RSS Awards

Welcome to the first monthly Really Stupid Song Awards.

Runner-up: Shakira. She sings, “Lucky that my breasts are small and humble so you don’t confuse them with the mountains.” This song narrowly missed the top spot because something might have gotten lost in the translation, as so often happens. The song was probably even stupider in Spanish, but this is an English award.
And the winner is: Barbra Streisand and Barry Gibb for Stranger in a Strange Land, the ultimate soundtrack to a delusion. Barbra sings, “I write a letter every single day to a stranger in a strange land far away.” Barry sings, “Da-dada-da dadada-da-dada”… They’re so… happy! Starry-voiced and wrapped in warm, fudgy vanilla emotion. Little flocks of bluebirds dart through the song, you can see the rainbows stretched across sparkling waterfalls. A pink butterfly flutters coyly on each phrase. Lambs and lions lie down in dewy pastures, and in the hazy distance you can see a little nuclear family skipping along, waving goodbye to “somebody’s son” who’s going off to fight “somebody else’s war” with a flask of hot chocolate tucked into his rucksack.

Congrats Barbra and Barry! You win a fools-gold-plated copy of Springbok Hits Country Style (the one with Barbara’s Daughter and Snakes Crawl at Night, around summer ’81 – “I am Barbara’s daughter, I am Barbara’s child”; “Oh the snakes crawl at night, that’s what they sa-ay, when the sun goes down, then the snakes do pla-ay”), and a big box of Quality Street.

Nominations for next month’s award can be posted to Comments. To qualify, songs must have actual lyrics, but needn’t be current hits.

Being James

Stephen King tells a marvellous story about James Joyce:

“According to the story, a friend came to visit him one day and found the great man sprawled across his writing desk in a posture of utter despair.
‘James, what’s wrong?’ the friend asked. ‘Is it the work?’
Joyce indicated assent without even raising his head to look at the friend. Of course it was the work; isn’t it always?
‘How many words did you get today?’ the friend pursued.
Joyce, still in despair, still sprawled face down on his desk, said, ‘Seven.’
‘Seven? But James, that’s good, at least for you!’
‘Yes,’ Joyce said, finally looking up. ‘I suppose it is… but I don’t know what order they go in.’”

- From “On Writing” by SK

Yuri’s Night

Yuri’s Night

Whose night???? Yuri’s. I just learned that April the 12th is the anniversary of Mankind’s first ever space-flight, by cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin in 1961, and also the launch of the first space shuttle exactly 20 years later. Many, many people will be throwing wild parties on Yuri’s Night, the kinds of parties where toasts are made to The Final Frontier… parties where people have Sudoku-type tournaments and where if you don’t wear spectacles you’ll feel a bit out. THAT kind of party. The coolest kind by far. Ok so I’m no good at Sudoku but SOMEONE has to make the sandwiches and pour the drinks, don’t they? To infinity and beyond!


I have nothing at all to say about the cartoon blasphemy brouhaha. But I do have a sort of parable:

In Terry Pratchett’s alternate universe there is a collective of omnipotent being-things called the Auditors. They hate life, because it’s messy. They can’t interfere with it, though, because that’s against the fundamental unwritten Rules. They would cancel life in an instant if it weren’t for those rules. What they can do, is play little tricks on it.
Thus: “The ascent of mankind must have been a boon to [the Auditors]. At last there was a species which could be persuaded to shoot itself in the foot.”

(From Thief of Time by TP)

That’s all.

Save Our SALT

I have to post this long lecture-thing here. Have to, because I haven’t heard anything more about this issue lately and I fear somebody may be Sweeping It Under The Carpet. Maybe not enough people know about it, and so it’s probably my duty to post it up. Even if only 2 more people in the world hear about it. If Phil Plait gets to hear about it, then I’ll count him as a hundred people because he’s the only real Astronomer I know (and I don’t even know him and he doesn’t know me either), and maybe he can talk to Other Astronomers and maybe they can, I don’t know, do a petition or something. Something. Anything.

Sutherland, Karoo, South Africa. Desolate, and in the middle of nowhere, but famous in certain circles, because of SALT. The Southern African Large Telescope was built in Sutherland for specific reasons: no light pollution, minimal radio pollution. Crisp, clean air and all the stars you could ever hope to see in a southern night sky. It has a very important job, and it should be one of our most treasured possessions, but most (80%?) South Africans don’t even know it exists and if they did, they wouldn’t care much, or realise how important it is. (“Oh, look, it’s a telescope, that’s nice. Where’s the mall?”)

