"Now we're halfway."

It's obviously not a coincidence that today, the 50th anniversary of John Kennedy's inauguration, falls on the same day as the exact midpoint of Obama's presidency. We're kinda anniversarial that way.

It also strikes me how similar their paths were up to this same midpoint in their scheduled terms of office. Kennedy also came into office after eight years of Republican rule, marked from the beginning by questions about his loyalty to his country and about his qualifications. He took on tough issues in the face of severe Conservative opposition, and accomplished a remarkable amount of what he set out to do in spite of that. He got to imprint his legacy on the Supreme Court, as well. Yet there were those who could never live with somebody that "different" being in charge. Some went as far as to distribute posters of the incumbent elected President depicting this:



The whole parallel of those days to these is depicted here, but the most frightening connection? The co-founder of the John Birch Society, the force behind the hate back then, was one Fred Koch; today, his sons are the money and the lack of brains behind the "grassroots" teabagger movement.

Sadly, the nation never got to see Kennedy- any Kennedy- carrying out the mandate of a full four years in office. In perhaps the cruelest irony, it was the death of the youngest brother last year that cost the Democrats their 60-vote Senate majority and, with it, any meaningful chance of carrying out what the 2008 electrorate asked for.

Here's to a better, and completer, second half of this Administration.

Betelgeuse! Betelgeuse! Betelgeuse!

Well, now we know why Zaphod was so anxious to spend his time down round the Basingstoke roundabout rather than on his home world:

The red supergiant star Betelgeuse is getting ready to go supernova, and when it does Earth will have a front-row seat. The explosion will be so bright that Earth will briefly seem to have two suns in the sky.

The star is located in the Orion Nebula, about 640 light-years away from Earth. It's one of the bright and biggest stars in our galactic neighborhood - if you dropped it in our Solar System, it would extend all the way out to Jupiter, leaving Earth completely engulfed. In stellar terms, it's predicted to explode in the very near future. Of course, the conversion from stellar to human terms is pretty extreme, as Betelgeuse is predicted to explode anytime in the next million years.

But still, whether the explosion occurs in 2011 or 1002011 (give or take 640 years for the light to reach Earth), it's going to make for one of the most unforgettable light shows in our planet's history. For a few weeks, the supernova will be so bright that there will appear to be two stars in the sky, and night be will indistinguishable from day for much of that time. So don't count on getting a lot of sleep when Betelgeuse explodes, because the only sensible thing for the world to do will be to throw a weeks-long global supernova party.

It's pretty amazing that Arthur C. Clarke might have only missed this phenomenon by a year or two.