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Serious Science People know that there is no correlation between moon phases and the waxing and waning of lunatic behavior. And yet, the tiny hairy drama queens in this household are busy turning it up to eleven.
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Write your own metaphors jokes here, because I have to go mop up another puddle…
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Yutsano
Yes because we all know astrology is bullshit and there’s no way celestial objects could possibly have ANY affect on us. Jeez it’s like Einstein shouldn’t have bothered sometimes.
And this is a decent view of the moon. Also.
sukabi
the tides go in, the tides go out… moon has no effect at all.
Martin
There’s no fighting in Benghazi, but a beeb reporter saw a fighter plane shot down and AlJazeera reporters had their vehicle shelled.
I know all governments lie, but you’d think the more corrupt ones would learn to be more subtle about it.
Calouste
The GOP has conclusively proven that there is no correlation between moonphases and the waxing and waning of lunatic behavior. Ok, there is waxing, but there sure as hell isn’t any waning.
Calouste
@Martin:
Gaddafi is just trying to capture Benghazi before the Franch jets appear. He really only has a few hours though.
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
Fuckin’ magnets- how do they work?
Martin
@Calouste: Yeah, I’m not so sure about the ‘few hours’ part though. I don’t know what time the summit will happen, but they better have tactical plans ready to go with wheels up once that summit lets out. And that means leading with a daylight strike which they’d much rather not do.
It’s 10am there now. I’m sure their preference is to not send anything manned in for at least 9 hours.
Steeplejack
Anne Laurie:
Heh. So true.
Steeplejack
@Steeplejack:
Oh, wait . . . you weren’t talking about some of the threads from earlier today? My bad.
Martin
Cool picture of that jet being shot down.
Just Some Fuckhead
I think we should prolly just let it go. I don’t have a good feeling about it and I’m the sorta person that can sit and pull the wings off of flies, paint them with gold stripes and glue them back on. Let’s just all agree to rise above it.
Just Some Fuckhead
FYI, Martin, yer near constant war pr0n stream sickens me. It seems so out of character.
Amir_Khalid
Give the BJ commentariat’s great love for our four-legged friends, I think this video from Japan is worth calling attention to.
JPL
This is from the BBC
Libyan government spokesman Musa Ibrahim said in a press conference “it’s our country”, adding: “We could never and we would never fire one bullet against our people … Come and make sure for yourself that this is the reality.”
I guess it depends on the definition of our people..
JPL
@Amir_Khalid: Thanks! In the comment section, it mentions that both dogs were rescued.
Winston Smith
ICANN has approved the .XXX top-level domain.
It’s a sponsored domain, so you can’t just get a domain name, you have to apply for it. Theoretically, they can deny your application is your web site isn’t smutty enough.
Over 200,000 pre-launch applications have been filed.
I wonder if Furniture Porn will get a new domain and update their site.
I wonder, also, if you need to be pornographic. What if you just want to be perverse? In that case, I might register freerepublic.xxx and repost their content verbatim.
Calouste
@Winston Smith:
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sarahpalin.xxx with “highlights” from her “speeches” and “interviews”?
Linda Featheringill
@Amir_Khalid:
I was told that those two puppies were rescued. The sicker one is receiving medical care and the brown and white one is in a foster home.
Lots of loyalty there.
JPL
Anne should put the dog video on the front page. A few weeks before Christmas I was dog sitting a maltese that my son wanted to surprise his significant other with. I have a small goldfish pond in my backyard and Miss Moxie would push the little pup away if she went near it. Dogs are amazing and loyal creatures.
debbie
@ JPL:
It’s like Baghdad Bob has a soul mate, no?
MikeJ
I was going to link to Keziah Jones’ “The Waxing and the Waning”, but couldn’t find a copy on youtube. This will have to do.
