If you’ve never seen a SpaceX rocket take off, now is the time. Skip ahead to the 8 minute mark for the actual launch.
Hobbes describes life as “nasty, brutish, and short”.
Keltner believes evolution has given Homo sapiens emotions like gratitude, joy, amusement, and compassion.
I have of late, but wherefore I know not, lost all my mirth, forgone all custom of exercises, and, indeed, it goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame, the Earth, seems to me a sterile promontory; this most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o’erhanging firmament, this majestical roof, fretted with golden fire–why, it appeareth nothing to me but a foul and pestilent congregation of vapors.
What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express & admirable; in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god: the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals–and yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?
Hamlet by William Shakespeare
THAT for six thousand years
—and no one knows how many millions of ages before
—the great whales should have been spouting all over the sea, and sprinkling and mistifying the gardens of the deep, as with so many sprinkling or mistifying pots; and that for some centuries back, thousands of hunters should have been close by the fountain of the whale, watching these sprinklings and spoutings
—that all this should be, and yet, that down to this blessed minute (fifteen and a quarter minutes past one o’clock P.M. of this sixteenth day of December, A.D. 1851), it should still remain a problem, whether these spoutings are, after all, really water, or nothing but vapour
—this is surely a noteworthy thing.
–Moby Dick; or, The Whale (Chap. 85: The Fountain) by Herman Melville
Feeling tired? Run down? Worn out by a facial and shampoo? Consider yourself better off than the model at center (above), who seems to have dreamed she was an astronaut in a vibro-massage bra. She will presumably arise like some assembly-line Aphrodite, renewed in spirit if mildly mortified in the flesh.
This menacing array of instruments for self-enhancement was put together to show the variety of space-age beauty equipment now available, but it almost seems better calculated to prove the French maxim: il faut souffrir pour etre belle.
Sending satellites to Venus, or aspiring to Venus-like charm, one is getting to be as complicated as the other. Over this photograph the London magazine Queen put the simple heading “All Systems Go!”
As they say, you must suffer to be beautiful.