The Awesome Post In My Head

No, I don’t have a real post today. Hey, I warned you this month was going to be rough. But I feel bad. This’ll be the first week in a year and a half of this project that I haven’t posted- real posts- at least twice. And the thing is, I have, right now, a whole, entire, complete post- with an awesome tangent and everything- in my head. Seriously, if you were here in my office with me*, I could just tell you the post to your face right now, and you’d be like, “Wow, that was awesome!” You’d laugh, you’d cry- it would be better than Cats.

*Yes, I’m blogging at work. Aren’t I bad? Oh hey, give me a break- you’re probably reading this at work…

But I just do not have the time in the next 12 hours to put my thought-stream to “paper” and to come up with the graphics* a post like this deserves. Yet I don’t want you to think I’ve flaked, or run off to Argentina or otherwise gone dark**. So here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to tell you what the post is about, and how awesome it’s going to be, so you can think about it over the weekend, and really have something great to look forward to when you come back to work on Monday. Sound good?

*It has occurred to me that I could both a) reduce my blogging workload and b) increase my posting frequency by abandoning graphics. And certainly there are many, many great blogs with no graphics. But I’m not doing that, for several reasons, foremost of which is this: the graphics are my favorite part of this whole project. Seriously, I absolutely love doing them. Remember, 90%+ of the things I blog about, I don’t know much of anything about until I get curious and start researching the topic. And somehow forcing myself to come up with a graphic makes me get the topic better. BTW, doing the graphics is the part of a post where I am most likely to start giggling to myself, so whenever I can I try to do them in private.

**”Going dark” is sales slang. It refers to when a once-promising client or prospect becomes completely unresponsive- no return calls, no email-replies- nothing. I use the term all the time, as does now my entire team at work, but I actually picked up the expression nearly a decade ago from previous boss, whom my peers and I referred to as “218”, because this was- no I am not making this up- the number of women he claimed to have slept with.

Monday’s post will be the first in a series of Astro-Updates, where we return to the navigational foundation we laid during AstroWeek (Man, was that a great week or what?), update our picture of the heavens as Winter progresses, and expand our view and understanding of the night sky. I’ll work to do these monthly, so we can chew off a little at a time, while keeping up with the changes above us.

Monday’s Astro-Update will include not only astronomy, but also- get this- religion, mythology, ethics, North Korea, nudity and the center of the freaking universe*. Really, it’s gonna cover all that, and yet it’s all gonna tie together, because it’s all in my head right now. I just need a couple free hours to let it out…

*Re-reading that I feel I must reassure you: The post will not have photos of Kim Jong Il naked**.

**Even though this one does. I’m sorry, I found it on a google search, and it was just too good not too use. Sorry if I ruined your lunch.