere, but it wasn't until 2004 that its liquid hydrocarbon lakes and rivers began to be mapped.  What it's got to do with Mars (the angry eye of war), I have no idea.

The eighth child, merriest of them all, shall turn his bald pate to his mother. Tipsy, he shall dance with his children where he lays.  He shall be crowned, but lightly.  His name shall be mystery.  Beyond sight of brother ... to follow his turning to the right star.  Immortal is his form.

Oh, come on.  Uranus is just merry because of the infinite puns made about its name.  It does orbit around an axis tilted at roughly 90 degrees from where it ought to be -- and it's got a faint set of rings -- but we knew that stuff in the 1970s, too.  Uranus was the first of the "modern" planets discovered via telescope, so it's only "beyond sight of brother" to the naked eye.

The bits about "to follow his turning to the right star," and immortality, intrigued me a lot.

The ninth child, terrible is his name, is the step but last to infinity. Lost of crown, lost of son, he shall be eclipsed by child stolen by broken kin. At his end shall be found by brother the new beginning...
 
The ninth is Neptune, and his "lost son" is probably meant to be Pluto.  I'm pretty sure the idea that some cosmic collision resulted in Pluto's ejection from Neptune's gravity was being talked about prior to 1980.  Pluto's weird orbit sometimes takes it closer to the sun than Neptune.

"Lost of crown?"  Nope, it turns out Neptune does have a faint ring system like the other gas giants.  Wikipedia says it was first discovered in 1968, but I don't think it was widely known until much later.

The tenth child, cold be his name, is slow and blind.  No heat there is for him.  Tiny are his children.  He wears no crown.  For many ages unknown will he be to brother.  He throws combs at his mother for her ingratitude. His brother shall know him when he takes his eyes from his face.

Here's Planet X.  Or, maybe Planet IX now that we've renumbered.  In the last year or so, there have been some tantalizing hints that there really may be a massive planet way out there, though the idea of it has been in circulation for almost a century.  If it exists, it may alter the orbits of some other asteroids, but it's not the same thing as the Oort Cloud (which does appear to send "combs" into the inner solar system).  "Eyes from his face" may refer to space telescopes?

The eleventh child...  (Here the manuscript breaks off.)

Oh, those Assyrian teases.

In hindsight, yes, this was hokey and silly.  It doesn't really pass the basic test of predicting things that weren't known in 1980 but are known now.  If only it talked about hexagonal clouds on Saturn, dried river beds on Mars, heart-shaped blemishes on Pluto, or pillars of salt on Ceres!

However, I've got to give it to the writer (listed as "Mark Matthews," but I wouldn't doubt pseudonyms were common) for assimilating so many contemporary astronomical discoveries into the world of myth.  This helped my teenage mind soar into the outer heliosphere, that's for sure!

Alas, alas, that great city Babylon

Despite my Biblical title, this post has absolutely nothing to do with the book of Revelations.  It's a celebration of J. Michael Straczynski's epic TV space opera Babylon 5 that ran from 1993 to 1998.

My family and I recently finished watching all 5 seasons, plus the 7 stand-alone movies, in an intense three-month roller coaster ride.  We're kind of in B5 withdrawal a bit now, but it was worth it.  In fact, watching it so "densely" meant that Straczynski's intrictate foreshadowing (in the early seasons) and heart-breaking callbacks (in the later stuff) weren't lost on us like they may have been if we only watched one episode per week.

I'm not sure how much needs to be said about the show and its background.  It takes place in outer space, in the 23rd century, and involves humans and aliens in a story of war, peace, love, and betrayal.  Straczynski plotted the whole thing out as a single story from start to finish, and he wrote something like 90% of the episodes.  Back in the 1990s, he also was ahead of the social media curve, contributing notes and answering fan questions in online forums.  I was a frequent reader of the Lurker's Guide to B5 back then, and I'm impressed that hoary site is still live.

