Magnetism

It's a strange journey the mind takes one on sometimes. The allotted blog theme being  magnetism , I was idly musing to myself that in fact the world is just a great big magnet when suddenly that old soul number by Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell crept uninvited into the fringes of consciousness - you know, the 'Onion Song'. I had to look it up on my search engine of choice:

"The world is just a great big onion/ And pain and fear are the spices that make you cry/ Oh and the only way to get rid of this great big onion/ Is to plant love seeds until it dies, uh huh."

Uh huh, not the greatest of lyrics! Quality control disappeared in a puff of whatever was being smoked that year (1969). However, the principal and incongruous image has remained in memory for half a century, which must say something, though I don't know what.

Not an onion then, but a planet-sized electro-magnet (to be precise) created by the effects of a convecting molten iron interior and the earth's rotation - on a vertical axis as it happens - giving us fields of force that flow out of the south pole and into the north, fields that in turn magnetise ferrous materials giving them polar properties (called north and south in representation of the mother magnet). As we all learned at school, like poles repel while opposites attract...

... and beyond that simplistic fact I can't generate much enthusiasm for the topic. I blame this on it being the ninth week of Covid-19-ness (oh, I've been checking back through the blogs) and while I don't think our government has handled Britain's response to the pandemic in a very credible way, I also suspect that's not what people want to read about right now. So... let's move on to some poetry.

With world-disorienting random factors in mind, I speculated on what would happen if something completely unexpected and outside of our control were to impact - for instance - the web of satellite-enabled communications and navigation systems we've woven around the planet in the last half-century. From the depths of the imaginarium to the outer limits of scientific possibility, I offer you, gentle readers, an allegorical work-in-progress. Maybe some day someone will stick it on their fridge (though I doubt it)!

Aerial No More
We have spun from pole to pole
and skirted fair earth's girth,
traversed our planet round
that once was thought flat,
back to the place we started from:
the best of journeys end where
they began, sweet home-comings.

But now we are confounded, can
orbit safe no more. Three holes sprung
in the fireball sun when seen
through NASA's glass darkly
portend stark news. All bode ill
for our enabling comsat* angels,
will scramble their sweet whisperings.

Freak solar winds wreak havoc
with our fragile networks, distort them
to a tangle, disorient receptors.
Geomagnetic fields gone dizzily askew
lead us to mis-migrate, foil our attempts
to navigate. We are, for now, grounded
by invisible blizzards, aerial no more.

* comsat = communication satellites

I didn't want to short-change you though, so I include a musical link to finish. Have a listen to this majestic recording: "Like a flying magnet, hyperdrive has never seen any reason to remain the same." This is Grace Slick with Jefferson Starship from 1974. Just click on the song title to activate the link to YouTube>>>> Hyperdrive

OK, thanks for reading. Stay isolate, stay safe, be supportive. S ;-)