The Eclipse

Can I get a big shout out for Eclipse Monday!  For the vast majority of this planet, today will be a day just like any other.  Here in Central Pennsylvania, it will go dark, at least for the most part.  We're not under the direct path of the moon's shadow, but we will get dusky.  Temps will be in the upper 60s (F).  Winds will be calm; that's right, they're not going to get excited about something that's happened millions of times.  

As you can probably tell, I'm not that excited by today's astronomical event... or, if you want, you can call it celestial.  You see, this is not my first rodeo.  There was another full eclipse of the sun when I was a child, about 8 or 9 years old, and people were just excited.  I was excited.  Back in the early 1960s there was another eclipse, though Central PA on caught the edge of that one.  My dad, who was working at the Good Samaritan Hospital in Lebanon, brought home some exposed X-ray film and cut it up into squares so we could watch the moon pass in front of the sun without burning off our corneas.  It was a big thing for me.  Today's eclipse?  Been there, done that.  What a shame for all of those eclipse watchers that we're most like going to have cloudy skies.  We will be dusky.

Yesterday work was slow.  I'm betting it's going to be slow again today because so many people are going to standing outside gawking at the sun as they try and blind themselves.

A long time ago there was a group I like named Travis.  They had a decent hit with a song called sing.  I bought the CD.  While they continued to make music, Sing was they're only big hit, and I thought they'd gone the way of most one hit wonder bands, until last evening.  The group has been putting out new music for years.  Here's their latest.  It rocks.

And, as expected, the approaching eclipse has brought the crazies out in full force, especially the Evangelical, Conservative crazies, like Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the rather dim governor of Arkansas.  How dim is Sarah?  Well, Sarah's believes that today's eclipse is the equivalent of "the sky is falling."  Yepper.  Catastrophic and Calamitous events will abound..  Things are going to be so bad, that Sarah's decreed a pre-emptive State of Emergency for Arkansas.  I actually began to read her decree and had to stop because I was laughing to much, I kept spitting out my morning coffee.  She had evidently decided that eclipses are Woke, and it is her job to prepare the people of Arkansas for the end of the world.  Honestly, there's stupid, and then there's Republican stupid.  Of course, there's always the remote possibility that Sarah knows something we don't.... nah. She's just dumb as a brick.