Think of Elon Musk

Well, the scientists are puzzled again, as they often are — for example, they still haven’t been able to find out what women really want — but this time, they don’t know what to make of a supermassive black hole that they recently discovered. They published a story about it in the journal Nature on Wednesday. As part of the story, they showed a rendering of the object, an object which nobody has actually ever seen. It looks a lot like an impressionist painting by Willem de Kooning. De Kooning, in the event you don’t know, painted pictures of things, but it took a long time to figure out what the things were.

The same is true of the supermassive black hole renderings. “Oh, look,” you might say, happening on to such a rendering, “there’s an undiscovered painting by Willem de Kooning.”

The newly discovered supermassive black hole is about 800 million times as big as our sun, and is 13 billion light years away from Earth.

There’s no doubt in my mind but what astronauts are already figuring out is how to get to the supermassive black hole. Elon Musk already may be designing the space vehicle to take the astronauts there. That vehicle will look like an oversized Tesla, probably.

The Milky Way — the galaxy in which we are located — also has a supersized black hole. It is called Sagittarius 2.

Let’s say you were on Earth, and decided to go to the new supermassive black hole. You take off in your “Supertesla,” and before you know it, you are lost. You happen to notice another space ship floating around in the universe, so you pull up next to it. The passengers in that ship are little green men and women who happen to be fluent in English, as well as their own language. It turns out they are out of gas. You ask them about the supermassive black hole you are trying to reach. They say, “Don’t waste your time. There’s nothing there. Just turn around and tow us back to Earth. You will be famous forever. And think of the Teslas Elon Musk will sell.”

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A few of you very dear readers have noticed that the TribuneTV section that came out on Saturdays for years in The Madera Tribune no longer is a part of the paper.

The reason for that is the price of newsprint has gone up considerably, putting it beyond our ability to continue printing the TribuneTV section without raising subscription rates. This change puts off a subscription rate increase for now.

However, we are continuing to publish the TV programs as part of the regular paper, along with news about television shows and stars. In today’s issue of the paper, the TV shows are on Pages B2 and B3.

Thank you for your understanding and your loyalty to the Trib, now in its 127th year of publication.