Glenn Kubish

Presenting Joyce, Beach This is the hyperreality of my brain. I share this for the good of science. And as an apology for what might make me look like a bad listener from time to time. This afternoon, Mikey was sitting on the couch with his laptop, planning his UAlberta term next fall with one eye to toward educational depth and the other toward having time for lunch. "I think I'm going to take something about galaxies," he said. "Stars. Maybe take an astronomy course." Out of the flow of his words, what extracted itself was the word "stars." Originally, I wrote that sentence in the active voice; that is, Out of the flow of his words, I somehow extracted the word "stars."  But then I delete-keyed over that version, landing in the passive, because I can't really say I had set out to segment the word "stars" in any meaningful way. How that worked, I don't know, but I suppose the word had been circling in another ...

That was one small step, but, man, it was one giant leap for brandkind. Felix Baumgartner sat alone in a balloon-lifted space capsule and, for about two-and-a-half hours, rose above the scrubland of New Mexico. When he got to about 128,000 feet, he went through a 30-point checklist, waited for the air pressure to rise and open the hatch door, and walked onto a balcony about the size of a skateboard. And then jumped back to Earth. He fell freely for more than four minutes before he deployed his parachute. In the process, he became the first spaceskydiver to break the sound barrier. He hit a top speed of 1342 kmh. He fell 38 km. By my math, that's roughly the distance between Edmonton and Millet. And he landed on his feet. Such was the ultra-stunt sponsored by energy drink maker Red Bull dubbed Mission To The Edge of Space. Indeed, Baumgartner was no regular astronaut. Instead of his country's flag emblazoned on his spacesuit, he had the Red Bull logo. For those wondering ...