Looking for Dragons

One day, she went looking for the dragon.

She set out on food, walking through the trees.

She walked past the hidden apple tree.

And strolled through the sumac tree wood.

And stumbled into the Enchanted Forest.

She saw a bird. It wasn't singing.

When she reached a strange rock wall, she paused and looked around...

Was she lost?

She turned back. Everything looked the same.

She frowned, concerned, and began walking again.

She walked for hours.

Finally, she found an old birch tree. It seemed to be

pointing her towards something. She began to walk in that direction.

Suddenly, she stumbled into the field on the edge of the Enchanted Forest.

She breathed a sign of relief.

She began to head towards home, disappointed that she hadn't found the dragon.

Then, out of the corner of her eye she saw a splash of red, 

amid the green wash of green and brown that surrounded her.

It was beautiful.

Then she looked up.

She saw something in the trees.

She moved closer.

A wall? She began to follow it.

It was the Lost Fortress!

Her mind began to spin castles and adventures...

...and suddenly there were knights and witches

and fairies and animals...

...and there was her dragon.

Why We Should Go to Space, Part 2

Recently, there have been a few things to inspire me. One is this little girl, speaking on behalf of the future to the UN:

The second thing was this quote by President Obama. He said this in 2009:

“Reaffirming and strengthening America’s role as the world’s engine of scientific discovery and technological innovation is essential to meeting the challenges of this century."

So my thought is this: let's reaffirm and strengthen America's role as the world's engine of scientific discovery and technological innovation by going to space as much and as often as we can. Let's go to the moon--we did it once, we can do it again (maybe this time we'll find the giant metal aliens that like to pretend to be cars). Let's land on an asteroid and pick up some platinum or palladium or some element we've never seen before. Let's go to Mars and set up a place to live (and hopefully not get infected by an intelligent water virus). Let's go to another planet and find life--micro or macroscopic--let's find that the universe, which seems so huge and empty, is actually teeming with life and possibilities.


And in the meantime, let's find a way to take care of our beautiful Earth.

Pinwheel Galaxy, NASA: 

How to Wing the Superbowl

A few days ago I experienced a crisis of massive proportions. We are talking crisis on the level of the sun going nova, or an asteroid killing all the dinosaurs. Imagine every volcano on Earth exploding simultaneously or the tectonic plates suddenly deciding to go swimming in molten lava: that kind of serious. The 'a basilisk ate Obama and the Queen' kind of serious.

First you should know that I don't cook. My mother would rush to inject here that she made sure my brothers and I knew how to cook before we left the house, as well as how to do our laundry, and how to sew. This is true. For me, not cooking is a personal choice. This choice stems mostly from my hatred of doing dishes.

Yesterday I decided to boil an egg. Not a difficult task, you say, but let me remind you: I don't cook. My goal was to boil three eggs. The first egg- no problem. The second egg- fine. But the third egg, as I began to slide it into the water, slipped out of my fingers and cracked on the bottom of the pot. HORROR! Egg began to emerge from its encasement! White slimy stuff sneaking out into the water, like a Trojan horse wheeling its way sneakily into Troy. The water started to bubble and foam until it had reached the edges of the pot and threatened to leap out and consume the world.

So I did what I always do during momentous crises--I called my mom. She said it was fine. She told me to turn down the heat. She also said I could eat it, even though it looked like a deformed alien trying to pre-escape its egg, or like Earth leaking gravity through the hole in the ozone layer (I didn't eat it, actually--it creeped me out too much).

There is another reason to be concerned about eggs. I'm sure you've seen a double-yolk or a spot of blood inside an egg. But have you ever seen an egg without a yolk? I hope not. These eggs are laid by roosters. If they hatch, a terrible creature comes out: a two-legged dragon with wings and the head of a rooster--a cockatrice. There are only two ways it can die: by hearing the crow of a rooster, or by seeing itself in a mirror. If it looks at you, you turn to stone.

The trick to prevention is to throw the cockatrice egg over your house so it smashes on the other side without touching the roof. As the best chicken catcher in my family, I'm sure I could manage to take down a cockatrice--so if you see one, feel free to call me. 

But if you believe that avoidance is the best method, move to Toronto. Otherwise you're bound to be tormented by giant rooster-dragons staring you into stone and gobbling up all your children.

On the other hand, a cockatrice could be quite useful, if utilized carefully. If you're very clever, you could wrangle that rooster-dragon and use it as a weapon against the Giants (if you live in New England)  or the Patriots (if you live elsewhere), so that your team would win; and if you were really smart, you would have done it last week, so the game would have been a shutout. Or, if you were really, really smart, you would have brought the rooster-dragon onto the football field during the game, so instead of tossing around a small not-round kicking toy, the players would have been engaged in an epic battle against the Cockatrice: it would have been the football game of the century.


Here is the moral of the story: pay close attention to your eggs, and you could be the decider of the next Superbowl.

 

Circling the Dragon Sphere

My favourite thing about flying is everything. I have no issues with airports. I have no issues with security. I love taking off and landing, and turbulence just makes my life that much more interesting and exciting.

The thing about flying is the space under me, the space above me, the space around me. There's so much space when you're 50,000 feet above the surface of the Earth.

I like to imagine flying, with nothing and no one around. To be completely alone, with only wetness of the clouds or the occasional greeting of a bird; with the landscape moving slowly underneath me, the planet rolling on it's axis, spinning the trees until their leaves fly off into the never ending universe. Everything else is stuck to the dirt and rocks, at the mercy of the dragon sphere with fire churning in her guts, lights shining in her eyes, and dirt under her fingernails.

Flying is like making the Earth turn faster. It's like running on a ball. I can see the green and the blue and the colours upon colours spinning underneath me faster and faster as I speed forward at the speed of sound. I can see the black inimitable magnitude of space over my head, stretching out infinitely, past the trees and the clouds and birds, past the ozone, and past the capsule of safety surrounding the dragon sphere.

And suddenly I want to go to space, to feel the space, to be succumbed into all that is nothing but the vast darkness and silence which is neither dark nor silent, but rather filled with the homes of a million million faces visible only as pinpricks of light an incomprehensible lifetime away.

So if you happen to have a spare $200,000 in your pocket, I hope you find it in your heart to buy me a ticket on the Virgin Galactic.