benzado

…on everything, including the chairs. Everybody is confident it will be no hassle to simply wipe them off tomorrow. I’m not; the seats are sloped, there will be a puddle on each one. Right now I can hear my mother in the next room, sharing with everybody the amusing story of my concern from earlier today. Ha ha.

Oh, and regarding the food: I don’t mind leftovers, but I do mind listening to people (a) make things more complicated than they need to be and then (b) complain about how complicated everything has to be. If my mother liked to cook, I’d understand, but she doesn’t. There’s also no plan to serve anything in particular, so shopping takes four times longer than it should. Each item we encounter triggers a question, “Should we get a cantaloupe? Should we get potato salad?”

The potato salad is still in the fridge, by the way. Nobody remembered to take it out.

…that we cover the folding chairs with a tarp in case it rains between now and the ceremony, which it is very likely to do, I am overruled. Not worth the hassle.

When I suggest we don’t need to prepare eight different things to eat for the rehearsal dinner, that nobody will eat all this food, I am overruled. What if somebody doesn’t like something?

What if?

What does it say about me, that I love this movie?

From Wikipedia’s entry on The Sun (emphasis mine):

The Sun does not have enough mass to explode as a supernova. Instead, in about 5 billion years, it will enter a red giant phase, its outer layers expanding as the hydrogen fuel in the core is consumed and the core contracts and heats up. Helium fusion will begin when the core temperature reaches around 100,000,000 K and will produce carbon, entering the asymptotic giant branch phase.

Earth’s fate is precarious. As a red giant, the Sun will have a maximum radius beyond the Earth’s current orbit, 1 AU (1.5×10¹¹ m), 250 times the present radius of the Sun. However, by the time it is an asymptotic giant branch star, the Sun will have lost roughly 30% of its present mass due to a stellar wind, so the orbits of the planets will move outward. If it were only for this, Earth would probably be spared, but new research suggests that Earth will be swallowed by the Sun owing to tidal interactions. Even if Earth would escape incineration in the Sun, still all its water will be boiled away and most of its atmosphere would escape into space. Even during its current life in the main sequence, the Sun is gradually becoming more luminous (about 10% every 1 billion years), and its surface temperature is slowly rising. The Sun used to be fainter in the past, which is possibly the reason life on Earth has only existed for about 1 billion years on land. The increase in solar temperatures is such that already in about a billion years, the surface of the Earth will become too hot for liquid water to exist, ending all terrestrial life.

P.S. I hope you aren’t so innumerate as to think that this has anything to do with pollution-driven climate change.