[BLOG] Some Friday links

[rfmcdonald]

• Bad Astronomer Phil Plait notes the unusual exoplanet HIP 65426 b, orbiting its parent star in a very distant orbit. Why is that?


• The Broadside Blog's Caitlin Kelly shares some photos from an evening spent at the Metropolitan Opera in New York City.


• Centauri Dreams imagines what could have been if Voyager 1 had, as some hoped, gone on to Pluto. What discoveries would have been made, decades before New Horizons by a probe with less capable instrumentation?


• Dangerous Minds takes a look at David Bowie's mid-1970s nadir, caught up in an oddly vegetarianism-driven panic over psychic espionage.


• At In A State of Migration, Lyman Stone uses a variety of demographic, cultural, and economic markers to define the Rust Belt of the United States.


• JSTOR Daily notes that, at one point, American funerals included swag, nice gifts to mourners like sets of gloves.


• Language Hat notes a language of the Pakistani Himalayas, Badeshi, that turns out not to be quite completely extinct.


• Justin Petrone, at north!, celebrates his discovery of a familiar type, an Italian coffeeshop owner, in his adopted Estonia.


• Out There considers the remarkable potential of exploration and telescopic study at the edge of our solar system.


• The Planetary Society Blog's Emily Lakdawalla notes that the Japanese Hayabusa 2 probe has detected its target, asteroid Ryugu.


• Roads and Kingdoms reports on tuyo, a Filipino comfort food combining dried fish with chocolate-flavoured rice porridge.


• Peter Rukavina reports on an entertaining-sounding club meeting in Charlottetown, of Island subscribers to The New Yorker.


• Starts With A Bang's Ethan Siegel notes how the new Great Magellan telescope will not have artificial spikes marring its field of vision.


• Towleroad notes< that CNN's Don Lemon is aware of Trump's nickname for him, "Sour Lemon".


• Window on Eurasia notes that Russia's working-age population is set to decline regardless of recent demographic initiatives.