Wednesday, August 11, 2010

The burning tears of St. Lawrence

The stock market tumbled a bit today.

If I were paying attention, I might release some more stress hormones worrying about retirement. But the plants in my garden grew just the same.

The Federal Reserve is buying more Treasury's, and the sky may be falling.

No matter--tonight the sky is falling, as it has each August, as it will--the Perseids peak. Get outside, look up, and watch pieces of a comet fry as they hit our atmosphere.





Oh, you can look at the purty pictures by National Geographic, and you can blather on about radiants and ZHRs and all kinds of nonsense, but none of that will take you back a few thousand generations as a brilliant bolide breaking across a sky we rarely even notice anymore.

You can feel the oxytocin wash over you as the night's cool air reminds you that we are, after all, part of this world, the real one, the one that will exist long after the words "Dow Jones" fall from our vocabulary.



The Perseid photo is from National Geographic here.


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