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NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

Admire the beauty but fear the beast. The beauty is the aurora overhead, here taking the form of a great green spiral, seen between picturesque clouds with the bright Moon to the side and stars in the background. The beast is the wave of charged particles that creates the aurora but might, one day, impair civilization. In 1859, following notable auroras seen all across the globe, a pulse of charged particles from a coronal mass ejection (CME) associated with a solar flare impacted Earth's magnetosphere so forcefully that it created the Carrington Event. This assault from the Sun compressed the Earth's magnetic field so violently that it created high currents and sparks along telegraph wires, shocking many telegraph operators. Were a Carrington-class event to impact the Earth today, speculation holds that damage might occur to global power grids and electronics on a scale never yet experienced. The featured aurora was imaged in 2016 over Thingvallavatn Lake in Iceland, a lake that partly fills a fault that divides Earth's large Eurasian and North American tectonic plates. Almost Hyperspace: Random APOD Generator

Photo by Juan Carlos Casado

I am at a loss.
A loss for words.
Yesterday was a good day.
We talked. Best time,
Enjoyable conversation, yet,
a faraway look, in her eyes.

Destroys me. I keep my
emotions in check,
when I want to cry, like now,
hours after I left her.
Went to bed at 10:30, and
awoke at 01:30. It is now
03:00 a.m.

How stupid am I?
It is so difficult for me.
Going to make the
decision for Hospice Care,
with the Drs. permission.

Hospice in my mind, is
the last step. A peaceful exit
from the suffering of my beloved.
God, I hate this.

A muse about waiting to order breakfast when the cloak of
invisibility covers you.

I see you walk by
as you're going away.
Is this another time
when I turn invisible?

I left after waiting 20 minutes,
of being ignored, even when
the wait person was 5 feet away.
No greeting or acknowledgement
that I was present.

My mind is a wasteland,
an empty place,
full of old ideas,
out in space.

Thoughts, bounce around,
without a direction,
turned back by being,
forced into rejection.

Why do I exist?
To serve another,
a woman I have loved,
as my wife and kids Mother.

A few days ago, I spent the afternoon
with my beloved.
My eyes were moist,
my hankie, damp,
from tears, leaking from my eyes,
as I saw my beloved,
in an almost Catatonic state.

Here I sit, awaiting,
alongside of you.
You say, "I don't know you,"
though you make eye contact.

My mind has grown cloudy,
strange thoughts in play.
Another favorite
is going away.

I'll miss you,
your perky smile,
with quick wit,
it's your style.

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.