Although I was a bit of a smart-ass yesterday in the rubbing of my beach trip in the faces of cold Chicagoans, it should be noted that the beach trip came just in time to stop the first round of real homesicknesses I’ve had since I’ve been here. I spent most of Sunday and Monday realizing that it’s December now, and I see almost nothing of Christmas around. Families back in the States are cooking and gathering . . . this is the best time of year to be in the States. And what about Santa Clause and the North Pole and Santa hats makes any sense at all when it is 90 degrees outside?
I was working on Thanksgiving Day, and will probably be working on Christmas Day. This is not meant to be a sob story, it’ s just meant to say that I miss you, and would sometimes like to be cold with you there in Chicago, and eat pumpkin pie and gingerbread cookies with you. And, thanks to this beach trip and an unexpected videoconference with Sarah Lynch, I’m feeling much better now.
The beach was great fun. I went with about 20 other teachers from my school, and we were like kids at Christmas just to get out of the city. We spent the whole day idly swimming, chatting, riddling, and guitarring away the hours, just happy to be in that place at that time. We also played a game of beach soccer, which my right foot is paying the price for today. I was forced to teach the word “limp” to my class tonight, as I can’t currently walk without a very silly-looking one. Beach soccer is probably not the safest of ideas.
[of course this injury came THE DAY i learned from a friend a new way of teaching iambic pentameter, which is basically to get the kids to limp around the room and go "i AM a PIRate WITH a WOODen LEG" along with the cadence of their limp. So what do you think this girl has been singing as she hobbles around this city? You got it!]
Also, I have some new trivia for you, stemming from this lovely beach outing: (forgive me, I’m apparently taking the “stream-of-consciousness” route today . . . )
1) What famous actor can take the first five letter of his first name, and combine them with the last five letters of his last name to make the name of an American city?
2) There are two animals that, if you remove the third letter of each name and put the names together, you have the name of a capital city. Which two animals and which city? (national capitals, not state capitals)
3) Name a law breaker that starts with an S. Remove the S and one other letter to get the name of another law breaker.
First person who can answer all of those gets a cookie.
I also went for a little walk along the beach – something that must always be done at least once a day if you’re at the beach, and I came across this hat:
I didn’t take the hat – there were things growing in it – but I did wonder for a long while at just where it might have come from. Maybe Thailand? Maybe China? Maybe Australia? Maybe a boat somewhere in the middle of the Pacific? Maybe California????
This is entirely thanks to Bill Bryson, whose (photocopied) book “A Short History of Nearly Everything” I just read. Bill Bryson has mostly just angered me in the past, but I would highly recommend this book if you have 500 pages or so in you. Much of the book talks about how coincidentally we’ve come across many of the things we know about the world. For example, oceanographers traced currents more accurately than they ever had before in 1994, when 34,000 ice hockey gloves were swept overboard from a Korean cargo ship and washed up everywhere from Vancouver to . . . ahem . . . Vietnam. I’m not sayin’, I’m just sayin’.
So while I’m on the topic of a Short History of Nearly Everything, and embracing the stream-of-counsciousness mood, here are a few other things I learned (all shamelessly plagiarized word-for-word, almost). If you’re not interested in this kind of thing you can get off here, but for those who are, here are some new fun facts in my world:
- Protons are so small that the dot on this ‘i’ can hold about 500,000,000,000 of them, or more than the number of seconds it takes to make half a million years
- The edge of the universe, at least the visible part of it, is 90 billion trillion miles away
- Tune your television to any channel it doesn’t receive and about 1% of the dancing static you see is a remnant of the Big Bang – the very first photons converted into microwaves over all that time and distance
- Let’s journey to the edge of our solar system. Even at the speed of light, it would take seven hours to get to Pluto. But we can’t go at the speed of light, we’re limited to the speed of a spaceship – about 56,000 kilometers per hour. That’ll take 12 years. So that’s Pluto, but you keep going b/c the goal is the edge of the solar system. The edge of the solar system is when we pass through the Oort cloud, and we won’t reach the Oort cloud for another – I’m so sorry about this – 10,000 years.
- If you tried to draw the solar system to scale, you would have to make Jupiter the size of the period at the end of this sentence. Even then, Pluto would be over 10 meters away, and the size of a molecule.
- If you are an average-sized adult you will contain no less than 7 * 10^18 joules of potential energy – enough to explode with the force of 30 very large hydrogen bombs, assuming you knew how to liberate it and wished to make a point.
- The Earth’s magnetic field reverses itself every 500,000 years or so
- It’s been known for a long time that Yellowstone is volcanic in nature, but for a long time we couldn’t find exactly where the volcano was, b/c we couldn’t find the caldera (the pit left behind from a rupture). Turns out, that’s because virtually the whole park itself is a caldera. At some time in the past, Yellowston must have blown up with a violence far beyond teh scale of anything known to humans. Yellowstone is a supervolcano. It sits on an enormous hot spot 72 kilometers across and 13 kilometers thick. Its last eruption was 1,000 times as big as that of Mount St. Helens. The one before that was 280 times as big, and the one before that was at least 2,500 as big. It’s next eruption is also overdue by about 600 years.
So, I’ll stop boring you with fun facts from Bill Bryson now, but it’s cool stuff if you ever want a read. And don’t try to take me to Yellowstone anytime soon.
So in conclusion. I miss you. I’m sorry about the snow taunts. But the beach rocks. Bill Bryson rocks. And the world is big and cool.
The end.
