Very interesting play on “dropping to a lower orbit to speed up” in the novel.

For an example of the physics informing the metaphor:

http://isaac.exploratorium.edu/~pauld/activities/astronomy/gravitywell.html

I think you may have passed me on the street, if not bumped into me, when you were zipping along Queen Street West. :)

And Francois—I have to say—you have the most interesting thought-patterns of anyone I’ve read.  If my brain were equipped to make the kinds of connections that yours seems to produce so effortlessly, I’d have no need of those “nothing to post” posts.  It’s lovely to have you as a reader, such that you can find meaning in all my emptiest drivel.

By the by, we were half expecting to run into you at AoIR…

I’m sure that the now almost-signature oh-this-just-a-little-boring entry line is designed to illicit closer reading. I reread the short entry and tried to understand where the heart attack might stop :)

The heart-racing lead me to reflect upon John Donne and conduct a WWW search which revealed that Benjamin Britten had set to music the lyrics of the Holy Sonnets including “Batter my heart”

http://www.luminarium.org/sevenlit/donne/sonnet14.htm [with a repro of a painting by Cranach depicting the trinity]

And to an essay by Paul Saffo http://www.saffo.com/roadfromtrinity.html

quote>“Funny how the mountains always inspire our work,” Robert Oppenheimer is said to have remarked to a toiling colleague while looking up at the Oscuras from Ground Zero during a rare break in the race to rig the Trinity device.

The MPs added to the farce by bringing up a HumVee-mounted fire-pumper to wash off the monument, even though the liquid thrown by the protester had promptly evaporated into the dry desert air. The result was a media circus of the absurd: a poor sergeant under orders dutifully hosing off an invisible fluid as the erstwhile hippies chanted, “You can never wash it off.”