11:39 a.m. My beloved Igor often brings interesting things home from his various meetings and forays out into the big world. But today, however, he brought something really special that he's letting me hang in my office ...

... and now I will share it with you. It's a real color photograph -- not a cheesy facsimile -- of our Pathfinder landing on Mars. Taken by our own tax-paid cameras, courtesy of NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. Crisp, delightful, fabulous.

The pale stuff in the bottom of the photo is the wide-angle view of the opened thing-a-ma-bob that landed on the surface. All very scientific. You can clearly see the solar arrays, (if that's what they are), the landing air bags, and a pipe of some sort sticking up on the far left side above my honey bear filled with hand lotion.

It's just too, too cool. Some of the opened stuff forms a sort of ramp, down which the little rover-type vehicle puttered, only to come to a halt beside a really big rock in a landscape of mostly nothing but rocks.

Here's a closeup of the photo. I draped it over the scanner, very carefully. So many modern miracles. The fact that we have a home scanner. Or the ability to beam results out to you within hours of bringing it home. The way my whole office wall looks prearranged, waiting for just such a long, very long photo. Odd.

See the ramp in the lower left portion of the picture? See the tire tracks? The big rock? Our little solar-powered (I would suppose) scooter? And assuming we've not gone back to pick up the pieces, yes -- here's proof that we've already begun littering yet another planet in the solar system.

Look at that unearthly sky.

It's enough to make you want to become a scientist just so you can get to see these pictures firsthand. Up close and personal. Out of this world.

I have a sort of rock theme going on around my desk. First, there's the Princeton graduation rock that my son made me with a button and two little pebbles when I graduated in 1979. He was 9. Then there's the rock from Dumpling Island, which we almost bought in 1986. (The entire island. It would have been interesting.)

Next, a small red rock from Sedona, which I got from the top of Bell Rock, after much personal huffing and puffing in 1990. Some more rocks from my son, including one with a scallop shell anciently etched. An amethyst crystal from a con artist.

I like rocks. They remind me of places I've known. The Martian rocks look strangely familiar. There's going to be nightmares tonight.

Maybe I'll start a serious collection. (Rocks, not nightmares.)

If you want to explore further, here are some relevant bookmarks: JPL, the Mars Global Surveyor, and a few more pictures of the Sojourner rover, computer enhanced from black and white images.