Daytime Moon

Weeks ago I took this picture on one of the occasions when the moon is visible during the day.

Upon zooming, one can see the high level of detail that can be obtained with modern cameras, with not only maria but individual craters clearly visible in the picture.

We constantly hear in the media about supermoons, the phenomenon in which the moon appears slightly (though not, in my experience, noticeably) larger than normal.  And sometimes we hear about the various seasonally-named full moons, like the Pink Moon.  But we never hear about the daytime moon, which to me is much stranger.  

When I see the moon suspended in the daytime sky, I feel as if I am on some alien planet where I don’t belong. 

But then, I usually feel like that anyway.  

The Local Noodle Restaurant

Tonight I happened to walk by the local noodle restaurant.  It was filled with teenagers.  When I was that age, my peers didn’t go to noodle restaurants.  When I was that age, though, I don’t think that noodle restaurants existed.  I imagine that for the teen demographic a noodle restaurant fulfills the two major requirements, which are that it is cheap, and that it gives them an opportunity to get away from their parents.

Whenever I see a group of young people, I can’t help thinking that I’m still one of them, or at least not far enough away from that time that I couldn’t fit in with them.  I want to approach and address them thus: “Greetings, teenagers!  I am one of you!  I belong among you!  Guns N’ Roses rocks!!  I can’t wait to watch Dana Carvey and Mike Myers on Saturday Night Live tonight!!  I have a computer that I use for word processing and video games, because those are the only possible uses for a personal computer!!  My phone is hooked into a wall!!!”

And then I come to my senses and remember that I am well over 800 years old.  Now I’m just left sitting here, wondering what happened to all that time.  And I guess that everyone is left just sitting here, wondering what happened to all that time, unless you’re one of the teenagers sitting in the noodle restaurant eating noodles.  

The Great Unknowns

Another month has passed, and I am still not in a blogging mood, and still more in a hibernation mood.  

To give me a post for the month I’m putting up two unfocused pictures that I discovered among my recently taken digital photographs.  I don’t know what I was trying to take a picture of in either case, and I suspect that I may have taken both by accident. 

I would be interested to know, however, what that brown object in the center of the first shot is.

January 2019

I suppose that it’s time to put something up in order to keep up my one-post-per-month rule.  I haven’t felt like blogging.  Maybe I’m still tired from all the blogging that I did in the fall.  And, at this point in the year, shouldn’t we all be hibernating?

It seems like only a few weeks ago when I was writing about how strange it was to be starting 2018.  Now 2018 is gone, and so is 1/12 of 2019.  

Anyway, here’s a picture from a few weeks ago.  It’s rare that I take a picture where the world is yellow and orange.  I find that mostly the world is nothing but grey and blue.  

Christmas Music Recommendations

Soon it will be Christmas, when we can all settle down for a long winter’s nap. And I think that we should all settle down for a long winter’s nap, a very long winter’s nap, given my previously-expressed opinion on human hibernation.

But, until then, why not relax with some of my favorite pop-rock Christmas songs (of which there aren’t many)?

This one brings back the best memories.

  I find this one the most musically interesting.

If you want that Eighties snarky attitude, try this.  

Or . . . for something that was only a year earlier, but went in an entirely different direction, specifically the direction of a depressing Seventies-style singer-songwriter Christmas, there’s this.  

Fall Fell

As I understand it, in mature forests, most of the trees are of the same kind, and so in the fall they all change color at the same time, leading to brilliant displays covering entire mountainsides.  But in the suburbs, people have planted many different kinds of trees that change color at many different times. In this area, at any point in the autumn one can find trees of different species anywhere on a continuum from fully green to completely leafless.  

To whatever extent there can be said to be peak color around here, it would likely be found in the first week of November.

Here is some foliage from the weekend after Halloween.

Two weeks later, it was all gone.

Ultimately, there is nothing remarkable, or even worthwhile, about my observation; I am just impressed with myself for taking before and after pictures that line up as well as they do.  

The Graveyard of Decorative Plastic Halloween Skeletons

Regular readers of this blog (by which I mean my family members and close personal friends) will be aware of my one-man crusade to expose the scientific inaccuracies of decorative plastic Halloween skeletons to the world (by which I mean my family members and close personal friends).

The weekend before Halloween, I was walking around town looking at the decorations, and I came upon this display.  It contained almost every plastic animal skeleton of which I had previously been aware, and some that I had never seen before, letting me know that there is more material out there should I wish to continue the series for a third year.