Sometime in 2011, I was walking home and passed a parking lot with a cab parked in it and the driver kneeling on a rug nearby. He was facing north east, and I thought, “Really? That’s where Mecca is from here?” But I didn’t raise the issue with the driver during his prayer; I kept walking. However, another guy came after me wanting the cab and asked the driver to take him somewhere. Ha-ha. What an idiot. The driver rightfully ignored him.
Then I got home and looked up the global direction to Mecca from Seattle and found out it really is north east. In fact, there’s an app for that called Qibla Compass, which I’m guessing the driver probably had on his smartphone.
There’s an app called Galactic Compass that does the same thing but for the black hole at the Milky Way’s center. You lay the phone flat, and it has an arrow to point the way to the Galactic Center. If I were 9 years old again, I would have so much fun playing intergalactic space explorer. I need this free app.
It amazes me how many of the toys I wanted growing up are now not only available but free. On the flip side, things like Zoom aren’t only available but turned into an intrusive nuisance. “Why are you putting your pants on, sweetheart?” I have a Zoom call. “Why don’t you just keep the video off?” They’ll figure out I’m not wearing pants. They’re not stupid. “I suppose.”
This imaginary discussion about my co-workers reminds me that several are missing right now. There are a whole bunch of vacant positions at the moment. We are in search of a new executive director, a vendor staff member, a volunteer coordinator and two advocacy staff. Those are the positions that I can think of that need to be filled. If you wonder why I call them co-workers, it’s because calling them cow-orkers would strike them as rude.
Apropos to nothing, just random noise, today’s (Friday, Feb. 23) New York Times Word of the Day is “folderol.” Folderol was a favorite word of my parents back in the 1950s — probably because of Elvis Presley. The word died off a decade later, but the NYT has brought it back just in time for Trump’s campaign.
A headline of a news outlet I never heard of: “LIFE SPREADS THROUGH UNIVERSE IN COSMIC DUST, PAPER SUGGESTS / AN INCREDIBLY BOLD THEORY INDEED.” They could have just said, “New paper revives old Panspermia hypothesis.” They didn’t need to shout. If it’s true, then wherever we go into our galactic explorations, we’re always going to find the same crummy microbes. I’d much rather planets grow their own life instead of copying off other planets.
Even if the hypothesis is true, I doubt life from cosmic seeding of Mars, say, would be recognizably related to Earth’s life based on RNA or DNA. Earth will have moved on too much, I’d think. But, what do I know? I’ve read too much science fiction.
The big space news is that after 51 years, the U.S. is landing probes on the moon again, and this time the probes are going to be mainly supplied by private corporations. Intuitive Machines just set a lander on the moon 300 kilometers from the lunar south pole. The lander isn’t staffed so we’ve been spared the Neil Armstrong-ish schlock, “That’s one small step for man” or whatever. By the way, that quote is proof the ’69 moon landing was real because no director would put up with that. Armstrong would have been replaced and the audio tape trashed.
The idea of plopping the lander near the south pole is because that’s where scientists think there might be water in the form of ice, sitting in craters, sheltered from the sun. The plan is to get closer and closer to the promising craters and eventually pull off a staffed landing either next to one or inside one. Then, maybe, set a moon base up there — I’m not making this up.
The timeline for all this is disturbing, as it may coincide with a second term of presidency for Trump, and he will certainly take credit for it because he is such a “stable genius.” He is, in fact, the rocket scientist that neither Obama nor Biden ever could be because they are nowhere near so brilliant.
So please don’t reelect him.
Dr. Wes is the Real Change Circulation Specialist, but, in addition to his skills with a spreadsheet, he writes this weekly column about whatever recent going-ons caught his attention. Dr. Wes has contributed to the paper since 1994. Curious about his process or have a response to one of his columns? Connect with him at [email protected].
Read more of the Feb. 28–March 5, 2023 issue.