Straczynski's writing was at times a bit stilted, but that was a small price to pay for the scope of his ideas and the depth of his characters.  I knew this was a special show from the earliest episodes, when the main character often reflected on his favorite poem.  Now that I think of it, the themes of that poem ran through much of the rest of the show, too.

The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep
Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,
'Tis not too late to seek a newer world.

The mind-blowing high-concept sci-fi ideas were brought to the show, in part, by creative consultant Harlan Ellison, about whom I've sung praises before.  The heart and soul came, mainly I think, from actors Andreas Katsulas and Peter Jurasik, who played alien ambassadors G'Kar and Londo -- sometimes bitter enemies, and sometimes bitter friends.

I never got into any of the Babylon 5 role-playing games, and there were a few out there.  However, there was one old sci-fi game that I think could be morphed quite nicely into the B5 milieu.  Weirdly enough, it was based on a much less intellectual, more action-packed pew-pew-pew, franchise.  Flash Gordon and the Warriors of Mongo (see a nice review here) was published in 1977 and was largely forgotten by 1978.  It was a hybrid of a role-playing game -- where your "player characters" could go where they wanted, and do what they pleased -- and a recruitment game -- where the overall goal was to gather up a team of allies to defeat bad ol' Ming the Merciless.  I think the main characters of B5 probably spent more time gathering allies -- and trying to prevent them from infighting and one-upping each other -- than they did fighting wars.  The idea of shoring up alliances in order to prevent war is one that I don't think games have utilized as much as they could have over the years.  This activity can certainly be gamified into something just as "fun" as blowing away your enemies, I'm sure.

Ah well.  There's so much else about Babylon 5 I could wax on about.  There was that "Day of the Dead" episode (penned by Neil Gaiman), when four deceased characters came back for one night, in the most heart-wrenching way possible.  There was Zathras!  There were some dangling loose ends, some of which I think were tied up in novels (that I'm starting to track down, naturally).  And there was love of all varieties... long-lasting, unrequited, obsessive, tragic, and comic.  I'm not sure whether the happy endings or the sad ones will stick with me the longest, but there are lessons in all of them.

Different Keystrokes for Different Keyfolks

As you may have guessed, I'm not going to let the lack of a new, over-arching theme for this blog stop me from posting about random stuff that I find interesting.  So, let me take this opportunity for a picture post in which I convince you that keyboards are cool.

The above is a close-up of part of the Commodore 64 keyboard.  I spent much of the 1980s figuring out the innards of that beastie.  It served me well.  Note that even back then, there was a superfluous "operating system brand" key -- I remember the "Commodore key" giving access to the weird emoji-like symbols you can see printed on the fronts of the letter keys.  Each of those symbols also served as shorthand commands for various things.  I remember that printing the heart symbol was obligatory at the beginning of most programs, since it was equivalent to a "clear screen" command.

But if you want even more keys for symbols, non-standard shift-key sequences, and overall high weirdness, you can't go wrong with the Space Cadet Keyboard:

Click to zoom... you won't be disappointed

Roman numerals!  Thumbs-up and thumbs-down keys!  Hyper, Super, and Meta?!?  I especially like the keys for set theory, partial differentiation, and infinity.  Hat tip to the great Ron Hale-Evans for introducing me to this one.

However, if you're really into the state of the art, I suggest you find an Optimus Maximus... in which each key contains a fully programmable little screen that you can change to any image you want...

This one made me think of the esoteric, customized keyboard (with a similar tactile look to it) that someone spent a lot of time in crafting for just one brief scene in the 1979 sci-fi movie Alien:

Another one to click on and be amazed

Note all the quasi-Buddhist Theosophical terms... Aum, Padme, and Hum all make an appearance.  Also Lingha and Yoni... as well as "Agaric Fly" next to "Trip."  (If you don't know, I ain't sayin.)  But what exactly is a "Druze Pile," and how does one get rid of "Shakti Excess?"  These keys might come in handy if you encounter Ascended Master Koot Hoomi on the seventh etheric plane, but I'm not sure how they helped Ripley blast a xenomorph out of the airlock.  See here for some additional exegesis of the fonts, buttons, and keyboards from Alien.

