a is for awesome, b is for badass - o

Woah, dude. Space is only the coolest thing ever. In the history of cool. Except dinosaurs, maybe. Actually, it’s interesting that I find dinosaurs (which are from the past) and space (which is excitingly futuristic) incredibly cool. Wait, I don’t mean interesting, I mean the other thing.

Space, however, is incredibly interesting.

That is putting it mildly. And why bother with that? Space is awesome, super cool and downright magnificent. I’ve always thought that, as far back as I can remember. Maybe it started with Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. Stars are definitely one of the reasons that space is so effing cool. There’s more, but we’ll kick off with stars.

Stars

Stars are like nature, but times a million. They are nature, I know they’re not unnatural, or supernatural. But they’re way beyond the nature we’re used to. It’s basically life, but not as we know it. And that’s catchy. They are massive, for a start – like mountains, but way huger, and then at the end of their life they can go crazy and eat everything like big, hungry bears or something.

Plus, some of them look like bears. Not individually, they work as a team. Not just bears – some of them are supposed to look like lions and eagles and water goats. And you can use them to navigate if you don’t have gps or a compass or map or whatever. One of them keeps us alive, so they’re pretty handy to have around.

The night sky is one of the most mystifying and inspiring sights, and we all get to see it every time it gets dark. Imagine standing at the water’s edge, looking out across the ocean, wondering what lies on the other side. We can’t really do that anymore, not if we’ve ever seen a map. But we can look up at the sky with the same awe and wonder. And the stuff that’s out there is just terrific – nebulae and supernovas, black holes and gas giants. It’s nature at its most intense and magnificent, so look around you at the ridiculously complex and diverse natural brilliance and think “woah, dude – that’s effing cool” and then look up at the night sky, and think “woah… dude…”

Space Travel   

When I look up at the sky, as well as thinking “woah, dude” I also think “I quite fancy going there” because space travel is one of the very cool reasons that space is so effing cool. This is in no small part due to zero gravity conditions. You can float around like you’re swimming, but not in water. When I’ve dreamt about flying, that’s been what I have imagined. And when you have a cup of tea, it doesn’t just sit there in the cup, it forms spheres and floats around. This has got to get pretty frustrating after a while, but it would still have to be one of the coolest irritations you’re ever going to experience. If something’s going to inconvenience you, it might as well be magic.

Space travel is how travel used to be. Not in the sense that we were all hopping off to Mars in the 15^th Century, but that it is still a massive and heroic undertaking. Like sea travel was in the good old days. When just getting from one town to another meant saddling up the horses and driving for days. That guarantees to make any journey dramatic, which is what is missing from travel today. It’s all too easy – you can fly across the globe in a few hours, and all you need to think about is how to fit all your liquids into a transparent bag, and how to stop your trousers from falling down when you take off your belt to walk through the scanners.

Not in space, though. You have to wear special clothes – like people used to on safari. And you can’t even breathe outside. And sometimes you have to do a spacewalk to fix the engine, and then you have to worry about getting lost in the fullness of space and no-one hearing you scream. That’s hardcore travel. None of your cushioned seating and luggage on wheels.

The Space Race

When I was little I was quite set on becoming a cosmonaut. A cosmonaut, you understand, not an astronaut. Because I was firmly on the side of the Soviet Union. Space and Communism were very important in my early years, which probably explains a lot.

But the Space Race era is just cool, in quintessence. Back when spies were spies and phones were phones and arms races seemed like a good idea. There’s something charming about past ideas of the future – things that used to be futuristic, and now look retro in the extreme. Things like that are great. Much like the mal-constructed dinosaurs at Crystal Palace, space race era visions of our present time give us a brief, illuminating glimpse of how people thought back then.

Perhaps the best of these are the Little Green Men we assume aliens look like. I think it’s probably unlikely that beings from another world look a bit like us but with bigger heads and green skin, but you never know. I could end up looking very silly any moment now. And if little green men (and women, let’s be inclusive) arrive on earth I could look even sillier because as well as the original silly thing I was doing, I’d also be proven wrong about what aliens look like. But either way, if they didn’t eat or enslave you, it’d be pretty awesome to meet an alien.

Not forgetting, we went to the moon. Actual humans from Earth walked on the surface of the moon. They watched their home planet rise over the horizon and looked up at a completely new night sky, still full of the same wonder that had brought them there. Then they planted a flag and played golf, but that’s humans for you.

