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I saw some a couple days ago coming back from somewhere down South. Apparent ingredients needed: one sun, mist, rainbows. I win!

There are constraints written into the fabric of the world which we do not see but are nevertheless there. It’s fun to talk about planetary, stellar, and galactic civilizations as if we will inevitably progress to them; it’s fun. But where’s the evidence of civilizations that came before us? The universe should be lousy with their leavings, the inevitable shitpiles that gargantuan projects always produce. Of course, some say the reason we don’t see any of these things is that we don’t know what to look for. They say it’s like asking a marmot to find a contact address in Outlook; it’s something completely beyond its (and our) ken and ability.

I suspect that the real reason we don’t notice these stellar shitpiles and .pst files is that they aren’t there. I suspect that there are good, unknown reasons that make it virtually impossible for a civilization to spread much beyond where it originated.

Celestron SkyScout

Simply point the SkyScout at any star in the sky and click the “target” button.
The SkyScout will tell you what object you are looking at.

A lot like what I wanted in this post, only without having a village elder to feed. I could get this for free, for all intensive porpoises. The only reason I know about it is that my AmEx ‘rewards’ program lists it as a reward. I have just enough points to get it.

I probably should, shouldn’t I? It’s an expert village elder, very reasonably priced.

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Eclipse set to be ‘best in years’

[Robert Massey, spokesman for the UK's Royal Astronomical Society] added that [the eclipse] was totally safe to observe and no protective filters were needed because the Moon would actually be less bright than during a normal full moon.

So, perfesser, what yer sayin is that I kin look at the sun without goggles r such, now, too, right? Am I hearin you right? Whyn’t yew mumbledy-peg eggheads make up yer minds already!

The first day of the year I see Orion is a good one. Usually it doesn’t happen until October or November, but as I’m getting up before the crack of dawn, it happened earlier this year. Went out with the dog to get the paper, turned back to the house, and there it was, right next to the chimney!

It’s a 400+ page free .pdf download you can get from universetoday.com. Every night there’s something else to see. Just another reference for your arsenal.

Through cunning devices and methods, people found out what stars are, and what they’re made of. They found out how big they are and how old they can get.

I think that’s pretty amazing. Good for us!

After much thought and effort, I have named the constellations. They are Bobo, Little Bobo, the Duck’s Foot, the Rocking Horse, and Wendell the Paper Kite. Giving Wendell an unbelievably long and complicated tail was a huge timesaver.

Above: an artist’s conception of the constellations
Bobo the Organ Grinder Monkey and
Little Bobo the Organ Grinder Monkey

I’ve decided to name my own constellations. You heard me! My education and inclination have failed me to the extent that I don’t know all the names of the constellations, so I’m resorting to inventing names myself.

I no longer believe I’ll learn all the historical names via a painless infusion of media pap. Other people might come to this realization and then take an astronomy class to round out their store of knowledge. Not me, Jack! Three thousand years of tradition stops right here. Right here. From here on out, I’m calling the shots.

The Big Dipper I’ve got, so I’ll keep it. But there’s no Bear there; I don’t see any damn Bear. Try as I might! It looks like a monkey to me, with the Big Dipper as its hindquarters and tail. Therefore I name it Bobo the Organ Grinder Monkey. For reference, an extension of a line connecting Bobo’s two hind paws points north to Reginald, which ancient mariners used to sail the oceans. Or so I’ve been told.

Scorpio I’ve got, but again, it looks nothing like what Greek people say it looks like. It’s a duck’s foot! The Duck’s Foot! To the north of the Duck’s Foot, a sausage-length away, is a constellation called Wendell the Paper Kite, because that’s what it looks like.

Of course I’ll have to document all my constellations for reference, and that will be a pain. But it’ll be a sweet pain, and it’ll be a blow if I forget any of them.

This has opened whole new realms of curmudgeonhood for me.

