In orbit

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My daily commute consists of a 15-minute drive, during which I listen to WERS (highly recommended -- listen online if you're not in Boston); a 10-minute walk, during which I listen to my iPod on shuffle; and a 10-minute subway ride, during which I read a book. Today I was in one kind of mood when I got onto the train and a different kind when I got off; I'm not sure how to describe them, but the cause was the book I'm now reading, "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close" by Jonathan Safran Foer, who is my favorite living writer along with Michael Chabon. (If Kurt Vonnegut were still alive, that would make three, but now he has to compete with hundreds of great dead authors instead of a few living ones.) The book is difficult at times, even frustrating, but absolutely brilliant -- one of the few that makes we want to shove a copy into the hands of everyone I know.

When I got to work, I immediately Googled "Dirty Laundry," which was a sort of underground compilarion taope of network news blunder set to the Don Henley song, which popped up on my walk this morning. I found the video on YouTube but the sound track but remopved because of copyright issues -- DAMN. Then I want to Wikipedia to read about JSF but was sidetracked by today's featured home-page article, which was about 243 Ida, a 36-mile-long elongated asteroid orbiting the sun between Mars and Jupiter. It has enough gravity to hold down a person, though little enough that the person could jump from one end of the asteroid to the other. Ida itself has a mile-long moon named Dactyl. It's amazing. I'm just all filled with wonder today, apparently.

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