But anyway, now that we're firmly transported into the future, I can't help but also remember some other buttons and keypads out of my nostalgic sci-fi dreams...

Don't do it, Scotty!

Putting aside the obvious question (i.e., how would anyone remember what each button does if they're not labeled?), let me just point you to an amazing web page that tracks down the origins of every gol-dang button on the bridge of the original starship Enterprise.  Some were repurposed from existing electronic equipment, and some were made from pouring colored resin into ice trays.  Don't believe me on the latter, do you?  See some recent fan attempts to make some!

This image speaks to me in a language I don't understand, but must follow. :-)

Another sci-fi TV show with interesting background graphical elements was 1978's Battlestar Galactica.  I loved all the quasi-Egyptoid and pseudo-Mormon symbolism, but in a post about buttons and keyboards, the closest thing I can think of is the joystick of the Colonial Viper ship...

The image on the left is the one seen most often... "fire" and "turbo" are obvious, and "IM" (inverse maneuver) was only used once: a rapid stop and reverse.  The image on the right was shown rarely -- possibly accidentally -- since it was the unaltered version. This prop really came from the cockpit of a Vietnam-era surveillance plane; it must have controlled the remote cameras on the outside of the aircraft.

Anyway, that's all for now.  If you're hungry for more stuff like this, there's a lot out there for the astute searcher.  There's also a surprising amount of interest in deconstructing the methods and meanings of sci-fi TV and movie "interfaces," too.  The blog that explored the Alien buttons and fonts also delved deeply into Kubrick's 2001 and a few other movies.  This blog had fascinating multi-post musings about the interfaces of Logan's Run, The Fifth Element, and quite a few others.

Lastly, I thought I'd show you the most sophisticated keyboard of all.  For the budding pirates in the audience, I give you the Corsair!

 

Won't you please?

Won't you please?
Please won't you roll... for initiative?

Hat tip to the Old School Roleplaying FB page

In a way, it was the perfect gateway drug for RPGs and other imaginatory pursuits.  A trip to the Neighborhood of Make Believe every day?  Who could ask for more?  And given that land was filled with kings, trolls, witches, talking animals, and aliens from the Planet Purple (I'm lookin' at you, Arneson's Blackmoor) I see no incongruity here.

- - -

More content soon, folks.  This blog ain't dead yet!

Venus Paradise: Cyber Edition

I'm still not done thinking about the long-term goals of this blog, but there is one idea for a post that I've had for a few months, and I'd like to get it out there.  Does anyone remember these?

Some time in the early 1970s, I got a few of these color-pencil-by-numbers sets as Christmas gifts.  For young Cygnus, the color pencils were a godsend.  I loved the ubiquitous Crayola rainbow, but wax crayons left a lot to be desired.  They couldn't give you the fine lines of a pencil or pen... and if you stacked up a few of your creations on top of one another, the papers would stick together and get kind of goopy after a while.

I was fascinated by one particular brand... the Venus Paradise pencils, which had their own unique color palette.  Each color was assigned to an evocative name and a specific number in an esoteric sequence.  The numbers corresponded to the digits on the color-by-numbers outlines, but I don't remember filling in many of them.  I tended to just hoard the pencils and draw other stuff with them (and I still have some nubs left in a box somewhere).

 
So, a few months ago, I discovered a massive, labor-of-love web site for Crayloa crayon collectors.  Over the years I've also seen quite a few attempts at creating web-based color palettes out of the classic crayon colors.  But where's the digital love for Venus Paradise?  Someone might want to re-create their childhood color-pencil artwork as accurately as possible.  Okay, Cygnus (plus some image-grabbing software) to the rescue.

