Just saw the waning goddamit so much for my great new mnemonic waxing crescent moon heading for the western horizon, which reminds me that I was happy to notice it, high in the sky, this afternoon, while sitting for two hours in the parking lot politely called "the Van Wyck Expressway." It made me think, as it always does, of a story my college roommate told me, about being in a science class way back in elementary school or junior high, when he dared to contradict the teacher when she said that the moon was never visible during the day.
"Do you want to flunk this class?" she explained, and so Bob chose discretion as the better part of going Galileo.
This is not meant to support some Republicanesque call for incompetent teachers to be fired, every day, so that we can pay the remaining ones even less, because Free Market!!!1!. It is just to suggest that a refresher course in pedagogical mentoring & science might sometimes be in order, although I admit the initialization could use some work.
[Added] Yeah, well, I still can't say "van gockhkhkhk" without feeling pretentious, either.
[Added2} What I saw was a bit less mixed with clouds, but M. Bouffant has captured the essence, as he so often does.
[Added3] Some more pictures, sent in by Ocean, below the fold.
Accompanying text:
Yesterday I stepped outside and saw the beautiful moon. No picture (at least with my humble camera) can capture its beauty, but, I wanted to share it with you since I saw your blog post about it the other day.
I played around with my camera to see if I got a better shot, and then edited the contrast/brightness with one of them, but it didn't improve a whole lot.
Pretty nice, nonetheless!
7 comments:
Proof!
And thanks for the reminder to post the proof.
"Excuse me for pronouncing it correctly," as my Comp Lit professor said when he showed the class a slide of The Potato Eaters.
Haha! Exactly.
What's especially troubling about that science teacher's statement (in addition to the iron-fistedness) is that I would think that everyone who has taken even a rough interest in astronomy (or even just happens to have a functioning set of eyes) would have witnessed such a phenomenon.
Maybe she was more of a geological bent, or she was raised in some strict version of one of the women-as-property religious, and so was always looking down at the ground?
In all seriousness, it is hard to imagine how you'd never have noticed that. Probably why I have remembered it all these years.
"you" being "she," of course.
Added pix from Ocean.
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