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Always wrong to the light
Apr. 19th, 2012 02:05 am
Currently at Toronto Pearson: 5. High today: 9.
A couple of hours ago, I saw Saturn's rings for the first time. Yesterday we brought my dusty old telescope over from my dusty old bedroom, where it has been sitting for ages in a corner next to a dusty old guitar that I borrowed from a friend of mine fifteen years ago or more. When I was a kid, I could never manage to see anything at all satisfactorily with this telescope; I'd always thought there was something wrong with it. I can see now that what there was something wrong with was me; I have the same problem focussing my eye on what's coming through the telescope as I do focussing my eyes on what's coming through binoculars. But I have more of an idea how to correct for that now. (I found tonight that I could focus on Saturn better if I kept my eye maybe a quarter inch away from the eyepiece, and kind of looked at the eyepiece rather than trying to look through it--maybe you're supposed to do that; I dunno.)
The thing about seeing Saturn through this hobby-shop telescope is that it just doesn't look real--it looks like a little computer graphic, like a wingding. The bright yellowish-white dot that is Saturn becomes a somewhat-less-bright yellowish-white ... larger dot, with a yellowish-white oblong ring around it. Whereas seeing Venus in broad daylight seemed not that different from not seeing anything, seeing Saturn through this telescope is definitely seeing something, but doesn't really seem like seeing Saturn.
Last night we went to see Ralph Fiennes's Coriolanus, so this would seem to be about as good a time as there'll be to talk about Kings and The Venture Brothers, which we've been watching recently. All I want to say for the time being about Kings, though, is that it has the one quality I can point to that pulls me in to Buffy the Vampire Slayer: the main character (if you can call David that in Kings; Silas is certainly the weightier character), while essentially invincible, is constantly being beaten on, psychologically as well as literally. (The theme music for Kings and Buffy, by the way, begins with the same three chords.) Through much of Kings, David appears desperately unhappy, and it strikes me that this is one reason that Kings could hardly have succeeded commercially: everyone in it is unhappy, more or less necessarily.
(There was an interview in Now last week with the writer/director of Cabin in the Woods, who was a writer for Buffy, where he says that Joss Whedon (who co-wrote Cabin in the Woods) impressed on him that you need to make the characters sympathetic, and then the audience will follow you any damn place with the story--which I found pretty weird, because I find just about everyone on Buffy unpleasant to some degree, and it's an odd thing to me that I like the show despite that.)
A couple of hours ago, I saw Saturn's rings for the first time. Yesterday we brought my dusty old telescope over from my dusty old bedroom, where it has been sitting for ages in a corner next to a dusty old guitar that I borrowed from a friend of mine fifteen years ago or more. When I was a kid, I could never manage to see anything at all satisfactorily with this telescope; I'd always thought there was something wrong with it. I can see now that what there was something wrong with was me; I have the same problem focussing my eye on what's coming through the telescope as I do focussing my eyes on what's coming through binoculars. But I have more of an idea how to correct for that now. (I found tonight that I could focus on Saturn better if I kept my eye maybe a quarter inch away from the eyepiece, and kind of looked at the eyepiece rather than trying to look through it--maybe you're supposed to do that; I dunno.)
The thing about seeing Saturn through this hobby-shop telescope is that it just doesn't look real--it looks like a little computer graphic, like a wingding. The bright yellowish-white dot that is Saturn becomes a somewhat-less-bright yellowish-white ... larger dot, with a yellowish-white oblong ring around it. Whereas seeing Venus in broad daylight seemed not that different from not seeing anything, seeing Saturn through this telescope is definitely seeing something, but doesn't really seem like seeing Saturn.
Last night we went to see Ralph Fiennes's Coriolanus, so this would seem to be about as good a time as there'll be to talk about Kings and The Venture Brothers, which we've been watching recently. All I want to say for the time being about Kings, though, is that it has the one quality I can point to that pulls me in to Buffy the Vampire Slayer: the main character (if you can call David that in Kings; Silas is certainly the weightier character), while essentially invincible, is constantly being beaten on, psychologically as well as literally. (The theme music for Kings and Buffy, by the way, begins with the same three chords.) Through much of Kings, David appears desperately unhappy, and it strikes me that this is one reason that Kings could hardly have succeeded commercially: everyone in it is unhappy, more or less necessarily.
(There was an interview in Now last week with the writer/director of Cabin in the Woods, who was a writer for Buffy, where he says that Joss Whedon (who co-wrote Cabin in the Woods) impressed on him that you need to make the characters sympathetic, and then the audience will follow you any damn place with the story--which I found pretty weird, because I find just about everyone on Buffy unpleasant to some degree, and it's an odd thing to me that I like the show despite that.)