1. Deep Yellow:  (247, 210, 039),  #F7D227
2. Sarasota Orange:  (245, 120, 057),  #F57839
3. Poppy Red:  (231, 067, 069),  #E74345
4. Hollywood Cerise:  (255, 111, 145),  #FF6F91
5. Orchid Purple:  (089, 062, 103),  #593E67
6. Navy Blue:  (022, 057, 108),  #16396C
7. Peacock Blue:  (078, 195, 239),  #4EC3EF
8. Emerald Green:  (036, 179, 134),  #24B386
9. Deep Chrome Green:  (024, 092, 069),  #185C45
10. Photo Brown:  (136, 068, 032),  #884420
11. Chestnut Brown:  (067, 047, 026),  #432F1A
12. Midnight Black:  (017, 017, 016),  #111110
13. Ultramarine Blue:  (059, 123, 210),  #3B7BD2
14. Natural Flesh:  (246, 224, 181),  #F6E0B5
15. Lawn Green:  (056, 134, 079),  #38864F
16. French Green:  (203, 215, 087),  #CBD757
17. Smoke Gray:  (159, 153, 146),  #9F9992
18. Blush Pink:  (251, 133, 126),  #FB857E
19. Cherry Red:  (217, 057, 064),  #D93940
20. Arizona Topaz:  (243, 208, 119),  #F3D077
21. Indian Red:  (174, 064, 042),  #AE402A
22. Sky Magenta:  (208, 123, 154),  #D07B9A
23. Cotton White:  (254, 253, 253),  #FEFDFD
24. Lemon Yellow:  (253, 243, 132),  #FDF384
25. Bright Gold:  (195, 170, 117),  #C3AA75
26. Bright Silver:  (155, 185, 190),  #9BB9BE
27. Sky Blue:  (104, 192, 236),  #68C0EC

I so love those color names.  If I ever write a noir-ish crime drama, I'm sure I'll steal at least three or four character names from the above list.  I think #4 and #17 must be having an affair.

Here's what the digital RGB colors look like in graphical form:

Please do whatever you like with this information.  I'm still not sure why it's ending up on this blog.  I just know I had a blast putting it all together.  Right now, that's enough for me.

I should note that I never owned numbers 25 or 26.  According to the web, these two were the rarest colors of the bunch.  It took me a while to even find an image of #26 (see below... ain't it bee-u-tee-ful?).  For #25 I had to go slumming with online images of other brands to even begin to guess what "Bright Gold" might look like.  I'll find one someday!  :-)

Q is for the Qesheth Connection

Preface:  I missed posting this on its proper day yesterday.   I was on a plane back from a crazy 3-day trip to give a talk in a foreign land, and now I'm back to packing boxes for our ongoing move from a temporary apartment into our new home.  Busy busy!  :-)

- - -

Some letters require a stretch.  You'll see the meaning of my "Q" soon, I promise.  I also apologize in advance if I'm including too many song lyrics to the detriment of "real" manifestos.  But this is one of the first ones that I knew I had to include somewhere in this list.

The Rainbow Connection, written by Paul Williams and Kenneth Ascher, was the first song that you heard in 1979's The Muppet Movie.  Sung by a little green frog and his faithful human Jim, it's a wistful and hopeful song that I think goes a lot deeper than Kermit's Florida swamp.

Why are there so many songs about rainbows
And what's on the other side?
Rainbows are visions, but only illusions,
And rainbows have nothing to hide.
So we've been told and some choose to believe it
I know they're wrong, wait and see.
Someday we'll find it, the rainbow connection,
The lovers, the dreamers and me.

I'm finding it hard to put into words what moves me so much about this song.  If I someday find that fabled connection, I think I'll find in these lyrics a resolution between the extremes from the previous two posts: Crowley's ultra-libertarian Do your own thing, and Queen/Bowie's compassion-at-all-costs urge for us to Be kind to one another.  There's got to be room for both.

I'm sure that people have pointed out that Kermit's vision of optimism and hope is probably meant to echo (in part) the events following Noah's flood in the Book of Genesis.  The "bow of promise" was set in the sky as a sign that better days were coming for humanity.  That same basic idea seems to be coded in other rainbow tales, from the leprechaun's gold to the bridge to Asgard.

