Fun_People Archive
22 Oct
Indonesian volcanoes

Date: Fri, 22 Oct 93 18:59:04 PDT
To: Fun_People
Subject: Indonesian volcanoes

 From: vangogh.CS.Berkeley.EDU!bostic (Keith Bostic)
 From: burton@het.brown.edu (Joshua W. Burton)

Everyone forgets that Krakatau (1889) was _not_ the `Big One'; the nearby
volcano Tambora blew its top in 1815, putting over fifteen cubic miles of
ash and rock into the sky---some ten times Krakatau.  That winter was known
in the US as `eighteen hundred and froze-to-death'; there was snow on the
ground in every month of the following summer, in New Haven, Connecticut.

Whether this has anything to do with the `blue-moon' cite of 1821 is beyond
me.  All the stuff about two full moons in one Gregorian month has always
seemed rather contrived to me, though this does seem to be what the papers
call a `blue moon' when they don't have anything better to write about.

What about two full moons in one _Hebrew_ month?  I propose we call this a
`tkhelet moon'.  (Explanatory note:  Hebrew months run from new moon to new
moon, give or take two days to make things come out even.  Tkhelet is the
blue dye in the Biblical requirement to make fringes of `blue' on one's 
garments.  We don't know what tkhelet is anymore, so we have to leave the
fringes white.  Come the next tkhelet moon---when a new moon and a full moon
fall less than two days apart---maybe we'll figure out about the dye again.)

[And my candidate for .SOTD...]

	If we can provide health care for every American,
	why can't we put a man on the moon?

© 1993 Peter Langston