Month / July 2021

by Robert Gerst

The Summer in Song: July 17, 2021

2,000 light-years away in the northern constellation Lyra

Writes NASA Heritage Project:

Ring Around the Cosmos

Except for the rings of Saturn, the Ring Nebula (M57) is probably the most famous celestial band. This planetary nebula’s simple, graceful appearance is thought to be due to perspective — our view from Earth looking straight into what is actually a barrel-shaped cloud of gas shrugged off by a dying central star.

Astronomers of the Hubble Heritage Project produced this strikingly sharp image from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope by using natural colors to indicate the temperature of the stellar gas shroud. Hot blue gas near the energizing central star gives way to progressively cooler green and yellow gas at greater distances with the coolest red gas along the outer boundary. The Ring Nebula is about one light-year across and 2,000 light-years away in the northern constellation Lyra.

Zac Brown Band, “Same Boat”

by Robert Gerst

The Summer in Sounds: July 12, 2021

Things to remember this day: Incessant rain. The mailman at the door. A shout in the street. The sound of a silent movie.

And Dr. Macphail watched the rain. It was beginning to get on his nerves. It was not like our soft English rain that drops gently on the earth; it was unmerciful and somehow terrible; you felt in it the malignancy of the primitive powers of nature. It did not pour, it flowed. It was like a deluge from heaven, and it rattled on the roof of corrugated iron with a steady persistence that was maddening. It seemed to have a fury of its own. And sometimes you felt that you must scream if it did not stop, and then suddenly you felt powerless, as though your bones had suddenly become soft; and you were miserable and hopeless.

Somerset Maugham, “Rain”

1928: Silent screen star Gloria Swanson (1897 – 1983) shares a match with a US marine in a scene from the film ‘Sadie Thompson’. It was directed by Raoul Walsh for Gloria Swanson Pictures Corporation and United Artists.

 

by Robert Gerst

The Summer in Phrases: July 12, 2021

Photo: Gerst

Every one of those impressions is the impression of the individual in his isolation, each mind keeping as a solitary prisoner its own dream of a world.

Walter Pater, Conclusion, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry

They that are awake have one world in common, but of the sleeping each turns aside into a world of his own.

Heraclitus, Fragment 89

I have sought for myself.

Heraclitus, Fragment 101

by Robert Gerst

The Good Old Summertime

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal..

“Obe” Young & Sally Brown, Lake Waccamaw, North Carolina,  (July 4, 1904)

Billy Murray, “In the Good Old Summertime” (1904)

You hold her hand and she holds yours
And that’s a very good sign
That she’s your tootsey-wootsey
In the good, old summertime