Nottest 100

I was going to lay low about the Hottest 100 because I haven’t listened to the station since 1995 or so, so I figure it’s none of my business and anyway Gen X Curmudgeon is not one of my life goals but WHAT’S WITH THE NO GURLS CRAP? What happened to

Blondie – Union City Blue, Heart of Glass
Kate Bush – Wuthering Heights, Hounds of Love, Man with the Child in his Eyes
P J Harvey – Sheila-na-gig, Rid of Me
Jane Siberry – The Walking, The Bird in the Gravel
Missy Elliot – Get Ur Freak On, Work It
Salt n Pepa – Push It
Nina Simone – Mississippi Goddam
Billie Holiday – Strange Fruit
Lydia Lunch – Death Valley ‘69
ABBA – Dancing Queen
Thelma Houston – The Only Way Is Up
Eartha Kitt – Just an Old Fashioned Girl, I Want To Be Evil
Siouxsie Sioux and the Banshees – Spellbound, Cities in Dust
Donna Summer – I Feel Love
Chicks On Speed – Kalte Klares Wasser
Marianne Faithfull – Why’d You Do It
Sinead O’Conner – Emperor’s New Clothes, Nothing Compares To U, Jump in the River
Karen Finley – Tales of Taboo
k d laing – Constant Craving
L 7 – Pretend that we’re Dead
Throwing Muses – Mania, Not Too Soon
Do Re Mi – Man Overboard, Warnings Moving Clockwise
The Breeders – Cannonball
Bonnie Tyler – Total Eclipse of the Heart
Madonna – Holiday, Like a Virgin
Dusty Springfield – Son of a Preacher Man
Betty Davis – Freak, Ain’t No Good at Fallin’ in Love
Janis Joplin – Piece of my Heart, Me and Bobby McGee, Mercedes Benz
Grace Jones – La Vie En Rose, Slave to the Rhythm, Pull Up To The Bumper
Tom Tom Club – Genius of Love, Wordy Rappinghood
Edith Piaf – No, je ne regrette rien
Jane Birkin – Je t’aime… moi non plus
Lene Lovich – Lucky Number
Björk – It’s Oh So Quiet, Hyperballad, Army of Me
Neneh Cherry – Buffalo Stance
Tracy Chapman – Talkin ‘Bout a Revolution
Look Blue Go Purple – Cactus Cat
Lauryn Hill – Doo Wop
Eurythmics – Here Comes The Rain Again, Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)
Yoko Ono – Walking on Thin Ice
The Shop Assistants – Safety Net
Hole – Miss World, Celebrity Skin
Aretha Franklin – Say a Little Prayer for You, R.E.S.P.E.C.T
Nancy Sinatra – These Boots Are Made For Walkin’

?

Not to mention all the songs by female artists that I couldn’t write down off the top of my head during my lunch break.

Cathode-ray Jupiter

The new, improved solar system, 4

Jupiter’s magnetosphere is a strange mixture of the impressive and the disappointing: a vast, wobbly pancake of ionised gases, hundreds of millions of kilometres wide and large enough to hold the Sun several times over, it would be wider than a full Moon in Earth’s sky, if it radiated any visible light.

But it doesn’t.  Talk about wasteful.  The largest single structure in the whole solar system is just sitting there, like an invisible Mount Everest.  And all it takes is a sprinkling of the right ingredients and a bit of a kick to get something truly worthwhile.

Io, the innermost of Jupiter’s larger moons, is our base of operations.  This highly volcanic moon is already pumping megatonnes of dust and gases into the magnetosphere, and its molten interior will be a handy energy source for our arrays of high-wattage lasers.

These beams will light up the plasma – cunningly doped by dumping suitable chemicals into Io’s magma – in all the gorgeous colours of sodium-green, oxygen-red and sulphur-blue, turning Jupiter into a huge near-vacuum tube with pixels the size of minor planets.

Io’s orbital period of 42 hours will give our display a refresh rate of 0.000006542 Hz, not the best on the market, but as it’s all powered by Jupiter’s rotation and gravity, it’s completely carbon-neutral.

Dark matter

Molecular astronomy

The new, improved solar system, 3

Shiny moons and new planets may be all right for the gawking masses, you may ask, but what of those of us with more refined tastes? The adventurous chefs of tomorrow won’t be content with merely Earthly delights, and fleets of robot probes will scour the system for new and ever more absurdly expensive ingredients and techniques.

Moon dust is unsealed at the table and sprinkled over the amuse bouche. As the glittering powder is exposed for the first time in millions of years to a moist, reducing atmosphere, the fleeting bouquet, comparable to Sichuan pepper, freshly-cut glass and burnt gunpowder, will arouse the most jaded palate.

