this one can be skipped

extraneous to the plot, but facts nonetheless, are two art shows, one in London that I wish someone who reads this journal would attend and report on, and one near Atlanta that I expect scarcely anyone who reads this journal will attend, much less report on:

( these )

further news from Atlanta

No one would have the bad taste to make up the tale of a personal injury lawyer from Atlanta who ignores warnings and flies all over Europe with a drug-resistant strain of TB, returning via Prague and Montreal and slipping past Homeland Security to come home to the city where his new father-in-law is a microbiologist specializing in TB and related diseases. Any fiction editor worthy of the name would reject the story for the reasons I have cited frequently.

To make up, at least a little, for this city's freshly unfortunate intrusion into world headlines, Georgia State University presents a photograph (from the telescope it operates in California) of the first star captured in sufficient detail to make out its status as a sun in its own right. The lights in the sky are stars, and we now begin to see them as they are, at least a little.

Here is the rather lovely, albeit gravitationally lopsided, Altair: