Up Up and Away in Colorado with Balloon Boy!!

I've written before of how I love living where I do; Hollywood. I don't know anywhere else in the state where I would rather live apart from the Hollywood Hills, which I can see through my window from where I type this; it would even be possible to live here without a car as I can go climbing when I want, walk to Rock 'n' Roll Ralphs and to any other service or store.

When I lived miles away from anywhere during the seventies in England it was almost a 'day trip' to take my clothes to the dry cleaners; here, it is fifteen minutes walk and I am just a couple of minutes walk away from the canyon and nature.

Lately we have had some very hot weather with temperatures in the eighties but yesterday it dropped dramatically to the sixties – a summer's day in Canada or Britain – and rained all day.
I walked down to Fresh and Easy on Hollywood Boulevard and it was like walking the streets of Kilburn; but today the weather is fine again: the sun is shining and the temperature is eighty degrees at the moment; what a place to live.

Throughout the day the whole country has been glued to their television sets because a young boy of six had apparently crawled into his father's helium balloon – just before it took off.

In no time the balloon was up in the sky heading towards the moon, for all I know, with no way of communicating with anybody on Terra Firma. The silver balloon, apparently made by the boy's father, reportedly reached heights of 7,000ft in no time; it travelled at around thirty miles an hour headed towards Denver Airport air space and was filmed from a helicopter from an ideal position and this is why we could all see it on our screens. I heard it first on the 12.00 news on the radio (NPR) and, like most people, put the TV on to CNN.

I can't tell you how terrifying the pictures were no matter how spectacular they looked. There was a little boy inside that, relatively, small balloon probably scared to death, crying for his mother and screaming; the balloon was reported to be around twenty feet by five feet and on the screen thirty miles an hour looks really fast.

One report came in to say that a sibling saw the boy fall from the balloon shortly after take off but this wasn't confirmed. Of course every expert then came on TV (where do they find them?) to tell us what they thought was happening; it reminded me of a scene from the comedy movie 'Airplane!' and the various experts gave us their million and one conjectures, hypothesise and forecasts and one of them even said that he thought there was no pay load on board because of the way the balloon was behaving.

When I looked at the TV again the balloon was flying low and was definitely headed towards a landing and, when it got really close, a load of sheriffs surrounded it and started to pat it; it was at this point that I wondered why they didn't just hold it and hold it hard to stop it taking off again!

But they didn't they just patted it! Then one of the sheriffs actually grabbed hold of the downed airship and threw a rope over it; the deputy on the other side of the balloon took a shovel and started to bury that part of it and others started to poke holes to let the helium out; I think the penny dropped in my mind that there was no boy aboard at this point.

Later when I was at lunch in American Burger on Sunset Boulevard it was reported on their TV that a basket had been seen to fall from the balloon shortly after it took off. Questions were asked as to whether the National Guard in Colorado had night sights so they could see where the boy landed if the basket had, in fact, been detached from the balloon. The National Guard were called out to follow the route of the flight to see if they could see where the little fella had landed – either in or out of the basket.

The mind boggled as to what was going on; this was a media circus and I was partaking in it by following it.

I had to leave American Burger to go to the bank and then when I came home I put the TV on only to see President Obama addressing people in New Orleans; in some way it was all over so I returned to where I had started a few hours earlier – KCRW.

The bottom line is the boy was hiding in a box in the attic all the time; the news was greeted with relief by the sheriffs who, I am told, tried hard not to giggle when they gave the good news; but we know what really happened - don't we?

The boy got into the balloon and was taken on a journey to a far away land up in the sky; up there where we couldn't see him he met his friends the giant panda, the giant mouse and the tiny elephant called Ephelump. The three friends took him on a great adventure in the sky where he visited a little village and ate all his favourite food, drank all the fizzy drinks his parents wouldn't let him drink and was returned to the attic just before the balloon landed in that Colorado Sheriff filled field.

His name was Falcon by the way.

33 sperms born from earth mother.

Florencio Avalos (above) alpha male?

There are few secular miracles in life and one of them is child birth; well not necessarily human child birth but any system of birth; I think the Panda must be the most difficult or they wouldn't have so many problems at the Chinese zoos and I would also hate to imagine the shenanigans two hedgehogs or even porcupines get up to just to have a child and male sea otters actually rape the female.

In the human being millions of sperms race towards those eggs – or is it millions of sperm? - and only one gets there and reproduces; as soon as it penetrates the egg the egg locks itself and no matter how those sperms knock on that egg the egg won't open. Can you imagine the frustration of the sperms after that huge journey swimming against the tide and gravity to be there and to be refused entry? Obviously the strongest and fastest one is the one who makes it – a bit like undocumented immigrants coming to the USA from Mexico; only the strong get in – but I digress.

If there are two eggs waiting there two sperms will be lucky and non-identical twins will be on their way to the birth canal – twins can also be born if two sperms hit that egg at the same time; if that happens the twins will be identical and they can be either sex or both as the fertilizer, the man, is the one with the female chromosome – both males and females retain one of their mother's X chromosomes, and females retain their second X chromosome from their father. Since the father retains his X chromosome from his mother, a human female has one X chromosome from her paternal grandmother (father's side), and one X chromosome from her mother.

The foetus, or the foetuses if there is more than one, gets nourished through the placenta throughout the nine months of pregnancy and the placenta feeds just the right amount of food and oxygen to each foetus – then when it is time the baby enters the birth canal and is born into this world.

When the baby is in the womb it is in a very safe place; the safest place it is every likely to be in and when it is delivered it is in another safe place but at first it needs looking after; so the journey itself from womb to the time the umbilical chord is cut is the most dangerous.

The safe place is only a safe place for a while as the feotus has to leave its very comfortable place or it will probably die.

If there are twins there is usually an alpha twin; evidence of twins in the womb reacting to each other has shown this, with one twin dominating the other.

The other day, when the capsule entered the womb of the earth where the miners were trapped, I couldn't help but think of the birth process.

There was a phallus shaped object entering the uterus of the earth and the miners gathered around to look at it; they were comfortable where they were, everything they needed had been fed to them by the very long placenta; they wore clothes suitable to the place they were in and their food was just the right amount for their dangerous journey.

Each of the miners knew it was the only way out; I can't think of a miner working underground suffering from agoraphobia but they may have been reluctant to enter the tiny capsule but as I said before their safe place is only a safe place for a while as the feotus has to leave its very comfortable place or it will probably die.

The miners were fed a very high salt diet to increase their blood pressure as a high blood pressure was needed for the journey; with high blood pressure it was unlikely that they would faint on the way up in the capsule; I think someone said if one of them had fainted on the way up it would have been fatal.

The stronger men were sent up first – the alpha male – Florencio Avalos, then the weakest and frail and then the others which included the captain who was the last to leave the ship – the afterbirth.

For a short while it would have been possible for someone from the outside to go down and look where the men had been; maybe a crazy photographer or journalist or even a scientist and I wonder if they did? Manuel Gonzalez went down first and there he is below being welcomed by the men; not much talk about that brave fella in the media.