Today is the day of the Autumnal Equinox, one of two points in Earth’s year-long trip around the sun when the planet’s and the star’s middles line up and we have equal daytime and nighttime hours.
The official moment is 10:09 central time this evening.
I like the equinox because it is one of the few calendar events that can be said to provide roughly the same experience everywhere on the planet.
What happens in the weeks before and after the equinox is vastly different, depending where you are. In the Southern Hemisphere, this day is a signal that summer is coming. In fact, some say we should call the two equinoxes “March” and “September” or “Northward” and “Southward”, because the terms we’ve been using are North Hemisphere-centric.
That’s undeniably true, but I do like the standard names because they make our Equinoxes seem like twins – related, but very different. One is hopeful, the other, dark.
So I’ve written them a little sing-song poem.
A pox, Autumnal Equinox!
A pox on your arrival.
To see the sun sink, southward bound
Bodes ill for our survival.
We’ll watch our day shrink to a blink
Its golden globe, a kernel.
Then wait through months of dark to greet
Your warmer brother Vernal.
I ask the question only because Minnesota is referred to as The Star of the North in our official state motto, L’Etoile du Nord. It also comes up in our state song, Hail Minnesota.
The official state website is called Minnesota North Star.
We have North Star Commuter Rail.
And of course our hockey team was the North Stars until they moved to Dallas and became the (ordinary) Stars. But if you’re a puckster looking at it from the Mexican state of Chihuahua, the Dallas team may still be the North Stars to you.
But North Star-ness is all relative to one’s position. Since Minnesota was once the northern most U.S. State, “North Star” made a certain geographic sense. But now the northernmost title for States of the Union goes to Alaska, no contest. Accordingly, the North Star is featured on Alaska’s flag.
There’s a New Jersey-sized section of Alaska called the Fairbanks North Star Borough.
And according to a controversial profile of Sarah Palin in Vanity Fair, the ex-Governor and conservative firebrand is rather fond of the name North Star.
It was a baking-hot Kansas afternoon, and from the lobby I watched as three slender, solemn young hairstylists and makeup artists approached a front-desk clerk at the Hyatt Regency hotel, in Wichita. The tallest of them said, “We’re here for North Star.” The desk clerk understood. He nodded and directed the three women to the Keeper of the Plains suite, on the 17th floor, where North Star herself awaited. The North Star is mentioned in Alaska’s state song and appears on its state flag. Fairbanks lies in a region called the North Star Borough. Palin is on the way to making North Star a personal brand. If she ever does run for president, it might well serve as her Secret Service code name.
I should point out, though this will come as no surprise, that the Palin profile is not flattering. The author, Michael Joseph Gross, claims that he wanted to write a positive piece but was unable to once he started talking to real, anonymous-by-request people. That may be true, but one must wonder how hard he tried. When the person you are writing about refuses to speak to you and you wind up interviewing restaurant servers to find out what kind of tipper your subject is (not very good, it turns out), I’d say the odds already favor a negative result.
But it does lead me to this question – would Governor Palin’s Minnesota non-admirers be able to stomach her adoption of “North Star” as a “personal brand”?
North Star? That’s us! Not only have we claimed it in all the ways I already described, but we serve as the headquarters for Polaris, a snowmobile company that has taken the North Star’s given name as its own.
But here’s the unfortunate truth – even Polaris itself can’t lay an unassailable claim to the title “North Star”. Sure, it has been the pole star for one half of planet Earth for many years and since it appears motionless in the sky it has served as a vital navigation guide to seafarers for centuries. But due to a rotational wobble called the Precession of the Equinoxes, even Polaris will one day lose the title “North Star” to a different twinkler named Vega. But don’t despair. In Twenty six thousand years, Polaris will get it back.
Fickle universe!
If you became president, what would you choose as your code name?
Here’s something for suburbanites to put in that empty third garage stall – a Space Shuttle.
With NASA retiring the orbiters soon, there is competition among museums to see who will receive one of the three remaining spacecraft. The good news? They’re free! The bad news? You have to pay for delivery.
This reminds me of the time when I was in fifth grade and I wrote to NASA to ask for a left over space suit. I was certain they didn’t re-use them. What adult would want to wear someone else’s yucky old astronaut costume, anyway? So why not take one out of the hamper and pop it in the mail? I could walk around inside it and impress my friends, and I figured the on-board air supply would come in handy in case Jennifer Brodie smiled at me again. The first time she did that, I found it impossible to breathe.
The Wall Street Journal article about museums vying to be the home of one of these space “thrifties” quotes an aerospace engineer and shuttle expert named Dennis Jenkins. He has written a history of the shuttle program and he explained why NASA requires candidates to have an indoor space ready for display of a vehicle. “They leak like a sieve,” he says. Apparently the icy vacuum of space and fiery re-entry are not an issue, but rain is another matter.
Watching this excerpt led to another realization about the space program. In the early days we sent monkeys and the Russians sent dogs, but did anyone ever think to launch puppets?
And speaking of public transportation, the Metropolitan council has posted a video game-like clip of the soon-to-be-built Central Corridor light rail line in action. I admit that I have a thing for trains, but I had no idea until I watched this sequence that the new line will float on a cloud of computer generated music.
What’s the coolest vehicle ever to take you from point A to point B?
Since I am open to any new idea that could lead to gainful employment, my attention was caught by an online article from CNBC about a relatively new business that predicts the performance of big box retailers by analyzing on satellite photos of their parking lots.
Yes, people look at parking lots from space. This is good news for me, since my “skill set” includes basic counting and the ability to recognize cars from overhead.
It’s not the planet finder job I was hoping for, but if I could break into this just-getting-off-the-ground profession, I’d be working with extra terrestrial equipment! And what better use is there for our off-planet photographic capabilities? We’ve already seen enough depressing images of melting glaciers and toppled forests.
Let’s find out who’s shopping at Wal-Mart!
According to Eamon Javers’ CNBC report, today is an important day for this new technique, as the second quarter profits are going to be announced and the satellite analysts have parted company with some of the other experts regarding Wal-Mart’s performance. Conventional methods say Wal-Mart will be down from the second quarter one year ago. The parking lot surveillance data from Remote Sensing Metrics says Wal-Mart will be up a bit, based on a surge of cars in June. If the space camera is vindicated, you can expect more off-planet surveillance and new ways to analyze the data. We could look at parking lot trash patterns, vehicle slot alignment trends, handicapped spot pilfering rates and trunk loading vs. back seat stuffing matrices.
I would be interested in working out a Cart Corral Correlation.
By counting the carts inside the cart corral and comparing that to the carts cast aside at curbside, could we concoct some conclusions concerning community spirit as it correlates with carelessness around cars? I bet we could!
Give me a magnifying glass, and I’ll get to work!
Do you always return your shopping cart to the corral, or are you an abandoner?
Tell the truth!
Trail Baboon 