Hello ladies and gentlemen.  Please take a seat, the show is about to begin.  The opening act tonight comes to you courtesy of 1994.  That's when I bought this shirt.  It just dawned on me that that makes this shirt 12 years old.  I've seriously been wearing it almost half my life.  It shows too.  I have a problem getting rid if my old clothes for some reason.  I just can't do it.  Something about my old crusty shirts just appeals to me...and only me probably.  I've definitely had my way with this shirt.  It is haggard.  It's like some used up old concubine that I completely defiled for 12 years non-stop and now I'm just comfortable with her.  I feel at home in her threadbare embrace. 

Cornerstone

Cornerstone

Cornerstone

NGC 6188 is an interstellar carnival of young blue stars, hot red gas, and cool dark dust. Located 4,000 light years away in the disk of our Galaxy, NGC 6188 is home to the Ara OB1 association, a group of bright young stars whose nucleus forms the open cluster NGC 6193. These stars are so bright that some of their blue light reflects off of interstellar dust forming the diffuse blue glow surrounding the stars in the above photograph. Open cluster NGC 6193 formed about three million years ago from the surrounding gas, and appears unusually rich in close binary stars. The red glow visible throughout the photograph arises from hydrogen gas heated by the bright stars in Ara OB1. The dark dust that blocks much of NGC 6188's light was likely formed in the outer atmospheres of cooler stars and in supernovae ejecta.

Hey everybody!  I'm in Baltimore!  Baltimore is awesome.  I like Baltimore.  Went to the Yankees game last night and it kicked major ass.  Jeter knocked in the winning run in the top of the 9th and I went ballistic.  The weird thing about games in Baltimore is that there is a pretty even Yankees/Orioles dispersement in the stands.  This can be a recipe for disaster as well...I saw two fights last night alone.  We're going to the 4:30 game today as well as the 1:00 game tomorrow afternoon.  Hitting up the Babe Ruth museum this afternoon too.  Go Yankees!

Saturn's ragged moon Rhea has one of the oldest surfaces known. Estimated as changing little in the past billion years, Rhea shows craters so old they no longer appear round – their edges have become compromised by more recent cratering. Like Earth's Moon, Rhea's rotation is locked on Saturn, and the above image shows part of Rhea's surface that always faces Saturn. Rhea's leading surface is more highly cratered than its trailing surface. Rhea is composed mostly of water-ice but is thought to have a small rocky core. The above image was taken by the robot Cassini spacecraft now orbiting Saturn. Cassini swooped past Rhea two months ago and captured the above image from about 100,000 kilometers away. Rhea spans 1,500 kilometers making it Saturn's second largest moon after Titan. Several surface features on Rhea remain unexplained including large light patches.

In the center of a swirling whirlpool of hot gas is likely a beast that has never been seen directly: a black hole. Studies of the bright light emitted by the swirling gas frequently indicate not only that a black hole is present, but also likely attributes. The gas surrounding GRO J1655-40, for example, has been found to display an unusual flickering at a rate of 450 times a second. Given a previous mass estimate for the central object of seven times the mass of our Sun, the rate of the fast flickering can be explained by a black hole that is rotating very rapidly. What physical mechanisms actually cause the flickering -- and a slower quasi-periodic oscillation (QPO) -- in accretion disks surrounding black holes and neutron stars remains a topic of much research.

What's happening over the water? Pictured above is one of the better images yet recorded of a waterspout, a type of tornado that occurs over water. Waterspouts are spinning columns of rising moist air that typically form over warm water. Waterspouts can be as dangerous as tornadoes and can feature wind speeds over 200 kilometers per hour. Many waterspouts form away from thunderstorms and even during relatively fair weather. Waterspouts may be relatively transparent and initially visible only by the unusual pattern they create on the water. The above image was taken in 1969 from an aircraft off the Florida Keys, a location arguably the hottest spot for waterspouts in the world with hundreds forming each year. Some people speculate that these waterspouts are responsible for many of the losses recorded in the Bermuda Triangle region of the Atlantic Ocean.

Well, I'm in a bit of a quandry.  No, I'm not.  I'm gonna put this damnable blog to damnable use right now.  I'm gonna think with it.  This blog will help me decide the fate of the evening.  Here's the deal.  I'm hungry.  I've got a man-sized hunger festering deep inside of me...near that place were my entrails touch the inside of my belly-button.  So, blog, here's where you come into play.  I have two options.  WHAT'S IN THE BOX!  The first option is the one that never goes away.  Finn McCool's.  Hot damn, a Finn's Philly is absolutely divine.  I think the main ingredient is love.  Seriously, it's that good. Seriously.  I wrote 'Seriously' twice to emphasize my point on this one.  I was going to write it again but that horse is dead to me.  Second option.  Eat at home.  Alright, this option is totally lame and doesn't even have a fraction of the divinity factor that a New Britian McDonald's has.  I'd rather eat the dead horse that I beat earlier.  What's on the menu you say?  Peanutbutter and bread with a side of tolerance.  I mean, I could eat that.  I've done it before and I'm relatively certain I could do it again.  But do I want to eat that?  No.  Hell no.  I'm sure that this decision seems like a nonentity to you, right blog?  What's the big deal here?  Why don't you just go to Finn's, fool?  You have money.  You have a car.  You have all of the prerequisite necessities that would facilitate a righteous meal such as the one you intoned above.  See, the thing is...I got to Finn's a lot.  I eat Finn's Philly a lot.  Its becoming a problem.  I realize that its becoming a problem and I have to stop the insanity before it goes too far.  God, I hope I didn't ruin myself.  God?  If you're there...please come down here and pat me on the shoulder and say, 'There, there."  Tell me that in your infinite wisdom you have created the Finn's Philly to be eaten by mere mortals and that eating it is not analagous with Prometheus stealing fire from the gods (not you!) and then having his liver eaten by eagles every day only to be miraculously regenerated every night and then eaten again the next day!  Please!!!!  Tell me those words! 

