BARNACLES

A few days ago, I decided to book myself an appointment with my Skin Croaker. (That’s Damon Runyonese for the dermatologist.)

Guys my age tend to spend a lot of time with the Dermo. With us, it’s not so much the pocky zits of adolescence, or even the occasional Taint-Warhead, but the effects of five or six decades of cumulative solar radiation exposure. As much as we all love a nice suntan, the radiation that tans us is also slowly trying to kill us.

When I was a young Snot-Nose, we would visit the Grand-’Rents in south Florida every year... and every year, I would roast myself to a nut-brown turn. Down the road, I may end up paying a stiff price for those childhood suntans, because Mister Skin never forgets an insult.

I know too many people who have been carried off by melanoma... including a colleague in her mid-forties who managed to survive a brain aneurysm only to succumb to malignant melanoma two years later. And so, whenever I see something that looks like it may be problematic, I hie myself down to the skin-doc and have it checked out.

She Who Must Be Obeyed had noticed a spot on my chest several months ago, and we both had been keeping our eyes on it to see whether it was changing or growing in an inauspicious manner. But after a while I decided that I didn’t like the looks of it; it was time to have the Dermo weigh in.

It took only a moment for her to make the diagnosis. “It‘s a barnacle,” she said.

Say what?

“It’s a barnacle. A skin tag. A benign actinic keratosis. People of a certain age start accumulating these things - they’re like barnacles on a boat. When you get enough of ’em, we can zap ’em off, but since it costs the same to zap one as it does to zap a dozen, you might as well wait until you get a few more. And you will get a few more.”

Sweet. I’m growing Gawd-damned barnacles.

It’s no big deal, but SWMBO has already drawn her line in the sand. “If you start growing a bunch of those things, and they start getting big and hanging off your face,” she warned, “they are coming right the fuck off.”

Well, OK, then!

THE LATEST GADGET

I’m not generally what people consider an “early adopter.” I like to wait until most of the kinks are worked out before I invest in major new technologies... but even I am a bit awestruck at the new iPad Apple unveiled a few days ago.

Holy. Shit.

Check it out. Watch the video. OK, it’s advertising, but doesn’t that product look übergeekerific?

I want one.

Even if, within a year, they’ll have new models out that make this first version look like a cinderblock. That’s the risk you take when you jump into the Modern Technology Pool.

This is so much like science fiction, I’m only sorry I can’t travel back in time to the Isaac Asimov of 1949 or the Orson Scott Card of 1985 and say, “Dude, we’re gonna be able to buy this thing in 2010!”

The only problem? That name. iPad puts me in mind of some sort of electronickal tampon... and I’m not the only one:



The skit above is over two years old. Prescient, innit? [Tip o’ th’ fedora to Houston Steve for the link.]

So how about it, Applefolk? Ya wanna rethink that name? What about iSlate? You can have that name - all it’ll cost you is a free iPad - er, iSlate - and a lifetime data service contract.

Henry David Thoreau and Fred Flintstone would be proud.

THE ANCIENT ORDER OF ROCKETEERS

Yabu calls me the Propulsion Engineer, and not without reason... for I have had a long, if intermittent, association with Model Rocketry.

Many of my Bloggy Buddies have seen my aerial exploits firsthand. While it’s not mandatory to fly a few finned projectiles at blogmeets, it’s become an off-again, on-again tradition of sorts.

My history with this hobby, however, goes back a good deal farther.

Back in the 1960’s, it was entirely respectable to have a Thoroughly Nerdly Hobby... especially if you were a thirteen-year-old kid. And so you could say I was entirely respectable, for launching rockets was about as nerdly as you could get.

Submitted here for your delectation and viewing pleasure is this Documentary Video that captures, in grainy 8mm film, a few moments in a rocket-studded summer of long ago. The year was 1966, and I was a few weeks away from high school...



Yes, we were nerds, then, back in those days of innocence before getting caught up in the Great American Vagina-Hunt. But we were children, then, too - and damn, we had fun.

TOTSTOSTERONE

No, it’s not a typo.

