Ok, first of all, yes, xkcd was also all over the sublime strangeness of the Curiosity Rover’s landing on Mars, but I think there is enough magical weirdness here to go around. (Of course, the really wonderful part about a Mars rover being dangled by cables in outer space is that it is not magical, it is carefully calibrated and heavily monitored scientific experimentation, but when it’s still a Mars rover being dangled by cables in outer space, why split hairs?)

There are many times when I wish I would have pushed past the difficulty in math class (and I still did fine, by the way, I just didn’t like it much) and actually learned physics and well, worked at NASA. But since there are very few moments when I actually want, yearn, to be doing math*, I suppose on the whole I didn’t make the world’s worst string of decisions.

Regardless, I still think the Curiosity Rover should have made the front page of the New York Times and stayed there all day. Additionally sci-fi aside: I mean of course the NYTimes online; I realized as typing the previous sentence that I have no idea whatsoever what was on the front page of the physical New York Times on Monday.

Finally, and unrelatedly, as I was tagging this post I chanced a look at the long string of tags that I’d used previously, and this is a random sample:

rhyming is the best right? / rise of the planet of the apes / road trip / robot apocalypse / royalty / sea bird / sea turtles / severely temperamental / shamefully late

…which isn’t the worst set of keywords for this comic.

Oh! And, if you are at all interested in writing fiction, and you live in Chicago, I am teaching a one-day intensive class on Saturday September 15 at StoryStudio Chicago. Please come!

*The exception being that time a new salon in Andersonville was giving away prizes if you could guess how many jelly beans they had in a cylindrical jar, and I managed to get within one bean by virtue of swift counting and simple geometry + arithmetic.