As I was sidewalk dining last night at a local restaurant in Portland Oregon, my hometown for 66 years now, the waitress handed me this comic cut out from the local newspaper. [She knows that I provide a public service of sidewalk astronomy here with large telescopes for more than a couple decades. I really appreciated seeing this, because I constantly get this [poetic and sometimes humorous vernacular,] while out at the telescope with the general public. I’ve never seen this comic before but it reminds me of the past famous Bloom County by Burke Brethed, or a little bit like Pogo, from a generation ago when I was a child. As I was hired to teach astronomy at a local University about 16 years ago, I had a Calvin and Hobbes comic cut out from our daily newspaper and pinned to my office door. It was in a similar vein about why all humans love to look up at the stars and how this increases ones philosophy of worldly outlook, even if many of us speak in a varied vernacular, whether common language or scientific idiom. I’m surprised that this column allows me to speak/write this long here. I thought it would cut off with a word limit. But just to add to my recent research about the public, possibly lacking in scientific learning, I would strongly recommend that others see the last interview that Charlie Rose conducted with Carl Sagan in 1996. Also see a short 9 Minute excerpt as an interview that Tom Snyder conducted in 1976 on his Tomorrow Show, with the media expert, Marshall McLuhan. It’s great to see the old classic mediums of printed comics still in hard-copy out of a newspaper today. Thanks for publishing this and I hope that we can keep the younger generation still reading real hard-copy print books.
As I was sidewalk dining last night at a local restaurant in Portland Oregon, my hometown for 66 years now, the waitress handed me this comic cut out from the local newspaper. [She knows that I provide a public service of sidewalk astronomy here with large telescopes for more than a couple decades. I really appreciated seeing this, because I constantly get this [poetic and sometimes humorous vernacular,] while out at the telescope with the general public. I’ve never seen this comic before but it reminds me of the past famous Bloom County by Burke Brethed, or a little bit like Pogo, from a generation ago when I was a child. As I was hired to teach astronomy at a local University about 16 years ago, I had a Calvin and Hobbes comic cut out from our daily newspaper and pinned to my office door. It was in a similar vein about why all humans love to look up at the stars and how this increases ones philosophy of worldly outlook, even if many of us speak in a varied vernacular, whether common language or scientific idiom. I’m surprised that this column allows me to speak/write this long here. I thought it would cut off with a word limit. But just to add to my recent research about the public, possibly lacking in scientific learning, I would strongly recommend that others see the last interview that Charlie Rose conducted with Carl Sagan in 1996. Also see a short 9 Minute excerpt as an interview that Tom Snyder conducted in 1976 on his Tomorrow Show, with the media expert, Marshall McLuhan. It’s great to see the old classic mediums of printed comics still in hard-copy out of a newspaper today. Thanks for publishing this and I hope that we can keep the younger generation still reading real hard-copy print books.