According to SWMBO, totstosterone is the hormone that makes grown men act like little boys.

We were driving along a few days ago and, as usual, I was busily amusing myself by making up silly song lyrics, producing disgusting noises, and indulging in any number of forms of Childish Behavior. Hey: It’s what I do. And that’s when She Who Must Be Obeyed had a flash of insight. An epiphany.

There had to be a physicochemical explanation... preferably one involving Big Words. And what better explanation than totstosterone... a hormone that, in males, is in all-too-good supply? (Plus, it’s a Big Word.)

Totstosterone. It’s what makes a Hugh Grant - happily married to a gorgeous woman - go get a blow job from a random crack whore. It’s why a guy will sit in a box seat at the opera... happily picking his nose. It explains most sports, along with institutions like NASCAR and Hooters.

When you’re on a hot date and your witty conversation is punctuated by attempts to crack up your dinner companion by making fart noises, you may be suffering from a surplus of totstosterone.

Alas, there is no cure. Don’t ask me how I know this.

NEW DEVELOPMENTS IN MODEL ROCKETRY

A Bloggy Rocket heads for the firmament.

I’ve written before about one of the great Nerdly Hobbies from my youth: Model Rocketry.

Apparently, I’m not the only nerd out there... because the infamous Yabu loves his rockets, too. So much so that he brought a pile of rocket-launchy supplies to the recent Hysterics at Eric’s.



There’s something magical about the combination of rocket-powered projectiles and half-drunken bloggers that sets the blood a-tingle. And Eric has the perfect location, with no nearby trees or obstacles that might interfere with recovery. Not.

We’ve indulged our Rocket Jones at earlier gatherings, most notably three years ago. But this year’s flights were exceptional. We made five successful recoveries out of seven launches, leaving two rockets to decompose slowly in the woods that surround the Straight White Compound. And every flight was picture-perfect, with the recovery systems deploying exactly as designed.

Speaking of recovery systems, we managed to steal a march on the model rocketry industry by inventing a totally new method... something that does not involve the conventional techniques of induced instability, parachutes, streamers, or gyroscopic motion - all long-established techniques of ensuring a rocket’s safe and undamaged return to earth.

I’m proud to introduce the Inflatable Ovine Recovery System (IORS).

Here’s how it works:

A helium-filled IORS (a spare unit is visible in the photograph below) is attached to a ground-based tether and released to an altitude equal to the expected maximum altitude of the flight.

The rocket is launched, using standard electrical ignition protocol.


Launch using standard electrical ignition, with spare IORS to right. [Photo courtesy of Teresa of Technicalities]

Activation of the ejection charge causes the rocket to dock with the IORS, in the special Docking Receptacle provided. The tether is then reeled in for a successful recovery.

I’ve posted a post-launch image below the fold to illustrate the configuration of the rocket and IORS after a successful recovery. The world of model rocketry will never be the same!

Post-deployment photograph of model rocket with Inflatable Ovine Recovery System (IORS), illustrating successful docking configuration.

ON BURNING MOUNTAINS

This rather dour looking individual is one Dionisio Pulido. You have heard of him, perhaps? No?

As the bartender asked the horse that wandered into his bar looking for a drink, “Why the long face?” Well, you’d look dour too if your hearth, home, and livelihood were, almost overnight, buried under a few million tons of ash and smoking rock.

Pulido, a farmer in the state of Michoacán, Mexico, was happily toiling away in his cornfield back on February 20, 1943, when a fissure suddenly opened up in the midst of said field. Sulfurous fumes wafted out of that crack in the earth as the ground shook with minor temblors. By the next morning, the fissure was no longer there, having been replaced by a cinder cone the size of a house.

The smart money, at this point, was on picking up and getting the hell out of Dodge... because the nascent volcano (for that is indeed what it was) kept erupting and growing for the next nine years, eventually reaching a height of 1,345 feet over the surrounding area and burying the nearby towns in several hundred feet of lava and pyroclastic material.


The Parícutin volcano in an early eruption, 1943.

