Holy Nova!

Either a supernova  or a mammogram.

So the Good Star Betelgeuse might be on the way out. One thing is guaranteed, humans being what they are (gullible, imaginative, and self-centered in the extreme): if Betelgeuse goes ahead and dies on us in a fiery explosion, a lot of people aren't going to be content to admire it for the awesome spectacle it is, but will impute all sorts of significance to it. It will be a sign of something: impending doom, God's Moral Flashlight, anything but the collapse of a massive star that has about run out of fuel and can no longer overcome the force of gravity. Nope: people already believe that their lives are disrupted whenever a planet looks like it's going backwards but isn't. They're not going to let a supernova go by without wringing as much meaning out of it as they can.

For instance, there's quite a lot of speculation that the Star of Bethlehem that led the three wise men to Jesus's bed of straw was actually a supernova. Now, right off the bat you have that problem with witness reliability: Matthew was the only Gospel writer who even mentioned a big star, which you'd think one of the others would have noticed. Especially if it was moving around the sky and pulling up short and parking right over the baby.

But evidently there was a doozy of a nova on February 23, 4BC. And some scholars, based on various things known about King Herod, put Jesus's birth at anywhere between two and six years before his birthdate, which is a good trick all by itself, but maybe not a problem for the divine.

We can't take everything the Gospel writers said to the bank. They don't agree with each other. Everyone has the blessed event taking place in Bethlehem, which concords with an earlier prophesy, but some have Joseph and Mary and the babe hieing off to Egypt and others have them right back in Nazareth, having only popped off to Bethlehem for the census.

(Think about that for a moment. We get all upset when someone bangs on our door for the census, or we have to fill out and mail a form. Imagine how a modern person would feel about making a road trip for the purpose. On a donkey. Pregnant.)

Anyway if it was that particular nova, once again, we're dealing with something that actually took place 21,000 years earlier, so if it really was announcing the birth of the Savior of Mankind, that was some slick planning. The only thing we know of that was happening around then was that people were moving to the vicinity of Canberra, Australia. And generally speaking it isn't mankind that needs to be saved when people start occupying territory, it's the animals that already lived there. Nevertheless, the whole coincidence--star blowing up, baby born 21,000 years later, mankind redeemed--is considered by some to be a mystical slam dunk, because God.

Now if good old Betelgeuse were to collapse this year, it really would've happened in about the time Peter the First of Portugal was born. Peter was in love with his wife's maid and his own father hired men to decapitate her; he had her dug up again, but nobody is reported to have sailed into the sky or anything, and he had to settle for matching tombs so that at least they could be together at the Last Judgment.

To be fair, lots of supernovas haven't panned out, Messiah-wise.

But let's stick to the convention that the significant event is the arrival of the light from the explosion to our planet. In that case, if Betelgeuse goes off now, we should start looking around for a new savior, and it's none too soon. I would've put my money on Greta Thunberg, but I guess it's too late.

My Stars!

Let's hear it for the Babylonians, who either invented or discovered astrology, depending, a long time ago. The Babylonians worked it all out just before being obliterated by Cyrus the Great--bummer they didn't see that coming!

But there's something to the idea that mere antiquity gives a philosophy weight. After all, rumors still persist that even before the invention of the written word, the primordial Wakka Wakka people were well on the way to proposing a Grand Unified Theory of particle physics, when unfortunately their oral tradition was disrupted by the terrible Tongue-Eater tribe bent on expanding their woolly-rhinoceros hunting territory. Such a loss.

Astrology, however, continued to thrive long after the Babylonians failed to, because it is fun. You get your own chart. It's your chart! Not really like anyone else's! You feel like a five-year-old with her first backpack that has her very own initials on it. It's very specific, and just as good at explaining your life as anything else. You can open a can with a car tire, too.

An acquaintance practices the occult arts for a living. Shortly after we met, she asked me my zodiac sign and I made her guess. She finally fetched up at "Libra" eight signs in. "You know how I knew?" she said, triumphant.

She has since explained various aspects of my personality to me, although I rarely recognize any of them as being my traits, and when I squinch up my eyes and say "Well, not really, I'm just the opposite," she tells me that it's because probably my moon is somewhere or other. Else. In a house. There are a bunch of houses. That moon could be anywhere. You can't trust it.

The idea is that the position of the planets (and moon and sun) at the very moment of your birth determines a lot about who you are and what you may become. Your whole natal chart is thrown out of whack if you're off by a couple hours.

Doesn't he look thrilled.

My mother was clearly aware of all this, which is why she had me induced one week before the school cut-off and two weeks before my due date, so that I would grow up to be the kind of kid likely to enter first grade at age five instead of age six and ultimately leave home altogether as soon as possible, because she and Daddy were getting on in years.

