Hilton Head Island: Edwin Hubble discovers the universe; solved; two Japanese death poems

 

One of the sites I view each morning is NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day.  The blurry image above dates back one hundred years today and is epoch making.  Actually the image is slightly older than that but Edwin Hubble realized the dot represented proof that our galaxy is not the entire universe and he wrote the red VAR on it on October 6, 1923.

A better explanation is found at:

https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap231006.html

It is amazing to realize how little we knew of the universe until not much more than my lifetime ago and how greatly our knowledge has expanded so quickly.  Instead of our Milky Way Galaxy being the universe, it is now thought the universe is at least 28 billion light years in diameter.  A size beyond imagination.  And it is getting bigger.

You can happily live your life ignoring that fact or you could consider what it means to the religious stories our species tells itself.

A few years ago I wrote a poem:

I solved a problem in one of the most satisfying ways possible.  I eliminated it.

As regular readers know, all five or six of you, earlier this year the two sail tie bags I have been using for stowage in GANNET’s Great Cabin came unstuck from the inside of the hull.  This is strange because they had been up there for a dozen years and more than 30,000 miles.

GANNET’s hull is unlined.  What you see on the inside is bare fiberglass into which nothing can be screwed, so I used Gorilla Construction Adhesive to secure two strips of wood on each side of the Great Cabin into which I could screw the hooks to hold the bags top and bottom.  The top strips of wood came unstuck.  The bottom ones remained in place.

I have tried various adhesives and glues to get the top strips of wood back in place.  Super Glue.  West G-Flex epoxy,  3M’s 5200.  All without success.  Just before I flew to Chicago at the beginning of July I used 5200.  The strips of wood remained in place and I reattached the sail tie bags.  When I returned to Hilton Head at the beginning of September and went down to the little boat, I found they had again fallen onto the pipe berths.

Most of September was too hot to work below deck.  I did go down from time to time to consider the problem.  Last week I had the Eureka moment:  eliminate it.  Don’t keep trying to get pieces of wood to stick to the hull.  Get rid of the bags and stow their not extensive contents elsewhere.  So I have.  Yesterday I removed the lower strips of wood, sanded the areas where the wood had been, wiped it down with acetone.  I came back to the condo and ordered another waterproof bag from Amazon, as well as new plastic tumblers—the old ones have seen too much use.  This morning I biked back down and painted the areas where the sail tie bags had been.  This was only a few square feet on each side and took only a few minutes.  I was painting white over white and I don’t think it will need a second coat.

Amazon just delivered the waterproof bag and tumblers, which in their pristine state are quite attractive.  They are made from a material called Tritan, of which I had not heard.

Maybe tomorrow, but with soccer matches and baseball games demanding my attention, probably not until Monday, I will go down and restow gear in GANNET’s now vastly more spacious Great Cabin.

I am due to have the stitches from my most recent chopping removed Monday afternoon.  A diver is supposed to clean GANNET’s bottom today or early next week.  I might then do something radical and go sailing.  

I am almost finished rereading the anthology JAPANESE DEATH POEMS.

Here are two:

Raizan died in 1716 at the age of sixty-three.

Onitsura died in 1738 at the age of seventy-eight.  I might have posted this one here before.