The volcano, named Parícutin after one of the villages it demolished, is extinct now, but it has the distinction not only of being the newest volcano in the Western hemisphere, but also the only one the formation of which was observed from the very beginning. None of this really was much help to Dionisio Pulido at the time, who had not taken out volcano insurance and whose corn crop suffered mightily from the several million tons of rock under which it was buried. At least these days, he’d be able to enjoy a few minutes of fame. Perhaps a spot on the Today show, in which he could nod his head at Matt Lauer’s questions and pretend he understood a word of them. A YouTube video of him running away from a wall of advancing lava. And tweets... lotsa tweets.

I first learned of the story of Parícutin and Dionisio Pulido back in my Snot-Nose Days, and that story both fascinated and terrified me. There is a savage beauty in the elemental character of our planet, a reminder that we are but tiny insects crawling upon the surface of a very large sphere... but combined with this is the paranoid knowledge that if it could happen to Señor Pulido, it could happen to any of us.

OK, the odds of your being buried in lava by a volcano that erupts out of your back yard are much greater if you live in the middle of the Trans-Mexican Volcanic Belt than, say, on the south shore of Long Island, but what is rational thought to an eight-year-old kid? Had the movie Volcano, which posits a Parícutin-like eruption in the middle of Los Angeles, been released in, say, 1960, it might have sent me right over the edge.

I would gaze at photographs of the Parícutin eruptions, spellbound at the cinders glowing against the silhouetted slopes of that grim cone. I also learned of Mauna Loa and Kilauea, the Hawaiian volcanoes, thanks to the kind offices of the National Geographic. No African woman’s pendulous dugs held as much fascination for me as those fire-belching Earth-Titties.

Many years later, we would travel to the Big Island and I would see firsthand the very landscapes that had captured my imagination so effectively over thirty years before. It was a transcendent experience...

...but there must still be a lot of volcanic residue buried deep, deep within my brainpan, for every so often I will have Volcano Dreams... dreams in which I am once again living in my childhood home, where the back yard cracks open and reveals a sea of boiling, glowing magma beneath. Parícutin writ upon the palimpsest of Lawn Guyland? Perhaps.

I need to see a shrink, methinks.

AWESOME, DUDE

Wonder and amazement are in short supply these days, and the word “awesome” is sorely overused.

“These chili cheese fries are awesome, dude!”
“Duuuude!”

But forty years ago today, I witnessed something truly awesome: Men set foot on the Moon, our planetary companion.


Front page of the New York Times, July 21, 1969, a well-preserved copy of which resides in the Elisson Archive.

In a very different context, Arthur C. Clarke found just the right words to describe our feelings, and what that moment - the moment when Neil Armstrong hopped off that ladder and felt lunar dust under his feet - really meant:

This was the moment when history held its breath, and the present sheared asunder from the past as an iceberg splits from its parent cliffs, and goes sailing out to sea in lonely pride. All that the past ages had achieved was as nothing now...”

The words are from Clarke’s magnificent novel Childhood’s End, and are (in the novel) inspired by the arrival of aliens on Earth. But in a very real sense, our having thrown off the shackles of gravity and transported ourselves to another cosmic body is the end of our Human Childhood.

Now, if we could only stop acting like children.

I wrote about my impressions of the Apollo 11 voyage two years ago, and pretty much everything I said then is valid today.

We achieved such great things forty years ago. Why are we not back on the Moon, learning, building, and exploring, when the computational power that guided the Apollo 11 moonshot is now available in a device the size of a pack of smokes? Why do we no longer dare to dream of doing great things? Our bodies are earthbound, though they need not be... and our minds, if we allow them the liberty, can travel anywhere in the Universe.

HUBBLE TROUBLE?

Thanks to recent repairs to the Hubble Space Telescope conducted as part of the STS-125 Atlantis shuttle mission, we should expect its useful life to be extended at least through 2014.

