The Other End of the Telescope

I have it on good authority (Wikipedia or The Smoking Gun, I can’t remember which) that sometimes when people make discoveries or craft clever inventions that could change the face of the world, they irresponsibly share their findings with other people instead of keeping the whole thing to themselves to pass off to huge conglomerates later for outstanding sums of money.

That’s what a man named Galileo did all those dusty years ago and is the reason I am now sorting through headlines that shout peculiar things about the public display of various bits of Galileo’s anatomy, which somehow became separated from the whole of Galileo in general. If you’re interested at all in the science of mathematics, you’ll be excited to hear that these random pieces are known as fractions, and therefore Galileo is still teaching us things long after he was buried, which is when he did the most traveling.

It seems that Galileo Galilei, which would be a smashing name for a romance novelist, came to be known by the Church as a Very Bad Boy. Back then Church was spoken with a capital C and in charge of the way people thought about things. Today Kanye West and Taylor Swift take care of all that.

The Church was mad because after Galileo invented a nifty tool called the telescope, he found out that the earth spun circles around the sun instead of the other way around, which caused me to fail Physical Science and send my Grade Point Average, which is essential for getting allowance, into the dumpster.

The Church put Galileo under arrest in his house where he whiled away the last years of his life playing video games in the basement instead of inventing more stuff like You Tube or Google or things like that which would make life easier for those of us who were grounded for making bad grades in science.

The Church wouldn’t let Galileo, whose name begins to look funny after you write it a lot, be buried any place good like under the Hollywood sign or on Broadway. So a long time after he died, people who secretly liked the telescope because they could use it to spy on their neighbors who should keep the curtains closed anyway, dug up Galileo’s bones and took him to be buried near his best friend Michelangelo. During this important scientific process, known as migration, a person described in local stone tablets as an admirer, lopped off some of Galileo's spare body parts in case there was a market for them on e-Bay. In case it comes up, I’d rather my admirers just send a nice card.

However, since Galileo died before inventing e-Bay, which is really more like something another old guy named Da Vinci would come up with anyway, the random body bits got tucked away in the junk drawer in the kitchen or the box of Christmas decorations in the attic or in a spare teenager’s room, where they wouldn’t be found for many years.

Luckily for us, we live in a generation where we’ve discovered things of our own, like how bad it is to use water bottles more than once and that the decomposed body bits of our friend Galileo were hidden secretly in a box with a big statue of him on the top. Unfortunately this discovery came along too late for me to write a report and save my science grade, but maybe they’ll do somebody some good.

I don’t think Galileo will be using them any time soon.

From Polar Caps to Cold Feet

As a woman who can no longer figure her age without the aid of a scientific calculator, a sheaf of graph paper, and a Number Two pencil, I completely understand the concept of global warming. I haven’t even hit the half century mark and I don’t break out the sweaters and scarves unless ice is forming under my fingernails. Mother Earth has got me beat by a few decades, give or take a period of conquering hordes, a roving band of dinosaurs, and a Crusade or two. I figure tornado-force winds come from her fanning herself to keep cool.
In my younger years I was the first in the neighborhood to break out the faux fur and firewood, but these days my polar cap is melting at a rapid rate, which is the only explanation I can find for my humid hairstyle and damp T-Shirt. If I had to hold the heat of all the people on Earth, there would be a spike in the number of new oceans, not to mention some even greater lakes, and not a small increase in tributaries. All of these new bodies of water would spring to life in the wee hours of the morning accompanied by a good bit of tossing and turning and 37 trips to the bathroom. It's odd, though, how the temperature of the whole is greater than the degrees of the parts. My behind is the permanent victim of Chinook winds and my feet are wedged firmly in an Antarctic ice floe. But I wear the Equator like a halo above my sweatsoaked brow.
I don’t mind the aging process. The popping of my joints makes for a lively rhythmic beat to keep me from napping at my desk in the afternoons, and I’ve become accustomed to wandering from room to room searching for a clue as to what I was looking for in the first place. But if Mother Earth is ahead of me in menopause years, I can understand why history repeats itself. She lost her place and had to start over.