Galileo Figaro Magnifico

It will come as no great shock to any of you that the first thing I think of when pressed to summarize the most recent seven days that I have lived through is work. Classes have really started to pick up and accordingly I have been spending a great deal of time studying. The nice thing about my workload is that it is mostly reading, so even if I have, say, five hours of work, as was the case yesterday, I'm spending four and a half of those hours attending to something written by someone other than me, which is considerably easier, I think, than attending to something written by me and by that I mean writing it myself.

The best movie ever made except for all the others.

A quick note on each of my classes, then off to something more interesting.
My seminar is going well. We watched clips of various cinematic adaptations of the story of Alexander, including a rather entertaining (though not in the way it was intended to be) version from 1956.
My Homer class is going well. Zeus is an asshole, though. So is Hektor.
My history of early Europe class is going well. Almost too well. I'm starting to think I should have taken a higher level history course. Then again, I have yet to write my first paper for the course, so I'm probably damning myself by speaking such things. Watch me get a C.
My astronomy class is going well. And upon this point I shall expound. Story time it is.

At the beginning of class last Friday, Professor Winkler stood in front of his captive audience and made a proclamation that would come as a surprise were it given by nearly any other teacher I know of. He spoke so seriously that, had a foreigner with no knowledge of English been present, he would not have been able to grasp the jocular nature of this proclamation.
"Here at Bi Hall [the state-of-the-art science building, remember?] we have many high-tech devices for various scientific purposes, but there is one that is more advanced than any other here." At this point I am sure I was not the only one in the room who was now expecting some fancy gadgetry to assist our aged instructor in some wildly fascinating lecture. Well, I was half right at the very least.
"I am, of course, referring to our time machine," he continued, with a perfectly straight face. "Now if you'll give me a moment, I'm going to head into the back room where we store it and see if I can't bring a certain colleague of mine back with me. He's an astronomy professor from the sixteenth century, and I'm sure he'd love to teach you about the cosmos."

Well, maybe a few more than three.

And with that our resident wizard disappeared into a room in the back, leaving the class to sit for a few minutes in which everyone turned to everyone else with his or her own ideas about who or what was going to come out of that door.
After a brief period of relative suspense, Winkler emerged from his little room of requirement, and by Winkler I mean a sixteenth century astronomy professor who looked a lot like Winkler but for his outfit. I wish I had a picture of his getup, but since I am not so blessed I will do my best to paint one here, albeit with rough brushstrokes and an artistic eye on the level of Mondrian's.

Asshole.

Atop his previously balding scalp sat a monstrous wig, around his neck hung an elaborately decorative chain complete with a garish cross, and across his shoulders and draped about his body hung a silky black robe that he later told us, in perfect honesty I might add, was worn by Middlebury's first astronomy professor and has since been handed down, making it more than a hundred years old.
When he spoke it was with a thick but flawed (and all the better for it) German accent, and what he spoke of was what, apparently, he knew best: the cosmos. He gave us an entire lecture on astronomy as it would have been taught under the Ptolemain geocentric model, thereby giving us opportunity after opportunity to poke holes in the Earth-bound model that had been the staple of cosmic knowledge for more than a thousand years, only to find out that Ptolemy's model actually does answer all the same questions that Copernicus' does, which is something I didn't know. Both models make sense as far as the nightly motion of the stars and planets, one is just simply correct and one is not. In fact, nobody was able to prove that Copernicus' model was more accurate than Ptolemy's until Galileo took his telescope to the heavens a century later.

"[T]he silent wardens of a long-vanished kingdom." - Book II, Chapter 9

Enough on that. I now have two posters on my wall in my dorm, which no longer resembles a dungeon quite as much as it used to. One of these advertises my favorite movie, and one my favorite painting. And while we're on the subject, I think it's worth pointing out that, yes, I have watched me some LotR in the past week, and by "some" I mean the entire first film (cinematic version, not extended, sadly) and the very end of the second one (My roommate watched both of them start to finish, and I only caught the end of Two Towers.) The remarkable thing was that, while we were watching Fellowship, people passing by would just stop for a few minutes and quote the movie, line by line, for a scene or two and then be on their way. And I thought only Cole and I could do that.

I have but one regret as far as the posters go, and it has to do with the Friedrich painting. You see, my poster, unlike its likeness below, is very dark, so it's more of a silhouette than a vibrant, color-filled painting. But oh well. I still like it. Just not as much as I could potentially like it. Which is more than I do now. By the way. In case you were wondering. Just thought I'd mention it. For your information. Yup.
I don't know why I decided to be annoying in those last few sentences, but I did, and you're just going to have to live with it.

Caspar the Friendly Ghost.

Now what to talk about? Hockey. Of course. I encourage all of you to completely disregard this paragraph; I won't in the least be offended if none of you end up reading it. In fact, it's only two purposes are to express my excitement and vent my frustration, neither of which requires audience participation. Seriously, you won't care about thisSo here we go. The NHL preseason has already started, and the regular season begins next week. In the past couple of days I have managed to purchase the NHL Gamecenter package, which allows me to watch any out-of-market game on my computer, and thus my concerns about not getting my fix have been averted. Now if I could only figure out how to deal with the time zone issue . . . You see, hockey games start at generally go from about 7:00 to 10:00 (or later if they go into overtime, which happens a lot, like a lot a lot). Which means if I'm watching a game in Philadelphia, it will start at seven and everything will be just fine and dandy. But oh by the way if I'm watching a game in Anaheim it will start at ten and end after one in the morning. And oh by the way those are the games I intend to spend the most time watching, because oh by the way I'm a Ducks fan. So that's gonna suck.

What do you mean he doesn't look fast?

Yum yum yum!

I'm glad we got that out of the way. Now we can focus on the other thing you guys probably don't care about: cross country. We raced at William on Saturday. I did alright. The team did alright. Next week is the Vermont state meet, and the week after is the Boston meet, and guess who goes to that one? Wesleyan! Which means I get to talk to Austin before and after the race, though certainly not during it, because he will undoubtedly be half a mile ahead of me throughout it. Which is okay. I guess. Fine.

And I was about to post this before heading off to my astronomy lab, but I decided to hold off in case something happened in the lab that I wanted to share. And indeed it did. First, I'd like to boast about the fact that I now know lots of constellations and can point them out, which is awesome, like me apparently. It's also worth pointing out that there was no moon tonight (Kvothe would be flipping out), nor were there clouds, and therefore a truly spectacular array of stars presented itself even to the naked eye. I saw three shooting stars (okay fine, comets). No big deal, right? But there was much more than that tonight. Jupiter was conspicuous, so we took a look through the old eyeglass, and what did we see? Jupiter, up close and personal. As in, OH MY BUJEEZUZ I'M LOOKING AT JUPITER AND I CAN SEE ITS STRIPES AND SPOTS AND IT LOOKS JUST LIKE IT DOES IN THOSE PHOTOGRAPHS YOU SEE AND, WHAT'S THAT? I CAN SEE THE FOUR GALILEAN MOONS ORBITING BIG DADDY.

So that was pretty much the coolest thing I've ever seen. How was your week?