Blogs / Bad Astronomy

My wife brought home a booklet she picked up yesterday. Titled "Holistic Happenings" she left it out on the table so I’d see it. I sometimes think she’s trying to induce me into a coronary so she can reap the hundreds of dollars of my life insurance.

Anyway, I sat down over my bowl of generic-brand Cocoa Krispies and started reading the rag. I was expecting it to be silly, but my oh my. I nearly choked on my cereal.

There’s a column in the back for something called "Shamanic Astrology". You can imagine how I felt about that. The guru of this particular New Age, uh, stuff, had this to say:

"Wholeness is awakening to your shadow as well as your light, balancing the upper, lower, and middle worlds, and integrating your past lineage with your future soul intention. "

If you can understand what he’s trying to say there, seek help. And not the shamanic kind.

Normally, I don’t make fun of stuff like this, but c’mon. That sentence is meaningless. It sounds deep, but it doesn’t say anything. It’s content-free. It’s the celery stick of philosophy.

I know, I know– I live in Northern California, and I should expect such nonsense to pervade the culture. But it’s frustrating anyway. And I also know it’s not restricted to this area, it’s all over this country. Red state, blue state, this kind of fuzzy thinking can be found everywhere.

Do me a favor folks. I don’t care if you agree with me or not, but just do this one little thing: think. Think clearly. That’s all you need to do. As I like to say, the Universe is cool enough without having to make up garbage about it.

P.S. I have a general astrology debunking I’ll be unleashing on the website soon. Stay Tuned.

OK, so I stole the title from my own main page. I can’t very well sue myself.

But Mercury is pretty cool right now. I’ve been watching it the past few nights, and it’s sinking like a rock (har har) in the sunset. It was up pretty high just a few nights ago, but now it’s noticeably lower. It screams around the Sun in only 88 days, so every day at the same time you can see how far it’s moved.

This is a picture I took of Mercury and the Moon just the other night. By tonight the Moon’ll be way out of frame to the top, and Mercury will be lower. It’s pretty amazing. Mercury is pretty dinky (5000 kilometers across, while the Earth is more like 13,000) and pretty far away (47 million km as I write this), so it’s cool we can see it at all.

They say (whoever “they” are) that the great astronomer Copernicus never saw Mercury. It was too foggy in Poland in the mornings and evenings, and Mercury never gets far from the Sun. At sunrise and sunset it was also too cruddy outside for him to see it. Given that, I would think he was kind of a loser, except for that whole coming up with heliocentrism thing. I have personally never revolutionized astronomy, so I have to give him substantial credit for that.

Plus, he’s on Polish money, which is pretty cool too.

So, it’s come to this.

Perhaps it’s been too long coming. If you’ve read the site, you know I have a lot to say, maybe too much. There’s a boatload of astronomy out there, Bad and Good, and not enough time to write up whole pages about it. Plus, sometimes I just think of stuff (the bane of the thinker), and I might want to make a short, pithy comment for the Curious Masses out there.

So here you go. The BABlog. I may have a contest later on how to pronounce that. In my head, it kinda comes out “blah blog”. Anyway, it was either this or do a podcast, and a podcasting friend of mine told me how much effort a ‘cast would be. So now I’m blogging, because I’m nothing if not least effort.

The next entry will have actual content. I promise. Until then, welcome, and take an hour or two to poke around the main Bad Astronomy site.