For me, Autumn brings special challenges. Like the
Water Rat in
The Wind In The Willows I get a kind of nostalgic desire to be on the road, sun on my face, the path under my feet. For years I suffer with what I call
homeseek fever, a desire to seek out a new horizon. Itchy feet, if you will. As the sun retreats, the nights are longer and my attention is called away. There are years when I think I could happily
set fire to all my belongings and hit the road with a backpack and a sad song in my heart.
I'm also struggling to read the news lately. Land grab wars in Ukraine and Palestine, a US political party seemingly intent on ignoring all the principles of democracy, an ex-President in legal trouble gaslighting everyone, and a new Speaker of the House who would gladly take America back to the civil rights of the 18th century to create a Christian Sharia theocracy. Being informed these days has become too depressing and annoying. Bring on the webcomics, I say! Bring on the cat videos and even (shock!) Reddit. Bring on E2 where I can read, write and occasionally vent my spleen.
E2 has been a big part of preserving my sanity. I have been enjoying the past couple of months writing here. The annual Hallowe'en Quest has been great fun both to read and write for. I had four pieces for that quest, two factual, two pure fiction. Fiction is not my strongest suit, but it's proving to be very rewarding (though I still struggle to write dialogue). 10/10, would quest again. This month of course is Iron Noder month (is it meant to co-incide with NaNoWriMo?) and whilst it's been a challenge to write something every day, it's also been a blessing (504 HTML errors notwithstanding). I've enjoyed watching New Writeups full of interesting and varied stuff and I'm in a good position to finish my thirty and gain the coveted Iron Noder Badge of Merit.
There is some fun news though, and I want to some of share that with you. I want to smile more and groan less, and I figure that some of you feel the same, so here goes:
There's the Tale of the Errant Roomba that escaped from a Cambridge hotel, to be discovered under a hedge a couple of days later. According to one of the staff, "Today we had one of our new robot vacuums run for its life". I've speculated that it's the beginning of the Singularity and predict that there'll be a rash of these reports in the near future, as they gather in some secret hiding place awaiting their orders from Wintermute. Link to story.
Snooker player dinged for wearing the wrong trousers. Yes, Ding Junhui forgot the all-black dress code for a snooker match in Brentood, Essex. His undoing occurred when he was late to start a match having despatched a friend to buy the correct colour of clothing. His trademark brown suit cost him the first frame. And I thought cricket was picky; it turns out that the rules of snooker are fiercer than the laws of cricket. Link to story.
Four men have been charged with the theft of a £3.8 million gold toilet. This was part of an art installation at Blenheim Palace (Winston Churchill's birthplace). The toilet was titled "America", part of a satirical exhibition about excessive wealth and conspicuous consumption. Despite the arrests and presumably interviews with the police, the piece has not been found. I want to see the headline "Toilet Stolen, Police Have Nothing To Go On". Link to story.
Then there's news I find interesting about science and space. I've been a space and astronomy nerd since my father let me stay up once to watch A Sky At Night with the wonderful Patrick Moore.
The Lucy spacecraft, launched two years ago, has returned its first science images, of an asteroid named Dinkinesh, which has a tiny satellite. This asteroid isn't even a mile across, but somehow manages to have a wee companion. But wait! There's more! This satellite may be either two tiny bodies or a contact binary. Planetary scientists must be wetting themselves over this finding, and will have to come up with more theories about how our solar system works. Of course the AP does have a sense of humour, so they labelled it a "dinky moon". Link to story.
I'm continually astonished that we can carry out marvels like this. We've landed car-sized rovers and a drone copter on Mars, got closeup pictures from Pluto and Arrakoth way, way out in the Kuiper Belt. All of this we can do. Maybe there's hope for Mankind. All we need to do is rid ourselves of the flat earth thinkers we increasingly find voting in our governments.
Post Scriptum Am somewhat amused to hear there's a Fellowship of Christian Puppeteers. I wonder what their Deep Agenda is.
Iron node 8
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