Hubble Sees Romulan, NASA sees bubkiss.

Nasa is at it again. Once more, the universe has given them Enriched Plutonium and once again they have made a radioactive sculpture of a stork.

See, The Hubble Teliscope caught sight of a Romulan

"… what Hubble saw indicates that P/2010 A2 is unlike any object ever seen before. At first glance, the object appears to have the tail of a comet. Close inspection, however, shows a 140-meter nucleus offset from the tail center, very unusual structure near the nucleus, and no discernable gas in the tail. Knowing that the object orbits in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, a preliminary hypothesis that appears to explain all of the known clues is that P/2010 A2 is the debris left over from a recent collision between two small asteroids. If true, the collision likely occurred at over 15,000 kilometers per hour — five times the speed of a rifle bullet — and liberated energy in excess of a nuclear bomb."

fire! O lord FIRE!

www.bentobjects.blogspot.com

this place makes my day.

The Iron Gym Debacle

Let me explain something about my family; my parents were the religious, conservative, church going kind of people, who took everything from Princess Di’s death to getting a flat tire as a sign from God. “God doesn’t want us to…” “I thing the Lord is trying to tell us…” “This is His will, son…” were common defenses for some of the most illogical and obtuse events of my childhood. In short, my family sorta epitomized the kind of people who could justify the crusades.

Anyway, the reason I brought this up was to paint you a picture that I can then proceed to lob handfuls of shit at. One of the “Signs” my parents saw was, apparently, that God hated television. After buying a string of Value Village TV’s (some of which WERE black and white), and having EACH explode, implode, overheat, melt or just flat out confusticate themselves in to electrical oblivion, they determined that God didn’t want them to have a Television. I just thought God didn’t want them to have a shitty Television and they should buck up and buy something that wasn’t previously owned by the unibomber, and that they should stop being so fucking cheap and calling it frugality. I’m pretty sure thirteen pre-world war two TV’s cost them the same as one modern, glitch free, explosion free, fire free, stress free color television.

My reason for bringing this up is that not only did I go through my teens and early twenties having absolutely no clue who the hell Nirvana was or what the deal was with Michael Jackson, but I was almost killed by my family’s unfortunate susceptibility to late night infomercials.

See, earlier this summer I was visiting my sisters Bella and Lydia at their place in Denver, and as we stood around the kitchen talking and laughing at their kids cause they couldn’t speak English, Lydia’s husband Roy came up from the basement with what looked like a burnished steel and spongy rubber Club, the ridiculous car safety steering wheel locking system from the nineties.

“Check this out, JJ,” he said, hefting the hunk of pipes and rubber above his head and jimmying it in to the top of the doorframe. Once in place, he gave it a good yank and then started doing pull-ups, his exuberant face flushing red from the effort.

“It’s called an Iron Gym,” Lydia gushed, explaining how she had seen it at a Circuit City or one of those other stores where late night TV ads go to die, and wasn’t it the coolest, most innovative advancement in home gym technology cause you could do pull-ups AND pushups on it and she had lost five pounds in two weeks and could now do TWO pull-ups WATCH! I stood in slackjawed disbelief as my sister did not one, not two, but THREE pull-ups on the very hunk of metal that I had once sleepily said could be my fitness salvation.

Lydia, in a dead hang, was still a foot and a half off the ground as she continued extolling the virtues of the Iron Gym, and I briefly wondered if I’d get candy if I hit her with a stick.

“Try it,” she said, dropping down and grinning ruefully at me (note: don’t do anything my sisters tell you to, it’s dangerous. Different laws apply to people of their slight stature, and for us normal sized people it can be dangerous in their too-small shoes). Like an idiot, I stepped up to the bar.

“Where do I hang on?”

“Oh, anywhere, really. Just get a grip that feels comfortable and pull yourself up!”

Wrong.

The Iron Gym is innovative, yes, creative and usefull and easy to use, but the simple fact of the matter is that there are maybe two places you can hold on to it when you are doing a pullup; the handles that jut out from one side, and the bottom crossbar. Any other hand placement, any deviation from the prescribed grip and the results can be devastating and humiliating. Though mostly humiliating.

