M.J. Rose

How was your eclipse?

Experiencing this fluke is even more rare than we can imagine…

From “Heard on Morning Edition,”

Why Future Earthlings Won’t See Total Solar Eclipses

by Nell Greenfieldboyce

“Anyone who gets to see the total solar eclipse on August 21 will be lucky — and humanity is lucky to live on a planet that even has this kind of celestial event.

Mercury and Venus, after all, don’t even have moons. Mars has a couple, but they’re too small to completely blot out the sun. Gas giants like Jupiter do have big moons, but they don’t have solid surfaces where you could stand and enjoy an eclipse.

And, even with solid land and a moon, Earth only gets its gorgeous total solar eclipses because of a cosmic coincidence.

“They appear to be the same size because of their distance away from us,” explains Amber Porter, an astronomer at Clemson University, which is in the path of the upcoming eclipse. The diameter of Earth’s moon is about 400 times smaller than the diameter of the sun, but “even though the moon is about 400 times smaller than the sun, it’s about 400 times closer to us here on Earth, which is how that perfect kind of magic happens.”

Because of this quirk, the tiny moon can obscure the entire face of the sun and reveal its eerie corona, at least right now. In the past, Earth’s eclipses did not look like this.

“The size of the sun hasn’t really changed over the age of Earth, but the moon has been moving away from Earth over eons. So in the past it looked bigger,” says Matija Cuk, a planetary scientist at the SETI Institute.

The moon is still moving away from Earth, he says. Every year, it shifts outward about an inch-and-half…”

For the rest, click here.

This is the oddest display of wealth we have heard of in a while: the phenomenon of ornamental hermitage.

From ati.com,

The Mysterious Lives Of 18th Century Garden Hermits
By Abby Norman

“The ceramic garden gnomes we see today have a very human — and very solemn — past.
Before the days of the ceramic garden gnome, a human being often played the role of stern, robe-wearing guardian of flora and fauna — and that person was preferably a grizzled old man who didn’t mind living in seclusion and forgoing even basic personal hygiene.

Meet the ornamental hermit.

Two trends in Georgian England created a moment in history for the phenomenon of ornamental hermitage: solitude and overt displays of material wealth.

Wealthy landowners desired expansive and often ornate gardens on their property, and would use these expanses to reflect not just financial riches, but existing social mores such as melancholy.

Elite circles viewed this deeper, more introspective form of sadness as a mark of intelligence, and thus sought to associate themselves with the sentiment whenever possible. Physical property presented an easy, obvious avenue to bring this social virtue of melancholy to life.

Soon enough, wealthy landowners began placing want ads in newspapers to fill this very aim. Ad writers often sought men who would agree to live in a garden for a span of time (usually about seven years, it seems) and devote themselves to a silent, forlorn — if not also wise and mysterious — existence…”

For the rest, click here.

Never mind the cathedral, look at the rose….

Painting by an anonymous artist from 1652 illustrating the founding legend of the cathedral; it is held by the Hildesheim Cathedral Museum.

From The Vintage News,

The Rose of Hildesheim: A thousand-year rose that’s believed to be the oldest living rose in the world

“The beautiful German city of Hildesheim is the home of the oldest living rose on the planet known as the rose of Hildesheim or the thousand-year rose.

She’s 69 feet tall and 30 feet wide and it’s believed that she was established by King Louis the Pious back in 815.

The rose climbs up the walls of a Catholic cathedral dedicated to the Assumption of Mary. The cathedral was hit by  Allied bombers during World War 2, and although the building was completely destroyed, the roots of the rosebush somehow survived and she blossomed among the ruins again.

The cathedral was rebuilt in the 1950s and 1960s in a simplified form and without its previous baroque elements that gave the building its Romanesque charm. After many years, on August 24, 2015, its renovation became a subject of the largest construction project in Germany in order to bring back the building’s old charm.

However, tourists visit the cathedral not only to see the building’s new look but also to admire the thousand-year rose that has become its most remarkable feature…”

For the rest, click here.