But Then Munitions Rain and We're The Epicentre

People. Are. Dying!

Perseid Meteor Seen From Space, NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center, 2011

For the most part I ignore Valentine's Day, though there was that one time I threw darts in lovers' eyes. I had in fact been planning to write something for said date, but at the New Year I decided to pursue a course of action that might not result in it being like every other year. Anyway, I was enjoying my day off work on the 15th by sleeping into the afternoon and being slightly disappointed by the previous day's apparent lack of progress. I eventually got up and refreshed the BBC News page before heading to the shop. I thought it had finally happened. I thought the opening of Rendezvous with Rama had come true sixty four years and 47° longitude early. In hindsight that would probably have been top story rather than the horse-meat scandal. Had the circumstances been different, Chelyabinsk could have been a real turning point. Time, size, mass, angle, speed - particular variations could have seen the city replaced with a crater. The thing about Earth is that it's mostly water, so even passing over a major population area makes it a landmark event. In a world that retroactively edits out the Twin Towers from films released in the quarter of a century before 2001, how often do you think Deep Impact or Armageddon would ever be broadcast again?

Panic (Hang the DJ)

But the waters... receded

Sextant (NOAA), Public Domain

Predictions of the end-times are likely as old as creation myths as likely as old as history itself. The invention of cinema enabled the depiction of the ultimate dramatic scenario and so it began. The disaster movie as a genre emerged in the seventies (Towering Inferno, et al) as classically narrative compared to their modern antecedents - almost all stories are of characters facing an obstacle they must overcome; in the above case a fire in a skyscraper. They boasted highly popular actors in the lead roles which, like any other film of the era, drew audiences. After Jurassic Park demonstrated the sky was the limit with computer generated imagery the floodgates opened (a metaphor that could actually make an interesting post-modern disaster film about the effect of CGI on film-making). Now there was nothing that could not be depicted. A lot of the modern disaster films since the mid 90s can be attributed to one Roland Emmerich and his little known 1996 film Independence Day. Inevitably someone will chime in with the old adage about how any critique of 'low-brow' movies is a comment on how the critic cannot turn their brain off and just enjoy it. I enjoy Independence Day and I happen to own The Day After Tomorrow (which I last watched on October 30th) despite its ludicrous implausibility. I even have a Steven Seagal movie (Under Siege 2) amongst a home video collection that includes a number of foreign language films, but the film 2012 (dir. Roland Emmerich) is just bad. Not enjoyably bad... and you already know why I'd bring that up three years after release.

You Could Feel The Sky

Twentieth Century Fox (suck it, Murdoch)

The past few weeks I've been starting work whilst it's still dark and stood at my window waiting for my lift. The first day I was staring out toward the hills in the distance and a light appeared on the limb and grew brighter and brighter moving right until quickly fading. Whilst I wandered what I had seen, the same phenomenon repeated itself and then I realised I was watching the headlights of cars on the road along the hillside. Similarly, the first time I saw an Iridium satellite in the sky I wanted to believe it was something supernatural, but by actually being educated in my observation I knew it was only a communications dish catching the sun over the horizon. As someone who would like to see evidence of extraterrestrial life or of the paranormal, is it not odd that I've never seen an aerial phenomenon that I was unable to identify? I've got Mulder's I Want To Believe poster on my wall for more than just X-Files fandom. Most UFO reports really are of Venus refracted through swamp gas, because most people can't identify the brightest planet in the sky.

Ready Let's Go

Beyond The Infinite, Prij, 2005 

Every year I forget to write something on the anniversary of Yuri Gagarin's flight, and judging by the lack of material here this year was no different!

I remember when I was around nine, and hardly anyone in my class could name the first man on the moon, my dad had told me about the first man to go into space. He and the others that followed him were mortal men and women, but they have and will find themselves amongst the heroes in the sky. I'd rather kids want to be like Yuri Gagarin or Neil Armstrong than one of Simon Cowell's puppets because it's exactly what needs to happen in order to regain the future that should have been already.

One of the earliest releases from the original Human League was a tribute to Gagarin, but also a tribute to the people of the Soviet Union that made it possible. The Dignity of Labour chronicles the miners digging coal to make steel with which engineers construct the launch pad and craft that propel Vostok 1 and its occupant upward into the void.

[188]

Don't Steal Our Sun / The Past Inside The Present

under this clock..., paloetic, 2010

Time and tide wait for no man. A pompous and self-satisfied proverb, and was true for a billion years; but in our day of electric wires and water-ballast we turn it around: Man waits not for time nor tide.
-Mark Twain

For a few years in school I refused to set my watch according to Daylight Savings. The very idea of gaining and losing an hour each year was absurd. Noon is noon - the point of day when the Sun is directly overhead. Of course this is never actually the case in most places even within a perfect time zone system, never mind the absolute mess that passes for a system in practice, but it's accurate enough for common use. If DST irritates me (and it is as I write this at 1am 2am) then you can imagine what I think of the Daylight Savings Bil 2010.

