Pale Blue Dot

I was cleaning out my hard drive and came across this picture, which blows my mind every time I look at it:

That is called the Pale Blue Dot.  It was taken in 1990 by the Voyager 1 spacecraft.  The "dot" is Earth, depicted against the vastness of space.  It looks so lonely; it's hard to imagine how teeming with life the planet is.  The best part of the picture, for me, is that it looks like Earth is caught in a shaft of light.  Really it's not a beam of light shining on it directly but a refraction of sunlight in the Voyager's camera optics.  But look at how tiny we are!  Earth is taking up less than a pixel of this photograph. 

Carl Sagan wrote a book called Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space.  In it, he references the photograph, saying,

"The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds . . . It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known."


Sir, Say no More

Sir, say no more.
Within me ’t is as if
The green and climbing eyesight of a cat
Crawled near my mind’s poor birds.

-Trumbull Stickney

Roid-mato

Look at the size of this tomato!

I got it yesterday at the CSA (there's your assonance).  Whatever farm that supplies them is supposedly organic, but this is a juicehead gorilla tomato if I've ever seen one. To give you some perspective of scale, here it is beside your normal Trader Joe's variety:

I actually think it's closer in size to this watermelon:

This called for a line-up reminiscent of the scale of planets in our solar system:

And then I got carried away:

I included Pluto as a planet even though I know it's been downgraded because the strawberry was so cute next to the tomato.  And isn't the plum Earth pretty?  Hey, look at all that consonance.  Consonance and assonance in one post?  That's a lot for a Friday.  Therefore, no rhyming for you.  Much like the planets revolve around the sun, many things in my life revolve around food and bugs, and with this ham-fisted segue, I leave you with this old poem I wrote:

A Morning Miracle

I happened to see Jesus one day in a line of ants.
Around my bathroom sink
they walked the curved
and narrow, careful
to avoid the temptation
of going for a swim for a bit
of sticky toothpaste.
It wouldn't fit God's will to get
out of order for pure greed,
and gluttony is a deadly sin.
So they plodded across
the great white virginal countertop,
I suspect on their way to turn a cracker crumb
into loaves of bread for thousands.

Grandma and the isotopes

You know when you're searching for something in your email?  You type in a word like "flapjacks" in the search box because you just know you have a flapjack recipe that your cousin sent to you three years ago.  You always meant to use it.  Surely you didn't delete it.  There are 7497 MB of storage space in this mailbox.  You keep everything.  Where is it?  Then you find yourself scouring message threads from years past (that may or may not have contained the word "flapjack") about which you had completely forgotten?  Sometimes you stop to read and reminisce or think about your situation at that point in your life.

Well, this happened to me when I searched the word "pie" (most of my searches are food-related), and I came across a series of emails between me and my sister, Tara.   This correspondence occurred over a period of time when she was living in Italy and I was staying with my grandmother for a summer in between semesters.   Tara was feeling full of woe, mostly due to the constant striking of the Italian transportation labor unions, which made her commute to work hellish to say the least.  Every day I was receiving an email with yet another tale of woe to the point where I ended up writing,

"No offense when I tell you that having a 'tale of woe' to look forward to in your emails is not the most scintillating thing.  Could you maybe change it up every once in a while and re-title these anecdotes more positively, like Tales of Once in a Lifetime Opportunities, or Tales of Doing Something Amazing?  That'd be swell and way more uplifting."

In return, I promised her a limerick.  Who doesn't like a limerick?  They are fun, they are familiar, they are rhyme-y.  They all consist of the same format and rhythm.  For many, they are a creative way to tell a dirty joke.  (We've all heard about that poor girl from Nantucket.)  But for my sister, I decided to try a daily dose of limericks based on the ridiculousness of my life living with Grandma.  Take, for instance, the isotopes.  I had forgotten all about them until I found this gem in the same series of emails:

"Today G'ma had her stress test.  I dropped her off at the doctor this morning and she told me to come back and pick her up when she was done.  Boy was she cranky this morning, having had no coffee for 3 days and no food since 6 am.  Well, when I picked her up she said, 'Now I have to drink lots of water because Tom told me that I'm full of isotopes.'  Tom was the technician at the doctor's office.  G'ma loves Tom because he was very nice to her and calmed her down.  She said she asked Tom how long she was going to be full of isotopes and he said, 'That is a very good question.'  And then he guessed that it would be about three weeks.  Now G'ma uses this excuse for everything.  Example:  'Lisa, I'm going to lie down because of the isotopes.'"

Well, upon reading this I didn't even remember what an isotope was, but this is what I wrote to Tara:

Do you know what an isotope is?
They're the cool thing to say in the biz
of handling old ladies
who drive big mercedes
to the doc for a stress test pop quiz.     

There it is.  Your daily dose of poetry.  It didn't hurt, did it?