Irony

You can't always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, you'll get what you need. (Rolling Stones)

I took a walk tonight after dinner. I had been thinking about ice cream as the weather has gotten better, and I decided I could have an ice cream cone as long as I walked to go get it. I contemplated part of a beer instead, but the idea of ice cream won out. So after dinner I grabbed the iPod and headed out.

I'm listening to "Packing for Mars", a book about space exploration. It's a chatty gossipy book, not heavily scientific. This is the kind of book I like listening to lately, non fiction, slow paced, but amusing enough to keep me interested. I've been through sections on psychological profiles, intercultural relations, space suit construction and plumbing and weightlessness.

This last section ironically led to a very graphic analysis of space and motion sickness. As I walked about a mile and a half towards the ice cream shop, I heard how weightlessness translates into motion sickness, what it is like to ride on Nasa's "vomit comet" airplane that allows 22 seconds of weightlessness in 60 repetitions, which Apollo astronauts puked when, what happens to vomit in a weightless cabin and how hard it is to dodge, what happens to vomit inside a sealed space suit, how researchers induce motion sickness to study it, and how the author nearly barfed all over Tom Cruise when he took her flying in his acrobatic biplane. By the time I was approaching the ice cream shop I was turning a bit green around the gills myself. I pressed fast forward on the iPod and went on to the next chapter about sleeping in space.

And the ice cream shop was closed. Still on winter hours. As it turns out, I was actually relieved.

- iPhone uPdate

P.S. hint: keep your eyes closed, keep your head as still as possible relative to your body, no turning or movement, and do mental arithmetic problems.