Martian salt, with its unique brick-red colour and sour, alkali undertones, is the idea garnish for sous-vide loaves leavened with Titanian anaerobic yeasts and poach/baked for three weeks.

Forget glacier melt or deep ocean water: nothing is as untouched, or as recherche, as comet water, frozen in the depths of the Oort cloud since long before the Earth formed. Its bracing ammonia-and-tholin tang makes it an ideal accompaniment for seafood.

Assemble the asteroids

The new, improved solar system, 2

It was once thought that the main asteroid belt of our solar system had its origins in a mysterious ‘fifth planet’ which orbited between Mars and Jupiter until it was destroyed millions of years ago by a catastrophic explosion, possibly involving primeval forms of Mentos and cola.

Modern astronomy frowns on this theory, depending as it does on a faintly embarrassing piece of numerology known as the Titius-Bode law, and prefers to blame the asteroids on the meddlesome gravitational influence of Jupiter. But just because the fifth planet never formed in the first place, it doesn’t mean that we can’t make one, and the materials are already to hand.

A solar system without asteroids will be a tidier and more well-proportioned place, with no pesky chunks of space rubble dropping out of the sky and causing extinction events.

It’s simply a matter of magnetising a couple of the bigger nickel-iron asteroids and waiting for them to glom onto each other in an ever-growing clump. Non-metallic asteroids can be hauled in with nets or static cling.

As a bonus, we get to make a new planet to spec, which will be much more fun than terraforming Venus or Mars. Renovations are such a bore.

Nerds may object that the total mass of all known asteroids is only 4% of the mass of the Moon, but remember that we’re building this thing from scratch. It’s not like it has to be solid all the way through. And anyway, once we get around to cleaning them all up, there are sure to be many more asteroids than we thought, just like when you move house.

Ice the Moon

The new, improved solar system, 1

It may come as a shock to you, but the albedo, or reflective brightness, of the Earth’s Moon is 0.12, which is very, very dark, about as dark as this: █

Much like a goth caught in the beam of a powerful searchlight, it only seems bright to us because it is reflecting the Sun’s rays against the even deeper black of Space Itself.

And because we’re used to it. Used to a dowdy, dim, low-wattage Moon, a lump of dusty black rock which is barely bright enough to prevent us stumbling drunkenly over tent-ropes and falling into campfires at night.

Saturn’s moon Enceladus, by contrast, has an albedo of 99%. Think of how bright that would be, if it were not languishing in the backwaters of the solar system.

I’m not proposing to move Enceladus into the Moon’s orbit: that would be ridiculously expensive. All we need to do is spray-coat the Moon in something white and powdery. Think of the gloriously warm, moonlit nights we would enjoy, basking in the rays of a highly-reflective and fully solar-powered Moon.

(Of course, the term ‘ice’ here does not refer to actual frozen water, which would probably melt. In astronomy ‘ice’ has a special technical sense, and refers to any form of sugared frosting.)

Two Sugars

We meet in Glebe in the winter wind
We hold each other tight.
I got you an adjective coffee:
A skinny large flat white.

Degustation

The Wire v The Wire

I got the soundtrack CD to best-TV-show-of-all-time The Wire as an anniversary present last night. In my CD collection I have about four or five samplers from music-magazine-I-used-to-buy-intermittently The Wire. Let’s see how they stack up against one another.

The Wire (TV show): Steve Earle, Michael Franti, the Nighthawks, the Pogues, the Neville Brothers, Tom Waits, the Blind Boys of Alabama, and a bunch of Baltimore hip-hop acts I’ve never heard of but which are great;

The Wire (music magazine): Throbbing Gristle, now and then an Albert Ayler track or something like that, and a bunch of stuff that might as well be by Throbbing Gristle.

Henry V

Shakespeare: the funny bits

Henry V is really quite odd. The two parts of Henry IV use the relationship between Hal and Falstaff to connect the historical action and the comic subplot, but now that Falstaff has gone, Henry’s wild youth is behind him and he’s soberly invading France and delivering stirring stuff like “Once more unto the breach, dear friends” and the St Crispin’s day speech. Meanwhile, in the place of a proper subplot, we have a series of characters who talk in amusing regional accents and rude French puns. It’s as if the form of the history play has distorted to the point where all that is left is a mass of rhetorical devices and Goon Show silly voices.

I felt I had to parody the whole thing in order to convey the play’s cumulative effect. The famous speeches are omitted, as they have become far too firmly associated with the idea that the English are plucky, scrappy, reluctant soldiers, even when they are embarking upon a war of conquest on the flimsiest of pretexts. In their stead I’ve included Henry’s fine address to the good citizens of Harfleur, which deserves to be better known.

Because we all know that Henry V is about inspiring people to go off to war. Isn’t it?