Who said that every wish would be heard and answered
When wished on the morning star?
Somebody thought of that, and someone believed it,
And look what it's done so far.
What's so amazing that keeps us stargazing
And what do we think we might see?
Someday we'll find it, the rainbow connection,
The lovers, the dreamers, and me.

In Hebrew, the word for "bow" or "rainbow" is Qesheth.  In the late 1800s, a secretive British society known as the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn made use of this word, and its optimistic symbolism, to discuss some even stranger ways that better days could be ahead.

Much like the Freemasons, initiates to the Golden Dawn had to go through a series of initiation ceremonies.  Unlike the Freemasons, though, these rituals were meant to take place in a complex symbolic landscape (known as the "Tree of Life") that describes the conscious and subconscious parts of the human mind, their interconnections, and their relationships to the divine.  The initiate's long journey "up the tree" parallels what they hoped would be an internal process of meditation, prayer, and mystical visions.  The end result would be a perfected, saint-like soul, that some claimed would be "more than human" (but many others dismiss that last part, saying that this is what it really means to just be fully human)!

All of us under its spell,
We know that it's probably magic...

Where's the rainbow connection in all this?  The first paths up from the bottom of the tree (where we all start out in life) were labeled with the Hebrew letters Q, Sh, and Th.  Put them together and you get Qesheth.  You need a little optimism when you're just getting started.

But the bow was only one half of the equation.  One of the key paths to mystical attainment was situated a bit above Q, Sh, and Th.  The vertical path corresponding to the letter Samekh shot right up into the heart of the Sun.  It also corresponded to the Zodiac sign of Sagittarius (the archer), so it was seen as the arrow let loose by the bow.

In that swamp, Kermit was just waiting for his chance to shoot that arrow into the air.  May we all get that chance.

Life's like a movie -- write your own ending --
keep believing, keep pretending.
We did just what we set out to do,
Thanks to the lovers, the dreamers, and you!

M is for Man of La Mancha

Sub-title: "I was a Teenage Carrasco."

Man of La Mancha has been a popular Broadway musical since before I was born, and it was based (in part) on a novel that turns 400 this very year.

You might be wondering where the manifesto is, here.  It's not the play.  I'd like to make the case that its most famous song, The Impossible Dream, contains lyrics worthy of nailing up on a church doorway.

To dream the impossible dream
To fight the unbeatable foe
To bear with unbearable sorrow
To run where the brave dare not go

To right the unrightable wrong
To love pure and chaste from afar
To try when your arms are too weary
To reach the unreachable star

The original story of Don Quixote was often slapstick and sometimes a bit cruel.  However, playwright Dale Wasserman's take on the conjoined lives of Miguel Cervantes and his fictional knight became something sublime.  The play contrasts the lives of two people: one successful and "sane" -- but cynical and selfish -- and the other "insane" but also kind, magnanimous, and super-inspiring to those around him.  Who's to say that the first one has more of a right to make his way in the world than the second one?

The second one, Don Quixote himself, sings The Impossible Dream as an encapsulation of his chivalric quest.  The repeated impossibilities in the lyrics make it seem he already knows that his worldview is out of step with everyone else's.  He doesn't care.

This is my quest
To follow that star
No matter how hopeless
No matter how far

To fight for the right
Without question or pause
To be willing to march into Hell
For a heavenly cause

For people my age, and a bit older, this song a bit of an old cliché.  We heard the likes of Robert Goulet and Jim Nabors belt it out on TV shows, after all.  But it was the 60s, and unrealistic idealism was in the air.  I wonder if the sky-high hopes of the Space Race were an inspiration for the lyricists.  This song was also was my first peek through some narrow cracks in a completely rationalist point of view.

I was first introduced to Man of La Mancha in a high school English class.  Our teacher (who was something of a 60s throwback himself) gave us all copies of the script, assigned each kid to a role, and had us read it.  When the script called for the songs, the teacher played them from a vinyl record of the original cast recording -- so we wouldn't embarrass ourselves trying to sing.

