Some Saturday Tidbits
An item I came across in an MSNBC slide show (The Week in Pictures) piqued my curiosity and I started looking for details on the Knoxville Rubber Duck Race because that sounded interesting to me on this Saturday morning. I never found a site that satisfied that curiosity. I came across many sites that wanted me to register (I find that practice mostly annoying) and this site that didn’t ask for registration but I think is asking for something else, maybe gullibility. They did have me for a minute.
More on Rubber Ducks at Rubber Duck Land.
The only positive thing I can take from last night’s dismal Saints performance is that I didn’t have to watch it.
I did go outside for a few minutes at about 11PM to try and see a few Perseid meteors. It was a bit hazy and a bit cloudy overall but it was mostly clear in the northeast. I was a little early for it but I managed to see one fairly quick meteor in those few minutes before I succumbed to exhaustion. They thrill me and humble me all at once. Most of them are millions or billions of years old and have traveled millions or billions of miles. That you are in the right place at the right time for that fraction of a second when their travels come to an end and they burn up on entry into our atmosphere is humbling by any definition of that word. I might have put on a pot of coffee if I didn’t have to get up at the usual time and go to work today.
6 days until Ya Boys Auction (Go Erasers), 15 days until CFFL Draft Day (Go Ragpickers), and 26 days until football season (Go Saints) begins...............
Quote of the Day
The region's greatest anti-terrorist minds; including Carl Sexton, South Knox Bubba, Bjorn Knoxley, Say Uncle and Brehd Patchley have developed a response plan that is currently being enacted.
Brehd Patchley, Knoxpatch.com
Blog of the day here.
Quote from said blog: "the beginning of the ghost festival and im feeling peckish. :P"
That rubber duck article is hilarious. hahaha! I went outside at 12:30 and lay on a blanket looking up at the stars and sleeping on and off. I finally went back in at 3:30. I saw a few meteors. Not as many as I expected. Still... it was worth it.
I prefer the Geminids in mid-December. This won't be a very good year for it because of the almost full moon. When its good, I grab one of my Adirondack chairs and a pillow, wrap myself in a blanket with a pot of coffee, and enjoy the show in the clear, crisp, pine-scented winter air. It is one of my very favorite things to do.
I really liked the way you phrased your observance of the meteors. The comic "Bloom County" (not to be mistaken for the sad reincarnation "Opus" in our Sunday paper) had a few poignant strips with the young black Einstein character stargazing and marking our humble place in the grand scheme of things.
Thanks, Scott. I've honed it somewhat over the years since I first made that observation and I could probably leave the "millions" out altogether. Meteors are space debris mostly from comet trails and its thought that comets were formed when the solar system was formed. I think all meteors are probably billions of years old. Love 'em.