Some days are cloggy-headed dreams, like your ears and your head are all filled up with warm milk or room-temperature library paste, those white, traditional kindergartner's snacks, that kind that stuck to too many ribs, back in the day.

Today has been one of those gurgle-headed days here, looking up now and then from reading about NASA's latest discovery, about 26 new planets in 11 systems -- bringing the Kepler mission's tally to date, so far, to 61 planets and 2,326 planetary candidates out there.

The Presidential Testicles, long thought missing,  may have been discovered, and in place, according to witnesses Tuesday. Confirmation is expected to occur, slowly and painfully, based on observations made by interested parties scattered around the country, in the final 360 days, the home stretch, of his initial term in office.

It's like we are all checking out the Times Square Ball Drop, on teevee, on New Year's Eve -- its only that the broadcast was delayed until now, due to technical difficulties of some sort or another.

The grating thing about unannounced or ongoing tests is not so much the surprise factor as never being quite sure what it is, exactly, that's being tested.

That suspicion intersects with another, that almost everything in and about life these days -- pick something, anything at all -- is really just meant as a test of our sanity, of how much we can take, how much craziness we can jam into the claustrophobically-closing, finite spaces all around us, and how much lunacy we can tamp down and cram in, into the potentially infinite space between our ears.

In summer, around campfires, warming against the night chill, it is easy to stretch one's lower back in the flickering light, and look upward, launching one's higher mind, into the clouds of stars.

It is an always stunning notion -- looking up into the skies and into the view of stars, is gazing back in time, participating in time travel.  That light took a long time to get here, but it went the top end of the speed limit, the whole way, as fast as light can go.