Outer Solar System, Milky Way, 2003: The Cassini spacecraft, being in the neighborhood, has taken 27 snapshots of Jupiter, and NASA folk have assembled them into a very detailed portrait of Jupiter, shown here.

Our solar system’s largest planet is eleven times the diameter of Earth, and may be made entirely of gas so it has no solid surface. In other words, nobody walking around, looking up at the beautiful 62 moons.

Walking would be tough anyway — the gravity would crush you into a teacup — and you’d be short of breath, as the air is made up of water (damp for breathing), ammonia (stings your eyes), and hydrogen sulfide (stink gas). It’s windy, too. Little breezes up to 300 miles per hour are common.

The detailed patterns are actually huge clouds. Near the lower middle of the picture is the Great Red Spot. It’s a swirling vortex of gas, large enough to swallow our entire planet of Earth.

The Cassini space probe also recently recorded the sound of a solar flare. More information about Cassini’s mission, and more photographs of Jupiter are available .

Kind of makes you stop and consider the size of things.

No? Well, that’s about the size of it.

Denton, Texas 1965: I met Jon W. at the Hob Nob. He was a gay guy with a haircut like the Beatles, but before the Beatles record came out, so to speak.

At the time, I didn’t really know what “gay” meant. In high school, my friend Bobby M. once spoke of “queers.” I asked Bobby what that meant, and he said they were very mean guys who wanted to hurt you, specifically by blowing air … well, this being a family-oriented autoblography, let’s just say that Bobby’s theory was wide of the mark.

So I met Jon and some of his friends, and they were kind of interesting, but I found it awkward. And embarassing.

For example, one day, sitting in a booth with friends, in the booth behind me were Jon and his friends. Jon was wearing a cologne, quite pleasant actually, but I couldn’t just say something like that, oh no.

Some comment was made, and he asked me if I liked the scent. I was embarassed, and gruffly replied, “You smell pretty.”

This was meant to be somewhat rude, so my friends wouldn’t think I was maybe light in the loafers, you know. But Jon never blinked an eyelash.

“That’s because I think pretty thoughts,” he said.

So mortifying.

But later I was happy I knew him, because he was giving up his cool apartment, and he helped me to take it over. Across from the English Building was Voertmann’s, the bookstore. Beside Voertmann’s, a narrow alley ran to the parking lot behind the store. On the building next door, a beauty parlor filled the first floor, and two clunking metal stairs led to apartments above.

The apartment in front was huge; and down a catwalk at the back of the building, my new apartment was tiny.

It was great. First, it was dirt-cheap, always an attractive feature. It was one room, with a bath and tub, and two closets: one for clothes, and one with a tiny refrigerator where I built shelving for food and a crockpot to make soup and chili. Presto! Instant kitchen.

Going around the room, I’d added a console television, a cabinet on the wall with a collection of teas — very cosmopolitan for a boy from Henrietta — and a set of black shelves built like a pole light. On these I stacked white dishes and bowls.

Beside the door, a huge speaker cabinet covered in blue burlap atop of which a black formica counter-top supported an enormous copper pot with a brass faucet for water. Then my record turntable, suspended by a chain, and a free-form wooden thing suspended from the ceiling, through which passed a pottery lamp above my bed.

A home-made sofa beneath a wall panel of colored cloth, and some rattan, four lithographs matted in dark colors, from my ex-roommate Hardy. A drop-down drafting table suspended from the wall, and my conga drum in the corner, both stained teal blue, completed the scene.

Red and blue bulbs in a pole lamp shone upon a fake brick section of wall, and gay Jon had painted the walls and the hardwood floors white, so a bit of blue sisal carpet cheered things up. A hi-fi and foldaway cardtable beneath my bed provided an evening’s entertainment or a dinner party. I was all set.

It happened that my friend Lefevre was visiting in town, and because I was extremely proud of these several weeks work, mostly done over a Christmas vacation, I got my ex-roommate Pat to bring Jerry over to see my new place.

As it happened, they were very late, and I worked nights at the Holiday Inn, so I left the lights low and the door unlocked. They came and saw the place and left, and later I was so proud of my handiwork when Jerry told me, “I had no idea your tastes were so fine.”

Of course, this glow of approval was dimmed a little the next day when Pat dropped by. He came in, looked around.

“Nice decorating,” he said. “… Early Homosexual?”

November 8, 1674: The blind English poet John Milton died at the age of 65. A student once wrote in an essay on Milton: “He got married and wrote Paradise Lost. Then his wife died and he wrote Paradise Regained.”

Dublin, November 8, 1847: Bram Stoker was born today. This is important because he grew up and wrote Dracula. One summer afternoon in the middle of our sunlight-flooded back yard, at the age of 13, I shuddered to read how the dog jumped off the boat. And Miss Lucy … ugh!

November 9, 1953: Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, author of Under Milk Wood, died at age 39, following the consumption of 18 stiff whiskies which put him into an alcoholic coma, from which he ne’er saw light o’day eremore.

“An alcoholic is someone you don’t like
who drinks as much as you do.”
— Dylan Thomas

JoeBobBriggs.Com, November 1, 2003:

“Wildfires raged through three separate areas of southern California, stoked by the hot Santa Ana winds and beetle-infested dead trees and some dudes with matches.

“Tom Sizemore was sentenced to six months in the pokey for beating up Heidi Fleiss during their one-year relationship. The actor admitted to a crystal meth habit that he says caused him to hit her in the jaw, because otherwise he could have lived happily ever after with his ex-convict callgirl pimpstress.

“Wheaton College, a fundamentalist Bible school in Illinois, lifted its 143-year ban on dancing and is planning its first school dance. The first song will be, of course, Theme from ‘Footloose’.“

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