In Which Frank Zappa Brings Us Back To The Sun, Or Something

Today our axis tilts furthest away
From Sol, our sun; the shortest day is here.
And, too, it is the sixty-ninth birthday
Of one of my great heroes. As this year
Plods onward to its close, I celebrate
Frank Zappa and his music and his wit.
I send my dirty love and a cupcake
To all who read this, and I do commit
To keeping Zappadan next year. Who else
Made music with a bicycle or could
Raise dental floss as livestock? Frank himself
('Tis he who tilts us sunwards now, for good)!
So now, let rip the weasels! Mudsharks, come!
And Happy Zappa Day to ev'ryone!

Of Slime, Zappa, Ants And Worms

Frank Zappa wrote a song about the slime

That comes through one's own television set.

The Simpsons had Kent Brockman, that one time

Proclaiming our ant overlords no threat.

Comes now the news that down in fair Raleigh

(That's Raleigh, not R'lyeh) there dwells a blob

Down in the sewer, pulsating. Call me

A sucker for a creature tale, but it's my job

To celebrate the weird and to explain

Here that it's really just some worms without

Ought to coil 'round but one another. Fain

Am I, too, in faith to point this out:

We've known of Argentine ants' teeming spread

All 'round the world since '02. Use your head!

Who They Jivin' With That Cosmic Debris?

I'm no economist, nor engineer,
But something in the skies torments my brain:
While it's a given now that with the sheer
Amount of stuff we've launched outside our plane,
A lot of paths will cross in orbit, there.
But lately it just seems that there's too much,
Too many things to track; it turns my hair
Pure white to contemplate. It seems, as such
It might be time to start to do more than
Just bob and weave our stations, shuttles out
Of harm's way when collision threatens. Can
We not begin at least to think about
Removing at least some of it? Or - shock!
Designing craft that throw off much less schlock?