Stars fell

To the uninitiated, it would have looked like an odd ritual to have driven into Lake Hudson park last night in the dark and come upon 16 or so people lying flat on the ground or in lawn chairs intently looking up. For meteors.

Viewing conditions were quite good, but I was disappointed with the results. I must have seen a couple of dozen from the annual Perseid shower, but there have been better years. It’s been a long time since I’ve had a better year. Is that particular asteroid belt running thin?

Unless two people spot a meteor, it never really happened according to my wife. It was probably only a lightning bug caught in peripheral vision.

• What’s the best way to keep a shark at bay? You need a can of this repellent made from “the rotten carcasses of other sharks, which had long been part of fishermen’s folklore.” It might work on humans, too. The inventor says it’s an extremely horrible stench.

• A commenter recently commented that I take cheap shots at Sarah Palin every other week. I think I spread it out a little more than that, but here’s the second reference in two weeks. She recently wrote about the “death squads” that the sick and elderly would have to face if the health care reform proposal becomes law. Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski wasn’t pleased with that statement:

“It does us no good to incite fear in people by saying that there’s these end-of-life provisions, these death panels,” Murkowski, a Republican, said. “Quite honestly, I’m so offended at that terminology because it absolutely isn’t (in the bill). There is no reason to gin up fear in the American public by saying things that are not included in the bill.”

Murkowski has enough problems with the bill as it is “without making things up.” Now who was it that recently told the press to “stop makin’ stuff up”?

• Archeology without a shovel: It was tried out in Italy to look for traces of ancient Venice when Paolo Mozzi, an Italian geomorphologist surveyed an area with infrared cameras during the severe drought of 2007.

• I’m looking forward to Ian Frazier’s upcoming book called “Travels in Siberia.” With a couple of Russian men, Frazier crossed the enormous country by vehicle from the Baltic Sea to the Pacific Ocean in a little more than five weeks. He’s published two excerpts in the New Yorker. It’s just packed with so many interesting tidbits about the culture of Siberia.The only time he saw a seat belt used was when one car was towing another. In the far eastern area, Chinese workers are employed in the construction industry. Their hardhats are made of wicker. A campground looked as those some confused people had decided to set up tents in the town dump.

I have been in mosquito swamps in beaver meadows in northern Michigan, in boreal wetlands in Canada, and near Alaska’s Yukon River. Western Siberia has more. On calm and sultry evenings when we busied ourselves around the camp, mosquitoes came at us as if shot from a fire hose.

Posted in It's life.