TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 30, 2003

In last night's episode of the Blues on PBS the show opened with the voyager spacecraft launched in 1977. On the spacecraft is a disk which contains words and images and sounds. Blind Willie Johnson's "Dark Is The Night" is one of the songs on the disk. Don Groble from Chicago wrote, "I LOVE Blind Willie Johnson's stuff, it's real spooky, and if the aliens get a hold of this stuff, they're either gonna get real scared and destroy our planet, or spooked real good and we'll never see'em."

Or they will mob our planet in search of more blues.

VOYAGER'S GREETINGS TO THE UNIVERSE

The Voyager spacecraft will be the third and fourth human artifacts to escape entirely from the solar system. Pioneers 10
and 11, which preceded Voyager in outstripping the gravitational attraction of the Sun, both carried small metal plaques
identifying their time and place of origin for the benefit of any other spacefarers that might find them in the distant future.
With this example before them, NASA placed a more ambitious message aboard Voyager 1

 

and 2-a kind of time capsule,
intended to communicate a story of our world to extraterrestrials. The Voyager message is carried by a phonograph
record-a 12-inch gold-plated copper disk containing sounds and images selected to portray the diversity of life and culture
on Earth. The contents of the record were selected for NASA by a committee chaired by Carl Sagan of Cornell University.
Dr. Sagan and his associates assembled 115 images and a variety of natural sounds, such as those made by surf, wind and
thunder, birds, whales, and other animals. To this they added musical selections from different cultures and eras, and
spoken greetings from Earth-people in fifty-five languages, and printed messages from President Carter and U.N.
Secretary General Waldheim. Each record is encased in a protective aluminum jacket, together with a cartridge and a
needle. Instructions, in symbolic language, explain the origin of the spacecraft and indicate how the record is to be played.
The 115 images are encoded in analog form. The remainder of the record is in audio, designed to be played at 16-2/3
revolutions per second. It contains the spoken greetings, beginning with Akkadian, which was spoken in Sumer about six
thousand years ago, and ending with Wu, a modern Chinese dialect. Following the section on the sounds of Earth, there is
an eclectic 90-minute selection of music, including both Eastern and Western classics and a variety of ethnic music. Once
the Voyager spacecraft leave the solar system (by 1990, both will be beyond the orbit of Pluto), they will find themselves
in empty space. It will be forty thousand years before they make a close approach to any other planetary system. As Carl
Sagan has noted, "The spacecraft will be encountered and the record played only if there are advanced spacefaring
civilizations in interstellar space. But the launching of this bottle into the cosmic ocean says something very hopeful about
life on this planet."



DREADED X FILE POLEAXED!

You remember it, you agonized over it, you tried to figure it out, you sent in answers, solutions, recovery programs, but sad to say nothing worked. That mysterious extension with the big red X over it continued to appear on my screen when I booted up. So I said to hell with all these attempts at figuring out what it was and reinstalled my OS 9.04 operating system on my trusty old powermac and-- viola and cello and slaphappy bass thumping-- the miscreant, the intruder, m'sieu diabolique vanished, gone, kaput, sayonaro, adios. Hooray and good riddance. Now let's not hear any more about it. Shhhh.

-- Capn skyp


SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 28, 2003

All over the land on Saturdays the football was happening and if you include soccer then it was happening all over the world; aolxtbul was all over the galaxy. We'll take you to sunny 97 degree day in Eugene OR.

Yes, that is a football stadium, gem of architectural study, and yes, that is a football fan's car and there is the football fan himself, decked out in the local colors.

Kit waving us in to motorhome alley for pregame mojo with kids and Kyle the T shirt maker showing off his chest to George making obeisance to the previous week's victory picture, portend of good or ill?

Elderly fan from the opposition watching young unruly fans brag on his team's prowess while George cases them warily from the other side, wondering just how tough these cougars are gonna be on the ducks.

Tuffduck flexes muscles, towers over mere cars, players rush onto field between rows of musicians tootling and quacking, officials quake at thoughts of monstrous lineman mashing them on downfield blocks.

Pissed this game away, head to halftime roasted duck, c'mon serve it up, man, can't you see I'm wasting away here. Leaving the stadium, the long walk home, a colorful expression of the afternoon's catharsis.

-- This report submitted by Sportshog #93

 

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 25, 2003

On the Autumnal Equinox weddings were held all over the universe and it was a grand occasion for celebration and cause for planetary intermingling.

The Visitors, a federation of races who are in contact with Earth, are displeased that the major seven governments of our developed countries continue to cover up Star Visitor contact, and have given up trying to convince our governments to end the cover-up. The Visitors feel that civilized people do not bomb others and wage war, and they feel the need to do something about our population's continued belief in these behaviors.

Because the 2012 date that ends our current time cycle is almost upon us, the Visitors have concluded that their program of close encounters with individuals is going too slowly. At the apex of this cycle, Dr. Boylan reports, Earth people will need to be "retrieved" until the new cycle can begin, and at the current rate of education, not enough people will be psychologically or socially prepared for this experience. Therefore... The Star Visitors are intending soon (no later than 2006) to begin making appearances to large groups of civilians in such a way that no one will be able to deny or forget what happened (the example Dr. Boylan gave was the Visitors appearing to all the people in a shopping mall).

The Star Visitors are aware that many people will interpret them as angels or saints. They also are saying that the individuals known as Jesus and Mother Mary will return along with "other Great Teachers," at which point the churches' distortions of the original message they were supposed to give to the People will be addressed. The Visitors also intend to work directly with religious leaders of all faiths and with indigenous peoples worldwide.

The message of "Love Your Neighbor" will be basic to our experiences of the Star Visitors in the future, so that, Dr. Boylan says, these encounters will be experienced in the context of a "family reunion."



MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 22, 2003

MEETING AT KESEY'S FARM

We gathered in front of the bus barn on a sunny warm day with the bus parked outside so we could touch up the paint job and patch the leaks, getting ready for a road trip in November. The occasion is the release of two books by Viking Press: Kesey's Jail Journal, finally published after its 1967 conception; and Spit In The Ocean number 7, the final issue of the seven book boxed set, this one edited by Ed McClanahan and entitled, All About Kesey.

Naturally there will be a book tour and the west coast tour will coincide with a Kesey Symposium being held at the University of Oregon on November 14th, 15th, and 16th. The bus and pranksters will join in, appearing at a bookstore in Eugene and at the Symposium.

After that there are trips to Portland and to the Bay Area. The purpose of our meeting was to come up with a plan; what would we do at the appearances? We yakked, we formulated, we agreed, we came together in a huddle, clasped hands, roared and shouted and threw hands in the air and backed off. Watch out, here we come.

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