The other day I leaving the grocery store, and an older man was coming in. He was holding the hand of a young person, kind of grandchild age, maybe 13-14, and it was clear by the young person’s gait that there were some developmental issues there.

I say “young person,” because in the brief glimpse I had, I truly was unable to determine gender. Perhaps that was unimportant.

The child—and to avoid ungainly linguistic contortions, I am going to assign the pronoun “he”—was dressed all in black, black hair, eyeliner, and to top it all off, a black cape. He was committed.

It was not a particularly nice cape, just that almost-sheer velour material one gets in a plastic bag out at Party City. The child didn’t seem to have the attitude sported by most of our emo cadre, that sullen haughtiness that just dares you to stare or roll your eyes. This kid seemed a little wary, as if his outfit were camouflage that he was afraid was not quite enough to allow him to escape notice.

You can’t help but construct narrative, can you? Is this a look he’s seen and for some reason has taken on in order to “become” someone? Is it someone he admires? A musician perhaps? A movie character? Someone at school?

Does the (presumed) grandfather love this kid so that he willingly takes him to the grocery store in his freaky getup? Or does he cringe, knowing that most of the people in the store are going to be judgmental one way or the other?

All kinds of stories pop into and out of existence.

I will say that I am proud that my first reaction was to think that I should stop and say, “Hey, cool cape! Did you make it?” (knowing full well that he had not), just to validate his choices.

But of course I didn’t—I was on my way out, they were on their way in, and there are always too many variables to consider in such a split second. Would my approaching him give him a positive validation, or would it send him into an emotional tailspin? Would the grandfather appreciate the sentiment, or would I trigger some defensive response? What if I read the situation completely wrong and made it worse?

If I had seen them up and down the aisles of Publix and had time to figure it all out, I’d like to think I could have done a good deed by giving the kid a thumbs up. I’d like to think so.

I’m pretty sure I’ve blogged about this before, but the bizarrely synchronous events in my life seem to me to be considerably above the proper average that statistics have laid down for our guidance.

For example, it’s a rare day when the New York Times crossword puzzle does not have an answer that reflects directly on something going on in my life, often a phrase, name, or word that pops up on the television show my lovely first wife is watching while I am working on that very clue.

Today in rehearsal during a break in the action, I was not involved in whatever was being discussed and idly opened one of the prop books on the table in front of me.  It was one of those bound volumes from Great Literature, and since I didn’t have my glasses on I could not read the text, but I could make out the headers on the left and right pages: CHARLES LYELL | GEOLOGIC EVOLUTION.

Well.

Flashback to teaching information skills to 3rd graders: one of my favorite activities to teach them how to use the dead-tree editions of the encyclopedia—because it was on the test that’s why shut up—was to have them look up their last name and see how close they could get.  I had an introductory presentation which demonstrated guide words blah blah and finally I would light on LYELL, CHARLES.  We’d scan the article and I’d show them how to extract the information they would need when they did their own name.  (I would also point out multiple times that I hadn’t found my exact last name so stop whining you little twerps.)

(We would also then turn around and use the online World Book and lo! almost every kid would find someone with their exact last name—and those that didn’t ventured over to Wikipedia.)

That was certainly worth a nostalgic chuckle, but then just now I was reading a Wonkette article on our next never-going-to-be-President, Rafael E. Cruz, and there in the comments was the following:

It turns out it wasn’t until the Alverez team published their findings about the KT Impact in 1981 that Mass Extinction was even talked about in the science community, all thanks to Charles Lyell, a lawyer who argued that catostrophism was absurd and advocated a more natural cyclical theory to life on earth.

With a link to the Wikipedia article even.  Mercy.  It’s harmless, but it’s certainly also unnerving.  I’ve learned to live with it.

update: Let’s add another one: using Slate’s Reincarnation Machine, I amused myself by following the chain of famous folk who died/were born on the same day, starting back from my birthday.  Eventually we arrived at Otto I, who was in the crossword puzzle yesterday.  (I also got Julius II in there somewhere.  Fun web activity!)

another update: So yesterday I mentioned info skills at Newnan Crossing.  One of the last lessons I invented was to teach a fourth grade class the difference between figurative and literal language.  They had to create a Keynote presentation on the new iPads that illustrated the metaphors in a Shakespeare sonnet.  I demonstrated with Sonnet 18 (“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”); they had to go back to class and work on Sonnet 73 (“That time of year tho mayst in me behold”).  This morning’s Writer’s Almanac?  Sonnet 73.

That time of year thou mayst in me behold,
When yellow leaves, or none, or few do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou seest the twilight of such day,
As after sunset fadeth in the west,
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death’s second self that seals up all in rest.
In me thou seest the glowing of such fire,
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed, whereon it must expire,
Consumed with that which it was nourished by.
This thou perceiv’st, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well, which thou must leave ere long.

So today we were making up the bed in the guest room (the west one) and were bemoaning the fact once again that one has no clue which side of the sheet is the bottom and which the side.  The tag is on a corner, which is not helpful at all of course, and many the day we’ve had to take a sheet off and rotate it 90°.   This curse is especially strong on fitted sheets, as is widely acknowledged.

