Enlightenment Beckons

As It Occasionally Does
 - after a long time of merely accepting something at face value.  The last example of this happening to Your Humble Scribe was a couple of years ago, when he suddenly realised that the prototype synthesiser break in the middle of Pink Floyd's "One of These Days" was in fact the theme tune to "Doctor Who".  Yes, really, Vulnavia.
     Anyway, what I refer to is the title sequence for "The Expanse", which has previously gone in one eye and out the other without making contact with the grey matter in between*.  Art?

Top middle

     This isn't a scenic ride of any description;  what we see is the consequences of global warming, with the ice melting irrevocably.  There's a neat and subtle twist to this as we next witness Ellis Island gaining a flood barrier all around it as water levels rise.  In fact if you watch the beginning of the Earth-bound sequence when future Italy is depicted, you'll notice that Venice has gone completely, a victim of risen ocean levels.
     However ...
     If you remember Season Three, during the Earth-Mars confrontation, the Martians got off a MIRV'd missile, one of which's warheads impacted.

Thus

     I don't remember this bit of the title sequence being present in Season Three, which is fair enough.  BUT it also foreshadows a game-changing future event that I know all about since I've read all the novels.  So is this clip, which is only a few seconds long, the past or the future?
     As that chap The Doctor was fond of saying, "Time will tell".
     I say, motley, shall we go and check our nuclear stockpile?  You never know who's been nosying in the airy and spacious Upper Dungeon, after all.

More Fallout From "The Stand"
You'll see how clever I can be in a moment or two <anticipates glorious cheering, doesn't notice flies are undone>.
     I finally finished TS last night, so I can now concentrate on crosswords and codewords again, hooray! for as you ought to know by now, I have no inner moderator.
     Okay, an author mentioned by this newcomer Stephen King made me note the name: Max Brand.  Art?

Impressive pet you got there, mister.

     This, it transpires, was the pen name of Frederick Schiller Faust, who had a whole slew of other pen names.  He was well-known for his Westerns, which were a cut above the rest of the genre, and that's the context we encounter his name in TS.  He also invented the young doctor James Kildare, whom even you must have heard of.  Art?

Not sure about a doctor who has "Kil-" in his name.

     There you go, we are all better-informed than we were five minutes ago, and you're welcome.
     The other thing about how TS ends - and here is a SPOILER WARNING!  SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER!
     - is that young Stephen gets it rather wrong about the nuclear warhead Trashcan Man finds at Nellis and hauls back to Las Vegas.  These things do not emit deadly radiation; they're designed not to, so Trashy would not be almost dead from radiation sickness by the time he parks in front of the hotel.

Ouch.  Better put some Sudofed on that, matey.

     Then there's the question of quite what Trashy managed to find, since Stu Redman, abandoned hundreds of miles from Las Vegas, feels the blast when Trashy's little present goes pop (and don't get me started on Permissive Action Links).  It must be a multi-megaton warhead and I don't think South Canada has warheads that big any longer.  Still, this was supposedly happening in 1990, so they may have retained a few B41s or B53s.  And now you see how clever I was about "Fallout", hmmm?
     You mind what I say now - this Stephen King character is a-going places!

A charming young man who's probably never murdered anyone

     
Feeling Gassy
NO!  This is nothing to do with bowels or wind or flatulence.  Kindly get your mind out of the gutter, as this is BOOJUM! where we are manifestly Safe For Work, if a tad a bit frequently incomprehensible at times.
     No, I refer - of course! - to that selection of astronomical photographs over on the BBC website, and this one in particular.  Art?

Jupiter

     Don't go looking for the "Discovery", that was a fictional spaceship.  This picture was taken by the Juno space-probe, which is a real spaceship.  Glad to point out the difference.
     What you see here is the gassy upper atmosphere of Jupiter, with bands caused by rotation, and there's an interactive display item at Eureka where you spin a transparent globe, making patterns exactly as above.  It's a simple yet effective display, and to see it mirrored in real life on an unimaginably larger scale is pretty cool.

By Jove**!

The Pearl As Allegory
I am minded of that William Orbit track, "You Know Too Much About Flying Saucers".  Okay, cast your minds back to 1947, when a pilot named Kenneth Arnold claimed to have seen a clutch of flying saucers - his description - flying along at about 1,200 miles per hour, and being oh, say 140 feet across.  Sadly he didn't have a camera, but he did have a mouth, and was interviewed several times about what he'd seen.  
     This is the genesis of modern UFOs, as the term "Flying Saucer" really took off, grabbed the public's imagination and hasn't really let up.  And, inevitably, the "They are UFOs therefore Aliens" mindset also came into being.

Oh Kenneth!

     However - and you just knew that was coming, didn't you? - 98% of all UFOs turn out to be very much IFOs, and the skeptical consensus is that Ol' Ken was probably misidentifying a bunch of - Art?


     Pelicans.  Of course the Little Green Men Fans hate this suggestion and will not consider it to be true in any way whatsoever, to the extent of sticking their fingers in their ears and shouting LAHLAHLAH.  

     And with that, we are done!

*  This is quite common for the senile old duffer <the awful truth courtesy Mister Hand>
**  Do you see wh - O.  You do.