An incredible stream of co-incidences passing me by

For the past couple days, while waiting for code to compile, I've been playing an old song of mine, "Living in the ooze", revising the lyrics, coming up with a bridge (finally! 6 years without a bridge!) that I think might work. This morning I even went out to get batteries for my recorder. I didn't get them because I don't know how to pronounce 'batteries' in French, and staggered back, defeated, to my apartment in Paris.

I've told the story behind the song in multiple posts over the past 6 years, and we're coming up on asteroid appreciation day feb 29th, next year, and I don't have a plan or place for the party... and in part those stories are always about impossible co-incidences and weird stuff happening at all the same time...

I have NOT been paying attention to space stuff AT ALL for the last 9 months, being deeply immersed in bufferbloat. I even stopped reading the Arocket mailing list. I spent the weekend completely immersed in a set of algorithms that finally, finally might reduce latency over wireless to sane values once again, only to end up with one bug per line of code and multiple kernels that wouldn't boot. Never left the house all weekend. Still haven't made it to the louvre. Or anywhere else in paris but the LINCs lab. I'm insanely frustrated with this project.This morning at 12:40 AM I was ready to chuck it all and get on the next plane to anywhere that didn't have computers... but was stuck on thinking where on earth that might be, so I did a few other things about my stuck-ed-ness..

I haven't been reading the news, either, as news.google.com insists on coming up in French no matter what I do. I'm still stuck on the six different ways to pronounce 'e', in my French-english dictionary.

So, later this morning, in an impossible co-incidence, I meet someone who just spent the summer in Nicaragua, who points me at her huffpost article, and I send a link back to one of my adventures in australia which happened to be the last thing I'd written about this particular song... and happens to be about some weird coincidences in spite of my agnostic-ism...

And then... I notice... at the top of HER post...

Quarter mile wide asteroid to miss earth Tuesday.



Nerts. It's going to miss Texas. It almost hits the moon though! That would have been spectacular! And the article has quotes from Lance Benner who I've exchanged multiple emails with over the years, and I still point actively at the data he collects on plausible rendezvous trajectories...

Perhaps the universe is telling me something. About what, I don't know. Perhaps some sort of sacrifice to it is needed. Perhaps it - or something in it - needs attention.

Either I get back to recording this song or go back to work, or go for a rendezvous.

OK, I've googled for how to pronounce batteries. And I wonder what can rhyme with UV55?
PS: Boycott the Hôtel Ibis Sainte Catherine, Bruxelles  ¶ 5:46 AM