A clean and VERY well-lighted place…

…and Holy Crap, it’s Milliways!

Or at least one of the fine Milliways Franchises near you.


Further proof (from the Associated Press of all people) that there is a God, and He is Irish…

Study Describes Bar at Center of Milky Way

By RYAN J. FOLEY, Associated Press Writer 35 minutes ago

After creating the most detailed analysis yet of what the Milky Way looks like, astronomers say a long bar of stars cuts on an angle through the center of the galaxy that includes the sun and planet Earth.

Some scientists have suspected the presence of the stellar bar, but the survey led by two Wisconsin astronomers shows the bar is far longer than previously believed, and at a specific angle.

The skinny bar is made up of old and red stars and is about 27,000 light years in length, about 7,000 light years longer than previously believed. The bar is at a 45 degree angle to the line between our Sun and the center of the galaxy and may put the Milky Way in a small class of galaxies with the unusual shape, researchers say.

"We're pretty certain the extent and orientation of this bar because we got more data than anybody else that has ever brought to bear on the problem by a long shot," said Ed Churchwell, a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor of astronomy who collaborated on the project.
…

"We've largely been ignorant of this very major structure in our galaxy for all these years," he said.
…

Billions of galaxies make up the universe and are mostly spiral or elliptical in shape. Galaxies that have stellar bars cut through the center is rare, but not unheard of, scientists say.

Fools.

The bar is made of mahogany polished to such a subatomically uniform and perfect plane that it absorbs no light at all and disappears into the mosaic of stars that blaze like Chinese Lanterns in every direction.

It is the very spot about which Asimov wrote the seminal “Nightfall”, of which a profoundly crappy movie was made several years ago.

Do not rent the movie.

Go Right Now! and get a copy of the short story (published in 1941, if you can believe it) and learn in a few thousand words of First Rate, Old School Science Fiction all you need to know about Fear, Science, intractable Fundamentalism and human nature.

And most of all -- most timely and cautionary of all -- see exactly how limitless the searing power of reality is to obliterate all of our pretty, petty delusions just by doing what Reality does: Keeping it Very, Very Real.

You want to come to terms with the questions the world will be confronting for the next fifty years? Read science fiction. The good stuff. The old stuff.

Escapist my ass!

The bar…will have a piano, and follow a gentle, sweeping curve almost invisible to the naked eye. It will be Ringworld-large enough to support peat bogs and distilleries from which the best Irish Whiskey in the Universe will be gently coaxed to life.

Utility bills and closing times are not an issue when you’ve staked out a claim at the heart of a solar cluster, and since unlimited fusion energy makes time, energy and raw materials no object…the breakfasts are to die for.

And the jukebox. Ahhh, the jukebox.

Perfect for an intimate rendezvous, or a party of billions.

Make sure you get a stool next to Hemingway: he's full of good stories.

“Nightfall”, BTW, is not only a brilliant story, but Asimov has the supreme self-confidence to begin it with this perfect little jewel by Ralph Waldo Emerson:

“If the stars should appear one night in
a thousand years, how would men believe
and adore, and preserve for many generations
the remembrance of the city of God?”

How then, when we sit alone in the dark, shall we know a little of God?

There are a lot of good answers, but among them, in my humble opinion, a cozy bar, a peaty dram and a long night of friends and sparkling conversation comes damned close to good enough.