Monday Celestial Peekaboo – an OT for the Syzygy*

Did you enjoy the Total Apoceclipse today? Hope you did and did so safely. Permanent eye damage is no joke. It's Saturday I'm typing this, but it's safe to assume I didn't drive out to Indianapolis to view the totality. Hope you've gotten Bonnie Tyler out of your system too.

Sex, published October 21, 1992. She's dead. Wrapped in mylar.

The last total eclipse over the Chicago area occurred in the 1880s and the next one over Illinois won't be until 2099, when I presume A.I. will have taken over my Backtalk OT slots. We did have an annular solar eclipse directly over the city in the '90s though. I remember it only because I was working part-time at Barnes & Noble and a bunch of us took a lunch or smoke break on the rooftop during the event. Madonna's coffee table book ($50 at publication) for perverts the discerning erotica connoisseur was a couple of years old and remaindered ($5.99? maybe). One of the employees had removed the mylar seal from a copy and told us it was safe to view the eclipse through it (THIS IS SPECIOUS my brain warned) and through the darkest section of mylar (Madonna's golden tresses) I glanced at the sky but not the sun. I hope they all did the same. The sky had noticeably darkened, and that was enough evidence for me that the phenomenon had occurred as advertised.

Like Madonna's Sex, it was a bit of a letdown, an anticlimax. 

Still, I learned a few things: 

• Don't trust Don "Mylar is the same substance they use in eclipse sunglasses" E___. He's smart about some things and not so smart about many others.
• Don't joke that the people on the sidewalk "look like ants," when in truth you're only ~ 35 ft above ground level. People down there can hear you and they'll glare back at you, shaking their fists like, Come down here and say that, you. You, you you you... you... weisenheimers. 
• That dumb Madonna book is priced at over $900 by some sellers. I should have bought at least one if not the entire stack. Holy Moly, it would have covered the gas for a trip to Indianapolis.

But various science-y sites have insisted that the TOTAL eclipse is a "teachable moment" for those charged with small children so I'll be busy doing something else and just take a note of the dimming sunlight again. Having taken children (my own, ok? and occasionally a couple of their friends) to museums, shows, zoos, etc. for a number of years, I've heard from various parents that: puffins are baby penguins; red pandas are the smaller cousins of the giant panda; I just don't get that Salvador Dolly; salamanders are lizards; "Shhh, Tommy the adults are talking"; [points to a Caillebotte] says "I love Monet."; "Because God made the lungfish that way, Tommy!" and so on. I can't imagine taking the family to a large gathering and relearning that the most ignorant, for some godforsaken reason, speak the loudest. There are signs. With info. Read them. Relay them. Also there's a universe of information – and misinformation – in their pockets they could consult at any time if they could just stop LOLing and Xitting and TikTok-ing on it. Just say "I don't know," and look it up together. People stopped being cute a long time ago. We're way past our sell by date.

So in June of 2012, Venus transited across the sun, the second of a pair of transits eight years apart. I read that a safe way to view the transit is to get a telescope or binoculars† and instead of looking through them, point it/them away from the sun toward a piece of paper. If you do it right, the image of a tiny black dot crawling across the surface of the sun will be projected onto the sheet. My kids were three and seven and were respectively nonplussed and/or unimpressed. A decrescendo after much buildup – an anticlimax – get used to it kids. I thought it was cool though! and it's probably a decent way of watching an eclipse without the danger of damaging your retinas. I would double check that.

(T CrB, only about 3000 light years away in the Corona Borealis constellation, is due to go nova some time between now and September. Visible to the naked eye. Eighty years until the next explosion. Once in a lifetime, water flowing underground.)

The next transit of Venus won't be until December of 2117, so it truly is a once-in-a-lifetime event. By 2117, the LLM posing as SQRL 9.7.3 will be hallucinating a Backtalk post about chocolate-bunny-covered Mandelbrot pizzas delivered by FTL fractals so as to get your rehatching brood to the Universal Brothelhood on time, as foretold in the Ebook of AltMan, chapter 3, verses 16–18. In other words, exactly the same as it is now, the same as it ever was. How will your LLM respond?

TL;DR – I shaved today, the 2nd time this year, to have my picture taken for a Costco card. They've been clamping down on card sharing, and even though I'm on my spouse's membership, they insisted I needed my own card. Compare that with my driver's license, the renewal of which I completed online and will receive a new one this upcoming week, presumably with the same photo from fifteen years ago. Yes, I went to Costco instead of eclipse-viewing and probably napped afterwards, brimming with misanthropic bile.

 * Syzygy has long been a favorite word, in part cuz it's weird looking. I don't think I've ever used it in real life.

† Keep your 'scope on a different shelf from your kaleidoscope cuz WOAH that was weird and took me way too long to figure out WTF just happened. I blame exhaustion and heavy drinking after seven years of parenting bliss.