orbis quintus

Animal Collective “Fickle Cycle” B-side from the Grass single/EP. I’ll be hornswoggled, but i heard XTC everywhere with these guys now. Yes, it’s one of their manic, hyperglycemic songs.

The Minders “Jack the Lad” This song is from The Stolen Boy EP, released on tour last year. According to this blurb, Martyn Leaper wrote a short story on that tour inspired by the movie Hunted. I haven’t seen this movie in years, but the two do not to mesh in my opinion. Good song though.

It’s gettting a little haphazard with the naming of objects, isn’t it?

“Santa is crazy, and it’s my favorite — by far the weirdest of the three,” Brown said. It is significantly larger than Pluto, it’s shaped like a huge cigar, and it rotates end-over-end every four hours; it also has a single tiny moon about 60 miles in diameter orbiting around it.

Easterbunny is about two-thirds the size of Pluto and is coated with frozen methane, Brown said, which makes it “almost a twin of Pluto.”

Xena — the largest of all, at least 1,800 miles in diameter — appears to have the density of rock with a veneer of water ice on its surface. It is probably significantly larger and more reflective than Pluto, according to Brown and his team.

All three of these are Kuiper Belt Objects. Santa is spinning so fast that it’s an unstable object, liable to split in two in the future.

Obviously Rising Tide has become one of the most popular books to read in post-Katrina days. I’ve always had trouble keeping the book in stock in normal times around here. Now it’s turned into a 3 to 5 week backorder. When one woman had asked me to recommend a history book right after the storm, and after several minutes of evasion and questions as to exactly what kind of history she had in mind, i finally suggested that book, it didn’t go over so well. Apparently a lot of people think differently.

There’s also been a run on Tidwell’s Bayou Farewell. Embarrassingly enough, i haven’t gotten around to reading this one yet.

The one that is taking me a little by surprise is the book that was snatched up by the rescue and aid workers heading down I-10 to New Orleans. A Confederacy of Dunces flew off the shelves this week. I don’t quite know what to make of that. Slightly tragic comedy doesn’t seem to match up with the fate of New Orleans now.