Quick One

Okay, here's a fast post.

I have to be up pretty early to drive to Galveston for the third straight day. There's a group from NASA and the German and Russian space agencies holding a meeting to discuss a possible manned Mission to Mars.

M2M, daddy-o. The real thing.

I get to hear all about it in this little meeting room where all I do is babysit a laptop and load their Power Point presentations. Should I steal them and post them here? Yeah, right - and get fired. They're mostly all about centrifuge issues, anyway. They're discussing a centrifuge on the spacecraft to generate artificial gravity and give the crew members resistance-based exercises so they don't become weak. After all, there won't exactly be a team of doctors on the Red Planet to help them get back into shape as they adjust to the gravity when they get there.

In other news, the new McCartney album is really good. His best in a while. I've enjoyed his last few efforts - pretty much everything since and including Flaming Pie. Anything's better than 1993's painful Off the Ground. The new record, Chaos and Creation in the Backyard, was produced by Nigel Godrich of Radiohead and Beck fame. McCartney has said the process was "painful" and like being "pulled through the hedge backwards" or something like that. I know Nigel wasn't afraid to tell Paul something was "shit" if he thought so. He even made Paul ditch his band and record most of the parts himself. But the result is really good and very different for Paul. Not in terms of melodic quality, though these are mostly all really strong melodies, but more in terms of texture and production.