i heart astronauts

Spring Planting

It was warm and sunny last week so I finally planted my basil. On a trip to Home Depot looking for a better delivery system for my weed poison, I found heirloom tomatoes on sale. I haven't had much luck with toms in containers but for big yellow heirlooms, I will give it another try. Trevor, if you any advice, I am all ears.

So I've got basil and toms poised for summer platters. If I could find a ciabatta tree, I wouldn't have to cook at all.

Lauren will be disappointed to learn that I believe making my own bread is harder than she insists it is. I'm not going to make mozzarella or olive oil either. I am thinking about making my own pasta, though. That's just a step away from bread dough, so maybe later...

Looking forward to the first caprese sandwich of the season.

a few of my favorite 'parents'...

MY PARENTS WERE AWESOME

  Definite fave so far:

  

  ( ( ( READ MORE!! ) ) )

Ooops

I forgot to mention it. Yesterday was the 38th anniversary of our first date. We went to the Greyhound Bus station to review the scene of a crime. Trying to impress me with his criminal defense chops. Dinner was Mexican food at Santiago's, the best tacos still.

Happy 38 Short Years, My Dear. Love you more.

Movies To Watch/Avoid

Last weekend we watched our requisite three films. Here are the thumbnail reviews:

Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus - What you would expect from Terry Gilliam, a mash-up with no discernible plot. Nice visuals though. Best part was the wardrobe test for Heath Ledger.

Touching the Void - A very interesting documentary/re-creation of two friends climbing a South American mountain and how it all went wrong. Overlong but the best of the three. I have no desire to climb anything other than steps to a museum.

Where the Wild Things Are - Boring, boring, boring. We could only watch 20 minutes. But we were done with it long before that.

Zombieland

I am not a fan of horror movies. With the exception of "Shaun of the Dead", I have never seen a zombie movie. We watched "Zombieland" last night and really liked it. First, you have to get through the opening gorefest. I almost turned it off only two minutes in. But once that's done, it's a very good movie. You realize by the end that the blood and guts don't bother you at all. You have become numb to it. That's weird, right?

It's clever and funny and has an odd Bill Murray cameo.

(Trevor this is not a Swedish torture porn film.)

You do have to watch through your fingers at first. With that caveat, I recommend the movie.

Note: Dad reminds me that "Night of the Comet" was a zombie movie. True dat.

Postscript:

This guy even clashes with his environment.

Pretty Awesome

Lauren and I had a brief conversation about the website "My Parents Were Awesome". I checked it out some time ago and forgot about it. I was looking today and this photo caught my attention. In my mind, this is what David Sedaris's mom looked like. Except she would have been holding a long cigarette as well. I just finished "When You Are Engulfed in Flames", so he was fresh in my mind. Yep, that's her.

I need to add that the word "awesome" is liberally interpreted for some of these people. I guess if you are related they look pretty cool but most are just lame and unattractive. It's rather reassuring that the 70's and 80's era Europeans look as stupid as the dorky Americans.

Please let's not let big plastic eyeglass frames make a comeback - pointy cat's eyes are ok, though.

Hurtling Star on a Path to Clip Solar System (!)

Hurtling star on a path to clip solar system - New Scientist, 15 March 2010

"A star is hurtling towards us. It will almost certainly clip the outskirts of the solar system and send comets towards Earth.

Vadim Bobylev of the Pulkovo Observatory in St Petersburg, Russia, modelled the paths of neighbouring stars using data from the European Space Agency's Hipparcos satellite and from ground-based measurements of the speeds of stars. He found four previously unidentified stars that will pass within roughly 9.5 light years of Earth. They will tug on the Oort cloud, a diffuse cloud of icy objects around the solar system thought to be a reservoir of comets.

However, the biggest threat comes from another star, Gliese 710, an orange dwarf now some 63 light years away but zooming our way at 14 kilometres per second. Bobylev's calculations suggest Gliese 710 has an 86 per cent chance of passing through the Oort cloud. This could scatter millions of comets into paths that cross Earth's orbit..."

17 4-Ever

Just a little incentive for SAT to check her blog.

You are never too old to be a tween.

Happy Almost Birthday.

Wait, it did what?

The Chilean earthquake that killed more than 700 people on Saturday probably shifted the Earth's axis and shortened the day, according to a NASA scientist.

Richard Gross, a geophysicist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, told Bloomberg that the 8.8-magnitude quake is likely to have moved the Earth's axis by 2.7 milliarcseconds - about 8 centimetres - and shorted the day by about 1.26 microseconds.

Gross used the same model to estimate the shift caused by the 2004 Sumatran earthquake that caused the Indian Ocean tsunami. That quake had a magnitude of 9.1, shifted the Earth's axis by 2.3 milliarcseconds and shortened the day by 6.8 microseconds.

Gross said the fact that the Chilean earthquake was in the Earth's mid-latitudes, instead of near the equator, meant it will have shifted the axis further despite being smaller. Plus the fault that caused the Chilean quake dips into the Earth at a slightly steeper angle, making it more effective in moving mass.

The changes caused by earthquakes are permanent, Benjamin Fong Chao, dean of Earth Sciences of the National Central University in Taiwan, toldBusiness Week.