Tuesday, Jan. 15, 42 A.B.
Hypatia, Harry, and Hans
Life is strange.
That is to say that despite the 22,560,000+ minutes of experience I've now had with life, I am regularly unable to accurately predict what the next minute is going to be like. That minute probably isn't going to involve my pencil getting up to dance the watusi with a resurrected crayfish, but I tend to be proved quite the fool whenever I expect much more than that.
Case in point: That Astronomy Picture of the Day site I linked to here on Friday. "Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer." Well, I clicked on it again on Sunday and found this:
It took a while for this to load, and of course it loaded in a series of bands, top to bottom. As it loaded, I sat here wandering exactly what the hell strange kind of intergalactic dust clouds the Hubble had discovered now. By the time the ear and eye had appeared even my brain was capable of realizing that this wasn't a dust cloud of any kind, but up until that point I had the strangest feeling that maybe - just maybe - I was about to see secret surveillance footage of my pencil dancing the watusi with a resurrected crayfish while I was out of the room.
Once the picture fully formed and that feeling left me without so much as a hug or a wave, the obvious questions remained: Who was this chick and why is she where something like a naked Crab Nebula ought to be?
Well, it turns out that this just happens to be Hypatia of Alexandria - a woman whose knowledge of math and astronomy made her one of the hottest things going about 1600 years ago.
"Reserve your right to think, for even to think wrongly is better than not to
think at all," Hypatia is credited with saying. "To teach superstitions as truth is a most terrible thing."Ahhh, it was love at first sound bite!
And learning of her intimate involvement with the astrolabe only deepened my infatuation. Mmmmmm, how I LOVE imagining the two of them together!
Unwilling to settle for the mere glimpse of Hypatia given by this site, I rushed to my Encyclopedia Britannica to learn more about this amazing woman - and to convince myself that she really HAD existed even though I'd somehow managed to remain utterly ignorant of the fact despite my more than 22,560,000+ minutes experience with life (see above).
"The first notable woman in mathematics.... her eloquence, rare modesty, and beauty, combined with her remarkable intellectual gifts, attracted a large number of pupils...." The phrases massaged my brain so sweetly, I rushed to read more and MORE.
Alas, the story soon delivered a sharp elbow jab to my heart....
"Hypatia symbolized learning and science, which at that time in Western history was largely identified by the early Christians with paganism. As such, she was a focal point in the tension and riots between Christians and non-Christians that more than once racked Alexandria. Shortly after the accession of Cyril to the patriarchate of Alexandria in 412, Hypatia was barbarously murdered by the Nitrian monks and a fanatical mob of Cyril's Christian followers...."
The Britannica goes on to say that many scholars left Alexandria soon after this and the permanent decline of that city began. At least that's what I think it said - even with my trusty magnifying glass and a night vision scope, it was a tad difficult to clearly make the words out through my tears.
(Note to the editors of the Britannica: That eye-catchingly explicit photo of a hymenostome on the facing page did NOT help matters any!)
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These events on Sunday would have been more than enough to make the day memorable. Little did I know that watching the evening news would make it even more so.
You know what I'm talking about - right?
Prince Harry has been caught smoking pot while away at school!
Seems the Buckingham Palace folks realized he was high off something the minute he waltzed in through the front door and declared, "I think Dad will make a GREAT king!"
They immediately attempted to scare him straight by sending him off to listen to hard-core heroin addicts tell their heart-breaking tales of blind, drug-induced faith in supply side economics.
I'm not sure if it worked, but I wish Harry all the best.
And I sincerely thank him for serving as the means by which the extreme shallowness of TV newscasts was conclusively revealed.
I mean, come on - they only have 22 minutes a day to tell us about all the wonders and traumas of an entire world of 6 billion people, and a teenage boy with a reefer makes the cut??
It would have struck me as ludicrous on almost any day of my adult life, I think. It seemed especially ludicrous on the day I found out that they could have been telling me about Hypatia of Alexandria instead.
*Sigh*
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THIS JUST IN!
The preceding entry has been ©Now by DJ Birtcher.
Stand by for instructions directing you to
the nearest shelter in the event it happens again!
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"So, Smart Guy - If you hate TV news so much, why the hell do you keep watching it?" my imaginary friend, Hans, asked me during the one call allowed him while he remains detained in an undisclosed location.
"Because of the pretty colors," I told him. "And because I'm curious to see just how bad Dan Rather's haircut can get. But mainly because of the pretty colors.
"I'm not proud of this, but there you have it. I'm visually addicted to the orange glow of forest fires, the brilliant yellow of bomb bursts, the rich browns of the typical courtroom, the ethereal blue haze of the monitors behind Peter Jennings, and a million other things I'd tell you about if the mere memory of all these things wasn't proving to be so damn intoxicating.
"Until reality allows me to crank up its color intensity knob as willingly as my 19-inch Hitachi, it can just curl up in a corner somewhere and bloody well watch itself."
I'm not sure, but I think hearing this made Hans feel much better about being locked up away from me....
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~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~What I Overheard My Imaginary Friend Sylvia Saying To Hans While We Were On The Phone: "We really live in marvelous times, you know that? Why, when Henry VIII swallowed a pretzel the wrong way, the poor people in Scotland had to wait weeks to find out!"
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