When I was a little kid, I loved two things: Space and Dinosaurs. I wanted to grow up to be an astronaut who traveled around space digging up fossils (a xenopaleontologist, if you will). Now, with the hindsight of adulthood, I see this job for what it really would have been: totally badass. But it would probably also face the bane of so many other fun and exciting jobs- terrible pay. Luckily, my childhood ambitions also included simultaneously being a rock and roll icon (slightly strange because I didn’t really get into music until I was on the cusp of adolescence), and those guys make the big bucks.

Another problem with that dream, of course, is that space is mostly cold and unforgiving emptiness, punctuated occasionally by lumps of matter like stars and planets that are usually even more inhospitable. Europa, a moon of Jupiter large enough to be a planet in its own right, is a favorite place for sci-fi writers and science groupies on the internet to imagine life evolving, and there is some evidence that under its surface a vast ocean of liquid water may exist. But Jupiter emits staggering levels of radiation, so much so that even though Europa orbits at a distance of hundreds of thousands of miles, someone standing on its surface would absorb a fatal dose within a matter of hours. So for now, it’s strictly off limits. As a scientist I have confidence we will be able to find ways to survive in the void, but for now we are still in the early days of spaceflight, and we must rely on semi-autonomous probes to go where we cannot.

For over fifty years – even during the heyday of the Apollo program – we’ve been sending probes to the various planets in the solar system. Although many of the instruments they carry serve very specific, slightly arcane scientific roles, each probe has also been equipped with cameras. The photos they send back certainly have valuable scientific purposes, but they also serve a dual role in drumming up public interest. My childhood fascination with space was fueled largely by a hefty tome published by National Geographic entitled ‘Our Universe’, which featured glossy full page photos from the Voyager probes (at the time, still on their main ‘Grand Tour’ mission) and others alongside high end artist depictions of moons, comets, asteroids and the like. Nearer planets – like Mars, Jupiter and Saturn – got pages and pages dedicated to close ups and panoramas, but as you traveled further and further from the sun the details got sparser. By the time you reached Pluto, then still a planet, all you got for a photo was a blocky image that needed an arrow pointing at Pluto to distinguish it from the background stars. To make up for it, they included an artist’s depiction of a depressingly dim sunrise from the frosty surface. When would we get a real look, I wondered. The only answer the book could provide was “someday”.

The other part about space is it is big. Huge. Almost incomprehensibly so. When you’re young, you don’t have the attention span to wait years for a probe to arrive at its destination. You move on to the next thing. Even as an adult I’m sometimes amazed at the patience of the scientists and engineers who design these probes and their experimental payloads, and then have to just sit and wait and hope the probe doesn’t just go silent before they get results. But the wait is part of what makes this year so interesting. You see, for the last decade or so, the New Horizons probe has been hurtling towards Pluto at a pace so fast that it went from the launch pad to beyond the orbit of the moon in less time than it took me to fly from Boston to San Francisco. I’ve been checking in on the mission roughly once a year when curiosity strikes, only to groan and say something like “Really? Still?”, as if the timetable would have changed somehow. It’s been so long that Pluto was still the ninth planet when it launched. But now, finally, it’s closing in.

Sad little Pluto, which barely even had a photo in ‘Our Universe’. Demoted to dwarf planet nearly a decade ago. Cold and frozen in the dark at the edge of our solar system. If Pluto was a person, it’d be a goth kid in Canada in the middle of winter, and his yearbook photo would just be a question mark. But this July, New Horizons will arrive and be the first probe to get an actual decent photo of Pluto. Some kind of useful science will doubtless get done, but the pictures, that’s what I’m excited for. Finally, something to replace the absent portrait at the end of the book.