My favorite constellation is Orion, as I’ve said before. The thing I like about Orion is its constellationness. It’s so obviously a constellation. I can show it to someone without the slightest knowledge of the stars, and he wouldn’t know its name, but he’d know it has a name. I think the only other constellation like it is the big dipper in Ursa Major. But the big dipper is too utilitarian to hold my interest, and I like Orion’s shape.

It’s important for me to have a personal relationship with the stars. I know it sounds holy-rollerish, but it’s true. I feel cozier when I can name what’s above me as well as what’s below.

Several times I’ve lost track of the stars, for whatever reason, for bad weather or boredom, and it’s always been kind of unnerving finally to come back out underneath them and struggle to suss what’s where. I need to keep track of the stars to feel connected to it all.

Eric said that one of the things he looked at when getting his house was the quality of the stars in his backyard. That’s a good one. I’m incorporating that into my next house. Before, I always bought or rented a place first and discovered whether the sky was thrilling or dull later.

The next offer I make on a house will be a consequence of the quality of stars in the backyard.

Another contingency of mine is that the ratio of natural sounds to man-made sounds will have to be high. I don’t want quiet, I just want more crickets and hoot-owls and fewer clankings and spinning tires. The hoot-owls can hoot all night long at the crickets if they’d like.

Quality stars and nature, or the deal’s off.

Dear God,

while we commend You for acting on our petition in a timely manner, this act is not quite what we were looking for. Frankly, we expected more from You in the portents department. A giant explosion, the largest ever witnessed, was a good idea, and we like the way You’re thinking. But x-rays? Something only our machines can see? What the hell?

No, what we had in mind was something that happens in the sky that’s visibly bright enough and lasts long enough to allow everyone to see it and contemplate it. Something you can yell inside to the kids about, and they can get outside in time to see. A tenth of a second x-ray spike, albeit ‘brighter’ than the moon, is simply unacceptable.

Don’t get us wrong; the fact that the event was harmless was a huge plus. Awesome but harmless is good.

But in light of the explosion’s inherent subtlety, we are resubmitting our petition. This time, let’s not fuck around with x-rays and gamma rays and tenths of seconds and what-not, please.

Thank you,

the teeming masses

I want to start a formal petition to God, requesting a fabulous omen. I think I could get a lot of signatures.

In my speech class that I’m taking, a requirement to get a good grade for a speech is to cite a “wealth of sources.” My informational speech I’ll be giving concerns how to book the best flight when going on vacation. Nice and easy. For the speech, my root source is faa.gov, a division of dot.gov.

Many topics have a variety of sources to mine. This isn’t one of them. There are no other sources; faa.gov is root. Any fact-giving anywhere else is derived from it. Any opinion anywhere else is based on it.

But my instructor will insist that I toss some more sources in there. Sprinkle em right on in.

A speech class is built and exists to treat students like children, which, judging from my fellow students, isn’t always a bad thing. Some of these people are terrifically dull. Oh, the stories I could tell. But a speech class isn’t built to allow for the odd grown-up who wanders in for unfathomable reasons.

The other reason Speech Class exists is to discover and nurture those people who have a knack for speechifying, of course. We’ve got to have a certain amount of people around who like talking to other people, otherwise civilization would crumble. But as an appalling consequence, I have to give two brutally pointless speeches (when all is said and done) to strangers.

I’ve given speeches before for classes and in the military; some of them might have even been worthwhile to one or two people who heard them. But I already know I don’t like giving them. They can cross me off the list; I don’t care for it. This speech class won’t lead me to bigger and better speech classes.

But I’m required to take it.

When the course and the instructor require me to have a wealth of sources, even when there is obviously just one source, they’re telling me that I am not root. They’re in my face about it.

The thing is, in the things I care about, I am root. Root doesn’t mean that I know everything, even on subjects I know a lot about. It means that, if someone asks me a question, and I don’t know the answer, I tell them so. For example, this guy

“If the increased southern temperatures [of Saturn] are solely the result of seasonality, then the temperature should increase gradually with increasing latitude, but it doesn’t,” Orton said. “We see that the temperature increases abruptly by several degrees near 70 degrees south and again at 87 degrees south.

