First: I've been absent, but I'll be back. I'll start commenting this week. Second, a tale started---spontaneously---in the forums, then in sitemails. And Messrs Wolfenshire (Wolf) and RodS (Rod) are creating some wild masterpieces based on what began as a little joke about Wolf being banished to a parking lot. Tales have strange origins. But this one took off... I, however, have no tale...so I decided to do a "pre" tale---a prelude to what they're doing. It has to do with grabbing a snippet of the corona of the sun. You heard right. That was Wolf's idea...I'm only following orders... I haven't written in a while, so this may need work...but I wanted to get it up before Wolf's and Rod's tales go up, so I'm posting it in the hope that it makes sense. (And I hope you like it.) I'll be back to comment soon, but for now a little Lab encounter. Take care, all and stay and well. Peace to you all, mark (ps---the image isn't 'exactly' about the tale, but it'll suffice...I did it just now...) ------------------ ...We peered over the old creaky microscope, everyone vying for a spot, dying for a glance at this extraordinary sight. They'd all said: "You have to see this, you won't believe it: You'll feel transported to another world..." I grabbed my place at the microscope (finally) and craned over the lens. I pressed my eye into the opening, and, my god---it was just as they'd said: A world of swirling flames, sitting on a slide, moving in and out of each other, dancing, swirling and leaping as if in a ballet; each tongue-of-flame paying homage to the other in a grand street dance...Someone handed me sunglasses but I turned them down: I wanted no filters: I wanted the flames in all their eye-piercing nakedness as they curled in and out of each other on that slide, looking miraculously gigantic even though they occupied a space smaller than a quarter. The size and scope of these flames---when viewed through a microscope---was like the sun itself. In fact, it was so much like the sun, I sank into the lens and couldn't come out; I was there so long, my neck froze, my back froze and I got shooting pains in my arms and legs; but I didn't care: I was sucked in as if into the eye of a hurricane, where everyone and everything around me disappeared leaving only me and those dazzling flames. It was that precious moment in science where you become so immersed in the universe, it's as if you discovered it for the first time, your very first glance into Being. I got tears. Everyone saw this and whispered: "You found it. You found it! Now you understand..." When I pulled myself away, I said: "Where did this come from?" "The sun," they said. "What?" "The sun. We're serious." "The sun? How???" (Humanity hadn't developed the instruments to take samples of the sun yet. I mean it was preposterous...) "What are you saying?" I said. "Here's the paperwork," they said. And they handed me this huge pile of documents filled with accounts, photographs, data, etc---a humongous scholarly description of just how we got a slab "of the sun"... "It's from the corona," they said. (The sun's outer edge.) I can't explain how I believed them: no time to delve into data and such...But they were right, I knew it; and I got more tears; in fact waterfalls of them. You have to understand: When you work with distant bodies in the universe all your life---analyzing, studying and recording them---you fall in love with these things, you dream about them and revel in the thought of returning to them each day. You develop a scientific love affair with those magnificent celestial bodies; which is one of the great gifts of doing research. You're blessed with the radiant gifts of what you've studied most of your life; and the experience is just splendid... But: We'd studied them from a distance: We'd never come near the sun (unimaginable!), never measured it, touched it, took 'samples' of it. Unthinkable....So instead you fantasize about what it would be like to walk on the sun, to touch it, bask in its heat (ha---1.6 million degrees on its surface: some bath!), even though it could vaporize you in seconds. Then one day you're handed a sample on some glass, and you realize: This is from the sun, the actual sun; and you want to take it in your hands and ogle over it, stroke it, talk to it; and you well-up with the overwhelming thought that you're holding the explosion of nuclear fusion and unthinkable heat and light that catalyzed all of life on earth...and, more, that you had an intimate 'moment' with it. I suddenly feared I would wake up, shooting out of bed, the victim of a pranking nightmare...or I'd wake up in the lab while the sun flickered sarcastically like a softball in the sky. "Please don't wake up," I muttered to myself: "Don't let this be a dream!" So I didn't move, as if flinching would jinx it and cause it to go away. And me, a scientist, I was muttering like a child dreaming-up a wild fairy tale... Someone brought out a petri dish: It had more sun in it. Now how was this possible? I mean, literally: Where was its planet-destroying heat? Its life-destroying radiation? Do you know the radiation that emanates from the sun??? Yet it wasn't radioactive---which was extraordinary! Did someone put it through some mountain-sized sieve, like a Photoshop filter for celestial bodies, that removed all the heat and radiation from the very sun? How was this possible? Was it 'being polite' because it was a guest in someone's home? Yet when they handed me the dish, I swooned: I cradled it as if it were my newborn child. You wanted to protect it. And what if I dropped it? Ay! Would it spread like a pandemic, consuming half the human race? I didn't move. And everyone huddled around it, oohing and ahhing as if it were their infant child, while not making a move for fear of unleashing this all-consuming giant on the world. Well. We spent the whole day studying it, taking copious notes and amassing mounds of data. And, after sleeping in the lab (with blankets on the desks and rolled up rugs on the floor), we woke up to find the sun-stuff was all gone! Poof! It disappeared. Omg. How did we not see this coming? Everyone sat in stupors feeling like utter failures. After everyone left, I stayed on. Something I had to figure out: From all I could surmise, the corona disappeared because it was slated to go to a writer who needed it for a tale. (Get that...) Something to do with Technetium, an exotic element found in the sun's corona. And that tale involved (you ready?) a strange and miraculous blend of abandoned lots and strangely-named stores, and mythic birds and arcane implements of war...this is why it disappeared. And it disappeared, as well, so it could go to another part of town, to yet another writer---who was constructing a visual tale, made of the same strange facts as the first writer's tale. That's why the corona disappeared. * * * Once outside, I saw the sun and wanted to shout: "I had a visit from one of your children! It was delightful! And so well-behaved!" I wanted to hug it---me, a scientist: I didn't do it, mind you---my reputation was at stake. But I thought about it. I still want to. But when I looked at the sun the last time--well I'll say it: The sun winked. I'm not kidding: The sun winked. Say what you will, I'll swear to my final day on a stack of physics texts and Einstein's Theory of Special and General Relativity that the sun winked that day. At me. But---get this---it turns out the rest of our team reported the same thing! So I winked back, then bowed, said "grazie" (Italian for "thank you": I figured the sun should speak Italian since it had such great taste), and I walked home. Did the sun say grazie back? There are some things I can't reveal on a website...but let's just say we had quite a conversation. But that's a tale for another day... Was the sunset beautiful that day? Oh my......... ------------------