Friday, December 14, 2007

The Stars Are Falling Tonight

"To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour."


William Blake, English poet, painter and printmaker


Whenever you travel, you'd want to see as many wondrous, special, weird, quaint, unique and outright-gobstopping things as you can before your vacation runs out of its time. You'd try to fit as many sights into your itinerary, cutting off sleep time, planning narrow hops between flights or trains - all corners you could barely afford to cut - just to see that little bit more. I know perfectly how that feels like. You ought to take a gander at the master plan of my North Indian Grand Backpacking Escapade (I made up this name, so there!) early next year - about a dozen cities from one side of the Indian subcontinent to the other in 3 weeks and a half.

That's a bit like how I like my life: Absolutely stacked and overflowing at the brims. I want to see as much as I can before I die. That's how I like my women too but that's another story.

Tonight after sundown, I'll hike up to End Point and plant my ass there till the cops make me leave. The Geminid Meteors are swinging by Earth tonight, and I'll be damned if I don't position myself someplace where they can hit me.

Just so you know, this is going to be a good year for the Geminids because the moon will be nothing more than just a slightly anorexic crescent in the night sky. The peak of this year's show would be on the 14th of December (also popularly and contemporarily known as 'Today, duh') at 14:45 GMT (which is widely described by Indian astronomers as 'a quarter-past-ten'). So we, the awesome people of Far Eastern Asia and Beyond the Pacific till Alaska (that includes you peeps in ol' Malaysia), will get the metaphorical front row seats this time around. About 60 to 120 fizzlers and sputterers per hour was predicted to be the max rate of atmosphere bombardment - that's 1 to 2 every minute! Of course, you got to move out of the light pollution radius of where you're living and head for the silent hills where the snakes are.

It's going to be grand - I can feel it in my spine.

EDIT: I saw 61 meteors! I wished I made wishes instead of going "WHOOOA!!!" like some backwater island yahoo every time one streaked across the sky.




Going on a star-hunt,
k0k s3n w4i

5 comments:

nissy said...

yes lah..
i saw thr! i'm back home~
my neck quite sore..diden bring my tikar just now.

février said...

i'm going to comment last. but just to remind myself of what to comment i shall type it out here first:

po fin' stars again for the second time. i bet he purposely berlagak n say he lost 'em before so he can fit in wif teh rest of us emo peepz.

the end.

Anonymous said...

My traveling style is much different. I will [refer to spend a lot of time at a single place and suck it the local aura if possible.

k0k s3n w4i said...

@innshan
n00b xD
You should have stayed longer. The best ones came after u left.

@beve
Your ability to spout out nonsense both amazes and alarms me -.-

@mrbherng
Trust me, you don't want to suck in too much of anything in anyplace in India -.-

sXydeViL said...

i missed it....
T.T