This helps a little.

1,500 light years away. Click here to get an inch or two closer. Rainy days and sundays...

In my head

for the last few weeks is this poem by Dolores Dorantes. The violence of the new millennium compacted into thirty-odd short pages. It wrecked me for a good three days after the first read. No English translation available, but it's perfect in Spanish, so don't wait.

Hills in Boston

"And some certain significance lurks in all things, else all things are little worth, and the round world itself but an empty cipher, except to sell by the cartload, as they do hills about Boston, to fill up some morass in the Milky Way."

—Herman Melville, Moby Dick

Falsity Is the Truth of Negation

New photos of the Carina Nebula from the Very Large Telescope. It's in Chile (the telescope, I mean, not the nebula) atop Mount Paranal in the Atacama desert. "The dry, dusty desert is almost devoid of life and a perfect place to watch the skies," says the Guardian. Hmmph. See previous entry on Eta Carina, whom you can see smiling brightly in the lower left corner of the photo.

It was a real horrific scene up there

Shaved animals prancing and hopping and loping about, some of them nearly fully peeled. The carpets, though, were spotless.