Liquid Rock, Stars, Space Rocks and Rock Stars

My ' boarding pass', enroute to Mars. Happy landings ...

Farewell to the historic Dawn - a probe which  became the first in our history to visit two different bodies in the asteroid belt, returning a wealth of information to increase our understanding of the early formation of the universe.
Dawn ceased communication with the Deep Space Network on October 31st , and it is believed that the craft ran out of  the fuel , hydrazine .
Dawn will remain in orbit around Ceres for a few decades.
It feels odd, but even as I write this, I'm aware that Dawn is already history; it launched in 2007: since then, in terms of ground - breaking, we've landed craft on a comet , hopping(!) rovers on an asteroid, had multiple take-off and landings of re-usable rockets , used a 'skycrane' to land another explorer on Mars ( and inserted the Mars Orbiter ) , had an up close flypast of Pluto and its moon, Charon, gathered info from Saturn and its moons, and Voyager 1 became the first craft to enter interstellar space. (I'm sure there are many more, and I apologise for any omissions) Every one of these was a 'ground-breaking' achievement, and I am both amazed and humbled by it all.
Go, humanity !

A large impact crater has been discovered beneath the Greenland ice sheet, dating back at least 12000 years.
Speaking of comets, the comet which helped eradicate the dinosaurs from Earth has been shown to have liquified huge amounts of rock , albeit briefly; still on the subject of space rocks, Oumuamua is heading away from us now, but NASA have learned even more about this perplexing 'traveller' from beyond. Buried amidst the excited chatter of how its 'albedo' gives us an estimate of its size, was the quiet revelation that it changed speed and direction.
This was apparently due to outgassing , but that relies on Oumuamua being an icy body, rather than a rocky one - Hmm - I'm almost tempted to see what the ' fringe' elements think - but even Harvard scientists believe that it may be an alien probe...


The ongoing search for alien life is being hampered by the demand for GPUs being used for cryptocurrency mining. Personally, I'd say the problem is also being exacerbated by the new demand for VR graphics. One of my pet theories is that portals to our multiverse exist in these burgeoning virtual spaces, so perhaps it's advantageous (or did I just play too much  Half - Life..? )

Before VR, there was humble anaglyph 3-D, and this new volume of images, lovingly prepared by none other than Queen guitarist, and Professor of Astrophysics, Brian May, adds a new dimension to a slew of images from the moon missions.

One of the oldest stars in the universe is hiding in a distant corner of our own Milky Way . At 13.5 billion years old, it is a remnant from just after the 'Big Bang' ( okay, .22 billion years after, but that's close)

Stunning image of the Jovian clouds from Juno


I was entranced by the image of swirling gaseous cloud -tops of Jupiter, my feverish imagination wondering how it would feel to travel into such a broiling mass - of course, it would probably be anti-climactic, as Jupiter has no solid rocky core, so the curious onlooker would find themselves eventually back in space, possibly with a battered sign attached to the windshield / viewport, saying ' Thank You for driving carefully through our Jovian funk '
Speaking of large clouds in our corner of space, the Mars Explorer has been observing a curious cloud in the equatorial region of the ' Red Planet '; which brings us neatly to the pending arrival of Insight on Mars, on the 26th of  November . I will be watching with crossed fingers, as my avatar will be aboard...

Designed to measure seismic activity , Insight will be a static lander, which has already attracted much online speculation ; apparently the designated landing site is close to a crashed ufo , and a walled city...

Apparently, a crashed ufo on Mars...        pic: NASA

Business Unusual

Hello everyone both of you,
 You may have read my rant recently where I got on one (as they say) with regard to spammers and bots misappropriating my magical words and thereby bringing a premature end to my blogging in the free world  (which was almost a joke, for those who recall the song by Neil Young...)
Speaking of which, what happened to music ?
I mean - I'm old and out of the loop - at 50 something, I should perhaps be grateful for pastoral symphonies and suchlike, to ease the pain of life in a harsh, unforgiving world.
For those of you protesting that 50 - something is not old ; when I was eternally 21 , anything over thirty was old, so I am technically a listed building.
All the hoary cliches of my punky mis-spent youth are now true.
I am that old fart that I shouldn't trust.
Though I'm not a 'hippy'...
but Peace anyway.
I am only grateful that age is less of a cliché than it once was.
Besides, I was reared on the musical dabblings of John Peel, and he was timeless

But the music, man.
What happened ?
Since 'home taping is killing music', it's been going downhill

Actually, it was a number of things, including the internet...

