Well guys, looks like I have to fly down to NASA and be there when the images come down from the Mercury flyby and we see the side of Mercury that has never before been seen by spacecraft. No more will we have a globe of Mercury with half of it covered by a mysterious shroud of gray and marked "unknown". Yes, the hidden shall be revealed tomorrow, January 14th, 2008; the final frontier of the terrestrial planets will be explored; all things will be made known.

I'll be gone for like 8 days; I may or may not have internet access... according to my supervisor we're going to be working like 24 hours a day to get the pictures and data ready for public and scientific debut. So if you see a link about MERCURY on your MSN or Yahoo homepage, click it, and read about the intercrater plains, and think of me, your friend Zanzibar, slaving away at the Applied Physics Laboratory just for you. My job is so hard.

The Welshman: "Is there a problem with me getting access to NASA seeing as I'm not a native American?"
Jimothy: "I don't think any of us are Native Americans, actually..."

Jay: "A bag of Skittles says there's an alien civilization."
Me: "I'll take that bet."
Jay: "Uh, actually, lets make the bet 1 or 2 alien civilizations."
Me: "What if one is a suburb of the other?"

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The day was spent dilly-dallying. Everyone was distracted with anticipation. Around 2:30 the Welshman and I started making preparations, and Thalweg joined us around 2:45, too distracted to focus on work anymore. We piled into the Adventure Camry, picked up the Welshman's girlfriend, we'll call her the Coolest Chick Eva, and we headed for the Great North.

That was the year I entered Princeton. That is to say, 2008, when I drove into the small town of Princeton, Massachusetts. Before we knew it, we were there! The finest ski resort in Southern New England: Wachusett Mountain. You know the one, just a bit north of Lake Chaubunagungamaug?

We suited up and off we went, shedding any and all thoughts of work, Thursdays, or Providence, Rhode Island that remained lodged in our conscious minds and shredding some coarse false powder, which slid over our skis more like pellets of plastic than snow.

All might have gone well this night, if not for one thing: Thalweg, the fastest skiier known to man, had not yet learned to stop. So it was that we went on a very steep blue run with many jumps and Thalweg mistakenly took one of the largest jumps available and executed perfectly the face-land... that is, she landed directly on her face, and slid down the mountain on it a fair way until her Thalwegian visage was covered in blood.

After several chocolate-covered sugar-waffles at Das Waffle Haus and a trip to the ski patrol hut, we were back on the slopes, and had a representative from In Touch magazine been watching, they would have consulted a plastic surgeon which does not treat the star and he would have agreed most heartily that Thalweg had had some augmentation done to her upper lip, which was now near twice its previous size. Her spokesperson would be unavailable for comment.

The way home, marked by the deep sleep of the Welshman and the Coolest Chick Eva in the backseat of the Adventure Camry, and an unfortunate >1-hr detour into the state of Connecticut, was nonetheless a perfect ending for a perfect night of skiing, and a great mischevious self-satisfaction took over all of us, as we had just been in another world, and no one would know when we went to work the next day. Except Thalweg of course, who can't laugh without splitting her lip, but who assured curious passersby that the wound was cosmetic and that they should feel sorry for the slope itself, which had to be taken away in a stretcher. Many stretchers, really, given the size of the slope.

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You'd think a talk about traveling to Antarctica and studying the movements of glaciers would be interesting. You'd THINK. Somehow, scientists have the uncanny ability to make everything that is interesting sound mind-numbingly boring. I was out of water, the room was dark, the Welshman was snoozing.

"You have to be careful," cautioned the speaker in a dry voice, "because there are many crevasses."

CREVASSES! You could fall into a crevasse! So there's this volcano in Antarctica, Erebus, and it is covered in crevasse fields, and this guy was riding along on his snowmobile and he just went crazily over an ice bridge and the undergrad he was supposed to be leading just followed him because how is she supposed to know? But the weight of his snow mobile had weakened the bridge and she barely made it across. Hours later, the ice bridge was completely gone. Can you imagine? An undergrad?

Then again, there was that advisor who sent his student to do field work in Papua New Guinea and then he was eaten by CANNIBALS. We were thinking that it would be hard for that guy to get new students after that.

But CREVASSES! Imagine tooling along in your snowmobile, and then KABAM! A crevasse you didn't even know existed would collapse under your runners and you'd plummet like 50-100ft into your icy grave. But you wouldn't die, oh no, you'd merely break your leg, and then face the ultimate question between dehydration and hypothermia.

After musing on the subject for a time, I concluded that no matter what kind of shape I was in, I would attempt to climb out. I know in the movies you have to like wait for your brother to attempt a dangerous rescue mission in inclement weather, but I don't have a brother and we're assuming that I'm very far away from help. Like this one guy in Antarctica, he fell in a crevasse and the rest of his party had died by then except this one guy who I think died when they fell into the crevasse, and he had like a broken leg or something, and he CLIMBED OUT and like dragged himself all the way to safety. Those south pole missions, everyone was always falling into crevasses; one time one of the dogs fell in and before they could do anything, all the other dogs fell in because they're connected and then the whole sled of supplies fell in. You'd better believe those people starved to death. Well, many of them, anyway.

So I decided that despite the incredible, insane pain, I would definitely scale the side of that icy crevasse. There's no way at the present time that I (or most anyone else) could get the whole way up just using the upper body. No, I would have to put some weight on the leg. If only my fibula or something was broken that would be no biggy. I mean, I already did that once. It didn't work very well, I must admit, the fibuless leg is not good at bearing weight even discounting the pain, but really all you'd need is for it to be like a wooden peg-stub that you could put a little weight on to balance yourself up the side of the icy crevasse. Naturally you'd hope that you still had your ice pick, and that it hadn't found its way into your eye or your guts during the fall down. And hopefully you'll have crampons, which is frankly a word I try to avoid using because it sounds really gross and unpleasant.

