The recent heatwave, experienced by many people round the world, ramped temperatures up so much that my web hosts had a fire break out in their server farm. This forced the need to temporarily shut down and evacuate the servers, for about a week. This meant that this website was offline for almost two weeks, only coming back online once the server configs were eventually put right, and after a good deal of tweakage on the client side to reset/rewrite lost settings correctly.
I'm happy to be able to report that we are indeed now up and running again, but if you were one of the handful of people on the planet who tried unsuccessfully to reach this site over the last fortnight, then you have my sincere apologies for your inconvenience, on behalf of my webhost, who I won't name here. I was wondering in what part of the world all that was happening. Where are those smoky servers?
Then I overheard someone say that they had searched for their location but couldn't find it, although after looking at their sales pages, where they sought to provide some legitimacy by showing a gallery of promo headshots with their relevant names, which all sound very Russian apparently.
So that likely suggests a rough geographical response to my wondering. It basically gives us Russia and most of Eastern Europe including a line that squiggles its way further west into central Europe. From our listening to some of those languages, here in the UK I imagine that we hear most of the surrounding states of Russia - the ex-Soviet rampart which used to surround its southern and western/eastern borders, as Russian.
To this distant culture with sparse exposure to the ex-Soviet states, even now decades after the collapse of the Soviet-Socialist Republic (USSR) the break-away states all sound vaguely Russian, with accents. That's beside the fact that they all appeared to suffer terribly at their dominant neighbour's whim, especially in the throes of the collapse, when Russia was punishing all who wished to leave the group with violence and catastrophic loss.
Anyway, I'm not saying that my webhosts deserve any of that, it was simply a passing thought after reading their explanatory email, and my attempt to place the story somewhere IRL. And then hearing that their sales team at least are based somewhere near Russia, which means, with the premise that the whole company are based at a single location, in the traditional style, that there are also wildfires kicking off there too.
And it seems the whole world is hot and dry, like the planet has a ridge of tinder around its middle, which could ignite itself, just for something to do. So, to the cheers of the Inuits, and the Falklanders and anyone else living somewhere too cold for most people usually, who could find themselves unusually toasting once sparks set flames alight, then the trade winds spread the burning laterally, the gulf stream fanning the fires northwards, while the American continent is scorched by fire-nadoes, flaming tornadoes, whipping up with such force — they cause the ignition by the strength of their whip.
The Earth will burn for two months before the blackened planet yields to its winter and crumbles into frozen asteroids, as it's component rocky/mossy chunks join the elliptical motion and succumb to the power of our sun system, no time to grieve the loss of our home. The atmosphere that once cloaked the whole globe, as it was exposed to the sun, along with all the oceans and rivers of water, vapourised in a moment on contact with the cosmic radiation, clinging momentarily to the escaping rocks that once held together, as a singular shape but are now dispersed, inheriting the Earth's path position on a huge elipse, going on in pieces, unaware and caring less about the catastrophe that created the smithereens. Onward is all there is now; any thoughts of rebuild are pointless.
On the other hand, if each chunk of charred earth, floating through space along with all the others, had somehow retained its own little atmosphere with its own patch of fresh water, and maybe something to eat, then we could just go on living but separated from the old Earth. And it would be not rocky chunks, but from a burnt out shell, crumbling, at best it would be like lumps of charcoal, big enough for some people to live on. I suppose we'd be fine to do a localised bit of burning of the old petrified rock under the ground. But dig the charcoal out and burn it up there so it doesn't catch light to our whole piece of planet, with its lucky scrap of atmosphere clinging in place, just above the sky, as expected. We could even each get our own individual bit of weather. That's the real clincher: the atmosphere means life, it is our window to look through and view the Sun and other planets, and all less significant pieces.
I don't even imagine a downside to this outcome. Although that would heavily depend on how it all played out.
So we're steamimg along through space, with our planet, the Earth, supposedly travelling at around 67,000mph along the retrodden annual route around the star, tracking our system. No matter how many of our Earth year lengths would be needed to equate to the annual cycle of the other planets, every planet in its solar orbit, each takes exactly one year on its elliptical path through space, because, as the name reveals, irrespective i complete, to cross the start point, and repeat ad infinitum, or thereabouts. Mercury, being closest to our host, is also affected by the most gravity. Being the closest means it travels fastest of the eight planets, with the gravitational bounds and the speed of travel diminishing the further out we go in our system. Earth sits at a prime point, the perfect distance from the Sun. It travels through space at about 67,000mph. Mercury travels at about 107,000mph, Venus at 78,000mph, Mars at 54,000mph, Jupiter at 29,000mph, Saturn at 21,000mph, Uranus at 15,000mph and Neptune at 12,000mph. The further out you go the slower the speed of travel.
If the whole universe is populated by systems similar to ours, then everything is in motion, always, with never a pause. And not just moving, but speeding along at mind-blowing velocity, through space. Same everywhere, I imagine all on near circular, slightly elliptical paths, and all moving clockwise, each on a different plane, or the same, all heliocentric, relative to the star at that system's centre.
Except Venus, as I read that it rotates in the opposite direction to all the others. Its path around the sun is still clockwise, but as it moves along that path it's spinning the other way on its day/night cycle rotation. It makes me wonder how that came to be. Perhaps it took a hit from a large asteroid, enough to set it spinning the other way. That must have been a huge hit.
Anyway we are back, so that's good. I'm in the process of putting together another playlist to accommodate the tracks I've completed most recently (three). Aiming to deploy the new list this weekend.
For anyone wanting to get hold of previous tracks that may have dropped off the current list, send me an email (the address is on here somewhere), I can still access all older tracks and if you ask nicely I might sort you out with an MP3 attached to my reply. If you ask really nicely I may even be able to muster up a FLAC for you (limited).
I worked today, at my job as a gardener, other end of Haslemere. And whilst the heat did ramp up a few times, it wasn't unbearable, or even draining. It did knacker me for a while tho.
Peace to all my listeners 😊 and I hope you enjoy what's left of this glorious summer 🌞 (wildfires excepted).