But that’s not the only long-overdue cosmic visit coming this year. Last week I was reading up on space stuff, for one reason or another, and things turned to the minor planets, as they are wont to do. See, there was a time period in the 1800s when the asteroids were first being discovered, and contemporary astronomers classified them as planets. When I first learned that, it had a similar effect to discovering that a favorite musician whose discography you thought you’d exhausted actually had a side project you had never heard about. Which was a thing that could actually happen before the internet went all-knowing on us. Of course, they (the asteroids) were eventually downgraded when people realized just how small they were. The truth is, basically all of them are just lumpy space rocks; poorly produced albums that you were better off not hearing. They were things, not places.

Except one.

Ceres, the largest of the asteroids, is big enough that it’s round. There’s a very scientific explanation for this, but basically it was big enough that its own gravity made it sufficiently malleable to behave a little bit like a fluid. More importantly, being round – somehow – makes it a place rather than a thing.

And we’ve already got a probe en route, a nimble little thing I was only vaguely aware of. A probe that will arrive in less than two months. Right now the best photo we’ve got is only a slight improvement on Pluto’s; a blurry, blocky little thing that wouldn’t look out of place in a Super NES game. Even though it’s essentially right in our cosmic back yard, we know almost nothing about. But by the end of January, the Dawn probe will be fully online, taking photos of Ceres that are fit for blowing up to poster size and framing. And Ceres isn’t just a rock, either. There’s evidence of ice there. It’s hardly the first time we’ve found water in space, but this may turn out to be the most readily accessible.

Over the next few months, as winter recedes and sunlight returns to the Northern hemisphere, we’ll finally be paying these places a visit, long after their original discoverers passed away. And afterwards, we’ll have two “new” frozen little worlds to add to our cosmic family portrait. I’ve been waiting for this since I was 8, but I suppose they’ve been waiting much longer to come in out of the cold.

Berkeley 5 way stop

Berkeley loves signs. People out here are absolutely crazy about them. During the run-up to elections this year, there were a bunch of Berkeley-only measures that people got really invested in. Measure D was about taxing soda, and the measure’s opponents bought bus stop ads pointing out that if people wanted to they could add sugar to drinks at home and not get taxed and that this was an outrage that must be prevented at all costs blah blah blah. The horror.

Another great set of signs was for Measure R, which was very long and boring and about zoning, and which I voted against because it would make bars close earlier on week nights and that’s seriously the only real information I managed to get from anyone about it. Which isn’t to say that both supporters and opponents of the law didn’t try; all over the city were green colored signs that said “Yes on R” or “No on R” and claimed that voting their way would create a greener, more vibrant and equitable downtown. The wording was essentially the same for both Pro-R and Anti-R signs.

My favorite Berkeley signs, however, are confined to a lawn and a tennis court in my neighborhood, and put up by a profoundly misguided, possibly disturbed individual who will stop at nothing to end the environmental horror of paper cups. According to this individual, we should all carry cups wherever we go just in case, and these manifestos are scrawled semi-legibly on random cardboard trash. One night about a month ago I finally got sick of them and tore down the one on the tennis court. Another, even more incoherent one had replaced it by the next day.

This went on for a while, and I started wondering about my newfound nemesis. Looking at the back of the most recent box, I realized that its previous contained an extra-large pepperoni pizza. A few days later, I noticed that the house next door, which was the epicenter of these crazy signs, had two cars in the driveway. So factory farmed animal meat and driving everywhere are okay I guess, as long as you have a reusable cup in your cup-holder and shame pedestrians and cyclists using the path by your house! (Note, I don’t actually care if you eat meat, because it is delicious and we didn’t fight our way to the top of the food chain just so we could go vegan).

Sadly, I don’t currently have photos of any of these classy, classy signs. As a consolation prize, here are some other Berkeley signs that make varying degrees of sense.

It fogged so hard that day that it almost counted as rain, so clearly people had to be kept off the field.

Cigarette smoke is like a filthy hippy I guess, which you would think people out here would love. Go figure. Also, if you see someone smoking something that large they are probably in People’s Park, and it isn’t really a cigarette.

Does this require a further caption? I think not!