And then I'd pull myself, inch by inch towards the top of the crevasse, and my half-crazed starving expedition-mates would throw me ropes and stuff, and I wouldn't know if it's because they want me to survive or because they were hoping to use my newly dead flesh as sustenance in the days to come. Like that guy who apparently killed his girlfriend and then chopped her up and was boiling a chunk of her flesh on the stove when the police arrived. Which begs the question: why boil? Everyone knows that straight boiling makes whatever it is taste dry!

This course of action could have several results, as I see it: either I make it to the top, in which case I might survive but it's still somewhat unlikely (I shall I always walk with a limp, how tragic!), I fall, injuring myself even worse, (after which I would definitely try again and be even more likely to fall), or lastly, that the pain from my broken appendage would be so much that I'd go into shock or pass out and succumb eventually to hypothermia without ever reawakening. I kind of like that idea better than regular hypothermia because I wouldn't actually have to feel any of it. But any way you frame it, I certainly would never just lie there and give up.

"I have no idea how you kept awake during that lecture," said the Welshman, well relieved to be on his way out of that dark and boring room.

I looked at him enigmatically.

"I have my ways."

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I want to post an entry even though I have absolutely nothing to say. Hm. Today... it was Saturday, wasn't it? That changed my daily routine because it meant that I drove to work instead of walking. But otherwise, nothing was different. When I got home, I did the dishes. I think that took from 7 til 10:30. There were a lot of dishes.

In other news, I finally got my cox to work. That is, the internet at my house. It's flowing. Or whatever the interwebs does that makes it go. Sends packets? Series of tubes? It's always a relief to have working cox.

So I've been reading "Americans in Southeast Asia: The Roots of Commitment". It's a fantastic book. They tell you pretty much everything you never knew about World War II. I think everyone should read it before they start talking about politics today, because they'll see that everything that faces us today is just echoes of the past, wrapped up in newer packaging.
I was thinking that it must be hard to impose sanctions on a country. I bet your mood would always wax and wane between being really angry at the country for their human rights violations, and then reminiscing about the good old days when relations were good and thinking of all the people who were starving as a result of your sanctions. You would *almost* be tempted to get on the red phone and say, "Listen Cuba/North Korea... I just wanted to say that I've been thinking about you, and everything, and I'd like to send you a shipment of food/weapons/oil. I mean, it would only be ONE shipment of oil. It's not like everything's suddenly good now. But you know, one sentimental shipment of oil or pharmecuticals or corn, just for old time's sake."

But you just can't do that. Nope, old North Korea would see that as a sign of weakness. Mr. Jong Il would think that you're starting to crack, you see. You'd end up like the UN- laughable and powerless. In the case of Cuba, where the sanctions are kind of ridiculous at this point, and it's high time we flooded Cuba with American goods and culture, you'd have to just keep reminding yourself of Castro's transgressions so that you could revive that latent bitterness towards Communism and remember why you were doing this in the first place. It's the principle of the thing, after all. You must be firm.

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So I suppose prospective student season has started again. PROSPIES. Did it ever end? Today we had Mr. Black to call. How might I describe him? He was a boy you could bring home to your Ranor.

You know, the half-asian type. Harvard grad. Currently on a Fulbright in Iceland studying gullies. Good-natured, with a little mischevious Brendanness stifled behind his good-behavior.

We thought he wasn't on facebook, so we were initially going to write him off. "How are we supposed to know whether he's hot or not?" fumed Jay. "What a waste of TIME!" None of us in the seafloor lab had idea whether we should spend the morning writing our abstracts that are due on the 8th or if we should be spending that time primping. There really was no question for Jay. The prospie had cited Jay in his abstract on gullies that he had submitted to the conference that Jay is running. He had Jay at gullies.

But as it turned out, he was on facebook, and he had Caleb at Zax. Yes, that is the highest scoring three-letter Scrabble word, and Mr. Black knew what it was. Scrabble nerd? Et tu, Black?

We went to dinner and Mr. Black enquired after our Antarctica program. "Do you guys always get along down there?"

My advisor gathered himself for his carefully-worded speech. "We have a good group here. We have a good dynamic," he began politely. "And we pre-select a great deal." he glanced at us, as if he were unsure about giving away his secrets.
"I have them into my office and I have the window open. I don't leave the window open because I like to be cold... I just like to see how they react."

It's true. He does have the window open on the most ridiculously cold days. But it's because he likes it cold. ISN'T IT?

"And that's also why you have the water slowly dripping from the ceiling?" I added.

"He fancies himself a psychologist," said Jay later.

Right.

Perhaps he'll take that prospective to Antarctica some day. I WANT TO GO TO ANTARCTICA. I promise I won't have a break down, or go mad. But I wouldn't begrudge the prospie the trip. After all, he had me at "I live in Iceland."

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It has been snowing just about every other day. When I came home last night my street was sparkling in my headlights as I drove. Tonight I went to get into my car and I looked out into the blackness and everything was silent. There is a more profound silence that can only be obtained after a snow, and this was it. But every street and every shop, every intersection, every type of weather, holds for me a memory in this place.

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Well, it's been a while. That might be the most common way of opening an entry on Nutang. A lot has happened, so I'll just give a short pictoral history of the last couple of weeks:











hmm... I have more pictures to add to this but my computer needs a rest, poor dear. And I have a Mario Party Party to attend.

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And ye, beneath life�s crushing load,
Whose forms are bending low,
Who toil along the climbing way
With painful steps and slow,
Look now! for glad and golden hours
Come swiftly on the wing.
O rest beside the weary road,
And hear the angels sing!

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