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Tuesday, August 30, 2016

Ellie's Diary - 30 August 2016

A Dog on Floor

Well, you’re probably wondering how I did at last week’s contest. This was my first big city contest—Stockholm. You will not believe what happened. I was disqualified! I can’t believe it. I was doing okay, going through the routine: sit, stop, turn around, back up . . . all that kind of stuff, when a couple good looking dogs walked past the edge of the field.

“Whose that blond bitch?” I heard one of them bark.

Well naturally I had to look to see who they were talking about, and it broke my attention. Next thing I knew my leash was pulled tight and that was it. When the leash goes tight it’s over. I was so embarrassed!

Lou Ellie Contest 27 August

The long ride home to Borlänge took 3 hours. I was wasted by the time we got back and Smoothy wanted to play. He’s just a young cat with more energy than a gerbil on crack. To tell the truth I’m really not that into kat play, though it’s fun to chase him around the house once in a while. I finally made it to the sleeping room and jumped up on the bed for a long nap. End of story.

Another contest’s coming in September. I’ll be ready to go again by then, and promise to ignore distractions.

Saturday, August 27, 2016

Ellie’s Diary – 27 August 2016



Ellie Hair

Well, here it is Saturday and another beauty contest coming up. I’m having a bad hair day and can’t really say I’m ready for this competition, but that’s show biz. It’s been a stressy week with a new kat in the house. Smoothy’s okay, but so hyper, jumping all over the place, and he seems to think my tail is some kind of kat toy.

No time to tell you more. I’m getting blow dried now and the man is loading the car. He and Smoothy are not coming with us. Thank God for small favors.

Smooth and the man

Monday, August 22, 2016

Ellie's Diary - 22 August 2016


Ellie's Diary - 22 August 2016

Smoothy Ellie Meet Best 

Smoothy has arrived! This photo was taken at our first meeting. It was quite exciting actually. He seems like a good kat, though a little frantic if you want my opinion. He’s running all over the place and the worst part of that is he’s so small he gets into places where I can’t follow, which is frustrating, but maybe for the best. I worry a bit about the Maine Coon part of his linage. They get so big! See photo below.
Coon Kat 

This is Smoothy now. He’s not a bad looking kat and seems friendly enough. He’s not afraid of me and we’ve been sniffing each other now and then.

Smoothy - Eating 

I’ll keep you posted on how things go.

Tuesday, August 16, 2016

Taking A Closer Look At Nothing - Part 1


Taking A Closer Look At Nothing


Looking for nothing Image
Taking a closer look at nothing

I’ve been thinking a lot about nothing lately, and assumed I was pretty much alone in this pursuit, but there are others, far more learned and affluent than myself in search of nothing. These are serious and expensive endeavors. Scientists spent 6 billion dollars and change to build the Hadron Collider to help them look for nothing, or to find the first thing after there was nothing. How did something happen?

The collider’s made of steel and concrete walls yards thick, a huge galactic, microscope extremely good at finding questions, not so many answers—lots of theories.  Seems like understanding nothing should be easy, but it’s not. The Hadron gooses protons ‘round it’s seventeen mile track at near the speed of light, in temperatures hotter than the sun . . . slamming them into one another. An atomic train wreck parts of particles get splattered everywhere, smaller and smaller.

Chain reaction image 
Particle Accelerator Accidently Deletes The Universe - Artist unknown

Protons are whales in the subatomic sea of quarks, and leptons, pions, kayons — bosons. We’ve been looking for a boson called the Higgs. ‘The God Particle,’ scientists  call it. The creator of matter. The thing that made something possible.

We weren’t always sure we believed in the Higgs, but the collider produced an enormous data base of collision results, as many as grains of sand it would take to fill a swimming pool. Out of this swimming pool of sand, they found less than a teaspoon of Higgs bosons. But they did find some with the help of  80,000 computers interconnected  in a private Internet. Now we believe in them . . . I think.

The Boson is described as a field that glues particles together, thus creating mass. Theorists suppose there might be several kinds of Higgs, possibly five of them. They say it would require more than a single cosmic task to glue the universe together, and suppose a single Higgs is just a one trick pony. They’ll continue to study the Higgs, or Higgses for years to come and probably discover they’re made out of something . . . else. When do we get to, “There is nothing here.”  It’s hard to believe in nothing.

Astronomers are interested in nothing. They’ve been looking for it looking for it with telescopes so powerful they can see into the past—time travel in 2-D. We can observe galaxies that existed when the universe was only 800 million years old. A long way back, but never quite to the beginning of it all.

Some astrophysicists on coffee break decided to focus on a spot in the universe where they were almost certain there was nothing. The Hubble Ultra Deep Field Project chose a black spot near the big dipper, its size visually comparable to a grain of sand held at arm’s length—those grains of sand again. They were astounded when the telescope revealed a megatude of galaxies.
Is nothing possible? Seems like there’s always something left, but scientists predict they’ll find it sometime in the next ten years. Better particle detectors will enable them to see even smaller things, and finally that first bit of matter that appeared the moment after nothing happened — when something appeared.

Sidebar:

After hunting for the earliest clues about the evolution of the universe for more than four years, Europe's Planck Space Observatory has gone dark.
Officials with the European Space Agency sent the Planck observatory its final command on Wednesday (Oct. 23, 2013), marking the end of its prolific mission. The space observatory launched in May 2009 on a mission to scan deep space for the faint relic radiation called cosmic microwave background — the oldest light in the universe — created 380,000 years after the Big Bang. 


Next week: Almost nothing about something.

Monday, August 15, 2016

Ellie’s Diary – 15 August 2016-08-15


I’m just back from another beauty contest, and it isn’t easy, I can tell you that. It takes a lot of preparation. The photo below is me at the hairdresser’s.

Ellie and Barber 
It takes a about an hour – boring, and they taped one of my ears back. Yuk. I can’t really feel it, but it’s embarrassing to walk around like that for days before the show.
Whatever. Things went well, I got three ribbons.

Ellie Ribbon 3

 The blue one is the most important. If I win one more of those I will be classified as a Swedish Champion. I still haven’t heard from Hollywood, but am adding this shot to my SAG file. (Screen Actors Guild).