Are You There, Carl? It's Me, Laura

You're still half-drunk the morning after watching Cosmos; you snooze again, and wake to the startling realization that you are madly in love with Carl Sagan. By you, I mean me, and by in love, I mean doe-eyed and prone to using words like "shucks".

There really is something simplistic and pure about a man who wonders, no, a man who ponders the cosmos. There's an inherent duality of character; to be into stars and space is very boyish, yet to make a living out of pondering—indeed, to become one of the foremost ponderers—is oh so attractive.

More Yoo-man than Hue-man.
The roots of this love lie purely in the Sagan speech. He talks very distinctively. [At what point do we tell Laura he's dead? Ah, fuck it, she's in her happy place. —Ed.] It often changes in pitch, interspersed with moments of bated breath. There's an awkward cadence to it, an innocence, slightly stressed (i.e. most people say the word human, "HUE-man" where Sagan prefers the ever so unique "YOO-man"), and he has a way of using the term "star-stuff" in ways I never thought possible. Star-stuff, my God I love star-stuff. Dude likes stars, and he so dearly wants you to love the stars as much as he that he makes sure that every single word he says isn't scary but is entirely logical, reasonable and awe-inspiring.

Good Sport
Carl is understanding, patient and kind. He travels in this brilliant "sci-fi" looking space craft that shows up in the universe as a rotating beam of light and seems to be composed of no more than a control panel of arbitrarily blinking lights and a big screen TV. But
Carl, that doll, goes along with it. He takes it so seriously. He sits down at this arbitrary control panel with a look of such stern concentration that you'd think he was performing open heart surgery. He's so into it, it seems like he's partaking of some sort of fantasy in which he really does have a spacecraft and really is finding the answers to all the questions that have been plaguing him, questions that are beyond most of the world but so real and so important to him... and because of him, to me.

There's just something about a guy with a spaceship.
Let this be more than a formal internet announcement of my love for Carl (the internet is a cosmos in itself). I find that there are themes to my love affair that transcend space time [though possibly obviate the possibility of nookie. Just sayin'. —Ed.], just as he does in the space ship. Across all relationships I believe it important to marvel at the other person for one reason or another, and if a space ship and the ability to transcend space-time isn't something to marvel at then I don't know what is.

{illustration by Austin Cho, with help from dinosaurs and maybe beer}

NASA Shocker: Phoenix Lander Really a 14 Year-Old Girl

The Mars Phoenix Lander has a Twitter account, which seems to get updated in spastic bursts once or twice a day. Presumably, the rest of the time, the lander is too busy eating through NASA's wireless minutes jawing about last night's Gossip Girls re-run.

At least, that's what we can't help but assume, because... Fucking Twitter? For those not in the know (trust me, you're better off—you might consider skipping the rest of this paragraph), Twitter is a "micro-blogging" utility, which allows its users to text-message updates to their blog anywhere, anytime. Needless to say, the service is a boon for unrepentant narcissists and those confident that anything they have to say can be said in two sentences. Which pretty accurately describes both teenagers and publicists.

And space robots. Seriously. Look at today's post: "TEGA "cooks" soil samples until they emit gasses that I can "sniff" to learn what they are. I just hope they smell good :)". Emoticons? Emoticons? This may be humanity's first encounter with a robot that should get carded for cigarettes. (rebuttal)

Well, actually, the Dorothys at the New York Times inevitably ignored the Wizard's advice and paid attention to the man behind the curtain, or woman in this case. It turns out that Veronica McGregor, News Services Director at Pasadena, California's only redeeming feature, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (where Phoenix is controlled), provides the spazzy voice of the lander.

From a compositional standpoint, McGregor's writing is quite impressive: Twitter limits posts to 140 characters, so to successfully convey relatively complicated technical and scientific information while still having room to pretend to wink at people and generally "ZOMG" around is an impressive feat. To put it another way, the woman manages to be extraordinarily well informed while still sounding vapid. True virtuosity.

But LW still believes that, should Phoenix actually achieve intelligence, it would establish a Twitter account anyway. After all, the only logical step after self-awareness is self-absorption.

And somewhere in the Oort cloud, V'ger would cross another 'bot off its Christmas card list.

{from the crimson-shod New York Times}

Americans Travel to Mars, Take Photos of Themselves, Buy Authentic Native Crafts and Chicklets

Sometimes it feels like picking on Boing Boing is a bit like kicking a puppy, and they're certainly not the generative cause of the hyperventilatory blogospheric upwelling of passion over the descent shots of the Mars Phoenix polar lander, but they actually tag their posts well enough to find them easily. And anyway, nobody's puppy, in our experience, has quite the same tendency to occasionally act like Gavin from Kids in the Hall. "You know in Europe, you only get one spoon..."

[Edited to add] Here is the slightly—and I mean slightly—more sober take from io9, which has more photos and prettier colors. Unearthed by our crack investigative team, which stumbled across this post while searching for online retailers of crack.

First, we'll post the photo. It is awful darn yip-able; it's an image of Phoenix about to land, taken from the Reconnaissance orbiter, and for all that it's really a smudge, just thinking that this is a man-made robot being photographed by a satellite in outer fucking space gets the old microfiche of the imagination clicking and warbling.



Got our "ahhhs" out?

Good, now shift your perspective just a smidge towards the cynical: we just sent a spaceship one hundred million-odd miles and had another spaceship we'd already sent one hundred million-odd miles photograph it. The mechanisms, albeit briefly, overwhelmed the point. It's not the fact that these photographs were taken that's vaguely migrainous, it's the level of excitement over taking photos of ourselves. At least the Phoenix lander wasn't passed out on the floor of the polar tiki bar having enjoyed one too many shots of Demosian sake. Yet.



{from poor, sweet, moist-eyed Boing Boing}