Let's turn from the latest cheating scandal involving the New England Patriots to a much more pleasant subject: breasts.
It is completely legal and acceptable for men to go shirtless in public throughout the United States. But in many states and cities, women do not have the same right. And heaven forfend there should be a "wardrobe malfunction" during the SuperBowl or similar event that exposes the country to a brief split-second glimpse of a female nipple (actually a pastie, but don't confuse us with facts). GAME OF THRONES is often slammed for showing too many breasts as well. As are other cable shows. And of course you can't show them at all on broadcast television.
Only in America. Why do so many people in this country go mad at the sight of a nipple?
Anyway, this Friday at the Jean Cocteau we are screening FREE THE NIPPLE, the docudrama about the women who led the fight for nipple equality in New York City.
New Mexico is not New York, of course... but our Cocteau staff will be appropriately clad to honor the fearless women who are the subject of the movie.
Holy cow! Watch this amazing Vine video of the SpaceX Falcon 9 booster crashing as it attempted to land on a barge last week after a successful launch to the space station. Make sure the volume is up, because holy wow.
The Jan. 10, 2015, launch of the Falcon 9 rocket went well, but the attempt to reland the first stage booster vertically on a floating platform/barge in the Atlantic didn’t go quite as planned.
Amazingly, the booster slowed, found the barge, and was able to target it for landing (all autonomously, mind you). But then something went wrong at the last moment. The fins used to steer it ran out of hydraulic fluid. The booster tipped at an angle, and the engines couldn’t compensate. It crashed, released fuel, and exploded.
A lot of people are calling this a failure, but as I said in my original post about the landing, it’s more fair to call it a near-success. Most of the procedure to land the booster went nominally, and now the cause of the crash is known. As Elon Musk points out, the next flight will have more of the hydraulic fluid on board, so the fins should continue to work.
Speaking of Musk, I have to hand it to him: He’s a master of PR. His tweets about the crash were good-natured and even funny:
"Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly" may have to become a new phrase in the lexicon.
This was a serious event, and I have no doubt it’s taken very seriously inside SpaceX. But the public sees this differently, and sees Musk differently, so these tongue-in-cheek tweets put a great spin on the event.
The next scheduled launch of a Falcon 9 is no earlier than Jan. 31, when it will loft the Deep Space Climate Observatory over a million kilometers from Earth.
Today is January 15th, 2015. My last day of full-time employment for someone other than myself was January 15th, 2014. The last time I set an alarm for anything other than a trip to the airport or a convention was a year ago.
A year ago today, I started sleeping.
It's sort of remarkable: I hadn't realized how much of myself I had sold for health insurance and a desk with my name tacked to the wall next to it until I started to sleep again, and started to wake up. Because seriously, that's what sleep allowed me to do. I slept ten, eleven, twelve hours a night, with two-hour naps every day, for three weeks. Not out of depression; out of the sheer joy of sleeping, the restorative delight of starting to feel like myself again. The sleeping tapered off. These days, I go to bed at 11:00, go to sleep at 11:30 (slow sleep insomnia), and wake up between 7:00 and 7:30. Naps are rare.
I have had two major illnesses in the past year, versus ten to fifteen a year for the last several. One was a twenty-four hour stomach bug that could have hit anyone, regardless of how rested they were; the other was a cold brought home by my housemate and incubated on my flight to London. I have slept through the night almost every night. I have become happier, more stable, and more productive.
(The more productive has actually been a problem, as I'm flooding my poor proofreaders with material. I was always fast. Now I'm working at more what I consider my "normal" speed, and it's terrifying.)
A lot of people asked how I was going to stave off boredom. The answer was, and remains, that I will let them know when I actually get bored.
My friend, Atom, has an EPIC beard that is so epic, his wife commissioned a song from Molly Lewis to celebrate it. That song is called The Year of the Beard.
I have had a beard in some form or another since the writer’s strike of 2007, when it started out as a solidarity beard, and quickly grew into an NHL playoffs beard, and finally into a “I’m lazy and this saves me literally minutes a day” beard.
I like having a beard, though I’ve always kept it very neat and short, mostly because I’ve been working on camera in some way or another, and I’ve needed to keep a constant appearance.
See, always I’ve never been able to drastically alter my appearance in any meaningful way, because for most of my life I had to either look like my headshot, or stay in continuity for the show or movie I was working on. Sure, I’ve done colors and even shaved it (which was awesome and I’d do again in a second if I could), but I’ve never been able to even consider a mohawk or sweet juggalo tattoo on my neck or bifurcating my tongue and changing my name to HISSSSSSSSS.
But I’m not really doing anything on camera at the moment, and I’m primarily working as a writer and voice actor, so what I can do, and am doing at this very moment, is let my beard just grow until I feel like doing something about it. At the moment, I don’t feel like doing anything about it until at least after JoCo Cruise Crazy, and I may even keep it through the production of Tabletop’s RPG Show, because I kind of like the idea of having a big old GM’s beard for that show.
In which the author is bearding as hard as he can.
Some people think it’s great, others think it’s horrible. I don’t particularly care what anyone else thinks, though, because it’s The Year of the Beard and mine is almost big enough to hide stuff in it.
Sometimes, YouTube stops to buffer and I get some pretty great Tablederp.
