Enjoy your 4th o’ July Weekend.

We still remember Neda right?

And now Billy Mays. He gets a brief mention on CNN and we’re moving on. Does he deserve round the clock coverage? What are the guidelines for who to cover?

Billy was a Pitchman, and a damn entertaining one. Watching his show of that name, you saw a cranky guy, the rough exterior, but also someone who seemed to genuinely like helping a li’l inventor get a break.

He wasn’t music or television show, he was a commercial and you were forced to watch. But alot of us didn’t feel forced, he was usually more entertaining than what we were currently watching.

He was a happy force in the world, a nice guy, and of all the celebrities, A through D list, he’s the one that gets me wiping the tears from my eyes.

“That’s gonna leave a mark”

I don’t need round the clock coverage to know that.

RIP Billy Mays.

“On Saturday, June 27th, many of the world’s large parabolic antennas (sometimes called dishes) will stop their normal space work and swing around to track the moon when it rises. EOA volunteers will then use the EME or Moon Bounce transmissions to link up with other dishes worldwide via the moon. Signals are literally being bounced off the moon’s surface and back to other stations on earth where they are received some 2.5 seconds later.

There has never been so many dishes pointed at the moon since the lunar landings and possibly this will even break that record.”

Also a good article on Wired: Moon Bounce

VIDEO: Buzz Aldrin- Rocket Experience

Space Gangsta Buzz Aldrin tells it like it is with Snoop Dog and Talib Kweli.

This is cute as hell. And you better think so too, because you know, Buzz can still kick your ass.

For East Coast June 21, 2009, 1:45 am EDT
And West Coast June 20, 2009, 10:45 PM PDT

Down under, Winter begins.

Solstice means the Sun Standing Still and
The days the sun stands still varies by where you live. A few days in the north east to over a week in the south west.

The US Naval Observatory has an online calculator for looking up how long the sun will be hanging out in your area:

United States Naval Observatory Sunrise/Set

Nico still doing a great job on Huffington Post gathering the news and live blogging.

Follow news at twitter:

ABC’s@jimsciutto

#iranelections

Andrew Sullivan is also worth a look for ongoing coverage, even if you don’t normally like him.

Some beautiful photos of terrible things at TehranLive.org:

“Launch of the shuttle Endeavour, grounded by a gaseous hydrogen leak during fueling Saturday, is off until Wednesday at the earliest, NASA officials say. But because of the already planned launch of NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter satellite Wednesday, the shuttle team could be delayed to June 20, the last day this month Endeavour can be launched.”

The red supergiant star Betelgeuse, the bright reddish star in the constellation Orion, has steadily shrunk over the past 15 years, according to University of California, Berkeley, researchers.

Long-term monitoring by UC Berkeley’s Infrared Spatial Interferometer (ISI) on the top of Mt. Wilson in Southern California shows that Betelgeuse (bet’ el juz), which is so big that in our solar system it would reach to the orbit of Jupiter, has shrunk in diameter by more than 15 percent since 1993.

Nobody’s 100% sure if this is a normal size variation, or the beginning of the end for Betelgeuse. Red supergiants are older stars, living out their retirement and telling comets to “stay the hell off my orbit!” Shrinkage could just be the next step on the way to the supernova grave. So raise a glass of Metamucil to Betelgeuse, in case this is the beginning of the end.

The countdown began on time at 9 a.m. Thursday, setting up a launch attempt at 7:17:15 a.m. EDT Saturday, roughly the moment Earth’s rotation carries launch pad 39A into the plane of the space station’s orbit. The shuttle has enough power to launch five minutes to either side of that “in-plane” time, but NASA targets the middle of the 10-minute window to maximize ascent performance.

Stephen Colbert Patch at The NASA Space Store.

Goldwater: you know he's right!

That seemed to prove to me that UFOs were a fact, and do exist. But, are they all aliens? I highly suspect a majority are! Hell, they are no doubt far ahead of our level of intelligence. TheUnited States Air Foce knows the truth, but will they ever reveal it to this nation?

“Astronauts aboard space shuttle Atlantis are preparing to return to Earth after an ambitious and risky mission to re-fit the Hubble telescope.

Bad weather in Florida has cancelled the Friday landing.

Next landing oppurtunity will be Saturday at 9:16 a.m. EDT (1316 GMT), and they’ll have a back-up landing space Edwards Air Force Base in California if Kennedy is still having weather issues.

Follow NASA on TWITTER

This is a very lively feed. Thanks NASA

“The Bohemian Grove, which I attend from time to time–it is the most faggy goddamned thing you could ever imagine…” – Richard Nixon

Found at If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger, home of an extensive Bohemian Grove gallery.

If anyone can identify the artist, please post a comment.