I was a bit upset with this whole situation at first, since I was type-cast (ever the science geek) as the rationalist villain of the story, Dr. Sanson Carrasco.  But, if you're familiar with the play, you'll know what I mean when I say this was a mirror that I needed to be faced with.

I'm not sure if I live my life up to the ideals of this song, but I strive, I strive.

And I know if I'll only be true
To this glorious quest
That my heart will lie peaceful and calm
When I'm laid to my rest

And the world will be better for this
That one man, scorned and covered with scars
Still strove with his last ounce of courage
To reach the unreachable star!

I is for Independence

I think today's post might be the most explicitly political of my A-to-Z series, but since the topic is about 240 years old, I don't anticipate it stoking up much heated partisan argument....

It may be naive American parochialism, but I have an unabashed love of the Declaration of Independence.  Although it's been drilled into the minds of schoolchildren for centuries, it's still very much a fiery manifesto.  Have we always upheld its words?

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

No, but our own failures should not detract from the worthiness of the ideal.  The original abuses that led to rebellion and revolution were laid out "to a candid world" in the Declaration, and capped with an air-tight conclusion,

A Prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.

Although on the face of it this conclusion may not be controversial, it's the application that's tricky.  What happens when some people think the situation applies, and others don't?

Thomas Jefferson wrote the original draft of the Declaration in June of 1776, and the Continental Congress in Philadelphia proceeded to do lots of editing by committee.  That's not usually a good thing.  However, it did prune away some of his more flowery flourishes (like shouting "our everlasting Adieu! eternal separation!" to Great Britain).  Unfortunately, the need for compromise between all 13 colonies also pruned away Jefferson's strong language against slavery.

My own connection to the events of July 4, 1776 is inevitably tangled up with the celebration of the U.S. bicentennial in 1976.  For those of you who weren't alive or old enough to know, the bicentennial was everywhere.  As a 9 year old kid, I couldn't help but get swept up in it.  Around that time I grew to love the musical 1776, which attempted to tell the story of the drafting and adoption of the Declaration as accurately as possible... with people breaking into song and dance for no reason.

Whovians will know that Ben Franklin there was the narrator of Tom Baker's imported adventures on PBS

Being that the bicentennial was also taking place within a decade of the Apollo moon landings, the patriotic imagery kind of got mixed up a bit.  At times it seemed like we were we celebrating our ultimate independence... from the Earth's gravity!  :-)  Still, I loved the lunar-themed reverses of the silver dollars from that era...

And how could I forget the anthem of the time, written (ironically?) by two Brits for their American friend's newly formed tennis team?  I've always identified with the lyrics -- especially since I spent many of my formative years in Philadelphia itself.  The analogy between America's independence and the hard-won freedom of a lone young person, striking out into the world, has always been with me.

The whippoorwill of freedom

Round-trip Roundup

In Harlan Ellison's Eidolons, there is an ultra-short story within a story (maybe just 500 words) that begins:

"I awoke at three in the morning, bored out of sleep by dreams of such paralyzing mediocrity that I could not lie there and suffer my own breathing."

The remainder of that paragraph-long piece tells how the protagonist's boredom was "cured" by an unimaginable sequence of horrible calamities.  The piece ends with the only possible reflection:

"Somehow, the universe always provides."

Well, for me, the universe is providing.  :-)  No horrible calamities as yet (fingers crossed), but getting ready to move across country is making for some big-time disruptions that my goodly wife and I haven't experienced since our 20s.  I got home yesterday from a quick trip to sign an apartment lease.  Finding a place that's okay with our four felines was stressful, but luckily the in-person part was completed in just one day.  A red-eye flight got me home before a big snowstorm hit the Rockies.

But!  The chaos of packing has unearthed some interesting artifacts.  I found the colorful plastic name-tag from my first job: picking up garbage at a Six Flags theme park.  (No image to post, but just think of the "pieces of flair" from Office Space.)  I found a copy of the Norse myth play that I wrote at the age of nine.

