Wednesday, February 20, 2008
We don't believe in planetary portents, anymore...
but if we did, today would be a day for it. Big planetary doings:
Magnitude 7.4 earthquake in Indonesia - just a couple of hundred miles offshore from Banda Aceh, which suffered so much in the 2004 tsunami. No tsunami this time, and amazingly only 3 dead, although of course for those 3 and their families, "only" probably rings a little false.
And then there's the total lunar eclipse, which I couldn't figure out how to photograph, but it's going on right now and it's pretty spectacular here. There's thin broken clouds over Boston, so we are watching the moon disappear through a luminescent scrim of clouds.
Back in the day, we took this kind of thing pretty seriously here. The New England earthquake of 1727 set Cotton Mather off on a sermonizing tear replete with calls for public fasting. (Estimated at a 5.6 magnitude - definitely non-trivial, though amazingly there were no fatalities, a fact that was not lost on the sermonizers, who clearly saw this to be a divine shot across the bows of a potentially redeemable people.)
Magnitude 7.4 earthquake in Indonesia - just a couple of hundred miles offshore from Banda Aceh, which suffered so much in the 2004 tsunami. No tsunami this time, and amazingly only 3 dead, although of course for those 3 and their families, "only" probably rings a little false.
And then there's the total lunar eclipse, which I couldn't figure out how to photograph, but it's going on right now and it's pretty spectacular here. There's thin broken clouds over Boston, so we are watching the moon disappear through a luminescent scrim of clouds.
Back in the day, we took this kind of thing pretty seriously here. The New England earthquake of 1727 set Cotton Mather off on a sermonizing tear replete with calls for public fasting. (Estimated at a 5.6 magnitude - definitely non-trivial, though amazingly there were no fatalities, a fact that was not lost on the sermonizers, who clearly saw this to be a divine shot across the bows of a potentially redeemable people.)
