Bill Murray's Blog, page 81
August 14, 2017
Call to Eclipse Action
Let’s get one thing straight at the beginning. A lunar eclipse simply will not do. You may have seen a partial solar eclipse, but neither will that do. The sun is such a monster that until a few minutes before totality the light from the sun blasts right around the disk of the moon and the Earth is little changed.
Annie Dillard wrote that the difference between a partial eclipse and a total one is the difference between kissing a man and marrying him.
Just so. So people search out totality, no matter how remote the spot. We’ve gone three for three, with clear eclipse skies over Lake Balaton, Hungary in 1999, Cappadoccia, Turkey in 2006 and Svalbard, in the Arctic, in 2015. Next week we go for four for four in a home game.*
Next week three hundred-plus million North Americans will have a shot at witnessing totality.
Please, I’ve got you by the shoulders now with a square look in the eye: Do this, go out of your way to get up and go and see it. If you’re lucky enough to have clear skies, those two minutes will change everything.
Bob Berman writes in Wired,
“Have you ever witnessed a total solar eclipse? Usually when I give a lecture, only a couple of people in an audience of several hundred people raise their hands when I ask that question. A few others respond tentatively, saying, “I think I saw one.” That’s like a woman saying, “I think I once gave birth.”
His point is that
“to most people, it might seem (reasonable) that seeing a partial eclipse ought to be almost as good as seeing a total eclipse, and it’s certainly a lot more convenient. Why travel? The sun being 99.9 percent eclipsed doesn’t sound too different from its being 100 percent eclipsed, right?
Actually, seeing an almost total eclipse is no better than almost falling in love or almost visiting the Grand Canyon. Only full totality produces the astonishing and absolutely singular phenomenon that resembles nothing else in our lives, on our planet, or in the known universe.”
Jay Pasachoff, an astronomer at Williams College in Massachusetts who is a veteran of almost three dozen total solar eclipses has some numbers:
“…when even 1 percent of the sun is visible — a so-called 99 percent partial eclipse — the sky is still 10,000 times brighter than it is during totality because 100 percent coverage causes the sky to get darker by a factor of a million. So even if 1 percent of the sun is visible, you miss all of the exciting phenomena associated with totality. So we’re trying to persuade all 300 million Americans, plus all the Canadians and all the Mexicans and all people from Central America and from northern South America, to travel into the path of totality — OK, maybe not literally all of them — but for those who can make it, it will be a wonderful thing for them to see. A total eclipse is indescribably wonderful.”
•••••
* And for taking pictures, what a luxury. With no need to leave stuff at home, no travel constraints, I’ll have 800 and 400 mm lenses on two Nikon DSLR bodies primed to bracket seven and nine exposures.
August 12, 2017
August 11, 2017
Weekend Reading
A few interesting articles to enjoy with your favorite beverage this weekend:
A Total Solar Eclipse Feels Really Weird by Bob Berman in Wired
The End of “Here and Now” by Alexandra Samuel in JSTOR Daily
The Omnipresence of Dust in Kathmandu by Abby Seiff at psmag.com
Will Russia Interfere In The Finnish Presidential Election by Pekka Virkki in Up North magazine
How to kill a dinosaur in 10 minutes by Paul Braterman at 3quarksdaily
The Haunted Mind: The Stubborn Persistence of the Supernatural by Bo Winegard and Ben Winegard at quillette.com
August 10, 2017
Chill
How’s August treating you? Is it warm where you are? Here’s a little refreshment, from the very northern tip of Newfoundland.
August 9, 2017
Quotes:
Andrew Bacevich, listing his policy prescriptions for America in the Trump era, in Tom Dispatch:
The challenge of the moment is to embrace radicalism without succumbing to irresponsibility.
August 8, 2017
Annie Dillard’s Total Eclipse Essay
Timely reprint of this Annie Dillard essay reprinted in today’s online The Atlantic. In Out in the Cold, I quoted Ms. Dillard writing that a partial eclipse just won’t do, and what do you know, I wasn’t the only one.
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“Seeing a partial eclipse bears the same relation to seeing a total eclipse as kissing a man does to marrying him, or as flying in an airplane does to falling out of an airplane.”
Election Day
Best of luck to Kenyans for a violence-free election today. Here are live updates from a Ugandan website. Here is some very thumbnail background on the issues. For a much richer portrait read Michela Wrong’s book It’s Our Turn to Eat.
August 2, 2017
Quotes:
The concept of one-size-fits-all health care is antithetical to the ethos of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Americans see health care as a status symbol, like big houses and expensive cars.
Konrad Yakabuski in the Globe and Mail
and I’m not saying that’s a good thing.
Gray Day at Terminal 5
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Again.
July 28, 2017
And Then, a Night at the Opera
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After their cruise yesterday, Presidents Niinistö and Putin joined us at the Savonlinna Opera Festival for the Bolshoi Theatre’s performance of Pytor Tchaikovsky’s Iolanta.
It was an authentic treat to hear the The Bolshoi Theatre Choir and Orchestra play Tchaikovsky, but the presidents and their retinues kept largely to themselves.