Instead of the handles or the crossbar, I decided to try a more difficult grip, since I’m an asshole and I wanted to remind my sisters just how tiny and weak they were. Karma is a bitch.

I grabbed the BACK of the handles, just above the crossbar and hefted myself in to the air with a Herculean grunt. A few things happened: my feet left the ground, the Iron Gym left the doorframe, the doorframe left the wall and the nails that had kept it in place AND the Iron Gym found my forehead, and my ass found the kitchen floor, where I lay, stunned, as little angels strumming Iron Gym shaped harps and playing Death Magnetic flew around my bruised cranium.

After the sharp CRACK, the only sound was laughter. Maniacal, devious, little-person-rage driven laughter. When my vision eyes straightened out I freaked; I couldn’t see out of my left eye! I raised my hand cautiously to my throbbing forehead and felt the strangest thing. The door frame that had clocked me on it’s way earthward had nailed itself to my forehead and was blocking my eyesight. I yanked the nail out of my scalp and dropped the chunk of wood, staggering to my feet.

My sisters got quiet fast, the men in my family have notoriously short fuses, but I could feel my eyes watering up, so I looked around, nodded my head and left the kitchen, silently stepping over the broken door frame and blood stained Iron Gym.

The moral is don’t be cheap. Buy a fucking TV and let your kids watch, cause it might just save their lives.

I've Seen Fire and I've Seen Rain

I just saw my hometown get nuked. I sat on the grass in the shadow of one of the university's structures and watched as the seemingly unending plume of fire and electricity thundered in to the sky, and looking around I was somehow not even surprised to see no one running, no one screaming. We all stared silently, almost peacefully, at the oncoming wall of fire that never quite engulfed our tiny bodies.

I saw the bomb fall, or at least saw it's jet plumed path arch across the sky. It was being carried by an orange rocket shaped something like the Bell X-1, the old test plane that broke the sound barrier, but this one was slightly different, and I watched it scream from the north and slam in to the earth near my parent's house. I'm about to puke just trying to remember this long enough to write it down.

I know I thought briefly of how sad I was that I would not be around to reshape the world with the other survivors, that despite every hope ever had for having a long life full of meaning and purpose and adventure, it was beign arbitrarily ended in one brilliant flash. More than any other emotion though, I just sat in resignation, watching my death fly towards me.

I was not alone on the campus. Behind me was a marching band decked out in blue, their drums silent. To the east a middleschool girl's soccer team stood in the long grass, their feet unmoving, their grass stained soccer balls forgotten, and south from me, towards the fire and the whispering death, stood some college students. Their books lay upturned on the dirt.

I thought of the woman I love, and how angry I was that I couldn't hold her one last time, of how useless I was to protect her from the mushroom cloud rising up in the south.

The walls of fire kept advancing, never seeming to kill us. The first one seemed to swallow everything, and from inside we could see the finger of death carving a white hot hole in to the pale blue early morning sky. Electricity arced from the earth to the peak of the explosion, and wave after wave of fire seemed to roll outwards, mocking us with it's absolute endign power.

In a nuclear explosion, one of three things will kill you; the explosion its self, if you are in the kill zone, the fire storm from the explosion if you are within a mile or so, and lastly, most horribly, the radiation kills the rest. It is the vulture that rides in the contrails of death, and I could feel it sinking it's claws in to me before the cloud had risen.

I could feel the radiation turning my thumbnails in to blood red splotches on my swelling fingers, the pressure building and building as the brilliant whiteness overcame me and boiled every liter of liquid in my body.

I woke up with a start, panting. I knew immediately that I had been dreaming, but that white hot image was burned in to my brain, searing my eyes with its ghost. My girlfriend was in the shower, and I stood by the washroom door for a few minutes just to hear the water and catch my breath. We had been dying moments before and now something as simple as listening to a shower on monday morning was healing me.

She didn't answer to my knock so i'm here writing this and for some reason hoping i'm not too late.

Zombies are nuts for brains.

You're welcome.