Evanston: spring cleaning
Evanston: spring cleaning
I noticed that yesterday I wrote ‘gray’ and on January 25 ‘grey’. Both are correct. One is the English spelling and the other American. I can never remember which and being exposed to both, use them interchangeably. I just looked it up and ‘grey’ is British.
I thought it was George Bernard Shaw who said, “England and America are two great countries divided by a common language.” And so he did, but Oscar Wilde may have said it first.
In checking that out I also discovered that, “There are lies, damned lies, and statistics,” which I attributed to Mark Twain actually comes from Benjamin Disraeli, of whom I am presently reading in a book about his rivalry with Gladstone, THE LION AND THE UNICORN.
The use of grey/gray twice recently was justified by Chicago tying an all-time January record for seven consecutive days without sunshine; the month being the seventh gloomiest January on record; and this the most severe winter in Chicago for more than three decades.
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One of the websites I visit each morning is The Astronomy Picture of the Day at http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html. It keeps things in perspective.
Today’s looks like a sky full of fireflies, a cloud of fireflies. But they aren’t fireflies, they are galaxies.
There are times when I almost think the universe may not be about us.
Thursday, February 14, 2008