โ Scribed by W Carl Gottschall
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
When a blue moon appears W rltmg an editorial m January that ~111 appear m March essentially forces me to write something about "blue moons" Note please that "blue" 1s a verb, an adlectlve, and a noun, and that "moon" IS also a verb, an adlectme, and a noun But look up blue moon m your dictionary Each of these four-letter words serves triple duty, which reflects the importance of qmckly spoken (since they are usually monosyllables) words Accordmgly, I believe that fourletter words have been mapproprlately stigmatized with negative connotations by too many Look, lust feel good, full, well, kind, love, okay' But I digress Many people associate the phrase "blue moon" with sadness or lonely sorrow, probably because of popular songs hke those of Elvis Curiously, "blue moon" was written about as early as 1528 Perhaps then the moon did m fact appear blue-as it did worldwide for about two years after Krakatoa blew m 1883 In 1951, forest fires m Alberta, Canada, were sufficiently widespread and fierce to produce blue moons m Newfoundland Partlculates (much debated m current health and safety circles, for a variety of reasons) obviously were the physical causes of these phenomena These rare events were likely the etiology of one of my favorite expressions Once m a blue moon This phrase of course refers to the erratlcally infrequent event Clvlhzatlon seems Intent on compressmg not only distances, but also the time dimension Perhaps that 1s why m the 1970s and 1980s the term "blue moon" was redefined (although, thank goodness, not legahstlcally) to mean the second full moon m a given month Noting that the length of the lunar cycle (29 53 days) 1s not an integral factor of the number of days m a year or of the varied numbers of days m the months (or by simply checking a stack of almanacs), one could deduce that "new" blue moons occur 7 times every 19 years, or roughly every 33 months Moreover, two "new" blue moons occur every 19 years So what do the two blue moons that we are experlencmg m January and March tell us about chemical health and safety? What does the lack of a full moon m the month of February portend for the future 3 Does the order-of-magnitude increase m blue moon frequency, combined with the feared computer problems and the concept (neither sclentlflcally nor chronologically accurate) of a new mlllenmum, guarantee that disaster 1s sure to happen' Maybe not lust a puny chemical disaster, but a cosmological disaster7 When was the last month without a full moon7 Will harvests yield nothing this year because of these factors plus February's lack of a full moon7
Hardly' Statistics tell everyone, not just good epldemloioglsts or chemical health and safety professionals, that "averages" will be exceeded (and not met) with some regularity and may therefore signify nothing Part of our duty 1s to explain the vast difference between correlatloq and causation
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