Last Monday night, a little after 11 EST, I saw a shooting star that seemed to fall from the sky and disappear just beyond the trees on the street. The short, sharp flash was so bright, I stood listening for a few seconds, half expecting to hear an explosion. I contemplated the other meteors I’ve seen from time to time and congratulated myself for remembering to look up at the night. And then I forgot all about it. So why am I telling you now?
Because a meteoroid, 2008 TC3, did explode over a remote area of Sudan about an hour and a half (0246 UTC) before the one I saw. (Coincidence? I wonder.) And that was only about 19 hours after it was discovered, predicted, and the news disseminated. It feels weird to know that so many people were observing it, calculating its path, discussing it, and making neat videos of it tumbling before the stars until it disappeared into the Earth’s shadow and hit the atmosphere. And I had no idea until today.
Good thing it wasn’t The Big One.
Writing Every Day 
Okay, another one to set to music.
Returning back to topic, if my memory serves, the Arthur C Clarke novel “Rendezvous with Rama” began with an asteroid** watch. I liked this book, and had expected Clarke to, some day, come out with two sequels, for the Ramans do everything in threes.
Instead, Gentry Lee wrote some “sequels.” I’m putting quotation marks around that, because in my opinion, these didn’t really match the original Clarke novel. I didn’t like ’em because they didn’t have the same “flavor,” you know what I’m talking about? I couldn’t really judge ’em on their own merit ’cause my feelings were totally colored by memories o’ the Clarke book, eh. Some day I hope to meet someone who read the Gentry Lee books without ever having read the Clarke book, and ask ‘im if ‘e thought they were any good.
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**Say, did you work on that movie? I wonder if anyone’s youtubed it yet. If not, I wonder if anyone ever will. LOL. Now THAT would be a memory that burnz.
Awww, that was cute.
Do I even have a topic?
I think I read Rendevous With Rama, but all I remember are long, loving, detailed description of the cylinder, and the mirrors and fields and rivers inside.
Yes, you have a topic. If you need a reminder, click on the “About Me” tab at the top of this page. You blog about writing, about reading, and about your garden, mostly.
Me, I’m a fanboy. I’d be a writer, but I don’t have a creative bone in my body. There’s a contest coming up and I’m sure the organizers are counting on a good entry from me.
http://uo.stratics.com/news/Baja.shtml
This is not going to be easy especially with the Halloween theme. I mean, people run around with outlandish costumes, and a variety of spooks infest the place 24/7/365.
If you scroll down on that page, you’ll see that I won the previous contest in all categories except “Grand Duchess’s Choice.” LOL. Never miss a chance to toot my own horn.
emu, it’s okay not to look kindly on the Lee “sequels.” Although Clarke’s name is on them, they’re radically different. They took Clarke’s simple, mysterious Rama idea and turned it into, on the one hand, an overlong multi-character multi-generational soap opera and, on the other, a science-fiction quest ‘proving’ the existence of God (yak!). I read them around the time the last one was coming out, just as I was getting back into sci-fi reading after a 10-15 year hiatus. They almost put me right back off again. In their own way they’re ‘okay’ books, but they shouldn’t have been blessed by Clarke or associated with the original, which was a short masterpiece.