A Bit About My Day Job*

*or 50 Pounds of Cat Food on a NASA Grant

I really should be writing something else right now. (Homework!) But I'd rather hang out with you all, real or imagined readers.

We were shown this in a meeting at work on Friday, and I thought it was interesting (and, wonderfully, short of 2 minutes). I'm an assistant grant officer in the central office of a research university. One of the things we do is make sure that researchers aren't misspending grant money. This video is a small bit about that.

Thoughts on Last Week's Game of Thrones

Season 3 Episode 5,  "Kissed by Fire"

Actually, I'm going to write about two of my thoughts on GOT up to this point. Two complaints, really. (I do like the show overall.)

First, the sides competing for the throne are unbalanced. Daenerys is too strong to make that interesting. She has dragons, a super-trained army, and I haven't seen her make one bad decision as leader so far. So unless she made one in season two (which I haven't seen), she's set no precedent for making mistakes. She's more of an icon than a real person. The only obstacle preventing her from taking the throne is her distance from it. The biggest thing going on is us waiting for her to get there, to finish her road trip. This makes Rob's concerns about winning the war seem small. He's only fighting to be interim monarch. I feel like the only thing to thwart Daenerys is either some act of god - flood, accidental spearing - or the White Walkers descending upon her. If it's the White Walkers scenario, then, in the meantime, we're still just waiting for the big players to get somewhere.

And I had something else...

Oh yeah, this last episode was dangerously close to being just a collection of scenes. Some of the scenes survive alright - Papa Lannister telling his adult children who they have to marry, Jamie and Brienne in the tub - but others don't. John Snow's and what's-her-name's sex scene in the cave felt supremely unimportant (even though he was breaking his vows) because their through line has been so spotty. We haven't seen them  together since maybe the first episode. We've lost the sense of their romantic tension, and so we don't feel the pay off. They're still an entertaining collection of scenes, but if they lose those through, lines it's going to be increasingly difficult to keep those scenes feeling important.

Corn Rockets

My boss’s boss told me a lovely (yes, lovely) story, yesterday. His sister owns a hot air balloon. She’d take him up in it – they could go a mile high if they wanted to. They could touch down on lakes, the surface tension of the water keeping the basket afloat, and drift steadily according to the wind. But what they liked to do was land the balloon in a cornfield and pull in all these ears of corn; then they’d take off. They’d fly really high above the rural towns and take the ears of corn, shuck them, and then drop them out of the basket. They called them “corn rockets.”

In my mind, I make this into an animated short or maybe draw it as a comic strip. The first beat is the balloon steadily filling up. Doing that thing where it lies limp, then teeters on its side, and finally expands enough to be respectable and upright. It’s all in bright colors. Then the people get into the basket. They fly up high. They land in the cornfield. They go back up and drop the corn rockets, whose pulled-back husks make them spiral like helicopter seeds. In the town, when the rockets hit, they immediately explode into popcorn. Air pop, most likely.