Sticks, Hawking, El blogging

You know what's awesome?

Consistent posting.

In lieu of that, you know what's awesome?

Floating Stephen Hawking. Dr. Hawking flew with a company that does the whole parabolic flight thing to simulate weightlessnes and apparently had a really good time. Good. If you revolutionize an area of physics, you should get to do whatever you want, basically. His eventual goal is to actually make it into orbit, which would also be pretty amazing. There have been concerns about how being in orbit might affect him considering his condition, and for how much I'd like him to be able to get there, how bad would it be if we ended up trying to send the smartest guy into space and accidentally killing him?

Other than that, it's really late here. I'd like to go home. I've got to take a few more measurements. And so I'm probably not in the most lucid state. But even now, there are some things I think I'll tend to pick up. On the way to go grab another one of my samples to take an aliquot that I can dilute and analyze, I nearly reached the door before NPR reminded me that it's NPR. And again, I'm often surprised when people don't listen to NPR more. Most of it's fascinating, there's some really off-beat stuff and I really enjoy it. Then, they say things like what I heard when I was leaving, apparently discussing a structure in an arboretum, and I'm reminded of what people must hear when they tune into this.

"It had a certain kind of grandeur that you wouldn't expect with sticks."

I'm just freaking stunned. Here's the piece. It's nothing stunning. Just that one sentence. Oh, and the reporter sounds like he's being punished for something when he's signing off.

There was a piece in some garbage Lakeview publication a long time ago that Jenna and I found while eating at a pretty good Hawaiian BBQ place down the road. I didn't really like how it was done. It seemed like something that was being written with the intention of being this big freaking thing, then failed. It just sounded kind of forced. My favorite part of it, actually, is when he gets afraid of all the black people at the late, late hour of 6:30pm and puts away his laptop. I think I'm going to try the same thing tonight, and there are a few reasons I think it will work. First, it's going to be about 1:30am when I get out of here, and I think the El is probably more interesting at that time than at rush hour. It's also Friday, meaning I'll be the only sober person on the train. Maybe the driver. We'll see.* I'm going to try to avoid commenting on the size of buildings in Edgewater as opposed to those in Uptown. Unfortunately, I'm going to do it with a pen and pad because, frankly, my laptop is locked to my desk and I'm not sure where the key is. Also, most of my observations will probably be colored slightly by the fact that I have the worst luck imaginable with the CTA and so hate them. And it'll still probably be really lame, but as my readership currently exists of six of you and I post twice a month anymore, I figure that in this case, any content is a bit better than really old posts sitting here forever.