OK, so, to recap my earlier post: the speed of light is a hard-and-fast limit for any object with a rest mass greater than zero (Basically, everything that isn’t a subatomic particle. You know—space ships, astronauts, baseballs, magic ducks…) (not to mention the fact that due to the nature of infinity, the scientist doesn’t get the girl/ boy. Damn it!)(For grins, here’s a great site at Cornell University where they provide clear, non-techno-saturated answers to people’s questions about concepts of astronomy and physics, including the speed of light, and here is an IBM paper in which the authors provide a theoretical proof that teleportation is possible, via circumvention of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, which is another limit you can bump into when contemplating certain cool SF effects)But wait—have you ever wondered why? I mean, why is there a speed limit at all? Quack! Quack! You just asked the right question. Give that kid a hundred dollar bill.

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The US Postal Service has announced a new stamp honoring Ella Fitzgerald. I know nothing much about Fitzgerald except, of course, for her wonderful voice; reading the AP piece it was nice to find out that she was, apparently, as down to earth as she seemed despite all the acclaim she recieved over the years. I do think, though, that whoever edited the AP article from which I got this information might have ended it on a note other than Fitzgerald’s participation in a Memorex ad.

Fitzgerald’s son said that he hoped people unfamiliar with his mother’s singing would see the stamp and wonder who she was, and be moved to find out. If only someone would invent singing stamps! Then everyone would know, and the mailbox would hum on the streetcorner. I think that would be cool.

A little over two years ago I got sick. I had a life threatening, life changing illness that also happened to be pretty curable (Hodgkins Lymphoma). I learned lots of life lessons and had lots of material for a blog. I went through six months of chemo (which sounds more horrible than it was, although I wouldn’t recommend it recreationally.) I did not get thin (proof that chemo is not nearly as horrible as it used to be and both a relief and mildly disappointing—and let me tell you, oncologists have no sense of humor when it comes to the issue of losing weight.*)
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