[MD] Star Gazing

[Case]

[Case to SA]
You say you got time to listen to bugs and gaze at the stars. 

Get a life, man. 
Get a life.

[SA]
I am really laughing inside... thanks  
By the way, I wish I had more time to listen to bugs and gaze at the stars,
maybe I should make more time.  Gotta go.

[Case]
LOL, at least you got that it was a joke. Sense of humor is a rare commodity
in these parts...

BTW I did not have to go to Miami so life on Jupiter will just have to wait
until I get around to it.

[Arlo]
My point?... Er, don't really have one. But Case, forget the report, the
chips for football can wait. And the oil in your car will seem less
important if you find a good night spot and watch the stars for a bit. Oh,
and take some Molsen... 

[Case]
It is a sign of the times that we consider star gazing a luxury. Never in
history have people had to travel to appreciate the heavens. Learning to
recognize the various constellations in the night sky is as good a way of
learning how our forbearers thought as any I can think of. Over the years I
have tried to learn one or two new constellations a year. I only know about
20 but each one of them has given me a better appreciation for the sense of
wonder and sense of humor of the ancients. One of my favorites in this
respect is Virgo. When you finally get a handle on her you notice that she
has a faint red star as a nipple on her breast and what I like to call a
twat star where her legs come together. Since her legs are not together I
assume she was not expected to retain her name for much longer. 

One evening I was trying to figure out Aries the ram. I had found the right
stars but could not see a Ram. All at once I had one of those Gestalt shifts
and saw that it was a perfect Ram's head and it was staring at me. I almost
fell over in shock.

[Ian]
Perhaps you should "get a life" lie flat on your back in a field (with or
without stimulants) and look up at those stars once in a while ...
did you ever read the story of how Douglas Adams came to write H2G2 ?

[Case]
I may have read that story but have forgotten it. This whole discussion
however did remind me of this:

_________________________________________________________

>From the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams:


The Total Perspective Vortex derives its picture of the whole Universe on
the principle of extrapolated matter analyses.
 
To explain - since every piece of matter in the Universe is in some way
affected by every other piece of matter in the Universe, it is in theory
possible to extrapolate the whole of creation - every sun, every planet,
their  orbits, their composition and their economic and social history from,
say, one small  piece  of fairy cake.
 
 The  man  who  invented  the  Total  Perspective  Vortex  did  so basically
in order to annoy his wife.
 
 Trin Tragula - for that was his name - was a dreamer, a thinker, a
speculative philosopher or, as his wife would have it, an idiot.
 
 And she would nag him incessantly about the utterly inordinate amount of
time he spent staring out into space, or mulling over the mechanics of
safety pins, or doing spectrographic analyses of pieces of fairy cake.
 
 "Have some sense of proportion!"  she would say, sometimes as often as
thirty-eight times in a single day.
 
 And so he built the Total Perspective Vortex - just to show her.
 
 And into one end he plugged the whole of reality as extrapolated from a
piece of fairy cake, and into the other end he plugged his wife: so that
when he turned it on she saw in one instant the whole infinity of creation
and herself in relation to it.
 
 To Trin Tragula's horror, the shock completely annihilated her brain; but
to his satisfaction he realized that he had proved conclusively that if life
is going to exist in a Universe of this size, then the one thing it cannot
afford to have is a sense of proportion.