In my youth I found it intriguing that every playground tire swing seemed to use a brand new, never-used truck tire.  It seemed needlessly extravagant. The homemade jobs, however, were near bald and slick enough to be dangerously hard to stay atop, with rough sisal rope and a heavy scent of damp pine straw and brake dust mixed with petroleum.

The biggest difference was the type of pain one’s hands experienced. The icy chill and cuts from galvanized chain versus the hot, sandy burn of the rope.

Saturday night.

The bar is crowded with empties and partials, and people I’ve just met keep buying me more. It’s Labatt’s 50, which is what Canadian steelworkers drank in the 70′s. A slurp of car trunk and old hockey equipment bags.

A girl billed as Adequate Amy is twirling hoola hoops near the stage, and each is brightly lit with flashing LEDs. It’s dangerous work in a punk club, and she defty switches hands when dancers flailing in high octane reverie draw too near.

Men in luchador masks are hammering out exceptionally ferocious surf music. A person I don’t know wraps his arm around my shoulder and hollers over the onslaught. “I just fuckin’ LOVE LOUD GUITARS, man!”, and I nod in agreement.

ohstarstuff:

Sharpest View of the Andromeda Galaxy, Ever.

The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has captured the sharpest and biggest image ever taken of the Andromeda galaxy — a whopping 69,536 x 22,230 pixels. The enormous image is the biggest Hubble image ever released and shows over 100 million stars and thousands of star clusters embedded in a section of the galaxy’s pancake-shaped disc stretching across over 40,000 light-years.

Use the ZOOM TOOL to view in full detail.

(WARNING: May cause existential crisis)