If only, we mused, the tag were in the middle of the bottom, then think how much easier it would be to put sheets on the bed.

Normally, after the idea of getting rich off such a scathingly brilliant idea passes, we sigh and go on about our dreary quotidian lives.

But not today.

No, today my lovely first wife said, “We could use a magic marker to mark the center of the bottom of the sheet.”

I will pause and let you bathe in the reflected effulgence of that idea.

And so, dear reader, we enter the glorious new world of sheet-marking.  Now we will be able to make a bed with no fear of getting the sheets wrong.  We will no longer dread having to remake the bed before we even get the comforter on.  We will march confidently from the linen closet to the bedroom with no misgivings, sure that we will get it right the first time.

The universe showers us with its love.

You are welcome.

Every morning I get up and walk two miles. This is because my doctor has gotten cranky in his old age. Part of the path I take is around the city park down on First Avenue, across the gully/railroad tracks from the theatre, going three times around the path.

It’s a lovely, open greensward, and lately part of its appeal is its unimpeded view of the sky. I realized this the morning after the recent Perseids meteor shower when I caught the last of the meteors flashing across the sky. I made a mental note for next time.

This past week I’ve been watching the conjunction of Venus and Jupiter on the eastern horizon, and since I’ve been reading Flat Earth, by Christine Garwood, it has been an amazing experience.

We have a couple of disparate threads here—I’ll try to keep it clear as we go along.

1.

First of all, Flat Earth is solidly researched and infuriating: no one after the Babylonians believed the earth was flat—you have been lied to every Columbus Day—but in the 1840s, after Darwin had published and scientists began establishing themselves both as a profession and as an arbiter of truth, there arose a countermovement which looks, unfortunately, very familiar to us here in the 21^st century: the Zetetic Astronomy movement.

Zetetic came from the Greek philosophers, and the short version is that it meant you shouldn’t believe anything but your lying eyes. Earth looks flat? Then it is. Those “scientists” were just pointy-headed atheists who were trying to pry you away from God, who clearly said the earth had corners and pillars and that Joshua made the sun stand still which how could it do if the earth were moving anyway hernggh??

It is very distressing to read how all the pieces familiar to us today from the evolution wars were already in place: shyster pitch-men who may or may not believe what they’re selling to the rubes; the appeal to Scripture as an absolute truth; the scalding vituperation towards science and fact; and the refusal to countenance any evidence that contradicts the Holy Word of whoever it is that’s telling you that the Earth is Flat.

One bit of “evidence” that the zetetics found irresistible was that no sane person could possibly believe that we were on a globe rotating at 25,000 miles per hour, hurtling around the sun at 67,108 miles per hour. Any child could see how that was an insane lie: we’d all be flung from this supposed sphere into the skies.

Hold that thought.

2.

If you get to spend any time with the stars at night, one thing that impresses itself on you is how they’re always the same. Javert was right in staking his moral imperative on them; they never change. (The fact that his moral imperative was wrong need not concern us here.)

For the ancients, the stars loomed much larger, of course. Every night was a complete blackout for them, and the view of the sky every night was spectacular in a way that requires us to take trips to Monument Valley to see.

And every night, the stars were the same. You saw the same patterns, the same groups, the same brightnesses, every night. You could identify them. You would notice how they rotated around that one star, how as the seasons changed they shifted northward or southward, how the sun rose each morning in specific groups that marched along in an annual procession.

You would notice the regularity of it all, how the sun would rise a little earlier every morning, a little further north every day, until one day in June when it would “stop” and go back the other way.

And then in the winter, after its southward trek, rising later and setting earlier every day, the sun would reverse course and return us to spring. I think I would have started having a party every year that day or something. Maybe something with a lot of lights.

Anyway, it was always the same, a crystal sphere set with twinkling gems, eternal and flawless and unchanging.

Except for those seven stars.

3.

Look at this:

[Disclaimer: I am in no way responsible for any time suck occurring because you clicked on that link.]

Here we have Venus (on the top) and Jupiter in what is called “conjunction,” and it is easy to see why. The photo is from the great site Astronomy Picture of the Day, taken on the isle of Elba on Monday, August 21.

Here’s what I saw last Friday, August 29:

This is what struck me like a ton of bricks: what a staggering thing to look up and see these stars that don’t behave. They are never where they were the day before, and you can see them change on a daily basis. The Greeks had a name for them: ἀστὴρ πλανήτης, “wandering stars,” astēr planētēs. Planets.

If you observed them carefully for a while, of course, you’d see that they too seemed to have regular paths and you could predict things like the conjunction of Venus and Jupiter, or when Mercury would stop in its tracks and retrace its steps across the sky for a while. Doing so required very complicated diagrams if you believed that everything orbited around the earth, which everyone did because NO ONE THOUGHT THE EARTH WAS FLAT, PEOPLE.