“A really hot thing within a couple degrees of the pole is something I don’t understand at all,” he said.

is my hero.

We should be bugged when an institution’s policy is to deny root to us. That should never be gotten used to.

Here’s a little ditty from yesteryear that I read in a book that I got from my mother-in-law last Christmas, Seeing in the Dark, about stars:

Follow the arc to Arcturus,
and on to Spica go;
Then turn northwest to Regulus,
the foot of the lion, Leo.

It’s just that far to Gemini,
Where Castor and Pollux glow,
Near Rigel, and Capella,
And Sirius, down below.

While I learned about my poor meatball on Mount Smokie, kids in else-time were learning about the stars in the sky. How did we get so street-smart, and so dumb?

The world has a fever, and has had for a long time. I hope it breaks soon.

The Sun and the Moon set astronomy back thousands of years.

As the only two things in the heavens that the ancients could look at and see any detail whatsoever, the fact that the Sun is a brilliant, featureless disk, and the fact that the Moon is a featureful but unchanging disk, kept Ptolemy and the rest of those guys in the dark. It was obvious to everyone that these things up in the sky were two dimensional. They were not spheres, they were heavenly stamps.

This is my example: if the Moon had rotated as it revolved about us, so that it showed a different face, gradually, every night, then it would have been obvious that it was a big ball out there. It is a stupendous coincidence of natural law that it shows us one unchanging surface. This stupendous coincidence allowed people to assume that it was not spherical. And if the Moon wasn’t a sphere, why think that anything else up there was? And if nothing else up there was spherical, why believe that the Earth was round?

There was no obvious reason to think that. It took many different people many lifetimes to convince everyone else that their subtle reasoning that the Earth is a ball, surrounded by other balls, was correct.

I tire myself out right now, just thinking about the inherent difficulty in trying to convince the hoi polloi of thousands of years ago that the earth is round, given the Sun and the Moon.

To prepare for my hike with Dave in Yo, I took out my planisphere. Turns out the Duck’s Foot is part of Scorpio, with a couple stars that are unrelated.

The Ancients obviously made a colossal mistake in not incorporating those extra stars and calling the resultant thing “The Duck’s Foot.”

So much for spanglemaking this one.

There’s a constellation in the sky now, about 120 degrees or so from the Big Dipper, to the south around midnight. I call it “The Duck’s Foot.” It’s obviously a real constellation, with a real name that I don’t know. A century or two ago, I’d go to the town expert and ask him what it was and he’d tell me, and he’d be happy to tell me. Nowadays, I can’t do that, because there are so many people that no one’s an expert on anything anymore unless there’s some percentage in being an expert on it.

So now we have the net: the new town expert. It’s a pretty poor expert. I know if I had a burning desire to call the Duck’s Foot by its actual name, I could research it on the web and find my answer— eventually. I’m not going to. I’m going to spanglemake it.

If I didn’t spanglemake it— that is, if I did decide to research it on the web— I’d find the answer. Not immediately, though, and not nearly as quickly as if I could just ask the town expert. The web is not set up to easily answer my question about the Duck’s Foot. It’ll tell me about all the constellations there are in minute detail, but it can’t accompany me to my backyard and look where I point and say “Oh, that’s the XXXXXX constellation,” like the town expert could.

What I want, since I no longer have experts to call in, is a star program in which I can make a crude drawing of what I see, and then the program will churn out one or three likely candidates for it. No star program I know of does this yet. I want it.

It looks exactly like a duck’s foot.

There seems to be some controversy concerning UFOs seen by Mexican pilots. Various theories have been advanced. This goes without saying, but apparently some people need to hear it: it’s a natural phenomenon. It’s a fucking natural phenomenon. Spare me the hypothesis that what happened can be pinned on ET.

Conspiracy theories wear me out.