What you can’t see…scientists find observational evidence for “dark matter” in the gravitational signature of visible matter. Cosmologists the world over are drinking irresponsibly and telling nebula jokes.

In the office, we’ve been trying out Interns again, but there’s been nothing but disappointment this week—these kids don’t understand The Aural Times. They don’t understand music. They don’t understand why they wouldn’t get paid.

“Tuition,” they cry. “How can I pay my semester fees?” Crybabies.

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Put the kettle on—Fire Island, NY water supply tainted by e. coli bacteria. They’ll be boiling their water—or drinking it bottled—for a few days.

We’re starting to look human again, here at The Times. The stuporous aftermath of our Fourth of July office Drink-A-Thon has more or less worn off—except in the case of Gloria, who has been officially upgraded to comatose by the folks at the hospital. Don’t worry—she does this regularly. Plenty of rest and saline, and, like clockwork, she’ll be awake and incredibly hungover by the first week of August.

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Careful, new moons tonight—Pluto’s second and third moons have been named. Nix, goddess of night, and Hydra, a nine-headed snake beast—fitting for a ninth planet, or so the reasoning goes. One wonders if Hydra tucked one of his heads out of view every couple thousand years, the better to taunt Neptune…

Today’s issue is brought to you by what I can only hope will be a short-lived Intern sideproject: three of these over-privledged under-achievers have taken to wearing their hats backwards and writing, mostly, songs about properly cooking a turkey dinner. They’re calling themselves the Baste-y Boys.

That is a sentence I would never have expected to utter.

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Three days late for the apocalypse—meteorite of suspected record size struck Norway early Friday morning. At press time, no clever jokes were available.

I have a note here from one of the Interns. Petunia, I think—looks like her idiosyncratic (read: childish, untrained) scrawl. It says, simply: “Norway. Built fjord tough.”

…

As I said early, at press time, no clever jokes were available.

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It’s a bad year to be in Jakarta—Mt. Merapi likely to erupt, just weeks after a nearby earthquake killed nearly 6,000 people.

It’s not exactly a good day for spelling and pronunciation in the office, at least for whichever lunatic Intern is responsible for the vocals on today’s song—if I didn’t know better, I’d guess he’s singing “Melapi”. Not that you can make out the words. Damned heavy metal. I’m going to have to put them back on barbershop duty if they keep this up.

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Running late? Alliterate! Soda czars ceasing sales to schools! In, well, a couple of years. And not diet soda. Or sports drinks. Or juice products. All of which have seen rising sales while traditional high-calorie soda products have been declining.

And there’s that issue of mounting legal pressure from various states.

Speaking of states, we at The Aural Times are heading, en masse, to Montana for a few days—which means, of course, renting a bus, packing in the Interns, and reminding them every five minutes (1) to sit down, (2) to shut up, and (3) that no, we are not there yet.

We may find a way to provide updates from the road—I have it on good authority that portions of the Big Sky state are now equipped with electrical power—but if you do not see an update on Monday, or even Wednesday, do not be alarmed. We are most likely not lying dead at the bottom of a cliff, amidst the smoldering wreakage of a mangled, cliff-overridden Bluebird bus, but rather merely enjoying the wilderness.

I just wish Dalton would stop talking about “getting back to nature.”

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After a months-long series of delays, commercial space-flight startup Space Exploration Technlogy finally managed on Friday to achieve a milestone:  screwing up a space-craft launch for a fraction of what NASA charges.

It’s a fact—new rocket fails on its maiden launch.

Frankly, I do hope SpaceX has more success in the near future.  I have always been fascinated by space—my youth spent idolizing men like Neil Armstrong, James Tiberius Kirk, Ralph Kramden—but I’m afraid space flight continues to be a bit out of my budget.

Site news: our Graphic Designer, with some help from our Technical Advisor (who is still recovering from our recent headaches), is installing the a new site design as I type this.  So by the time you read this, the site itself should be transformed utterly.  We are very excited about this.  Or at least we’d better be; it’s costing me a lot of money that I won’t be spending on a space shuttle vacation.

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Those eggheads at NASA have done it again—water hints at life on moon of Saturn.  The moon Enceladus, that is, and only for certain values of “hints at”, anyhow; scientists within the agency have been reserved as to the suggestion that a watery geyser on a frozen lump of space-rock means life is present.

But one cannot be too careful.  Theoretical though they may be, microbial though they would in their unlikely geyser-dwelling existence be, I prefer nonetheless to acknowledge Brockman’s Wager: I most heartily welcome, should they happen to exist, our new Enceladusian overlords.  Let us hope they find Yellowstone a comforting home away from home.

And now, a promotional concern: some of our work here at The Times has been featured in the latest podcast episode of The Delta Park Project’s biweekly flagship product, The Big Show.  We’re please as punch to be featured by such excellent Portland folks, and heartily recommend this and their other programs.  Examine the whole roster at deltaparkproject.com.

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It’s worth saying—the problem is H5N1, not the bloody cats.  I’m not a “cat person”, myself, mind you; if I wanted to clean up the droppings of a prissy, self-absorbed grimalkin, I wouldn’t have gotten divorced.  But—I was going somewhere with this, I think—don’t panic.  Keep an eye on your cats.

The interns—I’m not sure where they learned their ethics; they may not be throwing cats out the windows of The Aural Times‘s offices, but they are stealing beats, viz:

Sheep Beats, a sickeningly cute trio of ovis aeries laying out compelling (if not entirely well-tempoed) sequenced music.

Also—RSS feed.  I don’t know what it is, but our Technical Advisor assures me that it will improve site readership and is well worth the overtime pay I am required by state law to pay her.  There’s a link on the sidebar; click on it, if you dare.

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