Atomictumor

Virgin Galactic seems to be serious about starting suborbital flights for the well-heeled, which is completely awesome, even if my heel is not quite as kept.

Wired’s NextFest had a display of the interior of Scaled Composite’s SpaceShipTwo, based on the craft that famously won the Ansari X-Prize a year or two ago, and the ship commissioned by Virgin’s Richard Branson (who would most likely be a real life Batman, had he suffered an early parenting tragedy) to take folks for a few minutes of weightlessness.  At a price of, oh, about $200,000.

Now I hear people in the back saying “Oh snap, AT, thats about $50,000 more than I intend to pay for suborbital travel,” but to you naysayers out there, I’d like to point out the fact that Virgin is going to spring for a week of flight training for that 4 minutes.  Because weightlessness, undoubtedly, takes some conditioning.

I’m joking, but that hides the fact that I think this is the among the awesomest news we’ve gotten out of just about anything in the past 20 years.  People don’t see the purpose in space travel, and hell, there may not be on other than expanding the human frontier (in that we’ve pretty much expanded about as much as Earth has) and because I think that the idea of casual spaceflight would do tremendous good for society.  Sure, you’re not going to hitch a flight on one of these bad boys this year, but in 10 years you can bet the price will drop.

Just wait until they have overnight stays in space.  I’d be interested in the practical applications of zero-g romance, myself, and that might just be worth the ticket price…

Squirrels don’t like me.

Back in the day, I’d hang out at my buddies house in Chattanooga being generally thuggish and troublesome, but I stayed away from one particular tree in a neighboring house, because The Squirrel lived there.

Now, I don’t know what I did to the squirrel to piss it off, but lemme tell you, it was pissed. Maybe it was some kind of reincarnation thing, where I smote it in a past life or something, or maybe it just didn’t like the cut of my gib, but that bastard would shoot to kill whenever I approached. My little brother, my friends, anybody else were OK, but if I got within 20 or so feet of the mother tree, I’d get a warning chirp, then an attack cry (like a squirrelly ululation), then a high velocity walnut to the temple.

That bastard had some accuracy and range to go with that super-throwing-death arm that it possessed. Once I heard the cry, I’d know I came too close. There’d be no outrunning The Squirrel, because it’d clip you with at least two nuts before you got out of range. You never quite knew where they were coming from either, on account of the uncanny camouflage of The Squirrel.

Since then, squirrel activity seems to have become more and more aggressive. The hickory nut tree in my back yard only seems to drop nuts when I’m outside, leaving me to think they’re dropbombing me. I’m now almost certain they were responsible for the crack in the windshield that the poor Volvo received last year.

To that end, I was dismayed by two events.

First, I found this report from Mountain View, CA, indicating that guerilla squirrels are aggressively attacking 4 year olds and others this summer, indicating that the philosophy of The Squirrel has moved westward, as all philosophies inevitably do, in preparation of worldwide adoption. This is a problem, because while the government has been sure to work up laws authorizing torture and wiretapping, this is only effective against human opponents. In fact, as the American intelligence organizations are loathe to admit, the squirrels series of chirps, in the .01 and 10 KHZ range, has been found to be uncrackable thus far.

Theres no way to know what they’re planning in our back yards, but you can bet its going to be ugly, and probably nutty, as well.

Second, and more importantly, is that I crushed one of the bastards to death on Laboratory Road while driving to pick up the paycheck yesterday. Of course it was accidental, one of those moments when the beast is in the median of the road, not sure whether to zig or zag, and darts out. It cleared 3 of the wheels, but that rear passenger wheel came out of nowhere and nailed the poor bastard.

I can say its accidental all day long, but it won’t make a difference. They’re going to want vengeance.