And I’ll throw in everyone’s favourite vdub commercial.
cathyx
I thought that narrator sounded like a young Mr. Rogers. Can you say supermoon?
gnomedad
@Calouste:
Heh, she’ll be forced to get it before someone else does.
keestadoll
I have never used a full moon to excuse my behavior and I don’t plan on doing anything more wantonly absurd than what I would typically do on any other day and in all kinds of weather… If you can’t stand by your crazy for crazy’s sake, then I have no use for you.
Delia
And what about increased werewolf behavior? Has anyone thought about that?
burnspbesq
Whine you’re certain to hear from your favorite wingnut friend today, after Obama picked 29 of 32 NCAA tournament games correctly:
“He spends too much time watching basketball when he should be attending to the nation’s business.”
sukabi
@burnspbesq: they started that the other day… in relation to Libya and other stuff..
debbie
Funny, they never complained about GWB tooling around on a Segueway.
Mart
I think you folks did not watch the video or last month’s full moon. We were pulling in a parking lot in the evening and this gobsmackingly large full moon was rising over the horizon. Even the chillins were amazed. I thought the horizon made stuff look big because the light waves had to pass through more atmosphere. Think the clip said who knows why.
Anyway – check out the moon rise or moon set. You will not be dissapointed – it is huge.
Dennis SGMM
@debbie:
Bush managed to fall off the thing. That small gesture cemented him to his equally capable demographic.
maya
Super Perigee moon? Why not just call it that ol’ Bill-O moon.
cmorenc
Some interesting natural facts about viewing the moon from earth:
The angular size of the moon at its average distance is 1/2 degree (horizon to horizon the sky is 180 degrees, in a flat place unobstructed by mountains, treelines, or buildings). It’s a nice coincidence that the moon moves 1/2 degree per hour in an eastward direction relative to the background stars (from its orbital motion around the earth), i.e. an angular distance identical to its own diameter. This orbital motion of the moon itself is to be distinguished from the apparent westward motion of the entire sky from the earth’s rotation as the night progresses (stars, planets, and moon included), which is about 15 degrees per hour.
As the moon progressively goes through its phases, from full to new to full again, it rises on average around 50 minutes later each day (until it completes a 24-hour cycle over its approximately 29-day orbit around the earth). On the night of the full moon, the moon will rise at or very near sunset, and set at or very near sunrise, and rise progressively later (and with a progressively waning percentage of its surface showing) each night thereafter, until about 12 days later, it doesn’t rise until nearly first dawn’s light as a very thin crescent, and is lost in the glare of the sun for the next three days, around when it is a “new” moon (and absent from the dark night sky entirely). By a couple of days past “new” moon, it becomes visible as a very thin waxing (progressively increasing) low in the sky right at dusk, and each night advances eastward about 12 degrees (1/2 degree per hour * 24) from where it was the night before, and sets about 50 minutes later, and the lit visible part grows a bit more, until two weeks past the last new moon, it is full again.
One implication is that while most people don’t notice the moon except at night, the partial moon remains visible for awhile in the morning during waning phases, and becomes visible in the afternoon for awhile before sunset during waxing phases. The moon’s apparent orbital track across the sky is close to, but not identical to the apparent path of the sun across the sky (called the “ecliptic”), which is why we don’t have solar and lunar eclipses every single month, but rather only at times when the moon’t path coincides with the ecliptic.
slag
It definitely looked bigger to me the other night before I had heard of this super perigee moon stuff. I went to check the mail, looked up, and called the SO over to check out the big moon. Even when the moon’s not on the horizon, I say you can definitely distinguish a difference.
Bill D.
The explanation I’ve long heard is that the large size of the moon on the horizon is the actual size (in terms of angular proportion) while the smaller size when it’s high in the sky is the illusion, as at that time there is nothing to compare the moon to, to gauge its scale. This would seem to make more sense.
Commenting at Ballon Juice since 1937
The only times I have been significantly ill in the last 20 years was during some abnormal celestial event. The family is all “come outside and check out the sky” and I’m “if I get up I will hurl”. I’m not superstitious but I understand the motivation to be.