Astrology worked well enough to be considered a science for a long time, but there were always things that didn't quite add up, until, finally, the missing piece showed up in 1930, when Pluto came on board and straightened out the whole franchise. Unfortunately, he later retired as a planet, and now just does consulting part-time.

I'm not certain what mechanism the planets use to influence our psyches. Evidently it has to do with energy, which will remain undefined out of respect for its mystery. All the planets have different kinds of energy. I don't know which one holds the most sway over me. But the smart money is on a gas giant.

From Here To Totality

Let the record show we were on to it first. First, I say, and everyone else should get in line. By "we," of course, I mean my friend Linda, who notified me well over two years ago that there was going to be a total eclipse of the sun right handy-by, and that she was going to come out and watch it with us.

Not a lot gets by Linda, so it's good to travel in her wake. If there is a beetle in the natural world with a roof rack, pop-out cabinets and a convertible dinette, Linda has already read about it. If there is a sea creature with expandable tentacles for parachute capability that lures minnows by secreting vanilla pudding out its blow-hole, Linda will find it and send me a link. Linda can detect minor asteroids with her aura.

So this eclipse has been on our calendar a long time. "Great!" I said. "We'll do a little hiking, cook up a few nice meals, and the morning of the eclipse we'll pop down south a ways and soak it right up. Totality is only forty minutes away." Plans were later refined to get a slight jump by going to our cabin the night before, from which Eastern Oregon, with its more reliable sunshine, is but an hour's drive. We'll wander out to Madras, lean up against the fender, and have us a time. This was Linda's eclipse as far as I was concerned.

And then this eclipse got internet all over it.

Suddenly we are on the cusp of All Hell, and it's fixin' to break loose. One million people are slated to travel to Oregon just to see this sucker. Off the coast, the Cascadia Subduction Zone, leery of being upstaged, is sensing an opportunity to drown 300,000 tourists all at once. Inland forests and grasslands are expected to burst into flame from sheer anxiety. We are solemnly informed that allowing five hours to drive fifty miles is far too optimistic, and that if we really want to be in the path of totality, we should leave just before dawn four days ago. We should pack a cooler of water and sandwiches and a Bug-Out Kit with supplies to last three weeks including green-bean bake, freeze-dried protein pucks, astronaut poop bags, prescription medicine for ailments we don't have yet but which run in the family, a Glock, and a selection of luncheon meats. We should run through the list of personal friends that own helicopters and favorite them in our phones.

Meanwhile, astrologers have been working overtime to produce Content. Because this, that, and the other thing were mysteriously lined up when Donald Trump was born, we are warned that degrees were activated and are likely to be reactivated during the eclipse. A careful study of nearby celestial bodies, some of which have malevolent intent, reveals that something perfectly awful involving the president might happen soon, so watch out.

[Forewarned is still forescrewed, though.]

People who can't even get their Chevy to pass a National Guard water truck naturally ascribe great power to the moon passing in front of the sun. One fellow has advertised for a woman to conceive a baby with during totality. Such a child would be born to two parents who believe the universe is playing billiards with its matter-bits and who possibly shouldn't be trusted with a ballot; but confidence can get you a long way. For instance, this guy is pretty dang sure he can hook up with a random ovulating stranger and get the job done in a couple minutes, and I think he can, too.

Linda and I and our buddies Max and Peter are going for it. We're all in. If you don't hear from me by Wednesday, send someone out to paw through the charred-out remains of a mid-size rental car near Madras. It might smell like green-bean bake.

Knowledge In Retrograde

The Great Pootini

The other day my friend Dale made an announcement on Facebook. He said "nobody needs to know what I think about 'Mercury in retrograde.'" He typed it emphatically, you could just tell.  It's not always easy to judge these things in the digital world, but I believe he was taking a tone.

Dale and I are compatible spirits. We're not entirely alike of course. He tends toward melancholy, and I toward alcoholy. But I thought it was likely that if nobody needed to know what he thinks about Mercury in retrograde, maybe nobody needed to know what I think about it either. Which means I have to go look it up again so that I remember what I think about it. I try to keep a tidy house in my head and that means I maintain a running fire sale on thoughts that I haven't used in a few years.

So I looked it up. If a planet is in retrograde, it means it looks like it's going backwards from the vantage point of us on Earth. It's not going backwards. It's going the same direction as it always has. It's just an illusion brought about because the planets take different amounts of time to orbit the sun and they do a little leap-frogging. Shepherds who spent one heck of a lot of time under the stars noticed that the planets seemed to go astray every so often and, not having a clear grip on what was actually going on, began to read a lot into it. Maybe they fell into some hard times and squinted up at the planet backing up and thought: huh. We should probably be more cautious whenever that happens. And a whole network of observations and associations built up around these things and got passed down. It's like thinking your team loses when you forget to wear your lucky shirt, only bigger, inasmuch as it involves everybody and the whole solar system and all.

