Living with a writer
Mood:  mischievious
Now Playing: nothing
ever wonder what it is like living with a writer?
This is what I woke up to one morning.



yup. storyline notes on post-its stuck to my bathroom mirror. I'm glad there are 3 sections to that mirror.

On Hiatus
Mood:  rushed
I regret to inform you that I'm putting this blog on hiatus for the next two weeks. I have a manuscript to finish by deadline, and simply don't have extra energy to devote to being funny and topical here.

The worst thing about writing isn't the writing... it's taking the novel you've lovingly crafted and writing no more than two pages per chapter, cutting away the loving craft and leaving a skeleton that is still somehow supposed to sell the idea to the publisher you send it to. Nuts.

Got typing to do.
See you in two weeks!

Scott the harried

ScottLand Saturday
Mood:  spacey
We haven't blown away yet. Not completely anyway. Spent the night by the firelight and lanterns and such but it was nice rather than being a drag. It's odd to draw by lanternlight. You get a real insight into why Renaissance master drawings look like they do in terms of strong light from a single source, rich vermillions and copper hues on the skin and so forth.

"Hard-Headed Woman" lyrics by Claude Demetrius
"Margaritaville" lyrics by Jimmy Buffett
Both appear under "Fair Use" provisions of US copyright Law (Title 17 US Code, Section 107) as one-time usage for purposes of satire.

The storm before the lull...
Mood:  loud
Stupid weather!
I gotta get this posted while we still have power. Sometime last night we lost it (power that is) and it didn't come back until about the time I had to leave for work. Lucky thing my clock has a battery backup.

Our back porch is taking the brunt of it (appropriate, I suppose, since the front porch is no longer there...)

There's a roof of corrugated tinted vinyl which is supposed to make it a 'sun porch' but doesn't take well to huge limbs and 40mph windgusts rattling it.

I'm trying to decide what to replace it with or if I should just shrug and replace it with the same stuff. It really seems to work fairly well as a solar ceiling, especially considering that's the shady side of the house. A very pleasant place to eat breakfast under other circumstances.

Of course the cats are a little freaked by it all, but even when there's a bad wind blowing, this is Washington and into every kitty's day a little sun must fall. So Figaro - at least - found a lull amid the storm.

Gotta go. The lights are flickering and I don't wanna have to type all this again.

Scottie

ScottLand
Mood:  don't ask
Now Playing: "Troy" (The movie. I don't think I know anyone named Troy...)

"Can't Buy Me Love..."
Mood:  flirty
Now Playing: The Beatles (of course)
Happy Valentine's Day, everyone!

Sunday Funnies
Mood:  rushed
A flashback today. I drew this one in 2003 and only lately found it as I was digging through my old sketchbooks. Sorta tells you how long I've been thinking about doing this, I guess.

-Scottie

ScottLand
Mood:  silly

The Lost World
Scientists have discovered a Lost World, which would make Conan Doyle proud on a mountainous Indonesian Island which has apparently never shuddered under the footsteps of mankind. There aren't any dinosaurs (yet) but there are new species of plant, insect and animal being discovered daily. Biodiversity of a kind unimagined even in the Amazon. Large mammals naive of the danger posed by the two-legged interlopers. An arboreal kangaroo thought almost extinct, a strange egg-laying mammal, all have been seen for the first time since the 19th century.

Wow.

Follow the link and be entranced as I was.
And they say the Earth's surface has no secrets left to uncover.

This... this is amazing!

Scott

The Final Frontier...
Mood:  caffeinated
Now Playing: Still watchin' MacGyver on DVD...
For further reading if you're curious about more on the Spaceramp post...

Is the Shuttle Grounded Forever?
A discussion about the workability of modern Space Travel
Mars Direct at Scientific American

There's an interesting point brought up in some of these articles regarding a trip to Mars. Simply put, Martian surface Gravity is roughly 38% of "Earth Normal", whereas the gravity on the moon is roughly 17% Earth Normal. Excluding atmospheric influences, the Apollo moonlander(s) only had to generate a relatively tiny bit of thrust to take off relative to what it would require to take off on Earth and return its astronaut payload home...

So how are we going to get back from a planet with a denser atmosphere than the moon, which is our only extraterrestrial return-trip experience? A mars lander can't be blocky like the lunar lander. It'll need to be at least somewhat aerodynamic. The lander will pretty much need to be a proper reusable spacecraft in its own right, just to overcome the forces pulling on it as it tries to relaunch for the homeward trip!

Just to reach Low Earth Orbit (125-700 miles altitude give or take), the space shuttle has to exceed 15,000 mph (partially due to the density of the Earth's atmosphere). On the moon it was less than a sixth that, so simple boosters were all they really needed to get off the ground... how are we going to do that coming back from Mars? We'd have to carry sufficient fuel for an atmosphere launch, build a gantry or ramp or runway or whatever and take off again, facing many of the same problems (actually, about 38% of them, I suppose) a space launch faces taking off from Earth.

A sticky wicket and that's no lie.

Some serious people are considering the possibility of what I'm going to call 'disposable astronauts'. People we can send up and not come back! Yes, astronauts sent to explore another planet with no expectation of return, living out the rest of their natural (?!) lives on another planet, researching their new home and presumably sending back regular reports.

That sounds horrible but at some point, we're going to make the attempt to colonize an extraterrestrial environment beyond the International Space Station. This means people living, dying, and being borne off-planet. Mayhaps it's high time we got used to the idea?

I wouldn't want to do it, but then... I have to admit, I've always been intrigued by that last great feat in mountaineering... being the first to summit Mons Olympus on Mars, the highest peak in the solar system!

Eat yer heart out Sir Edmund Hillary!

-Scott