As you may already know by now, everyone's favorite sleepy deep sea denizen is awakening and ready to dredge up a little madness and destruction on us all, and if you're like me, you probably spent all night stocking up on comestibles and tuning up the booster rockets on your escape pod. Of course, it was only after emerging, breathless and grease-stained, from my parking garage underground laboratory that I realized I should have been spending more time fortifying the turrets -- the better to fight the giant fucking space trilobites we may all encounter on our long journey to safety.

"The hell?" you say. "Giant fucking space trilobites?"

Apparently so, or at least that's what it is said to look like in the most sophisticated and high resolution magnetogram data videos taken to date, courtesy of Japanese Space Agency's Hinode spacecraft from its 2006 mission to check out spots and storms on the solar surface. Magnetograms differ a little from regular video, not showing the viewer a viewable plane so much as a visual manifestation of the strength and location of magnetic fields. So far the conclusive data gathered has shown that 69 Love Songs is a really strong album that should the test of time, and also that sometimes look uncannily like primitive crustaceans made of pure energy swimming across the Sun's surface.

Now I have watched the video, and to me the solar flare looks no more like a trilobite than one could say of a cloud or a particular burn mark in a tortilla, but these are scientists and I trust them. Still, a handful -- likely in an attempt to downplay the severity and panic that would no doubt accompany knowing that the Sun has, at the very least, a major Substance D issue -- throw out other possibilities for the sunspot shape, but sadly they are uninspired and hardly as capable (or even worthy) of stirring up either mass fascination or hysteria.

Ehh, wrong. Sorry, Dr. Guhathakurta, we would have accepted Coelacanth, Giant Squid, Phromina Amphipod with killer claws, or Loch Ness monster as viable alternatives. But a base cellular function? Yawn. Everything mitoses, but not everything is a massive prehistoric horseshoe crab of death.

Even the article in question positions itself in such a way as to maintain that the whole point of reporting this is to marvel at the impressiveness of the new and dazzlingly improved magnetogram images presented by Japan's space program; they intend, it says, to harness the power of these images to better understand sunspots and hopefully soon learn how to forecast solar flares, in order to better help astronauts out on missions.

But between this and Flux's important work yesterday, I think the real story is clear: instead of forecasting solar flares, we must find out who these star-inhabiting crustaceans are working for. If it turns out that, despite their fearsome visage, they are benevolent, then perhaps we may persuade them to aid us in our moment of need. If anything otherwise, well -- we're all going to die.

Hope for the best.



_DictionaryGirl_, for one, welcomes our new giant fucking space trilobite of pure energy overlords!