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Let's just say she went non-linear Late bulletin: These other guys say Comet Linear's "breakup" description is "premature." So they're changing the name to Comet Blammo
Right after sunset, Well now the sucker is breaking up. Not just into chunks, but into, like, what was left of Alderan in the first Star Wars. It's been vaporized. Which probably means a major meteor shower at some point. Credits: NASA, Harold Weaver of (the Johns Hopkins University), the Hubble Space Telescope Comet LINEAR Investigation Team, and the University of Hawaii. I will have been overheard to have said... At this very moment (6:38pm PDST), I'm on The Linux Show! It's Web-only, but a great show. I'm a regular. It's on 6-7pm PDST, weekly (except next week, during Linux World Expo). Here in the Bay Area, I'll be on KQED's Forum show, on 88.5FM, from 9-10am Friday, 8/11/00. Then nobody was born yesterday, right? I've been into geology ever since I discovered that one of the rocks in my yard is a fragment of a volcanic bomb — a hollow ball of lofted lava that dried at altitude sometime in the Triassic period, which was better than a couple hundred million years ago, give or take. Seems it was left here, along with rest of the vast and vexing Fransciscan Formation, when the Pacific Plate shoved itself under North America, melting the submerged (actually, subducted) part into the granite batholith that was recently pushed up and exposed as the Sierras. The Fransciscan mess is what got scraped off of the surface and left here when the plate stopped moving, broke off at the San Andreas Fault and began to rotate, like a giant millwheel, to the northwest. Where I live is atop a ground-up mess of ruined volcano remains that used to sit atop a long-since-recycled region of what used to be the Pacific. About a mile to my West is that very San Andreas. Anyway, I see by the Comprehendeing Geologic Time page that if the Earth were one day old, recorded history is a little better than a half-second old. Homo Sapiens has been around for about 35 seconds. Kinda puts the deadlines I'm avoiding into perspective. Okay, she might have been early Holocene Sometime in the late Pleistocene (I think it was 1964), Leslie Gore (of "It's My Party and I'll Cry if I Want to" shame) had a minor hit with a song called "You don't own me." That's my mental soundrack for Howard Greenstein's new Weblog, which is about the ludicrousities of "owning the customer." Dig it. Sneezing of coffee... Kevin Shay just sent a link to an interesting story about the past and future history of Peets. One for the toolbar I just blew coffee out my nose laughing at Stalag Forrester in Tom Matrullo's new weblog, commonplaces. Dig it.
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a bit too close to the Northwestern horizon, Comet Linear has been gracing the evening sky, about a half-handle's length from the bottom corner of the Big Dipper. 