So “they” are now looking to do a golf course development in Sutherland. The reasons for "them" actually even thinking about wanting to do this in the first place are unfathomable to me... someone must have been pissed or stoned after work one evening and said, "hey bru let’s do a golf dev at Sutherland it’ll be fun." And so, a Proposed Golf Estate Development, a blazing thing sprawled out for kilometres, with state of the art irrigation plumbed straight into the water table and a dedicated power-plant (how else would they DO this? Call in David Copperfield? Factoid: Golf courses can use around two million litres of water a day. The Karoo is desert, and water-challenged as it is) festooning the night with bright garlands of light. Dubai-innie-Karoo, with all that goes together with that. No doubt they will go on about “upliftment of the community”, “job-creation”, etc etc but those are such empty, easy words to pull out of a hat when the schpiel comes to town. Please. This is all about Gary Player’s god-complex and the money to be made around it.

Observatory is a Johannesburg suburb, so called because that’s where the observatory was, way back when. Technically, the observatory is still there, although there isn’t any telescope anymore. How can there be? On an average night in Jo’burg you’re hard pressed to find the moon behind the light and smog, nevermind attempt a glimpse of the cosmos beyond. Now it’s a dome-shaped party venue. EXACTLY! That’s the point! It’s in Jo’burg. But we’re talking about Sutherland here, and we're talking about SALT, and the mere fact that the proposal is even under consideration by council is very, very scary. (Maybe they don't understand - maybe they think astronomers are the people who write the daily horoscopes in the paper and maybe they quite rightly suppose that you don't need a telescope to do that.)

Am I just being miserable here? Killjoy? Is SALT that important? Should we lay down in front of the bulldozers? Is that over-reacting? Should we hire an assassin? Would that be more effective?

There's hardly any noise being made about this. Two articles in the Cape Times and that's that. The astronomers at SALT didn't even KNOW about it. I think they weren't supposed to - "Project scientist at Salt, David Buckley... spotted the golf course proposal almost by accident on the Platinum Planet website..."
I don’t think this should just be allowed to go by without some sort of uproar.

Phil?

For the fearless

http://www.anzwers.org/free/universe/index.html

I’m not sure that this website hasn’t been planted by HQ for some nefarious purpose of the Intelligent Design (ID) fraternity, but it’s quite, quite awesome. Funny, I always automatically mistrust things with the words “anzwers” and “free” in the same line. Kind of a knee-jerk reaction. Still, even if it has been planted, I’m not sure it could really be that Dangerous. Unless the ID people are actually in cahoots with Marketing, in which case DO NOT CLICK ON THE ABOVE URL* unless you really want somebody mercilessly, stealthily and subliminally selling you a DVD of “What the Bleep Do We Know” (one free poseable Einstein figurine with every 100 units shipped). Actually, hmmm. ID and Marketing. A marriage made in Heaven? This is quite an interesting idea and I’ve just stumbled on it. Eina.

*It’s too early to tell, of course, so go on, just be brave. Really, it’s amazing. The visible universe…

Neil said...

“All my life, I've felt that I was getting away with something because I was just making things up and writing them down, and that one day there would be a knock, and a man with a clipboard would be standing there and say, ‘It says here you've just been making things up all these years. Now it's time to go off and work in a bank.’”

–Neil Gaiman

Experiment

I quite like this new green-apple-look template, which is oddly called “Rounders” by the Template People. Rounders I remember playing as a kid, it was something like but not quite cricket, mixed with baseball. This is apple-y though. I wonder: is there an html version of scratch-and-sniff ? A mouse-over-and-waft thingy, or something? It would be lovely to be able to have the scent of apples drift by as the page loads. I’ll have my… ahem… Eye Tea department look into that. (Dio – look into that would you? Eau de Summer Apple ok?)

If I made my own template, it’d look like this:

Many innocent people?

There was a full page story in The Star last week about a South African man who got conned by a young, pretty Russian girl over the internet. He parted with a good deal of cash and only realised his mistake when, after having sent her money for a ticket to SA (with two nights stopover in Paris as a special extra) she failed to emerge from the plane at Durban airport. She seemed so sincere, he said. He professes to regret his broken heart more than he regrets the lost cash. He said he was well aware that such scams exist; but that she did not grab any bait that he dangled (?), and was sweet enough (?) to have him “supersede my own set of rules and boundaries.”
Unbelievably, this credulous man is a 60-something attorney from Durban (ie, not a kindly old cabbage farmer driving a donkey cart in a remote village on the Isle of mists in the Land that time forgot... although… Durban… never mind) who had been “playing around on the internet” and visiting dating sites for some time, and who has “other internet girlfriends” too. He says, “I firmly believe that this is hurting many innocent people…” and wants the government to investigate and prosecute such scammers.
Come now, Sir. I might be hard and cruel for saying this, but you can’t have my sympathy.

Two Questions:
- Does anyone know what happened to Rolbos?
- Can anyone explain Carbon Trading to me in words I can understand?