There Is A Light That Never Goes Out

Home From Above, NASA (Public Domain), 2010

Looping hypnic orbit looking down. In the twilight I've looked up. Unfathomable distances separating the beacons. Laser light decoheres and planets resolve as less than a smudge. The universe is an explosion in which we exist. Soon we'll be blasted apart beyond horizons. The stelliferous era will be a faint memory as the stars extinguish and galaxies degenerate. DNA strands huddle round an ocean vent for warmth. Somehow the connection is made. We'll leave the cradle, disappearing into eternity. We'll slide through forever. Slide away.

The Darkness That Lurks In Our Mind

The Void (149), Prij

One of my favourite programmes in the mid 90s was Strange But True? - one of the very few programmes I ever watched on ITV. As a child just old enough to have grown up with Ghostbusters 2, I was fascinated by the paranormal in the same way the more exotic scientific phenomena, like blackholes, captured my imagination. Because it was broadcast on a Friday night, I was allowed to stay up to watch it. I clearly remember one particular evening, The Enfield Poltergeist episode (broadcast 20/10/95) kept me awake a lot longer. I was nine years old at the time so that's understandable. I was too young to have seen Ghostwatch, but I obtained a copy last year and at the age of twenty two I was disturbed enough to sleep with the light on.

Back in July I was lying awake one night with the window open. I go to bed early on a Friday because I have to get up early on Saturday morning for work. I had already been in bed around two hours without managing to fall asleep. By now it was midnight and I was on the verge sleep when I was startled by a noise outside. What at first I thought was water running down a pipe resolved into a loud growl. I live one floor up so either it was on my windowsill or in the garden and very loud. So loud in fact that my brother who didn't have his window open went out to see what it was (as the cat had gone outside). Neither of us could see anything in the dark, though the cat appeared and was watching the far wall that separates downstairs' garden from next door. Foxes occasionally wander this far down from the golf course and cemetery, but it would have had to have vaulted two fairly high fences to get into our garden, and jump the wall to get out the other side and I've heard foxes before but never that sound. Nevertheless, the most reasonable answer is that it was a fox but reason pales to emotion in forming impressions, and that is from which the mind jumps to conclusions.

Heaven's Night

Silver Falls 19, emperley 3, 2010

Early Friday after midnight I was reminded of the Perseid meteor shower. I spent nearly an hour standing still looking straight up into clear skies. The first I saw flashed across half the sky. I saw perhaps half a dozen. One of the brightest left an afterglow in either the atmosphere or my eye. Stood in the garden without sign of another, I could have been the only one watching.

After a while I couldn't crouch out of the streetlights anymore and lay down on the stairs, like an uncomfortable recliner. I lay there staring through space. I stared through it and at it. I started to move through it. As the stars rolled over I had to call it a night before I fell asleep. The night sky was probably the view our ancestors woke to on first watch. Unobstructed by skyglow, they would have seen the milky way and the enshrined heroes pivot on the celestial sphere.

You could feel the sky.

Sunshine of Your Love

I fell with her every rise
Dawn watched over me
I'd love to set eyes on blinding beauty
I'll die long before her

1] PAST.fall(ATELIC).PERFECTIVE.ATELIC-SUBJECTIVE-1p-SINGULAR rise.PRESENT-ACTIVE-PARTICIPLE.GENITIVE.COMITATIVE 3p-NEUTER-SINGULAR-OBLIQUE.GENITIVE
2] Dawn.NEUTER-AGENT watch(TELIC).TELIC-OBJECTIVE-3p-NEUTER-SINGULAR 1p-SINGULAR-OBLIQUE.LATIVE.SUPERLATIVE
3] eye(TELIC).VERBIFY.OPTATIVE.OBJECTIVE-1p-SINGULAR beauty.CONCRETE.PATIENT DUPLICATION.blind.SUBJECTIVE-3p-NEUTER-SINGULAR
4] die(TELIC).SUBJECTIVE-1p-SINGULAR.FUTURE DUPLICATION.long.CONCRETE.SUBJECTIVE-1p-SINGULAR 3p-NEUTER-LOCATIVE.PRECEDE

he.darew.[a]qi.kar rejas.[a]dán.en'ad ha.ne
hág.aṭa wirah.e ma'aw
xokå.je.jih.[a]me ṭiw.en.am ba.bál.a
diwax.[a]ke.z ta.ṭaláw.[a]ke hej'per

Hedarewaqikar rejasadánen'ad hene
Hágaṭa wirahe me'aw
Xokåjejihame ṭiwenam babála
Diwaxaket taṭaláwake hej'per

[Sample now out of date, IPA removed]

Share Bride Failing Star

Nighthawks, Edward Hopper, 1942

Last night the sky was the clearest I've ever seen without a power cut. The faint smudge of the central belt of our galaxy was just perceivable. My gaze was fixed upward, waiting for something to happen. A streak of light 100km above. The trouble with Earthgrazing meteors is that there's no sound. You can't write 'woosh', regardless of whatever noise your mind tries to associate with the spectacle. Shiin is apparently the closest you could get to describing it.

The Stars Look Very Different Today

Following on from my chance spotting of a Perseid earthgrazer in Zakynthos, the clear skies of the past week have led me to hang (uncomfortably) out of the window, uncomfortably twisting my neck upwards for extended periods of time. What did I see in that week?