on seeing things with fresh eyes.

Hello, all of you apparitions living in my mind, products of my brain and the world without. I've missed you. It seems there is so little time to discuss things with you these days. Busy as bees are we down here. This week of work has come to an end and rewarded me with two days of relative freedom. The progeny is watching Christmas specials with mother. The sun is shining. There is tea steeped; would you like some?

Fresh eyes: euphemistic, sure. One's eyes being well rested does not necessarily grant better vision or understanding. It's the quality of the rest that's most important for me. Ten hours of sleep is sometimes much worse for productivity, thoughtfulness, happiness than five peaceful, relaxed and dream-filled hours.

All this musing was prompted this morning by a simple discovery. It has always been that toilet paper must sit on the hook, dispenser (or what-have-you) with the loose end dangling over the facing side of the roll. Why would anyone's traditions run contrary to this? Well, the progeny has solved the riddle: toddling people (of, say, two solar years' age) like to unravel things, create chaos, act as "agents of change". It allows them to learn. If the loose end of the roll is at the back, then the toddler's natural inclination to spin the roll by pulling down on the facing side will not yield a ream of paper all over the floor.

This is, like everything I suppose, not fool-proof. But it is a good reason to consider the rear-facing-toilet-paper-roll-end. There you are, pass it on. Wars have been caused by less. Let's try to understand one another, even if others are only neurons firing in our brains. Communications.

click click.

http://www.google.com/mars/

The above link is actually self-explanatory, which is not always the case with our virtual addresses. The exception may be the spelling of the word "googol", but most people have stopped picking at that nit by now and have instead embraced lousiness.

Google has taken pictures of everything. Knowledge is power, and we the people seem to deserve, as a democratic right, to be able to know everything. Well, our robot-memories deserve to "know" and we deserve to horde, sit about, and get lazy.

Cinnamon bun for the breakfast? Sorry to change the subject, but I'm outta here! Maybe we'll talk about googols later!

farts.

Even as the current mission to the Red Planet is indebted to the appearance of bacteria, so too are we, down here on the Earthly outpost. Whether some of that living stuff came to the third rock from the fourth in some vaguely-explicable cosmic action is a really fun thought to turn round and round. "I turned into a Martian. Woah-oh-OH! I can't even recall my name...".

I was about to say that thoughts like this have already found their way into our zeitgeist, the comfort of the would-be lone-goer, the alienated, the freak. But using the Misfits as evidence is a dangerous game. Brain-trains get derailed.  Mr. Topham Hatt must warn Thomas the Tank Engine sternly against causing more "confusion and delay". Suddenly the compulsion to write about what Mythic Mrs. Zeitgeist teaches us about the God of War becomes impossible.

A few days ago, in the lunch-room, we opened a newspaper and were met with the leering centre-fold gaze of the new Mars rover, Curiosity. From what I saw spread before us in an attempt to cause awe-inspired swoons at the ingenuity of humans, I can safely say that felines need not forsake their lives just yet. They may go on terrorizing creatures capable of gravity-defying flight, keeping neighbourhoods awake in the wee hours, and relieving themselves in our flower-boxes. Do you remember, lovely reader, the lunar rover of decades past? Yes? Well grant it some modern computers and you have Curiosity. Huperdaughterkind (that's the feminist-sensitive way of putting it, though this project is likely starved of the female touch) is STILL stuck on the six-wheeled dune-buggy. REALLY. Grow up, boys.

Lunches went cold, became inedible, were thrown out. Jaws were too much engaged in the act of dropping to bring themselves to chew. Perhaps I hyperbolize, I don't even know anymore. What about a small android boy that can walk upright, uses laser-guided trowels (dare I say "in real time"?), has thousand-mile long harpoon-drills for fingers and operates an impervious suction-cup bubble vehicle that can roll up cliffs as he crawls within? No, N.A.S.A. is going with the dune buggy again. Dune buggies are the best thing for uncovering methane. And where there are farts, there is life.

So, let us go around the corner to see what the artists are coming up with when it comes to Space Exploration:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XUr1zGq5OMM

Ah! Eh? Yes.