When last we left our hero Cassini, in February 2008, he was already four years into his new career as a pinball, bouncing to and fro among Saturn’s rings.

Two months later NASA gave him permission to keep right on bouncing, at least until mid-2010, wearing a fresh T-shirt bearing the words “Cassini Equinox”.

This is all by way of justifying the use of yet another photo of Iapetus, that nut of a Saturn moon that did a fashion spread for Cassini in September 2007. This picture is among the astounding collection featured this month on the Boston Globe’s Big Picture website.

Iapetus was too walnutty to believe, as explained with great anticipation in a spring 2007 Dorseyland post, though it’s still not very forthcoming about its funny ridge.

Oddly enough, Cassini was in the process of transmitting its Iapetus snapshots back to Earth when it was hit by a blast of protons from deep space’s slingshot that shut it down like an armadillo being pecked by turkey vultures. The scare was temporary, though, and Cassini’s camera has had no rest since.

There have been some mighty fishy pictures on the Net lately, but given the sources I think it’s safe to say charges will not be laid against Photoshop.

These lumpfish were photographed at a Japanese aquarium. Eumicrotremus pacificus evidently have suckers on their fins so they can cling to rocks underwater, and the aquarium reckoned they could hold on to colourful balloons just as easily.

The National Geographic, no less, came up with this and other shots of the six-inch-long Pacific barreleye — Macropinna microstoma – which it insists has a transparent head!

What you see is its barrel-like eyes topped by green, orb-like, sunlight-filtering lenses. It lives 600 metres deep in submarine darkness off central California.

The eyes are looking upward in this picture by the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute. The pair of dark orifices out front that look like eyes are actually organs to smell with.

And then there was Briton Ian Welch, who was in Thailand last month helping with a stingray-tagging programme. He went fishing in the Maeklong River, presumably in Samut Songkhram, and landed the biggest freshwater fish ever caught with a rod.

In the river. With a rod. I’m still looking for further details on this story, which appeared in the British press but, as far as I know, in neither of Thailand’s English-language dailies.

Once you move away from fishes and into snakes, though, Photoshop rears its head and reality becomes ambiguous.

This image enjoyed a brief but wide-ranging life online because it’s supposed to show a gigantic snake shimmying down Borneo’s Baleh River. A second “photo” didn’t even come close to being realistic, but there were plenty of sceptics about this one too.

This shot was supposedly taken from a helicopter by a member of a flood-relief team.

The picture’s shelf-life was certainly goosed along by the accompanying allusions to the legend of the Nabau, a 100-foot-long snake with “a dragon’s head”. The story was not aided by comparisons to the prehistoric, 45-foot-long, crocodile-swallowing Titanoboa, whose fossilised skeleton was recently discovered in Colombia.

Someday I want to compile a list of the 10 funniest things I’ve ever seen or heard, and Monday’s celestial smiley face, courtesy of the moon, Venus and Jupiter, will be on it.

What a treat for this glum Land of Smiles to look up at the end of another state-of-emergency day and see the sky grinning at you.

I struggled with camera shake on the telephoto shots, but even when I failed, the light compensated by scrawling messages. I can see Dali’s signature; my wife can see Thai script that we both tried to decipher.

Maybe there’s are secret words in there, but the overall message is unmistakeable: You guys just keep on smiling, and Nature will take care of the rest.

I was scanning the cybersky for UFOs and spotted a cow being repeatedly plucked from its pasture in a very funny fashion on a website actually called CowAbduction.com.

The site complains about the “serious problem”, with the number of bovine disappearances nearly 720,000 and on the rise, primarily in California — possibly because the milk is tastier and creamier, it says — but also in 27 other US states and in Europe and Russia as well.

Evidently the cattle go flying off the surface of the planet with a “meee” rather than a “mooo”, followed by silence.

There are offers of support groups for bereaved farmers (those left eating their cereal with water) and several handy products, such as the fearsome, made-in-California, electric “alien cow crow”, designed to scare off predators but reportedly dangerous for everyone concerned.

