Lunacy...

I don't know a whole lot about the moon, really. And by "the moon," I mean "our moon," i.e. the moon orbiting planet earth. It is of course rather... um... terracentric... of us to call it "THE" moon, when so many of our sister planets have far more exciting moons. For example the moons known as Europa - my all time favorite moon - Callista, Ganymede and Io. These all happen to be all moons of Jupiter, which are the only moons I know by name. I sort of wish our moon had a personal name too. I think various cultures and civilizations have called it by names, and of course the root for most moon-words is from the latin Luna, the moon goddess. I think I'll start calling her Luna, just to spice things up a little. See, all of Jupiters moons have fascinating goings-on, giant ice rafts above bogglingly deep seas, active vocanoes, just to name a couple. By comparison, our moon is a real dullard. It's pretty much a lump of cheese, er, I mean, basalt. Once when I was 20 I held a piece of the moon. This lady from NASA brought it into a geology class. It was in an aluminum pelican briefcase with a combination lock on it and the NASA insignia embossed deeply. She took it pretty seriously. Apparently there's not really all that much moon rock on earth, partially because, I think, it's so dang boring. Not a lot of variety to study, like rocks here on earth. I think boring describes our moon pretty well in general. It's telling that from our perspective here on Earth at least, the time we get most excited about it is when we cast our shadow on it. This is what happened last night, and in a pretty visceral way I got excited about it. Actually, it probably wasn't in a visceral way. It was probably in a very cerebral way. There have always been ideas about how the moon affects natural phenomena on earth. Physical phenomena such as tides are pretty indisputable. Biological phenomena such as physiological and mental cycles in living organisms such as ourselves... now those are pretty DISputable... However, I like to think that even if slimy sea creatures and myself are both somehow affected by the periodic gravitational tug of the moon (which makes me rightly feel my kinship with them), I enjoyed yet another benefit of my higher biological complexity last night. The tides weren't affected by the total eclipse. It's just a shadow, duh. The sea anemones in dark tidal pools weren't affected by the eclipse (unless, I suppose, the photon flux change somehow registered with them to crawl out from under a rock or something...). No, this astronomical phenomenon went not to my viscera, but to my cerebrum (I'm a lame anatomist, GI- or neuro-, so excuse me...). I felt the queasiness somewhere deep that only natural aberrations on such a grand scale can impart to sentient, intelligent beings... After the brief goose bumps went away, what did I do? Well, I set up a camera to take a timelapse to post to YouTube of course, which I'll I close this post with. I'm which I'm assuming will set an all time record for factual foibles in my blog, so for your convenience in mending the mis-information I've potentially foisted do feel free to visit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon. Maybe I should read it myself. Or maybe I want Luna, that homely goddes, to remain partially mysterious to me...