"Hello, world!"

In the predawn hours of America's Jan 20th, the Rosetta Spacecraft woke up from a 2.5-year slumber, over 500 million miles away and at the end of a 10-year-journey, and tweeted home, "Hello, world". From here, it is going to continue on to rendezvous with Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, orbiting it, studying it, and eventually sending a probe to its surface to help suss out what the solar system was like before the planets were formed. In other words, what our mom was like in her hard-partying days before she had us.

My hometown rag, which has won numerous Pulitzers in its heyday, did not headline the momentous event. However, their headlines tend more toward the profane rather than the sublime. Today, for example, the front page looks like this:


And now I need to go lie down.

Edited to add: The gifted columnist Jon Carroll paid tribute. At least we got that.

Subaru flaw

Both my prior and current Subarus had a weird little flaw with the headlights. When you need to replace them, you find that the bulb is stuck in as if it is welded in place. You pull and pull (it's a plug-in, not a twist-in), and then it finally breaks loose, but bulb comes flying out, and you wham the back of your hand into the car frame. It's... not awesome. I greatly expand my creative vocabulary in such moments.

The other evening, one prong actually came out of the dang thing and stuck in the socket, and I had to pull it out with pliers in order to put the new bulb in:


What the hell, Subaru?

In other news, yesterday was just breathtakingly gorgeous:

I guess I ain't that Alaskan after all...

... considering how few of my friends appreciated this gem of mine:


Come to think of it, more than a few of my Californian friends didn't grok it, either.

I can't believe that I sat and stared at the pattern and laughed until my pants got nervous, then IM'ed around asking craftier friends whether it was difficult to cross stitch, and might I learn how from the internet, and then spent four consecutive nights stitching the damned thing, to the tune of 8 hours, and then finally, at the end of my efforts, proudly hung it on the wall, to receive a multitude of blank looks and/or generic compliments on how lovely it is and what a fine job I did with the needlework.

Hrrmph! I guess I'll have to give up what could have been a burgeoning career in ironic cross-stitching. Fo shizzle.