The Galileo Year

Okay, so it's not officially called "Galileo Year", but it should be. In commemoration of Galileo's lodestone that he pointed at the heavens in 1609, 2009 is going to be the International Year of Astronomy.

How do I know this?

Through the wonders of the streaming Internets. I still listen to KQED in San Francisco via their website, which is rad because WHYY in Phila... well, they can throw all the Marty Moss-Cowain they want at me, but give me Rachel Myrow and Michael Krazny over her any day, and twice on Sundays.

But back to the subject at hand: the International Year of Astronomy.

Astronomy is fascinating to me, ever since I learned about the 1919 eclipse experiment by A.S. Eddington that confirmed the theory of relativity. Matter really distorts space! Light bends according to the shape of space! Wacky! Wild! Awesome stuff!!!!

My Old bf in SF gave me a lovely book by Einstein that gives a popular recounting of the basics of relativity. How I miss him! (Einstein and Old bf, both. I haven't read any Einstein in maybe a year now.)

I ask myself, what should the International Year of Astronomy be? Shall we look for little green men? Shall we point the entire VLA in New Mexico at the North Star and see what we find?

I've always wanted to see the Southern Cross. I imagine people from Down Unda want to see the Big Dipper.

So strange that our skies look different above and below the equator.

What does the sky look like at the equator?

Random musings to start out this, the Galileo Year.

R U INSANE????

I just read a post of a former schoolmate in which she actually listed all of her former addresses. The real deal. ON THE INTERNET.

What a doofus.

A World Populated by Snotty Writers

Disclaimer: I didn't read the entire post, because I got too annoyed to finish it.

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So, big pet peeve of mine: Open Salon. Oh, how I hate Open Salon, and let me give you a snippet of it just so you can taste the Bitter Bitter Princesses for themselves

I don't want to compete with all the Internet for attention—I can already do that by just posting to any of my several domains. I want the one thing that makes Open Salon different—a personal conversation with intelligent people who are actually committed to being here and chatting about important things. What a special thing.

But once people who are posting elsewhere can dump their stuff here as an extra offload point, I expect you to continue the already annoying trend of featuring people with offsite blogs as editor's picks because I sense that you mistakenly seek to create the cyberspace equivalent of a kind of metropolitan cachet.

What, the rest of the blogosphere isn't good enough for you "real writers"?

Eat a dick.

Snobbery. Elitism. The Ivory Tower and the Benign Dictatorship of the Intelligentsia.

EAT. A. DICK.

By opening up Open Salon to less worthy writers, perhaps you could engage not in a community, but in a true plurality of voices. Yes, it's true, very rarely can you have both quantity and quality, but c'mon, people, Teh Interwebs are for everyone, and lets not forget that. (And let us not forget that they are also for everyone who is lucky enough to have a computer.)

It's this prima donna attitude that I find so offensive in writers like Augusten Burroughs and Elizabeth Wurtzel, but at least I can leave them on the shelf at Borders. You're telling me your prissy asses are going to be following me all the way home?

Screw you.

I'll stay with my pedestrian blogger site and try and remember that the world doesn't revolve around me or any imagined online "community". I suggest, Writer Dear, that you do the same.

Online Life

I'm exhausted. Everything in my life is exhausting right now. It's just too much. NaBloPoMo and NaNoWriMo are eating my soul.

I keep thinking about how now everyone's building a life online in some way or other, even just with email. I have a friend who said that he now finds it unusual when people *don't* have a blog or some sort of website. MySpace, LiveJournal, Facebook... We are building a Second Life. Which isn't even mentioning Second Life.

We are becoming a society devoid of privacy, exhibitionists all of us. But you know, I think that's a pessimistic way to look at it. I really believe that our gravitation towards having an online presence is a way of breaking out of the isolation of our daily lives. I think it is symptomatic of a world that has gotten very lonely in recent years. We're reaching out to each other, complete strangers.

If you think about it, it's really quite beautiful.

.... Now if only we could stop judging each other...