by | August 12, 2010 · 12:28 pm

Catch a Falling Star and Put it in Your Pocket

London, 1866. Photo courtesy of Agnes Giberne/Newscom

The last time I watched a meteor shower, I was wrapped in a blanket on Roe Park field in Highland Falls in the middle of October. It was freezing, but it was pretty awesome. So, if you have something you’be been meaning to wish upon a star about, tonight would be the night.

According to the Christian Science Monitor, the Perseid meteor shower has been raining down for the past two nights, and is set for an American performance early Friday morning. This shower is created from the debris of the Perseid comet, which flies around the sun once every 135 years, last passing in 1992, according to the CSM.

The debris “is a very old stream that has been building for a long time and is a very dense concentration of dust,” meteor researcher Peter Jenniskens told CSM. “If you look back at records from the Middle Ages, you can see that people in the Middle Ages were seeing the Perseid meteor shower.”

So grab some wine and a blanket and venture out around midnight tonight. For more details, vist the American Meteor Society .

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by | August 11, 2010 · 3:43 pm

Mecca Mean Time?

Me and the Meridian Line, Greenwich, UK, 2008.

In high school, my friend Elliot asked this girl what time zone all other time zones are based off of. This girl, who was beautiful but let’s just say she didn’t get the best grades, answered “Greenwich Mean Time.” All of us, both shocked and impressed, congratulated her on the great answer. Then Elliot asked her where Greenwich was located, and true to form, she answered “Connecticut.”

Well, come Thursday, we could all be wrong. According to the Daily Beast, “Saudi Arabia is building a giant clock tower in Mecca, and some Islamic scholars hope that ‘Mecca time’ will replace Greenwich Mean Time as the accepted start of each day.” Fox News is already activating the nuclear bombs we all know they have under their New York studio. They are now pointed toward Mecca, instead of 45 Park Avenue, New York, NY (look it up).

The clock, which is slated to begin keeping time on Thursday (or will it be some other day that Mecca time just makes up?), will be positioned on top of the Royal Mecca Clock Tower, and will be the second tallest building in the world.

I say we just get rid of time all together. I haven’t slept since December anyway.

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by | August 11, 2010 · 9:24 am

I Don’t Know Why Taiwan Keeps Animating Everything, But I’m Glad They Do

Pretty soon, people in Asia are going to think that all Westerners are animated cartoons. And I’m ok with that, as long as Taiwan keeps giving me the low down on how things really went down in America’s biggest news stories. Below, the entire reenactment of Steven Slater’s glorious JetBlue outburst.

There are no subtitles, but there are bleeps, so we can get the picture. The Taiwanese also make (maybe not) a big leap in assuming that Slater is gay, which I haven’t read in any reports. I guess in Asia, male flight attendant automatically means you have a same-sex lover waiting for you at home in his boxer shorts. Astute profiling Taiwan, very astute.

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