One of these days, I’m going to head up to Maine and do this tour of the Solar System. I was talking to Dr. Fiancée, and she is onboard, as she is with any travel proposal. The real question is now will we do it, but when we will do it. That remains to be seen. At this point, it’s as amorphous as an intergalactic gas cloud.
With that, here is 13 June 2024’s “TBT^2: Touring the Solar System in Rural Maine“:
Back in 2019 I learned about The Maine Solar System Model, a model of the Solar System stretched along Highway 1 in Maine. The planets are spaced proportionally as they are in the Solar System, with the Sun being part of an entire building. It’s a really cool concept, and it’s something I hope to see someday.
This model Solar System reminds me of what John Derbyshire calls the “old, weird America.” The United States is a vast country, with huge regional differences, even within States. Just look at barbecue, for example: there is no uniform way to prepare it in the South. By “barbecue,” I specifically mean pulled pork barbecue, and being from western South Carolina, we like a mustard-based sauce for ours. In North Carolina, its vinegar-based. Other States use—horrors!—ketchup-based sauces.
The point is not to get you hungry—although my mouth is watering—but to give one example of how even in the tiniest details, we Americans are an incredibly varied bunch. One major source of the American Civil War that is often overlooked is the sheer differences between Northerners and Southerners in their respective outlooks about the world itself, much less all the political and economic disagreements.
The Maine Solar System Model is a great example of that kind of weird, localized boosterism. It also harkens back to a time before everything was built to look like a Brutalist J.C. Penney’s.
With that, here is 8 June 2023’s “TBT: Touring the Solar System in Rural Maine“:
Okay, okay—I know I shared “The Rings of Saturn” last Tuesday. However, I went out that Tuesday night to open mic night, and—with all humility—I knocked it out of the park. As such, I had to share footage of this live performance.
I’ve been writing (and singing!) a lot about space lately. My interest in the topic is steadfast, though the highlighting of it here on the blog ebbs and flows. I also will hasten to add that I’m not much for the technical details of space exploration and colonization, and I suspect that many of our scientific observations about space are, at best, educated guesses. Rather, I adore the idea of humanity stretching its fragile fingers into the firmament.
This recent focus also coincides with the re-release of several of my old instrumental albums into the digital space. To save a few bucks (“quid” to my English readers), I released Electrock Music (2006) and Electrock II: Space Rock (2007) into a digital double LP (twelve tracks each, twenty-four tracks total):
Start with “Launch” to begin a musicologist’s tour throughout our Solar System.
To take an abbreviated tour of our Solar System—with a major emphasis on Saturn—keep reading:
Happy Sunday!
—TPP
Other Lazy Sunday Installments:
I’ve been on an outer space kick lately, especially with all my posts about Saturn. As such, it seemed like an excellent opportunity to look back at this little post from 2019—one of my favorites!
Surprisingly, I’d never bothered to reblog this one in the nearly four years since it was first published. It’s about a model Solar System in the State of Maine, The Maine Solar System Model (the website for which has gotten a facelift since 2019). It’s been on my traveling “to do list” ever since I learned about it on Quora.
With that, here is 24 September 2019’s “Touring the Solar System in Rural Maine“:
Saturn is my favorite planet (after Earth, of course). Who can resist those beautiful rings, and the clear demarcation of the Cassini Division? There’s also something otherworldly and mysterious about it. Just listen to the opening bars of “Saturn, the Bringer of Old Age” from Gustav Holst’s The Planets:
Years ago I wrote a song, “The Rings of Saturn,” which has never enjoyed a formal recording. That’s a shame, because it is one of my better songs (I write with all humility). It will have to grace an edition of Open Mic Adventures soon. The header image for my Bandcamp page is the a picture of the planet.
Needless to say, I like Saturn a lot. I sometimes image what it would be like living on one of its moons, or if we’ll someday have mining colonies on the larger bits of icy space-stuff in its rings.
Well, it seems those beautiful rings are disappearing. Fortunately, as with all things astronomical, none of us will be around to see them disappear entirely.
The school year is grinding down at an agonizingly slow pace, which means my mind increasingly is turning away from serious matters and towards video games.
