Author: Mark Alexander

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Well Shit…

Despite my continued social distancing and mask-wearing-in-public, I have somehow managed to come down with pneumonia. Again. Second time within the last twelve months…and it sucks. At least this time the symptoms were much less severe and there wasn’t any pain, unlike the bout last spring that landed me in the hospital for four days.

Still, it’s not fun. Thanks to a regimen of modern pharmaceuticals and a knowlegeable (and I must say, cute, gay) doctor at urgent care earlier this week, I do seem to be on the mend.  Now before you scold me for not getting the vaccine this year, I will accept full responsibility for that. With everything else that’s been going on, it completely slipped under my radar and I going forward I will not make that mistake again.

I’m cleared to return to work Monday if symptoms continue to improve. Not looking forward to that, but thankfully next week is my two-days-in-the-office with the other three working from home.

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Freaks

Emile Hirsch

I stumbled across Freaks on YouTube yesterday.  It had a slow start and I almost gave up on it several times, but I’m glad I stuck with it. And it’s obvious why I chose this particular screen shot to post, isn’t it?

This review from IMDB rings true, at least for me:

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Spill the Tea, Boys

Where was the most inappropriate place you rubbed one out?

The most inappropriate place I can think of was in the back seat of my grandparents’ car one summer while we were heading back to their house after doing grocery shopping. My mom and grandmother were in the front seat and—as far as I could tell—totally oblivious to what I was doing in the back. In the interest of complete disclosure, I seem to remember it involving the infamous nude centerfold of Burt Reynolds, but the date of that publication doesn’t coincide with the time frame of our last summer in Massachusetts when I recall this happening. (That was 1968, and that particular issue of Cosmo—which I can’t imagine either my grandmother or mother purchasing, BTW—came out in 1972.) So it’s either my memory at fault or more broadly another incidence of the infamous Mandela Effect.

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Shadows at the Moon’s South Pole

This is a multi-temporal illumination map made of the moon’s South Pole with a wide-angle camera. To create it, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft collected 1,700 images over a period of 6 lunar days (6 Earth months), repeatedly covering an area centered on the Moon’s south pole from different angles. The resulting images were stacked to produce the featured map—representing the percentage of time each spot on the surface was illuminated by the Sun. Remaining convincingly in shadow, the floor of the 19-kilometer diameter Shackleton crater is seen near the map’s center. The lunar south pole itself is at about 9 o’clock on the crater’s rim. Crater floors near the lunar south and north poles can remain in permanent shadow, while mountain tops can remain in nearly continuous sunlight. Useful for future outposts, the shadowed craterfloors could offer reservoirs of water-ice, while the sunlit mountain tops offer good locations to collect solar power.

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