re: Out of touch with what?
well, I was probably too terse, but I thought engineering intuition plus common sense would say pretty clearly that, given the Sun is one gigantic superhot fusing ball of PLASMA, then forget about any idea of a solid surface (for gossakes) - or floating chunks either
My guess is that these days you're more involved with other (political) stuff ... that's what I meant by being out of touch - with physical common sense. Political battles might be important but they don't really help exercise physical intuition.