I know the exact date Neil Armstrong walked on the moon because it happened on my sister’s sixth birthday (July 20, 1969) and our mom made a “Pin the Man on the Moon” game for her party. On my birthday in 1973 the comet Kohoutek reached its perihelion, which is the only reason I know what both perihelion and unfulfilled media hype mean. Ah, the early ’70s; it was all Tang, Space Food Sticks, NASA mission patches and a pop-cultural appreciation of science and the vast wonder of the universe. Even we campers at the JCC took a break from jacks to watch Skylab flit across the night sky at a sleepover scheduled for the occasion.

It all kind of faded away in the 1980s with the terrible tragedy of the Challenger disaster and such fitful happenings as the post-Hippie yawnfest that was the Harmonic Convergence and all those sad, sad Star Trek movies (yes, nerdlingers, except for The Wrath of Khan).

Maybe the awesomeness skips a decade, because the 1990s were spectacular for the casual astronomer. I saw a total lunar eclipse on a dusty, cluttered rooftop in Cairo in 1992; a breathtaking display of meteor showers on a different, cleaner rooftop in Turkey a year later; then a total solar eclipse in the spring of 1994 in Berkeley, and the collision of comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 into Jupiter a few months after that. You could see the comet Hyakutake not too far from any U.S. city in 1996, and anyone walking around town at night in 1997 could see the comet Hale-Bopp (two tails, very bright) on her way to dinner in Dupont Circle.

Again, skip a decade and here we are in the 2010s, which have been pretty excellent so far: we had a once-in-a-century Transit of Venus in June this year and the successful landing of the land rover ”Curiosity” on the planet Mars just the other day. I’d say the heavens have opened up again.

And late tonight (August 11/early August 12) is the peak of the Perseids, the best meteor showers of the year, so please, go out and celebrate the wonder of popular science by standing out on your lawn or driving out to a park someplace this weekend. Look for the constellation Cassiopeia (it’s shaped like a wide “W” in the northeast) and fix your eyes on the space just below the back of her chair toward the constellation Perseus and watch. If the weather cooperates, you’ll never forget it.

Space stuff is awesome: it’s forever and it’s free — all you need to do is look up.

Photo by jking89 via Flickr

The only person I could think of who might offer fitting tribute to the late Gore Vidal was my sister, Jennifer Robinson, who is keenly feeling his absence. So I emailed her.

Here’s part of her reply to me:

“When I was a junior in high school I read my first Gore Vidal book, Burr. A lot of the history zoomed right by me at the time, but the transformation of the Founding Fathers from demigods to recognizable human beings (hilariously venal) was an unexpected blast of fresh air that filled me with the hope that there were actually fun adults out there with genuinely interesting things to say. Quite simply, he became my education. I’d check out what he enthused over in his essays — Suetonius, Daniel Shays, Dawn Powell; I’d reread his American Chronicles to see if I understood any more of it since the last time; I’d go over his musings on the state of the union and on nature (Are we straight or gay? Nope, neither: We have tendencies. I’ll buy that — now let’s talk about something important); I’d laugh at his bon mots, but also at his cute trick (maybe too cute) at lifting the scene of Brutus and Cassius in the tent from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar line-for-line in meaning between two characters in his Judgment of Paris. For the rest of my adult life, I’d do some living then come back to Gore.

“It’s been so satisfying to have turned my friends into fans. One dear friend fell so in love with Vidal’s treatment of the subject that he went off and wrote his own screenplay about Aaron Burr. Another fellow returned Creation to me, partially read, unimpressed saying, ‘He can’t write.’ We didn’t see much of each other after that. The guy I married counts Creation as one of his favorite novels of all time. Just saying.

“I’m not a literary critic; I’m a reader. If I were a writer, I’d have noticed a long time ago that a lot of his novels’ characters sounded the same (like him); that some of his pronouncements sounded just wrong; or that most of his writing excited me intellectually, but seldom emotionally (though I don’t think anyone could finish Lincoln without a lump in the throat). But he wrote for me — the ‘reader’ he used to bemoan was dwindling out of existence, and who I’m reasonably certain still exists as a certain kind of sub-species. And I’m mourning our loss pretty thoroughly.”

Thank you, Gore Vidal, for Julian, for true snark, and for teaching my sister and me to look deeper into and beyond the books we read.

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Photo by: david_shankbone via Flickr

Everyone is in this picture and each is doing the thing s/he did the best: John Wayne is the leading man (his breakout role), John Carradine is dastardly, Andy Devine is a dumbass sidekick, Thomas Mitchell (you know who he is, trust me) plays a drunk…again, and Claire Trevor is the prostitute. Ah, Claire Trevor. There’s  nothing that woman couldn’t do. She could be cutting, sympathetic, damaged, scheming, bad, mean, sexy, and  tired — but always real, human, and female. Nobody writes women like that much anymore and it’s criminal. Sure, a gal would fall in love with a guy she’s only known for 45 minutes and who’s kind of mean to her — just like in today’s pictures — but back then she made you believe it.

Claire Trevor had the kind of career most women of her time had. She worked steadily in substantial roles until she hit a certain age (mine), then shifted to stage or took ever-diminishing secondary roles until the mid-1960s when she dropped out of sight. She reappeared in the 1980s when the likes of Love Boat and Murder She Wrote found something for a woman of 70+ to do.

If you’re interested in Claire Trevor, I recommend Key Largo (1948), because it’s easy to rent and she got an Academy Award for her portrayal of Gaye Dawn, Edward G. Robinson‘s drunken mistress. She’s a peach.

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Photo by: StuSeeger via Flickr | Stagecoach was filmed on location in Monument Valley, Utah