Boat Trek III: The Search For A Buyer

[Reacting to their first look at the U.S.S. Excelsior]
Uhura: Would you look at that!
Kirk: My friends, the great experiment: The Excelsior. Ready for trial runs.
Sulu: She's supposed to have transwarp drive.
Scotty: Aye, and if my grandmother had wheels, she'd be a wagon.
Kirk: Come, come, Mr. Scott. Young minds, fresh ideas. Be tolerant!

My friends, the great experiment, i.e. my owning a boat, has run its course, with decidely mixed results. The aphorism that comes to mind is, if you own a boat, you had better love owning that boat. Unfortunately, my feelings were more like being stuck between first and second base, knowing I was not going to even try to make it to home plate, so to speak, and instead was ready to be taken out of the game. Sorry coach.

She is a fine vessel, but my heart twern't in it, and so she is now up for sale on Craigslist. Here's the link. And here's the BoatTrader.com link.

America Gives Up, Israel Destroyed, Al Qaeda Victorious

Such is the premise behind a new thriller by Robert Ferrigno, Prayers For The Assassin, set 35 years in the future. This novel sounds fascinating. An interesting review by Tim Rutten in the LAT is here.

The Moon of Earth

The moon. I like the word “moon”. I like the sound of it, the imagery it conjures up, the feelings it stirs: a wistful yearning, almost an ache.

I sat in a meeting the other day, discussing technical documentation NASA may require as part of our proposal for the Crew Exploration Vehicle (CEV). I thought about the moon, and I marveled that when I was a kid, I was certain I’d live to see the first man walk on the moon.

I never dreamed I’d live to see the last man walk on the moon.

I’m hopeful that won’t come to pass. Many countries are gearing up for a return to the moon. A decent LAT piece covers the subject here.

Pandora's Tesseract

I can't believe I haven't checked out Pandora.com before today. An offshoot of the Music Genome Project, this site will create a streaming playlist of music based on your initial input of, say, a band name, and you can then thumbs-up or thumbs-down the pushed content to further tweak your me-friendly audio output. Warning: it's addictive. Do not operate heavy machinery while using the Pandora service.

So I type in "Mahavishnu Orchestra", and the first track that plays is "Sanctuary" from the Birds of Fire album. Excellent. The next track that comes up is really great too, and is by Chad Wackerman, whose name seemed vaguely familiar (drummer for Zappa, as it happens), but what grabs me is that the guitarist on the track is Allan Holdsworth, which is bloody amazing, since I've never heard this song before, so in twenty minutes time, pandora.com has earned a place of prestige on my Scroll O' Great Things.

LV-426 Mystery Ship Exposed!

The mystery surrounding the discovery of an alien derelict ship (top photo) on planet LV-426 has been solved. It turns out a secret U.S. government agency known as the Pre-Company built the ship in Dubai (bottom photo) and used chaos-stringette-wormhole deconstruction teleportation techniques to fling it into the future to be discovered by the hapless crew of the Nostromo. How Alien eggs were deposited in the hold of the ship remains unknown, though rumor has it that the current administration has captured an Alien queen (aka "you BITCH!") and has secreted her in "an undisclosed location."