A more recent layer of strata revealed the robot costume that we made for my son when he was 5 or 6...

A bit of garage mold necessitated a ceremonial disposal, but not before fully documenting the find, like good archaeologists.  :-)

There were also a few things that connect with the history of this blog...

Yup, this was pretty much a true story.  Below is the most surprising find...

...which completes the documentation of the Alphabet of Neptune that I previously revealed to the world.  The above symbol, by the way, is the "Interplanetary Peace Sign."  Nice.  If there's interest, I could conceivably post a translation of the whole booklet.

There hasn't been much time for writing fiction, but on the plane I added quite a bit to the copious notes and outline for the story that I talked about last time.  My characters now have names.  :-)

The Songs of Autumn?

A few months ago, some of us hosted a blog-hop called The Songs of Summer, in which we waxed nostalgic about a handful of favorite hot-weather songs.  I originally thought of this as a way to share virtual "mix-tapes," but we ended up not using that particular phrase because it may have excluded bloggers too young to know about that particular piece of DIY-cassette history.

But, last weekend, as we've been starting to pack up our belongings for a big cross-country move, lookie what I found...

What could be in that dusty feaux-leather case?  What do you know... a combination of store-bought cassettes and mixy mixes.  (You can spot those from their dot-matrix-printed labels.)

Please click on all these images to make them (slightly more?) legible.

I hope my phone did a decent enough job in rendering these crackled gems.  The above was side one of the case; here's side two:

Too many memories to list them all here.  When I was first getting into Canadian prog-gods Rush, I made the era-spanning tape called "Tempus Fugit," but later it got mothballed as I eventually bought every one of their albums (on CD... but that's a later geologic era).

There are a few that I'm a little afraid to listen to.  The hand-scrawled tape titled "Scrambled Eggs" contains an impromptu collection of sound effects, clips, and recordings of myself & friends doing strange things in a college dorm room.  Were we actually funny?  Like I said, afraid to know for sure.  There's also a mix-tape of love songs from an ex ("A Shade of Music"), but don't flip it over to hear what I assembled after the breakup ("Heart of Darkness").  :-)

I tried to give my artistic side some room to play in making the tape covers.  It's amazing the things you can do with Steve Jobs' original 128K brick...

WBVR was the unofficial name of the collection of music and stereo equipment of a set of 4 engineering & physics students (well, I was the only physicist).  The name comes from the Beave, whom I've mentioned before.  His 45's were the core of the collection.

If you look closely at the Monkees' Greatest Hits (cobbled together from whatever we had... no relation to an actual greatest hits album), you'll see the rainbow logo of Six Flags Great Adventure, which the four of us visited on the emblazoned date to see the Monkees play, along with Herman's Hermits, the Grass Roots, and some other 60s wonders.

I thought I'd give you a look at one song list, this from the tape labeled "Carpe Diem."  (Gosh, I wonder what movie we'd just seen when I came up with that name?)  I always popped this one into the walkman when I needed a bit of an optimistic lift...

...though I can't for the life of me remember why I thought of "American Pie" as an appropriate inclusion for an optimistic, seize-the-day-ish mix tape.  :-)

Songs of Summer

Here we go!  This is my entry in the Songs of Summer bloghop, hosted by the Armchair Squid, Suze, and yours truly.  (I'm posting early, but not as early as Yaz Pistachio did...)  The goal is for each of the participants to post about 5 of their favorite summer songs, so between us we can swizzle up an awesome mixtape of tunes to carry us through the fall and winter.

I wonder if summer memories tend to overlap strongly with coming-of-age (high school?) memories.  I could have filled this list, and several more, with songs from just a couple of pivotal years.  You'll see those years represented below, no doubt, but I did try to stretch a bit both backward and forward in time from the days of Bueller and Spicoli.  :-)

1. Under the Boardwalk, by the Drifters.

I grew up just 20 minutes from the Jersey shore, so for me the idea of "summer songs" pretty much requires something that gets sand in your shoes.  It took me a while to figure out which sunny, beachy song would help me get this theme out of my system.  I could've chosen anything by the Beach Boys, of course.  Springsteen's Jersey Girl hits close to home, but the lyrical protagonist is kind of a jerk. The Ramones' cover of California Sun is awesome, but I only discovered it a few years ago.  Nah, I've got to go with this 1964 classic.  It's never gone out of style.  This is the prototype, the patriarch, the Ur-beach-song, for me.

