As Les UDs prepare to leave for Big Meadows at Shenandoah National Park, the way they do every August, to mark the twin celestial events of the height of the Perseid meteors and UD‘s birthday, some sources warn them to trim their expectations. Meteor-shower and fire-ball-wise, what you’re after, in the words of the great jazz standard, is No Moon At All; but this year what you’re getting is a great big ol’ moon.

Howsomever.

We are instructed by a raft of astronomers to go for it anyway.

Despite the light bath, there’s still hope for a good show for a couple of reasons. First, the shower is prolific — Perseids flash by at the rate of more than one a minute. Even if you reduce that by more than half due to moonlight, that’s still around 25 per hour. Second, this famous annual shower is the undisputed king of fireballs …

Indeed, when I’ve seen fireballs at Big Meadows it’s been indescribably exciting.

Just as exciting, now that I think about it, have been the full moons in clear skies that I’ve seen at Big Meadows. Here’s a birthday post of mine from three years ago.

August 15, 2019

A MOON UNLIKE ANY UD HAS EVER SEEN

The irony was that we were there for the perseids; but sitting on our rickety beach chairs at the Big Meadows clearing last night, the real show turned out to be an absolutely full brilliantly lit moon that insinuated itself as a silver glint among horizonal clouds and then raised itself up to surreality right before our eyes. UD grabbed her binoculars and attempted to make credible the massive and intricately legible orb, its hollows and craters so blatant… When it climbed to higher clouds, they made a golden aura together, the moon now and then blindfolding itself with a black ribbon of atmosphere, and I sat there thinking about my mother who loved the night sky. And of course immediately came the thought that has so often for so long come to UD: We are here to experience the terrestrial wonder that our dead don’t get anymore. We’re doing it for them.

… and kisses the modern world goodbye. Eli Lilly and Cummins are the first major employers in the state to announce that if they’d WANTED to move to Mississippi, they would have done so. They’re initiating the withdrawal method.

Other corporations located in the state will follow.

Happily, there will be new jobs opening up for the unemployed Hoosiers they’re leaving behind — in knitting needle, coat hanger, crochet hook, and arsenic factories.

Over the years, I struggled with what came to be characterized as “major depressive disorder,” and took a cornucopia of medications. Nortriptyline, paroxetine, venlafaxine, buspirone, sertraline, citalopram, pregabalin, mirtazapine. None worked. Optimistically, I tried lurasidone, bupropion, and vilazodone, followed by aripiprazole, amitriptyline, and zaleplon, which also made no difference. Then Restoril, protriptyline, desipramine, escitalopram. Nothing. My psychiatrist began to talk ominously about “treatment-resistant depression.” Nonetheless, I carried on with fluoxetine, temazepam, triazolam, and trazodone.

This piece in the Atlantic is an astringent little take on lethal sadness.

In the worldview most folks in the anti-abortion movement have, abortion is murder. It’s worse not only in the sense that it’s certain death, but that it’s intentional. From their standpoint, if some women die because they’re refused care, that isn’t a certain death, there isn’t intentionally going to be a death, so that’s the lesser of the evils in that situation.

… take a bow! Look what the refusal of many of you to vaccinate your children has brought back.

… we gotta start talking stoooopid “exceptions.” Gag me.

It’s all the fault of that ten year old vixen who made that guy keep raping her. If she’d just quietly hemorrhaged giving birth as God intended, no one would have been the wiser.

*************************

I mean, did I say “That baby deserves a right to life whether it is conceived in incest or rape or there are concerns otherwise for the mom.” ?

HAHA I WAS JUST KIDDING. I MEAN OKAY LET’S UH… LET’S … LET THE MOM LIVE!! HOW’S THAT? YOU HAPPY?

… of the race.

Navarro says something mean about Kushner.

What an impressive achievement for the Jewish homeland.

Dick Cheney is certainly right; and it’s not just Trump. Sometimes the entire Republican political establishment looks like cowards.

But at least they’ve got Josh Hawley: The man who stood up to Finland and Sweden!

Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kan.): “It was a quite a gut punch. [Kinda like an illegal abortion, Senator.] Yes, I’m shocked, absolutely shocked. [Guess you’re spending too much time in DC. Maybe you should visit your state occasionally and get to know the people who live there. Or maybe Kansans should vote for a Senator not liable to be totally shocked by lopsided electoral outcomes in the state.] But regardless, I respect the process. .. That’s not what I was expecting, not what I was told the polling showed, and I thought it was gonna be a tight race. But it is what it is. And, again, I respect the process. I don’t have an explanation. [What a telling confession. You really have no explanation at all for this result? … Let’s start real slow for you. Are you able to come up with any explanation at all for why a person might vote in favor of abortion rights? Take your time.]“

[I]f abortion supporters could fare as well as they did in Kansas, they would have a good chance to defend abortion rights almost anywhere in the country. The state may not be as conservative as Alabama, but it is much more conservative than the nation as a whole — and the result was not close. There are only seven states — in the Deep South and the Mountain West — where abortion rights supporters would be expected to fail in a hypothetically similar initiative.

Kansas is just a blip.

At one level, the Republicans do realize that actually winning the culture war requires them to do what the white South did to post-Reconstruction Blacks: deny their critics the right to vote. That’s become the fundamental electoral strategy of a party that understands that they can’t hold power in an America based on majority rule. But it may be that their racism, sexism, homophobia, assault-weapon infatuation, and primitive religiosity targets so wide a spectrum of Americans that no campaign of voter suppression can encompass all the Americans they’ve threatened, or deter all the enemies they’ve made. It was the good Republican middle-class suburbs of Kansas City that doomed their anti-choice amendment last night. Does the GOP have to keep them away from the polls, too?

You take away Americans’ established rights at your own peril, as Kansans made very clear last night.

*************

Harold Meyerson, The American Prospect

As of Wednesday morning, Mr. Greitens had mustered less than 19 percent of the vote, a distant third-place finish. Mud that rancid still sticks.

More on Greitens.