Juice - Steve Vai

This song has been constantly running through my head for the last week or so. I love it so much: Vai seems to be a four-year old child, overfull of energy, running around the garden laughing his head off. I spend a lot of time lamenting the lack of this kind of simple joyousness in art. Sometimes life is complicated and confusing and we feel surrounded by liars and feel liars ourselves: and there needs be art that responds to this; but sometimes the sun is high and bright and the grass is green and stuff is just, you know, pretty all right. And Vai knows this as well as anyone, I'm sure, and he reminds you that it's something to be known when you listen to him.

On a completely unrelated note, have you ever wondered where to go after giga-? Well, it's tera-; then it's peta-. Then there comes ones you've not heard before: exa-, zeta-, and yotta-. I think the Earth has a mass of just under six yottagrams. What an awesome word. Going the other way, after milli- you get micro-, nano- and pico-, and then the weird ones are femto-, atto-, zepto- and yocto-. My ability to understand maths and atomic theory, which is not good, tells me that the mass of a carbon-12 atom is just under 20 yoctograms.

Yoctograms.

EDIT (13/3/'10): There is a Facebook group campaigning for a name for the introduction of a new prefix, which comes after yotta-! The proposed prefix is: hella-.

If this gets through, we will be able to say of Jupiter that it was 1.899 HELLAGRAMS. Now that's cool.