Hiding Your Light Under a Bushel Named Science
Hearing the learn’d astronomer.
The bug-light lobby is at work again.
Oceanside is the latest city to be bugged by the folks who run Palomar Observatory. San Diego, Escondido, Poway, San Marcos and Vista have already surrendered.
What the telescope boys want is for Oceanside not to put regular white-light street lights in new developments.
The telescopers prefer yellow-orange lights, the kind you install on your back porch to provide illumination without attracting flying bugs in the summer.
Yellow-orange light is supposedly easier for the telescope to filter out so that the astronomers can continue peering for celestial bric-a-brac.
Don’t get me wrong: Astronomy seems like a nifty hobby and not a bad way to make a living. Astronomers buy homes and pay orthodontists to straighten their kids’ teeth, doing their small bit for the local economy.
But what price stargazing?
Let’s be real: Palomar Observatory may someday discover something that will rate a handsome reference on a Discovery Channel documentary about the origins of the universe. Or maybe not.
For this, the rest of us are forced to live in neighborhoods that glow at night like a ghastly scene from science fiction. Practicality, thy name is not astronomy.
Put in an application at City Hall to add a bedroom to your ranchette, and you’ll have neighbors, community groups and plannercrats at your throat.
Say you represent the interests of Pure Science, and you can get approval to bathe entire communities in uremic light.
What if Palomar Mountain was occupied not by astronomers but by a coven of poets and philosophers? And the poets and philosophers made a similar request about keeping the night sky dark so they could continue to front the essential facts of life.
We both know what would happen: Politicians would pat them on the head as if they were children, and reporters would write devilishly clever stories.
Which just proves that a 200-inch telescope can be a very demanding neighbor.
Deputy Doings
It says here.
* First, would-be author Mike Kelley (under the pseudonym James McDonnah Slade) gave us “The Mysterious Billy Glass,” a novelistic treatment of Fallbrook racist Tom Metzger.
Now comes Kelley’s second effort, which he figures is made even more timely by the deputy-kills-deputy story in Olivenhain.
Kelley is out with “Billy Glass Gets Even,” which he says is modeled after a corrupt narcotics cop in a North County police department.
* Talky.
Donald Van Ort, the Olivenhain man who was bound and threatened by narcotics Deputy Michael Stanewich, is making the media rounds, despite the Sheriff’s Department’s wish that he clam up.
News conferences, in-studio interviews with television stations, and now radio shows, answering questions from callers.
* So far, the tabloid television shows--”A Current Affair,” “Hard Copy” and “Inside Edition”--have not called the Sheriff’s Department about the Olivenhain story.
But, if they do, they’ll get no official cooperation unless they agree to give the sheriff the right to review the completed script.
It’s part of a department policy that distinguishes between news programs and entertainment shows. The tabs are classified as the latter.
Your Name Here
Signs of the times.
* It pays to advertise.
San Diego comic ventriloquist Joe Gandelman swears he saw a streetwalker along El Cajon Boulevard with a helium-filled balloon reading “I Love You.”
He asks: “What will they do next, skywriting?”
* The San Diego-based Elephant Alliance will picket tonight’s opening of the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus at the Sports Arena. To protest the treatment of pachyderms.
* If you care, the life-size transparent cow at the Del Mar Fair was filled with 756,200 M&M; candies. About 75,000 fair-goers submitted guesses.