You may now insert paragraphs about Copernicus and Brahe and Newton. Blah blah science blah. Have some pictures:

And a couple of movies/interactive sites:

Travel through the solar system at 300 times the speed of light

If the moon were only 1 pixel…

To quote the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy:

Space is big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space.

4.

So here we are, on our morning walk, and knowing what we actually know about the universe and not what our lying eyes tell us, look up again:

Now we can see what’s going on here. Venus and Jupiter. We know that Venus is closer to the sun. We know that Jupiter’s diameter is actually 11 times that of Venus despite appearing smaller to our lying eyes. We know that’s because it’s gazillions of miles further away.

We know that each is heading its own way around the sun—Venus is going faster than we are, Jupiter slower.

And if we stand there and look at those two stars, we can begin to see that the reason they are getting farther apart every morning is that we are hurtling on our path between them at 67,000 mph. Jupiter is falling further behind to our right, and Venus is scampering on ahead on our left.

More:

See the line formed by Venus/Jupiter? That’s the ecliptic, the plane on which all the planets orbit the sun. (Pluto notoriously does not, but then… well, we know about poor Pluto, don’t we?)

Notice that it’s at an angle. A 23.5° angle. That’s how much the Earth is tilted from the perpendicular to the ecliptic. It’s what give us seasons; it’s why the sun moseys from north to south and back again, solstice to solstice. We’re tilted in space, and here we can see it.

So there I am, looking at these two beautiful points of light in the morning sky, and when I think through all of these things, I get a very very real sense of the ground beneath my feet moving at 25,000 miles per hour towards the rising sun, while tilted at a 23.5° angle, zooming towards and between those two lights through vast, empty spaces.

It is no wonder that our Flat Earth friends rejected out of hand these marvels—it’s so much safer to believe your lying eyes, isn’t it?

Well, one of the mysteries of life.  And don’t go googling it and show me that everyone else already knew this.  Don’t care.

It is widely acknowledged that a tube of toothpaste will be half empty in a week, but then the remaining half will last a month.  Unpossible, right?

Probably most of us have a nagging sense that this is not really so, it’s just a perception of an average human being who is generally not quite awake most of the time it’s noticing this.

But it is so.  I will now explain.

Here we have a cross-section of a tube of toothpaste:

Or a sideways view.  Whatever LEAVE ME ALONE.

You may have seen some television program on how they make these things, but essentially, it is a tube that is crimped at the bottom.  In other words, an uncrimped tube would look like the blue square below:

From here, we can easily see what happens if we look at the two “halves” of the tube:

When we say that “half” the tube is gone in a week, it’s because we’re looking at the rectangle of the crimped tube (as viewed from the top) and dividing it in half visually.  By volume, clearly, that lower half is not even close to being half the contents and is therefore used up fairly quickly.  What’s left is the majority of the toothpaste, and of course that takes a lot longer to use up.   We could go all Euclidean on the topic and prove it with MATH, but I’m content to leave that work to future generations.

And now you know.  Unless you already knew.  Whatever LEAVE ME ALONE.

On my morning doctor-mandated walks, I cover basically the same path every day.  Almost every morning I listen to whatever I’ve accomplished vis-à-vis Seven Dreams; it’s the only way I can smooth out all the rough edges.

But I also find myself returning to the same ideas about my surroundings, mostly ideas about how others can improve my surroundings.  Here are some of them.

This is in the park down at the end of College Street.  For one thing, there’s this line of shrubbery stretching right across one of the only level areas in the park.  I would hate to think this was a deliberate design to keep people from picnicking and playing chase there.

The more immediate problem, obviously, is that no one in Parks & Rec has maintained these shrubberies.  Sure, they’ve come in every spring—too late for pruning—and reshaped them, but slowly and surely those shrubberies are eating the sidewalk whole.  My vote is to rip them all out and make it all lawn.

This is at the back end of the erstwhile Scott’s Bookstore.  I’ve lived here for more than 50 years and I don’t know that I’ve ever really noticed that little garage building.  I’m almost positive I’ve never seen it open.  What is it??  Can we tear it down and install a little garden cafe in the alley?

Here’s a thought I’ve had for years:

This is the AT&T complex, which stretches nearly the entire block between Jackson Street and First Avenue.  I was always told that it had been city property and AT&T snagged it through some kind of deal, which would have been before my time.  Outside the frame of the photo, City Hall is to the left, and you can just see the C Building of the theatre peeking up in the distance.  Goodyear fronts the property on Jackson Street.

So I’m thinking, what would it take to convince AT&T to move out of downtown and reclaim that property?  They’ve got to be hurting for space, and the facility has got to be so outdated as to be held together with duct tape and twist ties.  Surely they’re ready to move.  Perhaps they could build on the old EMC building site at the Bypass.

Best use would be of course a new building for the theatre, but I could also see another park there. Or how about a facility for all the nonprofits in town?  Meeting spaces, storage, etc.  It would be best if we could convince Goodyear to  move as well so we could have the whole block front to back.

See?  I’m just full of helpful ideas like this.  I need to start charging consultant fees.