Magazine Posts

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

Bright sunlight glints as long dark shadows mark this image of the surface of the Moon. It was taken fifty-four years ago, July 20, 1969, by Apollo 11 astronaut Neil Armstrong, the first to walk on the lunar surface. Pictured is the mission's lunar module, the Eagle, and spacesuited lunar module pilot Buzz Aldrin. Aldrin is unfurling a long sheet of foil also known as the Solar Wind Composition Experiment. Exposed facing the Sun, the foil trapped particles streaming outward in the solar wind, catching a sample of material from the Sun itself. Along with moon rocks and lunar soil samples, the solar wind collector was returned for analysis in earthbound laboratories.

Author’s Introduction: Everywhere in the news I’ve been reading about how Artificial Intelligence (AI) and programs like ChatGPT will be eliminating thousands of jobs in countless industries. Thanks to recent advances in AI, fashion magazines can create images of fashion models that are so realistic, there may soon be no need for human models. Writers and actors are on strike right now in part because of very real fears that artificial intelligence will make their jobs obsolete. Why pay a few hundred background actors thousands of dollars when movie producers now can just create digital fakes to accomplish the same thing? Why hire writers when ChatGPT can write a complex script in minutes?

It got me to thinking. Is MY job as a humor writer at risk? You tell me. The other day, I asked ChatGPT to “write a satirical humor article about being an American man married to a Canadian woman in the style of Tim Jones’s View From the Bleachers humor website.” (My wife is Canadian.) … and this is what it came up with: More at View from the Bleachers ➜

No more the light,
from your eyes, shine.
It matters not,
for you are mine.

My love for you,
has no bounds,
while your voice,
emits beautiful sounds.

What has thou wrought?
Love has gone away,
and shan't be back,
until a happier day

I see a faraway look,
in her eyes,
a thousand-yard stare,
and a look prompting sighs.

Where are you now,
my sweet girl?
Are you lost in this life,
where everything is a twirl?

Sweet and low,
off and running,
sometimes it's better,
than being cunning.

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

High-speed outflows of molecular gas from a pair of actively forming young stars shine in infrared light, revealing themselves in this NIRcam image from the James Webb Space Telescope. Cataloged as HH (Herbig-Haro) 46/47, the young stars are lodged within a dark nebula that is largely opaque when viewed in visible light. The pair lie at the center of the prominent reddish diffraction spikes in the NIRcam image. Their energetic stellar jets extend for nearly a light-year, burrowing into the dark interstellar material. A tantalizing object to explore with Webb's infrared capabilities, this young star system is relatively nearby, located only some 1,140 light-years distant in the nautical constellation Vela.

When I was fifteen years of age,
I rode a horse on a cattle drive.
Moving the cattle, down the country
roads, through Sagebrush and other plants.

After one day of riding, my rear end was
sore, and we kept on "driving the cattle,
toward our goal, which was a ranch,
east of Ellensburg.
My legs were sore after being in the
saddle. I didn't know what I was doing
but quarter horse knew every move the
cattle would make, cut them, off so
we could continue our drive.
Great memories of that time.

Dearest Elle,
sweet Ellie true.
I wish it were me,
not unlucky youl

Of all the love
which exist in this Word,
you are the one and
will be my only girl.

I should have left my writing alone,
as my eyes are brimmed with tears,
recalling the memories from home.
I recall Happy moments.