daily prompt

Superb Moon 2015

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

For those aware that there is a thing called the sky, last night presented those of us located on the continental United States with the sight of a full lunar eclipse during a full moon. It was not only a lunar eclipse during a full moon, but it was a “supermoon,” as newspaper headline writers insisted.

The Moon’s orbit around the Earth is not a perfect circle; it varies from 221,000 miles away to just over 252,000 miles away. Last night, it was at perigee, or its closest point in its orbit, and that coincided with the full moon. Thus, last night’s full moon looked enormous: 14% larger than the average full moon and many times brighter than average. And then the Earth’s shadow took it away in an eclipse, because that’s what the Earth does.
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End of the Line

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

A heavy rain drowns each raindrop; a light rain, like the kind I saw in the woods out behind my house when I was a child, a light rain striking the leaves and branches of trees, further slowing their impact, that rain produces the strongest petrichor of all, the one that renders me into an seven-year-old noticing the world for the first time.
 
The lightest of rain after the driest of spells leads to the most argillaceous petrichor, which is the kind that humans smell as relief, the thought that things will start growing again.—The Gad About Town, “Petrichor,” Jan. 26, 2015

We called it “The Woods.” Well, I did. Sometimes, I referred to it as a “forest,” which it most certainly was not. Our backyard ended at a line of trees and the dross beneath it; our lightly manicured, suburban lawn did not grow beyond that line, despite my teen-aged lawn mowing efforts to expand the lawn by clearing the dead leaves and branches away. That tight boundary made The Woods appear all the more elemental and foreign.
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Fear of Success

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

The term schadenfreude literally means damage-joy. When one enjoys the news that a rival is encountering trouble, one is experiencing a sense of schadenfreude. Most of us have experienced this feeling at some point in our lives, but most of us also have been jerks at some point in our lives, and the two sometimes come at the same time.

There is no real-world term for its opposite, so some people have begun to use a made-up word, freudenschade, to describe the distress one feels when a friend or rival is doing well or has had a success.

And then there are some people, I am thinking of the late Gore Vidal here, who appear to take pleasure at others’ distress at one’s success. Vidal confessed to feelings of schadenfreude over other writers’ freudenschade. (That is as hard to type as it is to say.)
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