(silence)

no.

no.

no.

no.

no!

Well, I'm off to make a sandwich.  Crap.

NGC 3314 consists of two large spiral galaxies which just happen to almost exactly line-up. The foreground spiral is viewed nearly face-on, its pinwheel shape defined by young bright star clusters. But against the glow of the background galaxy, dark swirling lanes of interstellar dust are also seen to echo the face-on spiral's structure. The dust lanes are surprisingly pervasive, and this remarkable pair of overlapping galaxies is one of a small number of systems in which absorption of visible light can be used to directly explore the distribution of dust in distant spirals. NGC 3314 is about 140 million light-years away in the multi-headed constellation Hydra. This color composite was constructed from Hubble Space Telescope images made in 1999 and 2000.

What arm is 17 meters long and sometimes uses humans for fingers? The Canadarm2 aboard the International Space Station (ISS). Canadarm2 has multiple joints and is capable of maneuvering payloads as massive as 116,000 kilograms, equivalent to a fully loaded bus. Canadarm2 is operated by remote control by a human inside the space station. To help with tasks requiring a particularly high level of precision and detail, an astronaut can be anchored to an attached foot constraint. The arm is able propel itself end-over-end around the outside of the space station. Pictured above, astronaut Stephen Robinson rides Canadarm2 during the STS-114 mission of the space shuttle Discovery to the ISS in 2005 August. Space shuttles often deploy their own original version of a robotic arm dubbed Canadarm. Next year, a second robotic arm is scheduled to be deployed on the space station.

Named for Australian astronomer Colin Stanley Gum (1924-1960), The Gum Nebula is so large and close it is actually hard to see. In fact, we are only about 450 light-years from the front edge and 1,500 light-years from the back edge of this cosmic cloud of glowing hydrogen gas. Covered in this 41 degree-wide mosaic of H-alpha images, the faint emission region is otherwise easy to lose against the background of Milky Way stars. The complex nebula is thought to be a supernova remnant over a million years old, sprawling across the southern constellations Vela and Puppis. Sliding your cursor over this spectacular wide field view will reveal the location of objects embedded in The Gum Nebula, including the Vela supernova remnant.

Holy crap!  Two of my photographs are going to get published in the AALL magazine!  (American Association of Law Libraries)  I submitted two views from my office and they both got accepted!  Woot! 

Here are they are!

I'm so excited! 

An alluring sight in dark southern skies, the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) is seen here through a narrow filter that transmits only the red light of hydrogen atoms. Ionized by energetic starlight, a hydrogen atom emits the characteristic red H-alpha light as its single electron is recaptured and transitions to lower energy states. As a result, this image of the LMC seems covered with shell-shaped clouds of hydrogen gas surrounding massive, young stars. Sculpted by the strong stellar winds and ultraviolet radiation, the glowing hydrogen clouds are known as H II (ionized hydrogen) regions. This high resolution mosaic view was recorded in 6 segments, each with 200 minutes of exposure time. Itself composed of many overlapping shells, the Tarantula Nebula, is the large star forming region near top center. A satellite of our Milky Way Galaxy, the LMC is about 15,000 light-years across and lies a mere 180,000 light-years away in the constellation Dorado.

Bright gas and dark dust permeate the space between stars in the center of a nebula known as NGC 6559. The gas, primarily hydrogen, is responsible for the diffuse red glow of the emission nebula. As energetic light from neighboring stars ionizes interstellar hydrogen, protons and electrons recombine to emit light of very specific colors, including the red hue observed. Small dust particles reflect blue starlight efficiently and so creates the blue reflection nebulosity seen near two of the bright stars. Dust also absorbs visible light, causing the dark clouds and filaments visible. NGC 6559 lies about 5000 light-years away toward the constellation of Sagittarius.

I was just reading the Federalist Papers and I came across this very insightful tidbit by John Jay.  Thought I would share...the part about absolute monarchy was kinda scary.

"But the safety of the people of America against dangers from FOREIGN force depends not only on their forbearing to give JUST causes of war to other nations, but also on their placing and continuing themselves in such a situation as not to INVITE hostility or insult; for it need not be observed that there are PRETENDED as well as just causes of war."

"It is too true, however disgraceful it may be to human nature, that nations in general will make war whenever they have a prospect of getting anything by it; nay, absolute monarchs will often make war when their nations are to get nothing by it, but for the purposes and objects merely personal, such as thirst for military glory, revenge for personal affronts, ambition, or private compacts to aggrandize or support their particular families or partisans. These and a variety of other motives, which affect only the mind of the sovereign, often lead him to engage in wars not sanctified by justice or the voice and interests of his people. But, independent of these inducements to war, which are more prevalent in absolute monarchies, but which well deserve our attention, there are others which affect nations as often as kings; and some of them will on examination be found to grow out of our relative situation and circumstances."

The International Space Station (ISS) is the largest human-made object ever to orbit the Earth. Last August, the station was visited and resupplied by space shuttle Discovery. The ISS is currently operated by the Expedition 13 crew, consisting a Russian and an American astronaut. After departing the ISS, the crew of Discovery captured this spectacular vista of the orbiting space city high above the Caspian Sea. Visible components include modules, trusses, and expansive solar arrays that gather sunlight that is turned into needed electricity.