"Could the face 'waiting in the sky' over Nepal be David Bowie's 'Starman'?" Sure, why the hell not.

"But 'the' Earth? Why a definite article? Clearly not to distinguish the Earth from an Earth—from one of those other Earths out there. No, I suspect the purpose of that word was to distance us, however subtly, from our preconceptions." —The Last Word On Nothing's Richard Panek writes an appreciative meditation on president Kennedy's use of a precedent "the" in referencing Earth in the speech he gave 50 years ago today calling for NASA to put a man on the moon. It was pretty important!

Okay. Just two weeks to go. Everybody's sniffling and coughing and more regularly and severely hungover than usual. And feeling guilty about all the extra baked good they're eating. And too busy with planning and shopping and going to holiday parties to even really enjoy any of it. And it's so cold. (Will winter never end??!! Oh, right it hasn't even started yet.) Worst of all, perhaps, the music. Which, if the world made any sense, we'd only be just starting to hear on the radio and TV commercials and piped into in the aisles of our corporate convenience stores, but instead have already been subjected to for [...]

Here ya go: "A David Bowie television performance that no one has seen in three decades, and that Americans have never seen at all, hit the web today. As the story goes, Bowie as his red-haired Aladdin Sane persona visited U.K.'s long-running music program Top of the Pops on January 3, 1973 to showcase his then-new single 'Jean Genie.' The performance aired only once, and the tapes from that TOTP episode were placed in the BBC vaults… where they were ultimately erased so the network could reuse the tapes, the BBC admits. It was believed that this "Jean Genie" was lost forever, but recently, a cameraman named John [...]

It's May! It's May! How are you feeling? Merry? This is supposed to be such a merry month. If you were outside this past weekend, you could see why. Spring has sprung, the weather is warming. All those April showers seem to have done their job. Flowers are everywhere—on the ground, in the trees. It was raining pink cherry blossom petals in Washington Square Park over the weekend. One fell right on to the banh mi sandwich I was eating; I couldn't even complain.

Oh my God, psyched! As if they read the Awl and know what a crappy August we've all been having, the folks at NASA are holding a contest where the public can choose "wake-up music" for the astronauts who man the penultimate space shuttle voyage, mission STS-133, scheduled to launch November 1st. Go to the NASA website, where you can listen to 40 songs that have been piped in to start astronauts' days on past missions (and you get to hear the radio communication back and forth with ground control, too) and vote for your favorites. I voted for Elton John's "Rocket Man," because… What do you mean [...]

23. Earthling

22. Tonight

21. Never Let Me Down

20. Hours…

19. Black Tie White Noise

18. Reality

17. David Bowie

16. Pin Ups

31. Weeping Wall

30. Moss Garden

29. V-2 Schneider

28. Move On

27. Suberraneans

26. The Secret Life of Arabia

25. Be My Wife

"In many ways, this is it. This is potentially the end. There are no antibiotics in the pipeline that have activity against NDM 1-producing Enterobacteriaceae… We have a bleak window of maybe 10 years, where we are going to have to use the antibiotics we have very wisely, but also grapple with the reality that we have nothing to treat these infections with. It is the first time it has got to this stage with these type of bacteria." You heard the man! This is it, people! According to Tim Walsh of Cardiff University, it's time to to tell the people that you love that you [...]