Stars Are Stars -

 - And They Shine So Hard
To quote Echo And The Bunnymen.  Really, go check out "Crocodiles" - an album notable for being entirely absent of any such saurians - and get back to me.
     What I would like to point out to you, gentle reader, is a post by the Bad Astronomer - Phil Plait.*  PP holds his own over on SYFY and his posts are always worth a view, if only to confirm that in astronomy, all the numbers used are incredibly enormous.  Art?

R Aquarii

     This is a spectacularly weird binary star system all of 650 light years away, where one star is a red giant <place your Stalin joke here> and the other is a white dwarf <ditto Tyrion Lannister> that have a strange lifecycle.  Material from the red giant falls onto the white dwarf in large amounts, eventually reaching sufficient mass to trigger a thermonuclear explosion of apocalyptic proportions, after which things chug along for a while until BIGGEST BLAMMO EVER AGAIN happens.
     Said process has been happening for a long, long time.  Thus the region of space around R. Aquarii is full of gas and dust and the debris from past explosive cycles, making it messy and interesting at the same time.  Art?

     This is a representation of a false-colour picture of R. Aquarii and it's uneasy patch of real estate in space, except the photograph on the right is from Hubble back soon after it was launched, and the picture on the left is a painting by Micky Dolenz.
     I suppose a recap is in order here, given that you whippersnappers out there are probably shockingly ignorant of anything that happened before 2000 AD.  Art?

Micky Dolenz at right

     These are The Monkees, a patently manufactured band back in the day, with a moniker also patently nicked from The Beatles, except they had a corking television program that aired their songs, and their songs were actually rather good, and Conrad loved the television program, which was very much out of left field.  Heck, it even won awards.  Art?

Monkeying around.  In a very mild way

     Micky Dolenz was their drummer and frequent singer, and The Bad Astronomer once bumped into him at a science-fiction convention, where they had a pleasant chat together.  Small world, eh?
     WRONG! What did I tell you about astronomical values?  NOTHING IS SMALL!
     Anyway, it's pretty cool to pick R. Aquarii as your subject, and even more impressive when your painter is a pop star.
     There was that one time, though, when I was reading Sherlock Holmes short stories - and for any South Canadian readers SHERLOCK HOLMES IS NOT REAL! - shame, really, they're such nice people but somewhat gullible - whilst playing The Monkees television series in the background, and - O look who's this but Micky, with Davy Jones, and they're disguised as - Sherlock Holmes?
     OWW!

Bitten.  Again.

     Look, look, I can prove I'm not raving - **

Proof positive, folks

     Now, motley, let's see how well you've learned to juggle chainsaws - why yes, they are running, why do you ask?


"Hard To Be A God" Yes, we are back to the Brothers Strugatsky again.  I hope you don't mind, especially since Ruffian science fiction is so little-known in the West.
  Anyway, there is another Afterword written by Boris, about the background to the novel, which is an insightful look at how art and literature was treated by the Sinister Union back in the early Sixties.

That unforgettable era of the CUBAN MISSILE CRISIS!

   That's Kruschev there on the left (do you see what - O you do).  Allegedly he went to an exhibition of modern art in Moscow in 1964 and was violently and profanely angered by everything he saw there, raving about this painting and that sculpture, finally ending up snarling at the curators "And what's this butt with ears here?!" only to be told that it was a mirror, not a painting ...
     Ol' Bo, speculating over a generation later, mused that The Hog (as was Kruschev's nickname) might have been in a bad mood because he got the short end of the stick concerning the CMC, with all those Sinister IRBMs being freighted back home.  You couldn't say this at the time, mind, or you'd have been in the Gulag before finishing the sentence.
     Subsequently, according to Boris - Art?

Ol' Bo in later years

     - all the bootlicking sycophants, smelling a change in the wind, came out of the woodwork to pour odium on contemporary artists and writers.  Unusually, this tide of opportunistic hypocrisy didn't last, and although Boris and Arkady were criticised, they were given the right to reply, which was the Sinister's way of being wildly generous.
     And because it all happened a long, long time ago, in a country far, far away, it is History, not Politics.  So there.

Far, far away.

Colour Conrad Confused
"Flageolet" popped into my head on the bus ride into work this morning.  Why?  Who knows, certainly not I.
     "It's a kind of musical instrument, isn't it?" I mused silently, for - bus; passengers; worry about large sinister-looking man talking to himself, that sort of thing.
     Yes, it is indeed.  I can even show you a picture of one.  Art?

Flageolet with puny human hand for scale

     The thing is, it's also a variety of bean.  Same spelling, but probably tastes better than the woodwind item.  Art?

Full of -

     How can this be?  Well, it seems that the musical instrument is named after the Old French for a "Small flute" - "Flajolet".  Whereas the bean derives from the Italian for "Bean" - "Fagiolo".***
     There, I'm glad we got that sorted.  BOOJUM! - educating the world one factoid at a time.


Finally -
We have actually hit the ton, so I'm only in need of a short closing item.  I have 6 minutes until work officially begins, so perhaps I'll postpone typing and merely muse until lunchtime, then let loose with a fusillade of wit.  Or horrid puns, whichever comes first.
     Okay, that archetypal English countryside village Ottery Saint Mary has come onto my radar.  Art?

"You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy" - Ottery Saint Mary: the hideous truth

     Conrad is POSITIVE that this place features in a murder mystery, but, Dog Buns!  can I find out if this is true or not?  No, I cannot, which annoys and irks me.  And I've given away all those Dorothy Sayers novels that might have held the truth.
           
                                                      It seemed appropriate, somehow.



*  Pronounced "Playt" or "Platt"?  I don't know.  I once asked and can't remember his reply.
**  Yet <the horrid proviso added by Mister Hand>
***  We have classily avoided linking beans with wind - at least until this bit.