All the great futuristic stuff like space suits and freeze-dried food is just awesome. Who doesn’t want to write with a zero gravity pen, and eat astronauts’ ice cream even though it burns? Who wouldn’t happily jump into a space suit at a moment’s notice? To be honest, it’s not all ice cream and moonwalking. You have to wear a nappy, and your muscles start to waste in zero gravity. So maybe it wouldn’t be such a great trip, but it sure is tempting.

I’d be up for a trip to the moon, or Mars – I’m not fussy. I’d brave the food and nappies for a chance to stand on the surface of a different world, and watch the earth rise and set. Because the night sky has always filled me with wonder and awe at the vastness of the universe. I look up at the stars and think about the great and terrible marvels of the universe – the extremes of heat and cold, of gas giants and nebulae and I think “Woah, dude, space is frickin’ awesome.”    

lack of direction

Some days you just wonder why everyone is so incompetent. 

It started with a packet of cheese sauce mix, as all great stories do. It started in the sense that I found a packet of it. Legitimately found it – in the cupboard, not in the bin or on the street or in the belly of a whale.

Being open to new experiences, some would say to the point of recklessness, I decided to use it to create a poor imitation of macaroni cheese. I’m pretty well seasoned at making actual cheese sauce (and it’s pretty well seasoned, I don’t mind telling you) which is how I have made it to 25 without using a packet of cheese sauce mix.

The only real bonus of cheese sauce mix is that it’s incredibly easy. When making a food decision you have to balance the scales of effort and pleasure. Real cheese sauce takes more effort, but tastes much better, thus provides more pleasure. So at times when a great taste experience is your goal, real cheese sauce is the only way to go. Some days, though, you might want to minimise the effort side of the equation, and are willing to sacrifice pleasure to achieve this aim. Sometimes, though, you are just a reckless fool who has to cook everything you find in the cupboard, for the sole reason that you’re curious.

Being pretty secure in my cheese sauce making abilities, I ripped open the packet and popped the odd smelling contents in the pan. Some would call my instruction-eschewing vigour reckless – I say, who cares, live a little. But on top of being reckless, I’m also pretty curious if you remember. So I took a cursory glance at the instructions to fully immerse myself in the experience.  

My goodness, I’m glad I did – is this not one of the best things you’ve ever seen?

At first glance, perhaps not. But take a look at those instructions. First you pour a little milk into the pan and mix. Fair enough. Following completion of that step you simply have to pour in the remaining milk. Easy.

Wait a minute… remaining in what? You just said put in a little milk. Do I just put in what’s left? What if that was it? What if I was using up the last of the carton? Do I just put up with it being mostly powder? Or do I open a whole new carton and have at it? Or is it all the milk remaining in the house, or the supermarket, or all cows everywhere, for that matter?

You just have to marvel at the exquisite display of incompetence. Maybe not while your woefully undiluted sauce is in danger of burning, but once you’ve used your own judgment to add an amount of milk to the pan that seems not to be completely awful, you can take a minute to really have a good old marvel at just how incompetent everyone in the whole world really is. Not me of course, I am a consummate professional.

Just a minute, what’s that? What do I see in the corner, there?

Did I just tear through the instructions? Maybe everyone really is horrifically incompetent, including me… I mean, someone else has to share in this one, because they put the quantities right along the perforations. They practically tied them to the tracks in the path of an oncoming train.

But wait just one more second – a closer look reveals that it makes 300ml. That’s makes 300ml. Makes. Because cheese sauce increases in volume during cooking. Millilitres, being a measurement of volume, we’re meant to… what? Work out the percentage of expansion, and from there calculate the amount of milk necessary? This seems a lot more complicated than grating a bit of cheese and getting busy with the flour.  

Having seen the cheese sauce through to completion, I think it’s fair to say that the effort it takes to even think about finding a measuring jug is out of whack with the maximum amount of pleasure that is possible to be gained from the whole experience. Working back from the pleasure side of the equation, I think it’s pretty unreasonable to be expected to walk to the fridge for some milk, even, so maybe it’s better to not have any directions, because then one would feel obliged to follow them, and it really isn’t worth it.  

I probably could have guessed that without going through the rigmarole and heartache of actually making (and then eating) the cheese sauce. But I was curious, and I am an empiricist right down to the bone, although I don’t really fancy testing that one.

I also could have guessed that everyone is completely incompetent, but it’s always worth gathering some good hard evidence. I’m amassing quite a cache of raw data on the utterly confounding state the world is in, so if there’s a budding scientist out there wanting to study the countless fuckups we indulge in on a daily basis, I’m in. We might win a Nobel Prize, for mathematics or something. Then we can drop the cheque in a smoothie maker and win one for incompetence, too. If it comes with a trophy we can use them as bookends.