13-August-99 Meteor drizzle
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They call it a meteor shower and I guess if you have a really dark sky it can be. One year we were at Fundy National Park in New Brunswick and saw a lot of meteors from a good dark hillside by the Bay of Fundy. Last night we went out at about 10:30 and saw one good meteor, but all the weathermen (called meteorologists but not for that kind of meteor) said you'd see more after midnight. This morning we set the alarm for 3AM. The place with the most sky and fewest streetlights that we can think of in Newton is the field behind the high school. Even there, even at quarter past three, there was a bright pink glow in the sky on the Boston side from all the streetlights. There was a light fog, too. Conditions were not ideal. We got a blanket out of the car and laid down to watch.
Arlene spotted one that I missed. After several minutes I saw the most impressive meteor I've ever seen. It was cruising low left to right parallel to the horizon, going much slower than I expect a meteor to go, so I had time to say “There's one!” and have Arlene look long before it was gone. It left a trail so long and bright that you could imagine you saw individual sparks in the trail. I don't think it was even part of the Perseid shower; it was coming from an entirely different direction. We saw another bright one that was part of the shower, and I saw one that just looked like an extra bright star in Cassiopia that was just there for a second or two. It must have been headed almost directly at me for me not to have seen any apparent motion. Well, directly towards somewhere within a half mile of me. Even so, I'm glad those burn completely up forty miles up in the atmosphere! So we didn't see a lot of meteors, but the one good one was worth losing an hour of sleep for.
After that night I drove to work and went out for a uni ride on the riverwalk at lunchtime. Some people walking behind me said, “There are people who do that in the woods.” I've been seeing articles about off-road unicycling in On One Wheel, the publication of the Unicycle Society of America, but I haven't been tempted to try it. Today I was having trouble with my balance. Maybe it was that my tire was a little soft -- with a uni you don't get to say “my left rear tire”, nor even “my rear tire” -- but really, it's probably just that I'm out of practice.
Say, I don't think I mentioned this before, but a couple of weeks ago there was a Fed Ex truck in front of me as I made the next-to-last turn bicycling home. I looked at the logo, and couldn't believe I had never before noticed the arrow in the negative space between the E and the X. Take a look. It's a part of the background that forms a perfect arrow. I very much doubt that it's an accident; artists are trained to pay attention to background shapes as well as the foreground. The font, letterspacing, and relative heights of the upper and lower case characters work too perfectly for it to have been an accident. Even if you don't notice it, it gives a subliminal whoosh to the logo. OK, now you'll never be able to not see it.
I grilled a swordfish steak for supper. I've noticed that the grill, which is normally bright red, turns a darker maroon when there's a fire in it. I've figured that the color is somehow responding to the heat. Tonight it started to rail a little just about when the fish was done, and I watched the rain drop on the hot grill cover. Sure enough, the spots where the rain fell turned bright red for a few seconds, until the water evaporated and the enameled metal heated up again.
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