I've always been wary of the charts (payola man, breadheads and cocaine)
But the situation has spiralled downwards -
The birth of CDs, the death of tapes,
The advent of Mpegs , torrents and Spotify .
The death of vinyl - now making a comeback, hurrah - but boo as I will have to re-invest in turntables .

When I was younger, living through the shock of the new
and grooving to Punky - Reggie music
my mainstream was The Clash, The Sex Pistols, The Stranglers and The Jam.
With a side order of The Damned , Wire, The Gang Of Four, The Mekons , XTC , etcetera.
Later flavours included The Swell Maps, The Normal, Patrik Fitzgerald, early Ultravox.
Stateside we had Devo with their buttoned - up version of Satisfaction
Novelty nonsense The Dickies .
Guilty Pleasures were The Vibrators and The Tubes.
It's already getting messy, and I haven't mentioned so many ...
For melodic, old school moments, Mr David Bowie.
For more challenging old school, proto-punks The Velvet Underground.
Back in the U.K., The Soft Boys.
Oh, and Queen, now and again - though I never quite got their angle ...
As my personal musical tastes expanded, I discovered the joys of reggae, psychedelia, blues, mod and metal.
I had mind expanding moments with Captain Beefheart and Mr Barrett...and I was a sucker for coloured vinyl and gimmicks from John Cooper Clarke to Dr Feelgood.

Not to Scale

It was an incredible world with a wealth of stuff.
I always assumed that as I matured  got older, I might gain a new found respect for 'Prog Rock' embodied by Yes, Hawkwind,' The Floyd ', and suchlike (in fairness I never warmed to Jon Andersons voice, or much of the endless self indulgent guitar- noodling of 'The Floyd ' and co, but c'est la vie...).
I also grooved on the Stones, The Who, The Beatles, The Kinks, The Small Faces, etc
These groups were endemic and are mostly timeless - but what happened to music ?

Punk became 'New Wave' with a slightly wider remit and real grassroots d.i.y and more influences - even the dressing- up box as Adam And The Ants morphed into pirates followed by the likes of Siouxsie and the Banshees, Spandau Ballet, Ultravox and Visage leading to the New Romantics and the rise of Goth, which was led by The Mission, Fields of the Nephilim, Sisters of Mercy, All About Eve , Bauhaus and The Cure.
As the Eighties became the Nineties, dance music mashed and mangled choice moments from years gone by - eventually creating loved up baggy - swagger.
I never quite got the angle of people like the Happy Mondays, who seemed more of a gang than a band. Plenty of fashion and attitude, but not so hot on the ditties, in my opinion- but they were part of the burgeoning u.k.dance 'scene' in the early Nineties, which felt like more of a protest, with endless illegal raves organised in secret, and 'cat and mouse' games with the authorities...one of the beauties of this rebellion was the sense of unity, and the fact that you could be happy drinking water all night long...
The 'House' scene diverged, with Euro-House, Acid-House, Hard-House and probably Wendy House.
Trance - Dance, Ambient, Junglist, Drum and Bass, Grime and so on, as movements splintered and labels gradually morphed.
Millenial awakenings led to the decline of the drug-addled payola -  ridden muzak biz, where glad-handing and cheeky lines of marching powder fuelled an increasingly deluded industry full of inflated egos and precious little talent...
...so here we are, painfully aware that perhaps there really is nothing more to explore - I think it was Paul Weller who once said that by the year 2000, all possible chord combinations would have been used: and he's the Modfather, so he should know-
But then he also gave us 'The Cappucino Kid', so maybe not -
- so here in our post millenial hangover, are we condemned to re-hash everything that went before ?
Don't get me wrong - I've used and abused sampler technology too - but I say use what's gone before by all means, but add something new.
Give it a twist.

...and that seems to be the problem.
There's no twist anywhere
Apathy has descended upon us...
There's an overwhelming sense of - to quote Bohemian Rhapsody:  nothing really matters anymore.

Discuss...