Thousands of years later when we're sophisticated enough to land a golf cart on a particular plain on Mars, people still figure the shepherds were probably on to something.

So I don't have the particulars, but you're supposed to approach decisions in your own life in specific ways whenever it looks kind of like the planets are going to backwards even though they're not. Like, right now Mercury is in retrograde. It's in retrograde an average of three times a year, so you have to stay on top of it. When Mercury is in retrograde, you might need to plan more carefully. With proper knowledge of your star charts, you would know when to plan for more spontaneity, say. And everyone isn't affected the same way. It depends on when you, personally, first presented your slimy self to the outside air. If you're a November baby, you might have to conduct yourself in a whole different way from a spring hatchling.

Which means my parents changed everything for me when they had me induced two weeks early. The effect that Mercury has on me as it trundles predictably around the sun but appears to be going backwards might be entirely different than it could have been, all because of parental fatigue and a  Pitocin drip.

If I do want to know what it is I should be doing, or doing differently, as a result of these celestial illusions, there's an astrologer in the neighborhood I can consult. Scoff if you will, but she's got powers. She gets bigger every time she approaches me and smaller when she leaves. Swear to Jupiter.

The Stupendamoon!

The moon was huge the other night. It was so big I almost got my period.  Supermoon, they called it, but that doesn't mean much. That's just more word inflation, which seems to be required in a world where, omigod, we're all brilliant and everything we do is uh-mazing. The moon is always worth looking at and doesn't really need a public relations department. I had the same thought I usually do when I see a nice full moon: wouldn't it be cool if we had a bunch of them?

I mean, wouldn't it be swell to be on Jupiter? Except for the chilly part. Sixty-seven moons winging around that thing, all taking different amounts of time to make the trip, some going this way and some going the other way. There would probably be people around who could rig up tables of exactly how they were going to be arrayed on any given night, but your average person is unlikely to be able to keep track of it without the cheat sheet. Which shouldn't detract from the sheer joy of it all.

Just my luck I'd be stuck on the bus next to someone who goes on and on about the relative positions of Ganymede and Io and the consequences for my fortunes. She'd reel off a dozen moons in retrograde that will soon collaborate on an auspicious moment for changing jobs or starting a relationship, and explain my own personality to me based on the confluence of Europa and Callisto at the moment my egg split off from the motherpod. And on Jupiter it could be a long, long bus trip. I swear, Jupiter is wasted on the Jupitroids.

Anyway, what we just saw here was the Harvest Moon. It's called that because it's a full moon that occurs during "harvest time," which is an old-timey expression from back in the days we didn't have mangoes and kiwi fruit available in the store all year, thanks to all that oil. Same exact moon in February would be called the Shoot Me, It's Still Raining Moon. If we could see it.

Harvest Time

Mangoes be damned, it does signal a change of seasons. We still have changes of seasons--most of us--because our planet is tilted in relation to the sun, and depending on where we are in our revolution, the sunlight is scoring either a direct hit or angling in. The difference between lolling on a raft in your underwear and having to wear everything you own just to cross the parking lot comes down to how much atmosphere that sun needs to slice through. And the atmosphere isn't very thick. It's just a wafer of batting wrapped around the planet. But that thin batting is why we have wind and weather and, for that matter, liquid water at the surface at all. We owe our very existence to that batting, but we've gotten mighty slapdash with it. We just keep dumping crap in it.

That's what happens when people keep their perspectives narrow. Heck, we think the sky is blue, when really it's black almost everywhere, as soon as you get a few miles from here. We even fancy God on a nice fluffy cloud in the blue sky and imagine it's heaven, although that would mean God is practically parking His Fanny on the earth itself. Hope he likes it toasty.

Make Room For Ophiuchus

By now most of you have heard that you are not the Zodiac sign you always thought you were, and have made appropriate adjustments. Unbeknownst to anybody but the ancient Babylonians, there is a thirteenth constellation in the solar ecliptic, and it's jammed right in there between Scorpio and Sagittarius. Moreover, those thirteen constellations have been changing around over the years since the Zodiac was first thunk up, due to the wobble in the earth's axis, which it could totally get under control if it cut down on snacks.

The Babylonians left out the thirteenth constellation probably because twelve seemed so much tidier. Thirteen is a terrible number, representing the death of your childhood and your entry into a lifelong state of pimples and anxiety. Sadly for Sagittarians, it is now the thirteenth star sign, with the new old boy Ophiuchus horning in there in twelfth place. I was the one who had to break it to Dave that he is now Ophiuchus, and he didn't take it well, although he admitted he had been feeling a little gassy lately. The constellation Ophiuchus is represented as a man holding a snake between his legs, so maybe "gassy" isn't really the attribute we're looking for.

