{"id":383,"date":"2018-02-05T09:35:44","date_gmt":"2018-02-05T09:35:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/urbanmole.is\/?p=383"},"modified":"2025-04-02T09:34:59","modified_gmt":"2025-04-02T09:34:59","slug":"raising-the-mars-bar","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/urbanmole.is\/?p=383","title":{"rendered":"Raising the Mars Bar"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>An MMA friend of mine misread \u201cmartial artist\u201d and applied for a scheme which saw him take up a three month residency on Mars. He\u2019s charming and athletic and probably NASA had the final say on who went.<\/p>\n

He came back with a body of work at once rubbish and endearing, like a child\u2019s picture of anything, and found some small acclaim among the lettered, who saw in his work something they lacked: nothing.<\/p>\n

Kim (not his real name but Andrew sounds rubbish in the ring) doesn\u2019t know classical Greek or Latin and won\u2019t \u201csally forth\u201d from anything. Most of his heroes are living and all have taken the time to repeatedly and vigorously punch him in the head (he mentally grafts the dead ones onto living sparring partners). He doesn\u2019t know Prometheus or Hercules, can\u2019t name drop Jan Wagner or Allen Ginsberg (Jan and Allen Ginsberg to those in the know), and doesn\u2019t see Hannibal marching over every elevation in Europe.<\/p>\n

No, Kim kicked a lot of loose stones around the perimeter of the Vallis Marineris base and taught the head of the planetary geology team the most effective tackles for taking down aliens (with the caveat that the environmental suits prohibit some of the finer groundwork).<\/p>\n

He also wrote \u2014 because that was a condition of his residency \u2014 about the sunset, which was pink except for the bit around the sun which was blue, and about the moons (T-Rex and Tadpole). He wrote about the orange sky and brown rock. He wrote a romantic sonnet spanning thirteen pages to a young xenobiologist, got turned down, wrote a late night prose piece (with pictures) Sade would have grinned at and got a time out.<\/p>\n

And he won an award, of sorts, because of those new friends of his who, competing over which of them could say the least with the most words, conceded to Kim, who really did say nothing but meant it all.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

(This piece was originally published October 2017 and subsequently lost in a simultaneous host and backup server meltdown. It’s wild out here on the fringe!)<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

An MMA friend of mine misread \u201cmartial artist\u201d and applied for a scheme which saw him take up a three month residency on Mars. He\u2019s charming and athletic and probably NASA had the final say on who went.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":372,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[46,13],"tags":[156,157,158],"class_list":{"0":"post-383","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-literature","8":"category-travel","9":"tag-mars","10":"tag-nasa","11":"tag-residency"},"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/urbanmole.is\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/383","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/urbanmole.is\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/urbanmole.is\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/urbanmole.is\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/urbanmole.is\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=383"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/urbanmole.is\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/383\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":385,"href":"https:\/\/urbanmole.is\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/383\/revisions\/385"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/urbanmole.is\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/372"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/urbanmole.is\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=383"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/urbanmole.is\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=383"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/urbanmole.is\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=383"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}