As a grown man with too many responsibilities and not enough time, I don’t indulge in video games much anymore. I’ve always been more of a casual gamer in the sense that I play in short spurts for fun of it, not necessarily “beating” (finishing) a game, but enjoying playing with its mechanics or discovering some bit of its story. I play games that would be considered “serious” among gamers, but I don’t do so with the intensity of those more committed gamers.
Increasingly, though, my gaming habits have turned towards more casual games—puzzle games and the like. I don’t do a ton of gaming on my phone, but there are a few that I enjoy.
One of those is TerraGenesis, a game in which you take on the terraforming of a planet. The game starts you with Mars, and by the time you read this post, I should have completed my first successful terraforming of the red planet. The game draws heavily from the style of the board game Terraforming Mars, which is one of my favorites in the “make-this-planet-habitable-for-humans” genre.
Playing that got me thinking about the granddaddy of all terraforming games, SimEarth. I wrote a loving tribute to this DOS classic a few years ago, and it seemed like a good time to give it another look.
With that, here is “TBT: SimEarth“:
We’re back with another movie review from Audre Myers, who is tossing in reviews of her favorite flicks whenever the mood strikes (or whenever I e-mail her asking her to contribute something).
She offers up her review of the 2016 film Hidden Figures, about three black women “computers” working for NASA. It was a darling of the critics for its frank depiction of segregation.
Unfortunately, some its iconic scenes—like the lady having to walk half-a-mile to use a segregated bathroom—are Hollywood hogwash. The segregated facilities were abolished in 1958—three years before the films setting—and while there were segregated restrooms in one part of NASA’s facilities prior to that year, they were unlabeled. Katherine Johnson, one of the titular “hidden figures,” unwittingly used the whites only bathroom for years, and ignored the one complaint that was ever issued without any further escalation.
These inaccuracies—perhaps dramatic artistic license?—don’t mean segregation wasn’t real—it certainly was—but it seems that NASA was not exactly the hotbed of segregationist sentiment that the film depicts. That makes sense—an organization reaching for the stars probably isn’t all that concerned about such earthbound issues as skin pigmentation. Besides, there are plenty of alien species we can discriminate against in the distant future.
With that, here is Audre Myers’s review of 2016’s Hidden Figures:
Regular readers will have surmised that, in spite being thirty-seven-years old, I am very much a kid at heart. Often, I am also a kid in practice.
I was blessed to receive two incredible LEGO sets for Christmas: the Imperial Shuttle (#75302) and the Darth Vader Helmet (#75304). These sets are 660+ and 800+ pieces, respectively, and are probably the largest LEGO sets I’ve done. I did have the legendary Black Seas Barracuda (#10040) as a kid, which is nearly 900 pieces, but I never built it—my older brother did.
Both of these builds were deeply satisfying. I was sick with a low-grade fever and a sore throat (but tested negative for The Virus, no worries) the week after Christmas, and was generally enduring some low times besides the sickness, so I had plenty of time to dive into both of these kits—and was eager to do so.
Here, I’ll share some pictures of the builds, and discuss a bit of what it was like constructing them.
I’m a big sucker—pun most certainly intended—for vampire movies. I’ve always enjoyed the vampire mythos, and find them to be terrifyingly fascinating villains (or anti-heroes). The concept of immortality in a fallen, ever-changing world is itself a haunting prospect, one filled both with opportunity and, ultimately, hopelessness.
I also love science-fiction movies, notably those that take place in space. The sense of boundless adventure and the thrill of exploration combine with high-tech gobbledygook to make for some fun stories. Sci-fi, like horror, also has the ability to be among the best social commentary put to paper.
With 1985’s Lifeforce, those two genres are combined in a pleasing, memorable way. Indeed, the film is based on a novel called The Space Vampires, which gives the game away on the front cover. The vampires of the film and the novel are energy vampires, sucking the lifeforce from their victims, luring them in by shapeshifting into the guise of what the human victim most desires in a mate. In doing so, they turn their victims in ravenous husks who must feed on the energy of others to survive. If they don’t, they explode into a puff of dust and ash.
The Portly Politico 