2. Magic, by the Cars.

Okay, now let's jump into history.  It's June 1984.  Junior year of high school is ending, and little do I know that this will be the summer that changes everything for me.  More on that in a bit.  All I know in June is that some strange things are going down.  My best friend -- who normally was as straight-laced and nerdy as me -- was rebelling against the system and about to go to summer school for his transgressions (speaking truth to power, I still say).  I'd just had my first "real" kiss, after the Junior Prom, and was about to start working my first "real" summer job.  Life was feeling pretty topsy-turvy.  So, when I saw Ric Ocasek walking on water, crooning about how summer turns him upside down... and is like a merry go round... I knew I had my theme song for the coming months.

Twisted, under sideways, down.

3. Rock Lobster, by the B-52's.

Ah, but did I really know what life had in store?  Not quite.  Fast forward to August 1984.  I left my summer job early because I got into a three-week program for future scientists at a local college.  Even my nerdy, D&D-playing friends joked that I was nuts to voluntarily go to anything resembling schoooooool during the summer.

Suffice to say, going away to that program was a defining moment in my life.  For one thing, it helped me discern what I could, should, and would do, career-wise.  That was huge, but it wasn't the most important thing.  It put me in a dorm with 99 other kids who, more or less, were just like me.  Have you had this experience?  The realization that "These are my people," which feels both like a weight being lifted, and like an urge to close your eyes, fall backwards, and crowdsurf?  Down, down, down...

At a weekend dance party, one of these 99 fellow weirdos put on this weird record by a weird band I'd never heard of before, and whose crustacean-ish song I still don't claim to understand.  To this day, though, it brings me back to that time.

4. Your Love, by the Outfield.

I went on to my senior year of high school a changed Cygnus, and graduated in 1985.  Then came college in the fall, which found ways to keep blowing open my doors of perception even beyond what I've mentioned already.  New friends, new things to learn.  And I also had Philadelphia as a playground -- a big city to explore with those new friends.  In early 1986, we got the spring fever bad, and started making firm summer plans probably around March.  I earned some of my worst grades in college in that spring semester, but our many walking trips to the museums... parks... bookstores... oh, anything and everything... of Philly were worth cutting class for.

This silly pop song by a British one-hit wonder band was peaking along with our wanderlust, and I remember sitting back in the dorm room, playing it over and over on vinyl 45 with my two best college friends.  That song (whose lyrics, for some reason, I never cared to think one whit about) cemented those friendships and helped build us into the adults we wanted to be.

5. Nightswimming, by R.E.M.

I'm not sure if I have a coherent story about this one.  It was released in 1993, and I most associate it with a trip I took to a conference in Quebec in 1996.  Ten years after that Philly spring, I was a graduate student about to defend my PhD thesis and (finally!) go out into the real working world.  This trip was to a drop-dead gorgeous lakeside resort (Lac a la Truite, St-Michel-des-Saints), and we swam and kayaked on that lake in between talking science in the conference rooms.  It's still one of the only times when I've stood with my colleagues under a sparkling night sky and talked about life, love, and stellar astrophysics.  I don't know... something about this song just meshes with that moment.

Nightswimming

Remembering that night
September's coming soon
I'm pining for the moon
And what if there were two
Side by side in orbit
Around the fairest sun?
That bright, tight forever drum
Could not describe

Nightswimming

It's been interesting... and a bit scary... to use music to go deep into autobiography, here.  Apologies if I've blathered too much about peak experiences.  There were of course lows to match the highs, but summer isn't the time to focus on them.

Now, go (blog) hop around to see the other participants, good people!