It’s an amazing tool, the Hubble Telescope... and the latest fixes have made it even more so:

With the newly installed Wide Field Camera, Hubble will be able to observe in ultraviolet and infrared spectrums as well as visible light, peer deep onto the cosmic frontier in search of the earliest star systems and study planets in the solar system. The telescope’s new Cosmic Origins Spectrograph will allow it to study the grand-scale structure of the universe, including the star-driven chemical evolution that produce carbon and the other elements necessary for life. [NASA]

Since its initial launch in 1990 (and an early repair mission in 1993 to correct issues with the ’scope’s main mirror), the Hubble has provided a stream of astounding images of distant cosmic events. Here are a few:


Jupiter’s Red Spots.
[Image: M. Wong and I. de Pater (University of California, Berkeley)]


Star-Birth Clouds in M16.
[Image: NASA, ESA, STScI, J. Hester and P. Scowen (Arizona State University)]


Cone Nebula.
[Image: NASA, H. Ford (Johns Hopkins University), G. Illingworth (UCSC/LO), M.Clampin and G. Hartig (STScI), the ACS Science Team, and ESA]


Turbulent Gases in the Omega/Swan Nebula (M17).
[Image: NASA, ESA, J. Hester (Arizona State University)]

Some of these dramatic images depict phenomena that are reasonably well-understood, at least by current astronomical and astrophysical standards. Atmospheric turbulence on a gas-giant planet. Star formation. Other Hubble images have captured the accretion discs of collapsed stars, the titanic energies of colliding galaxies.

This recent image, however, has proven to be completely mysterious:


A cosmic mystery.
[Image: William Magnus]

What the hell is it, anyway? A quasar at the edge of the known universe? A chunk of ice and dust from the Oort Cloud that surrounds our solar system? The double-domes at JPL and NASA have been completely flummoxed.

Until now...

Cosmic mystery, revealed. It’s Ringo’s ass!
[Image: William Magnus]

Why, it’s the Cat’s-Ass Nebula!

A tip o’ th’ Elisson fedora goes to Morris William, who forwarded the two Mysterious Images above - taken by our nephew William on his Daddy’s iPhone!

THE (PLA)CENTA CANNOT HOLD

I have eaten a lot of strange things in my lifetime. My having a semi-adventurous palate, coupled with extensive travel in Asia, means that some, ahhh, interesting food has, at one time or another, crossed my lips.

But this... this is completely Beyond the Pale. Human Placenta!

Yes: in a Time magazine article graciously forwarded to us by our friend Catherine, intrepid columnist Joel Stein holds forth on the experience he and his wife had recently with the Placenta Lady. There’s even a video!

I encourage you to read it all (gag). But I will tell you in advance that the end result of the Placenta Lady’s preparations is a bottle of Placenta Pills. Capsules, to be precise. Which sounds vaguely medicinal... and which doesn’t impress (or horrify) me nearly as much as if she had sliced that sucker up and fried it with onions in a little duck schmaltz.

Never mind the after dinner mints - how ’bout some afterbirth-fer-dinner mints! Yeef.

SKY-TITS

What do you think this is?



Is it a close-up of Paula Deen’s cottage cheese-like asscheek? Donovan’s Brain?

No!

This photo will help:



Yes, indeedy: Those are clouds. Mammatus clouds, to be precise, captured by Morris William (SWMBO’s kid brother) on his iPhone.

Mammatus clouds bear a vague resemblance to the Pendulous Bosomage from which they take their name. Me, I call ’em Sky-Tits... because it amuses me to do so.

I HAVE DRUNK OF THE KOOL-AID...

...and it is Good.


The new Elissonphone.

Yes: I am now the proud owner of an iPhone.

AI YI EYE

Meryl Yourish reports that NASA, with the help of the Hubble Space Telescope, has managed to find the Eye of Sauron floating somewhere Out There, about 25 light-years away.



The scary-looking Eye is really a debris ring around the star Fomalhaut. (Who comes up with these kooky star names, anyway?)

Debris rings are formed, presumably, when dust and small particulates are blown out during the formation of a stellar system. Which, I suppose, would make this the biggest Blown-Eye known to humans.