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I have been dreading this day for months, but now that it’s passed, everything’s fine.  I’m cool with being 60.  I find it hard to believe but it’s easy to do the math.  2014-1954=60.

It was a low key celebration.  Went to a better than average poetry reading last night, featuring a Canadian folk duo.  Had a lazy day today, with just one class.  My crazy Iranian kids.  Ages 7 up to about 14.  All shouting at once.  But, they’re focused.  They want to learn English.  So, it’s always an enjoyable class.  And today they learned the epic, downright sysyphian tale of the eentsy-weentsy spider.

Then I picked up Isabel from school, just like when I was 59, and went home.  I’d pretty much forgotten it was my birthday when Helena showed up, loaded with loot.  I got two new shirts, a wallet, a bag – seriously,  my old one was comically bedraggled, worn through  in spots and with one zipper broken.  We had KFC for dinner, followed by a thick, sweet, fudge cake with chocolate frosting.

And now I’m off to bed.  I’ll write a more serious blog tomorrow.  It’s my birthday.

Well, file this one under “It’s about damned time.”  The Japanese are planning to put a giant solar panel in space.  It’s an idea that’s probably about as old as space flight, and I’m sure it will be economically feasible because, once it’s up there, collecting solar energy in deep space, fresh from the sun, unfiltered by Earth’s atmosphere, it will be up there for a long time.  Low wear and tear and not much overhead (that’s a joke).

Let there be light. Let there be power.

I once worked on a dairy farm (on a kibbutz in the Negev desert) and one of the perks of working in the dairy was that you could tap the vat where the raw milk, unpasteurized, unhomogenized, thick with fat, and still warm from the inside of the bovine mammaries, was kept.  As much better as that was from regular store brought milk is how much better space based solar power harvesting will be from earth based solar power  harvesting.

I’d like to see the idea catch on.  Of course, there is some expense in setting it up, and the Japanese Space Agency has a few steps to go through first,  but they’re going to do it.  It’s going to take about 25 years, but they’re going to do it.

Part of the problem is that it takes a country like Japan before something like this gets done.  I’m not saying they are particularly adventurous, or better engineers than everybody else.  But their need is greater.  The reason the U.S., and Russia, have not bothered to exploit space in this particular manner, is because both countries have large, government  controlling oil companies.

Cheap energy is the last thing they want.

Well, I was going to wait a couple of days, at least tell we’ve heard back from Create Space, but Helena just said to me “Why don’t  you write about Pink Snow and let everybody know it will be available in a day or two and you can include a couple of the poems, which will make the blog easy to write” and I’ve got to admit that’s true.  Also, she put in a lot of work today to get it into publishable shape and off to Create Space, so I’d better do what she wants if I ever want assistance again, and I’m sure I will.

The Cover: šafařiková street in bloom, by daniela šafranková

I’m very pleased with the book, it’s sort of a catch-all, an excuse to publish all of the poems I’ve written since my last book of that type, maybe two or three years ago.  One thing I’ve noticed about my own writing is most people usually like my shorter poems better than my longer ones.  Me, I’m proud of my longer ones, they took more work and generally  I’m trying to convey something of great importance.  As I read through this book, however, as much as I’m proud of the longer ones (especially ‘One morning in Germany’, which most poets would class as a short poem but that’s all relative – it’s a true story about overcoming my inhibitions to try a nude beach), it’s the short poems that are the stars of this book.

Like the titular poem:

Every year in April

There’s a gentle breeze that blows

And the petals fall from the cherry trees

just like a soft, pink snow

or this:

In any western language

on signs wherever you go

you’ll see a little happy face

drawn inside the O

which may seem like a silly, little thing but I believe it makes a very important point about the deep universality of language and how our world is becoming more homogenous and also how language is evolving,

or this:

The differences between the sexes

Now, and always will perplex us

which is not a terribly original thought, but it’s short, and sweet, and true.

So, in summary, ‘Pink Snow’ will be available from Amazon soon, probably within a week, and on Kindle shortly thereafter.  At very reasonable prices.

What is music, anyway?  Frank Zappa once described it as sculpture of the air.  That is, sound consists of pulses and waves in the air, and music is an aesthetically pleasing arrangement of sound.  That can come from many sources, not all of them human.  There is the music of birds singing, the regular rhythm of waves pounding against the rocks, the soft natural woodwind sound made by the wind moving through the woods.

So, we have two basic types of music: that made by human beings, which includes everything from Old McDonald Had a Farm up to Mozart’s operas, it ranges from the greatest jazz musician down to a 4 year old kid screwing around with a kazoo; and that made by nature, which is either random, or instinctive.

Now, there is a third kind.  Finding music in things which were previously not considered musical.  Just today, I found three examples of this exciting new genre.  First, there was this, which explores the possibility of what would happen if you tried to play a slice of a tree like a record, because with their  rings, previously only thought to be useful for ascertaining the age of the tree, that’s a thing that can be done.  I don’t think it’s going to be the next dance craze, but there was definitely a musicality to it, and apparently each different species of tree has quite a different sound to it.  O.K., so it’s 2 years old.  I saw it for the 1st time today, and I still think it fits into the miracles-of-our-modern-age category.

Then there was this piece, which I suspect was originally based on a New Yorker cartoon.  I don’t know how to read music, so I don’t know how faithful to the birds position the music actually was.  I am certain, however, that birds don’t deliberately line up in order to provide the notation for human music.  So, it’s gimmicky, but the artist did get a very sweet piece of music out of it.

Of the three, this was by far the most musical, which is why I’ve saved it for last.

The most interesting thing about exoplanet Kepler-186f is that it might have life as we know it.  It is within its star’s Goldilocks Zone, and it’s not freakishly large.  Of course, we can’t really tell just by  looking at it.  It took an amazing space telescope, and a lot of notations and calculations, even to know it was there.  We are discovering new exoplanets almost daily lately, but this science is still in its infancy.

So, if we were to find ‘technological life,’ people who can communicate over long distances and maybe even have spaceships,  on Kepler -186f, it would be a major miracle.  It would be a home run in our first at bat, a hole in one in our first golf swing, a strike on the first time we throw a bowling ball – ever.

Hontas Farmer

This is the first exoplanet we’ve discovered that might have life, and to actually discover it there would be mind-boggling.  It would be a serious indicator that there is life all over the place, on millions of planets in our galaxy.  That’s going to have to change our view of things a bit.

Still, at that distance (500 liight years), and our primitive state of technology, the only  way we’re going to know there’s intelligent life there is if they send us a signal.

One scientist, Hontas Farmer, believes there is a 50/50 chance they already have.  She is basing that on radio waves coming from that part of the sky which are not random.  I don’t know, they looked random to me, but what I don’t know about science would fill the space between here and Kepler-186f.  If she’s right, that means there is a civilization on Kepler-186f that discovered radio at least 500  years ago, and is at least 400 years totally  over their reality TV phase.  And if we can just fine tune our radiotelescopes, we’ll be able to watch their TV programs.  That would be cool.

If it turns out that Doctor Farmer is correct, however, we’re going to have to find a catchier name than Kepler 186f.