Diary of an up and coming sociopath

I know I wasn’t going to talk about money, but today I received the excellent news that I’ll be getting a couple of hundred quid as a bonus for how well the tech department did last quarter, at work, 6 weeks of which I was involved with, so I thought I’d share my glee at that. This job just keeps on giving. I also got confirmation that my contract will be extended by another 3 months, so I’ve got employment through until the end of May, by which point I’ll actually be in a financial position to start looking comfortably for work again if they don’t want the contract to continue. This contract extension guarantees me, more or less, the crucial “6 months experience” of legitimate work which was previously quite hard to pretend I had. It’s not much, but it’s a start.

So, glad of that news, I move to the next item on my agenda, the reason I sat down to blog today. I am interested to see, of late, that we are moving beyond the reaches of our planet, sending probes to all corners of our solar system in search of, well, whatever’s out there.

Now, let’s see. What’s out there?

The recent Spirit Mars Rover sent back this, an image of the Martian Surface. The location most exotic and certainly the most prominent in human imagination since the start of last century.

Outstanding.

And now, the Huygens mission has delivered us this, a picture of Titan, named after the giants that strode the land in classic Greek mythology.

Out…standing…

And finally, The Moon. Earth’s watchful guardian. Revered since man could comprehend the sky.

Great stuff.

So, does anyone else see the common thread here? We have spent millions of pounds, thousands of man-hours, literally centuries of waiting to see just wha it is that’s actually out there.

The answer?

Rocks. Shitloads of rocks. You like rocks, then we’ve got just the solar system for you. Jagged rocks, slightly less jagged rocks, those odd shiny rocks people sell at the seaside, any kind of rock. Just come to Sol and we’ve got your rock. “Rock On, Sol”, the marketing slogan would go.

Now, based on the information provided by these probes, I’ve managed to extrapolate information about some of the other planets in the solar system. For instance:

Mercury, closest planet to the sun.

Venus, closest planet to the sun except for mercury.

Pluto, cold, dark, and named for Mickey’s dog.

And finally, some as yet undiscovered purple planet, possibly residing around some far distant star.

I’m expecting NASA to call any minute. Or maybe that Beagle guy with the mutton chops.