Which Are Not Diamonds, Just To Be Clear
They are, in case you weren't aware, one of the constituent class of asteroids, which we have certainly not given up on. O noes. Art!
The very definition of click-bait, I'm afraid, yet not completely divorced from the subject matter we're going to be exploring in this Intro. Art!
The proto-hominid crouched at Scarlett's feet is the original 'Lucy', whose fossil skeleton was unearthed in 1974 by one Donald Johanson, at Hadar in Ethiopia. Her bones were dated back to 3.2 million years ago, and named after The Beatles' song 'Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds', because of course they were, million-years old fossils and lysergic acid diethylamide going together like fish and chips.
ANYWAY were I to say 'Eye In The Sky' then I would split you, the audience, into three parts: the very old fogeys, the balding hippies and the drone generation. Let us mock each in turn. Art!
I have chosen this illo out of sheer perversity, as almost all the others feature eyes, in the skies. I think I've read this one, decades ago. PKD had it published in 1957, so if you read it first time around you must be in your dotage. The plot concerns people being thrust unwillingly into alternate realities, generated by each other, and you're never quite sure if it ends with things back to normal, or if the cast are still trapped in a simulation. Typical PKD. Art!
Prog from the early Eighties. The band was led - you may be ahead of me here - by Alan Parsons, studio-engineer-producer turned musician. Conrad has never heard it, so I may venture over to Youtube and bend an ear. Art!
The rather delicious Helen Mirren, WHO IS ALSO A GREAT ACTRESS, and a film that was released in 2015, when drones were solely enormous great things as big as an aircraft. I think the film is about ethics and voyeurism and, because Helen's British, I bet she's the villain of the piece and all is saved by a plucky South Canadian girl who exhibits attitude but is a killer drone operator. Er - so to speak.
ANYWAY ANYWAY in this Intro we have two 'Eyes', which information I have taken from 'The Sky At Night' again, a resource I am squeezing like a lemon. Art!
You recognise, I HOPE, the James Webb Space Telescope, that gigantic replacement for the Hubble Space Telescope, which sits in outer space and scans the heavens, producing images and data with incredibly fine resolution. This enabled it to focus on the Near Earth Object 2024 YR4 and measure it's diameter as 60 metres, a precision unavailable to terrestrial telescopes, which have to contend with atmosphere. Art!
Webby before being packaged up for transit to deployment, and a scattering of puny humans for scale. That's one beastly big eye in the sky. There was an immense sigh of relief at NASA when it finally and fully deployed, as with the following craft. Art!
This is NASA's 'Lucy' spacecraft, just finishing deploying it's giant 'eyes'. Only joking, these are the solar arrays that will help to provide power for all it's systems. They were unfurled after launch in late 2021 and will sustain the voyage until 2033, by which time it will have done a grand tour of 11 asteroids. One of these flybys took place only weeks ago, as Luce buzzed the minor asteroid DonaldJohanson. Art!
Yes, it has a very unusual shape, which is typical of small asteroids, as they lack the gravity to coalesce into a sphere. Here you are seeing an object that dates back 150 million years, from a distance of 600 miles, which is practically in it's lap in astronomical terms.
Let us move on, for Lucy has a long way to go. The mission plans to loop it back to Earth and slingshot around our planet, accelerating the probe to speed it along to an intercept with Jupiter. Once there, it is going to investigate two sets of asteroids trapped in the 'Lagrange Points', each of them a variety of Sargasso Sea in space. Any celestial object at a Lagrange point will remain there, as they are stable locations, so these asteroids are - stretching a bit here - 'fossils' left over from the early days of the Solar System. Art!
The array of instrumentation aboard Lucy will inspect and analyse the asteroids it comes into reach of, thus deepening Hom. Sap's knowledge of exactly what they are made of and how said materials stack up. In this way any potential Near Earth Object that might become an On Earth Object can be better intercepted, diverted or plain old destroyed.
We're still not done, so don't go celebrating just yet.
Let's Insult Donold A Little More
I'll be sad when he either keels over dead from a heart attack or is locked up for 379 years, as he generates content for free wherever he goes. This time I am stealing a comment from 'Anna Odesitka'. Art!
However - you guessed right that word was coming - it does impart a certain character to her Tweets. She described Prez 47 as 'durak with IQ of shoe' and from context you could tell it wasn't a compliment. I liked it so much I warned it was going to get stolen for BOOJUM! The word means 'fool' or 'idiot' and if the shoe fits -
Art!
All three of them have a collective IQ of 36. On a good day.
"The War Illustrated Edition 209 22nd June 1945"
You must excuse a certain gloating relish in the pictures that TWI was choosing to publish, as this was the end of six years' struggle of unmitigated awfulness and the world had come a verrrry long way since September 1939. Art!
DOG BUNS!
Your Humble Scribe managed to make a bodge of ordering one of the rarer volumes of the Australian Official History of the War 1914 - 1918. It was something like a 4th edition, thus going for only £45. When I checked my bank account there hadn't been a deduction for it, so I went awry somewhere along the way. Art!
This one is a First Edition, which always hikes the price up. £145? I think not. Conrad is going to have to keep his eyes peeled from payday onwards, and GET IT RIGHT THIS TIME.
Bah!
"The Art Of The Squeal"
I am satirising here. 'The Art Of The Deal' is one of the more famous books ghost-written for Mopey Dick, whose chosen writing implement is a crayon three inches in diameter. Art!
Here's the rub. Konstantin, in his last 'Inside Russia' vlog, explained that lots of authors' works are being removed from libraries or bookshops across Mordorvia, because said authors dared to criticise Putinpot or his Special Idiotic Operation, and Charlie Chipmunk Cheeks is quite as petty and spiteful as his tangerine chum. The writers are now categorised as 'foreign agents'.
Apart from books ghost-written for Donold Judas Trump. O, they are being ordered by regional and provincial libraries by the score, especially TAOTD. A case of 'Just in case', one presumes.
Big K. let it be known that TAOTD was the first book he ever read in English. Poor bloke.
Finally -
Just to keep you informed, I am typing this up on Tuesday for Thursday's blog, and have consistently forgotten to get a picture of the flapjack I made on Monday. It's quite tasty yet a little too soft and falls apart if handled incautiously. This may be due to Canderel being used in lieu of sugar, or a cheap block of cooking margarine instead of butter. Don't worry, you WILL get a photo of it.
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