Victims, witnesses and sympathetic visitors submit photographic evidence of the phenomenon, such as this picture from John Edgecombe of Cornwall, taken from inside the cockpit of a Cessna at 3,000 feet. There are many reports of Unidentified Flying Bovines.

And here’s Scott Walker’s shot of a spacecraft of some sort actually lifting away a cow. He said he was blind for nearly three hours afterward because of the intense light of the beam.

Well, it didn’t take too long to figure out that the website is another clever promotion from the California Milk Processor Board, the same people behind the long-running and ultra-successful “Got Milk?” advertising drive.

This is the campaign that’s had everyone from Andre Agassi to Zhang Ziyi, with Batman, Bart Simpson and Yoda along the way, wearing a milk moustache, and spawned parodies like “Got fleas?”, though the board didn’t care much for PETA anti-dairy “Got pus?” campaign.

Californians will have to forgive me for knowing nothing about the two-year-old Cow Abduction campaign, which took the form of five TV spots ads. I’ve tried to make up for my ignorance with the eyewitness photo of my own, at the top of the post.

Okay, and the one below as well.

Canada’s Walrus magazine had an article by Jill Frayne online recently that I thought was a particularly well-written explanation of the the sky’s light-and-sound spectaculars, now just coming to an end here in Thailand as a daily sport.

Frayne brews up a thunderstorm, “either from warm air rising off the ground, or from a drop in temperature in the atmosphere”, and continues:

Cheery, popcorn-white clouds in the sky mean unstable air has stopped rising and has reached the dew point, when its temperature equals that of the surrounding air. These cumulus clouds can persist for days or they can dissipate, but if warm thermal air keeps pushing up, they often develop into cumulonimbus clouds.

When this happens, an aerial game of pinball begins. Droplets bounce around, collide, pick up grit, old volcanic ash, the detritus of life below, all of it freezing into ice crystals in the troposphere. Air travellers experience this as turbulence, their plane passing through cumulonimbus clouds, lurching in the chaos, the cabin windows dashed with rain or hail, until the aircraft emerges from the cloud.

On the ground, this intense interior action looks like a change from roly-poly clouds jogging in the sky to clouds darkening and mounting into towers. This formation means a storm is brewing. Inside the cloud, ice crystals and raindrops zing about in all directions, slamming into and fusing with one another, growing larger and heavier, until they start falling through the cloud as rain or snow or hail.

Lightning gets into the action through an electrical charge that builds during these high-wire collisions.

When a beauty of a storm is brewing, a negative charge heats up at the base of the cloud. The earth’s surface tends to be negatively charged, and since like charges repel, current at the bottom of the cloud draws away from the ground, leaving a positive charge in the air.

This is that pre-storm sense one gets, the hair on the head lifting slightly, the air freighted with electricity.

It’s in the nature of air to act as a buffer, to resist electrical flow, and for a time it contains the mounting charge.

But it can’t hold out forever. At a certain point, the negative charge from the cloud expends itself, not all at once, which would be an atomic reaction, but haltingly, in a “stepped leader” about as thick as a pencil.

This negative charge gropes toward the ground, moving in a searching way, like a lonely drunk in a bar looking for a connection. Eventually, it attracts a positive charge from something tall on the ground — a tree or a tower, a farmer on a tractor.

When lightning strikes, the charges have connected in a streamer, a flood of positive current that surges back up into the cloud, spectacularly hot, so intensely superheating the surrounding air that a shock wave bulges out, faster than the speed of sound.

Thunder is the sonic boom we hear when the percussive force breaks the sound barrier. Once the stepped leader from the cloud locks to the streamer from the ground, a channel opens for pulses of electricity to pass through, producing several flashes. We see the lightning before we hear the boom, but the thunder actually occurs first; the speed of light outraces the sound of thunder to our senses.

In its defence, lightning is only doing its job. It’s the celestial housekeeper, balancing an overcharged heaven and earth.