In the new celestial order, I am no longer a Libra. As a Libra, I am fine with the news. We are the Scales: we weigh things. We  see one side, and then, on the other hand, we see the other side. We're good with anything. We do not have the courage of our convictions. We don't even have convictions. So if I'm now a Virgo, I can take it in stride.

Except, as a Virgo, I'm offended. There's a place for everything, and everything in its place. If something as large as a constellation can't even stay put for a few thousand years, what hope do we  have that anyone will  hang up their coat where it belongs? Honestly.

One aspect of the whole Zodiac thing that always troubled me, from my former position on the cusp where I could have toppled either way, is that a whole set of traits and fates depended on where the stars were when I busted out into the light, rather than when sperm met egg. (The sperm-and-egg thing troubles me too, because of what it implies about my mom and dad.) I was, in fact, born two weeks prematurely, because my aged parents, in a moment of prescience and clarity, were interested in getting me out of the house at the very earliest opportunity, and my due date would have held me out of first grade an extra year. I was pharmaceutically induced. My birthday is printed on a medical-appointment card I still possess. If mom had gone in one day earlier, maybe I would have been moved to keep my room clean.

Anyway, there have apparently been thirteen constellations all along. Which means the gods have been up there all this time snickering over us and our horoscopes. "Watch this," they are saying, "Murr thinks this is an auspicious time to buy real estate. Cue the floods!" Which kind of casts doubt, for the first time, on the whole serious business of astrology. The gods are laughing their gigantic fannies off.

South Dakota Legislature To The Rescue

A round of applause goes out to the South Dakota State Legislature for finally doing something about the threat of global warming science, taking direct aim and thwacking it with the arrow of nincompoopery. Not since their foremorons nearly eradicated the bison in the 19th century has such decisive action been taken on behalf of the common peabrain, a demographic unfairly underrepresented in the educated elites. It's about time.

The legislature passed a resolution seeking to protect children from the menace of a scientific education. It's a sound document, fortified by five "whereases" and a pack of "be it resolveds," and as such it demands serious examination. Let's take a look.

Whereas: Erik the Red settled Greenland where they farmed and raised dairy cattle, and [now] Greenland is covered by massive ice sheets...more than two miles thick. That sheet of ice, of course, was there when Erik was farming at its edge, although we do not blame him for it, since it predated him by over 100,000 years. In fact, it is the longest record of atmospheric data extant. You couldn't even slice former Alaska senator Ted Stevens' thigh open and examine the rings and get more information than you can out of that ice sheet--that's how old it is. We have no information as to whether Erik the Red's dairy cattle emissions contributed to a warming trend, although we do note that it wasn't until around the twentieth century that everyone on the planet was issued an internal-combustion vehicle and the Lord said, "Gentlemen, start your engines--" thus spewing an unprecedented volume of carbon into the air that happens to track precisely with global temperature spikes. Or am I being too facty?

There is a danger in displaying the fruits of one's education, since we do not want to scare off people like the two commenters on the recent Discovery blog post on the subject. One regrets that we know so little about the past because, as he notes, "what if the ancient Egyptians simply thought 'wow this is a hot year...or cold' and didn't bother to write it down." Or, I might add, what if they did write it down, but not in English? Where would we be? I would gently direct him to the Greenland ice sheet data (above), or even Ted Stevens' thigh.

The other commenter was incensed that a carbon tax might be levied, and wrote: "I'm not that concerned with global warming as I am with global pollution. If anything should be done it should be a way to curb pollution from burning fossil fuels and other industries." In cases like this, we're best off being grateful we ended up on the same page, even if we're reading different books.

Whereas: carbon dioxide is not a pollutant but rather a highly beneficial ingredient for plant life on Earth. Quite true. That's one thing it has in common with water, although, sadly, the legislature did not think to convene at the bottom of a lake. The legislature will not meet again until later this month, when the rise in real estate prices in the absence of real value will be put forward as evidence against the "theory" of gravity, and a proposal will be floated pointing out the cooling effects on the climate due to the accumulation of fairy dust in the atmosphere.

All right, let's wrap it up.

Be it resolved: that there are a variety of climatological, meteorological, astrological, thermological, cosmological, and ecological dynamics that can effect [sic] world weather phenomena...

Well, we know "thermological" refers to the infrared imaging of the human body, so that is undoubtedly relevant, as anyone who has noticed the temperature rise in a crowded room can attest. As for the rest, it is an established fact that Mars is going direct after being in a long retrograde, Venus just moved into Aries and there's a new moon in Pisces on the Ides of March (did they leave out numerological?), all of which points to transformation. So, bingo, right on the money.

...and that the significance and interrelativity [sic] of these factors is largely speculative.

Undeniable. And when one is dealing with the future, one would not want to speculate. We're better off waiting for the future to arrive, at which point we can really nail it down.