WE NEED YOUR TEARS. YOUR SWEET, SWEET TEARS. CRY FOR US.
#not_creepy

Approximately one million years ago, before the internet, there was a show about an even more ancient time (the 50’s), called Happy Days. And on that show, a popular character known as The Fonz (played by Henry Winkler) once jumped over a shark on water-skis, dooming the rest of the show’s run to a slide into irrelevance and future generations to painfully naval-gazing debates over whether the term “jumping the shark” had itself jumped over one or more proverbial sharks.

I’m not here to defend the term, per se, although I find it relatively innocuous compared to almost every other word or phrase coined by the citizens of the internet. Rather, I think the concept itself – embracing the ephemerality of all things and having a show (or band or whatever) peak in a self-aware way while it’s still cool – is unfairly maligned. While some things end when they reach their natural conclusion- older movies, modern prestige television, most anything that could reasonably described as drama without some kind of modifying prefix – other formats – particularly television comedy or anything geeks like – can drag on until the audience and advertisers give out.

Unfortunately, that’s the nature of the beast. Futurama was rebooted multiple times with (mostly) diminishing returns. Indiana Jones survived a nuclear blast and costarring with Shia Lebouf. Pam and Jim got together and even married and then Steve Carrel left and somehow The Office just kept happening. Tupac Shakur got turned into a fucking hologram after being dead for a decade and I’m horrified for him and I don’t even listen to his music. And we all gripe about how the things that used to be cool suck now. But what if there was a way for show creators to say to those of us who are ever so hip that “This is it. The apex. We have reached the summit, and while the network won’t stop milking this cash-cow and we’ll just be doing fan-service from here on out, this is your chance to pretend this is the last episode and have only fond memories.”?

Enter the shark

You see, with the shark, there’s an opportunity for what could be thought of as a kind of mid-series finale. Consider The Simpsons episode “Behind the Laughter” or Always Sunny‘s “The Nightman Cometh”. Sure, “Laughter” was season 11 and purists would disdain even mentioning anything after season 8, and “Nightman” was only the 4th season finale of Sunny, when the show was still fairly fresh. But they both came around the time when room to grow  was running out on their respective shows. Don’t get me wrong, I still watch new seasons of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia when they arrive, and will occasionally watch the more well reviewed new Simpsons episodes when I’m bored, but it’s not the same. There’s no need to watch them anymore. I’m not trying to be stuck-up; frankly, for this kind of transition to happen in the first place requires that the show at one point be great. Everything in life waxes and wanes, and if it’s a little bittersweet to know you are seeing the high-water mark for something you love, that’s normal.

I’m ruminating on this in part because I watched “Nightman” last night, and in part because this is something I’ve learned to accept and even use to my advantage in the past year. A recent anime/manga I got into for a little while, Nisekoi, seemed like a fairly fresh twist on the classic rom-com formula of “they bicker and can’t get along at all so you know they of course eventually realize they’re in love”, which I have a soft spot for because sometimes that’s my life. The art style is great, there’s a central love triangle that actually makes some sense (unlike the bizarre “all these girls love this one idiot” theme that’s become painfully common), and the gimmick – that the two leads are from rival yakuza families and are forced to pretend to be involved to prevent an all-out gang war- actually kind of works as a justification for them not figuring it out and just getting together by the end of the first few episodes.

But sure enough, lurking just along the fringes of the story, you can see some of the worst trends in anime starting to come out of the woodwork. So when the cast put on a play together and the female lead realized mid-production that yes, she actually really likes the male lead, I knew that the series would either have to wrap up shortly or descend into crap. I found out the American translations were a year behind plot-wise (itself a bad sign), checked out some fan-translations, and discovered that yes, it definitely turns into pure shit in incredibly short order. But that’s ok. Everyone has to earn a paycheck, and I feel like the series creator gave me fair warning so that I could exit on a high note. And who knows, maybe I’ll check back in for the finale when they finally get there?