Alien Jesus Collective

Da Pope is in town. Cupcakes!

GQ talks about the battle over James Brown’s estate in a new article. But some of the best stuff is the stories people tell about JB. From long time girlfriend Gloria Daniel:

One night in the summer of 2001, after he’d slathered her in Vaseline (“He liked you all greased up,” she says. “Like a porkchop”) and wore her out trying to come, he gave up and left the room, and Gloria dozed off. When she woke up, Mr. Brown was standing at the foot of the bed in a full-length mink coat over his bare chest, a black cowboy hat, and silk pajama pants with one leg tucked into a cowboy boot and the other hanging out. He had a shotgun over his shoulder and a white stripe of Noxzema under each eye. “I’m an Indian tonight, baby,” he announced. “C’mon, let’s let ’em have it.” Then he dumped a pickle jar of change on the floor, told her to get a machete, and went out to the garage. He took the Rolls, drove ten miles to Augusta, weaving all over the road, clipping mailboxes, smoking more dope, and screaming about being an Indian. Gloria kept thinking she should flag down a cop, say she’d been kidnapped.

Hard to top that, but there are a few other bits that at least match it. Definitely the unvarnished view of the man. Worth a read if you love JB’s antics.

One of us is a Martian with an Acme detonator!

If you’re going to be anywhere near Geneva on April 6th, don’t miss the final opportunity to tour CERN’s Large Hadron Collider:

The Open Day on Sunday, 6 April 9:00 — 19:00, is your one last chance to see the LHC and its experiments. In addition to visiting the surface facilities, you will be able to go underground to see the accelerator and the experiment caverns. Exceptionally, most of the access points around the ring will be open.
An attractive programme of activities on the surface and underground visits awaits you on all the points around the ring, so we encourage you to visit the one closest to where you live.

Limited to 15,000 visitors, not sure how many of those are treadhead seats.

Via Slashdot

A couple of scientists are suing for a time out on CERN’s Large Hadron Collider project, current slated to come online this summer. The LHC is arguably the world’s most advanced particle accelerator (or “atom smasher”). According to the NY Times article:

But Walter L. Wagner and Luis Sancho contend that scientists at the European Center for Nuclear Research, or CERN, have played down the chances that the collider could produce, among other horrors, a tiny black hole, which, they say, could eat the Earth. Or it could spit out something called a “strangelet” that would convert our planet to a shrunken dense dead lump of something called “strange matter.” Their suit also says CERN has failed to provide an environmental impact statement as required under the National Environmental Policy Act.

Phillip Plait (of BadAstronomy.com fame) has a concise and rational response to the concerns about LHC. I tend to agree with his assessment. If you’re going to panic about world destroying science, panic about genetically modified crops.

NASA - Space Shuttle

Endeavour is scheduled to land at Kennedy Space Center, Fla., at 7:05 p.m. EDT Wednesday.

Full Moon Easter Weekend.
Photo by Agent Ackme.

Happy Spring 2008.

Click on pic for Here in the Hills, many more glorious photos.

NASA TV Live

The Atlantis Shuttle is landing Wednesday Feb 20. Live coverage of the landing of space shuttle Atlantis to end the STS-122 mission will begin at 7:30 a.m. EST from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center.

They have a landing blog in real time! NASA Landing Blog

Universe Today Eclipse Info
For viewer on Eastern Standard Time the eclipse will enter the partial phase on February 20 at 08:43 pm; for Central Standard Time, 07:43 pm; for Mountain Standard Time, 06:43 pm; and Pacific Standard Time at 05:43 pm - before sunset. For viewers in Europe and Africa, the action begins at the beginning of a new day - on February 21 at 01:43 am GMT. (Sorry, to the good folks down under and in the Far East… no eclipse will be visible.) Totality will begin at 10:01 pm EAST, 09:01 pm CST, 08:01 pm, MST, 07:01 pm PST, and 03:01 am GMT and end precisely 50 minutes later. Then, you have 1 hour and 18 minutes left as the Moon slowly slides out of the Earth’s shadow once again.