‘So in my usual manner, I get in to my office in the morning after dropping the Little Astronomer off at school, plop my bag onto my desk, start up my coffee, and grab my phone to listen to my phone messages.

The normal morning ended there. But in a good way. Well, a weird way at first, but then good.

One of the messages was from a woman with a New Jersey accent. Here it is in its entirety:

Hi Phil. I was just reading your article on the equinox and the egg. You mentioned it’s a hard boiled egg. Try standing a raw egg up on that day. That’s the way it goes. It’s a raw egg not a hard boiled egg. Have a good day.

That’s it. No name, no specifics. The caller ID listed the number as being from Jersey, so that matched the accent, but I had no clue who the person was. I wasn’t even sure what article she was talking about! The message was left shortly after last week’s spring equinox, when this legend gets attention. I have my egg standing article on my website, of course, but I also wrote one for Night Sky magazine.

So I had a laugh over that, wondering who this person was and how she got my number.

Then I checked my email.

DEAR DR. PHIL PHLAT [sic]:

YOU’RE A KILL JOY!

IN REGARD TO YOUR ARTICLE:
AOL Research & Learn: Night Sky – The Equinox and the Egg

P.S. THE EGG SHOULD BE RAW, NOT HARD BOILED. THAT’S CHEATING!
BUNNIES KNOW THESE THINGS! LOL!

Buh-Bye
BUNNYJOEY(ON HEF’S LEFT)

I must say, the last line certainly caught my attention. "Bunny"? "Hef"? I am but a man, and so I felt the need to investigate. I don’t open attached images, and my website mailer won’t let me see them anyway. So I did a search on "bunnyjoey", and voila:

OK then. I’m not sure when that picture was taken, but then, I’m not sure I care.

And yes, I am clearly not above using sex in this blog. Duh. But I also figure that using the words sex, Playboy, and bunny in this blog entry are bound to get it to rise a bit in Google. In that vein I should mention the link above about using sex in this blog contains nudity (sorta) and which, of course, means someone in the picture is naked.

I wonder how popular this particular blog entry will become? Think of this as a scientific experiment in social marketing. Oh, and did I mention that I saw the movie XXX with Vin Diesel? No? Yeah, that XXX, not a great movie, and Vin Diesel is kindof a boob, but it’s worth mentioning at least twice here. Yes. Maybe three times. XXX.

Anyway, I replied back to BunnyJoey and told her a hard boiled egg spins well, but yes, a raw egg is what you need if you want to stand one up (I’ll note that I never mentioned in the article that you should try this with a hard boiled egg– and incidentally, the article on AOL was a reprint of my Night Sky article). We’ve been exchanging lighthearted emails (she’s interested in what I know about Orion’s belt– given that Mrs. Bad Astronomer sometimes reads these entries, I’ll note that I avoided the obvious and steered Joey to my friend Jim Kaler’s pages about those stars).

OK, so not much astronomy in this entry, but what the heck. I’m human, despite being a scientist, so sex I like to mix it up naked sometimes and write about other things Playboy bunny. I obviously have no ulterior motives.’

Just a quick note: I will be interviewed for three hours on Coast to Coast AM with George Noory tonight. The show starts at 10:00 11:00 p.m. Pacific time Saturday night, and runs until 2:00 a.m. Saturday night/Sunday morning Sunday night/Monday morning. We’ll be talking about a lot of the topics I’ve written about here: NASA, George Deutsch, Saturn, WMAP, the SpaceX launch failure, Stardust, and certainly the new Mars orbiter– I’ll have a longish blog entry up about that tonight by the time the show airs.

Many radio stations stream the show, so take a look at the affiliate list to see which ones do. I’m pretty sure the Canadian station CFUN does, for example.

This may be the most important page on the internets: how to cut through the endless phonemail systems of various businesses so you can get an actual human on the other end: GetHuman.

Of course, if you email me you just get a ‘bot that replies back saying, “404 Human Not Found.”

‘

BABlog reader Fernando Rodriguez at San Luis Potosí, México, pointed out to me an image (via digg.com) of Buzz Aldrin on the Moon… sorta. It’s actually an amazingly rendered computer graphic by Andrea Bertaccini, obviously a very talented computer artist. I could tell right away it was fake; on the real one you can see lunar dust all over Aldrin’s suit. There are other telltale signs. Can you figure them out? The comments on digg.com have lots of hints, and a side-by-side comparison of the real image and the artwork.

The computer image was posted on the CG Society of Digital Artists forum, and in fact they have a huge number of incredibly cool images there. Go take a look.’

‘I noticed today that the sitemeter on this blog (on the right hand side, near the bottom of the list of stuff there) says that the BA Blog passed the 500,000 visitors mark. I installed it on May 22, 2005, so it started counting at that time. In fact, my own web statistics package says the number should be higher, but I’m not overly concerned about it. The point is, a lot of folks come here!

And in fact I know more people have visited, because I didn’t install the sitemeter for a couple of months after I started the blog. The first blog post was on March 13. I missed my first anniversary! I’m really not much for arbitrary celebrations, so it’s not a big deal to me, but it’s nice to know that after a full year plus some, the Bad Astronomy Blog is still going.

When I started it, I wanted to write about astronomy, the parts of it that enthrall me and make me want to learn more about it every day. But as time went on, things got more complicated. It’s almost impossible for me not to inject opinion into what I write, and from talking to people it seems that this is the very thing that they like about what I write. The Universe is cold, dark, and deep; yet for me astronomy is a very personal endeavor. So my own take on it is inevitably going to come out in my writing.

But then the attacks on science kept coming. Of course I would blog about the Moon hoax, or astrology, or the face on Mars. But as the attacks started coming from higher levels, from people who were not just gnats in a storm but actual wind-makers, I knew I had to speak out. My first few entries about this seemed pretty tame compared to what I’ve written lately, but at the time I felt really tentative about it– even nervous. I’m glad I did it though. Every day I am more appalled at what I see going on in the seemingly permanent war on reality, and every day I take a deep breath and feel the stronger for fighting it.

I’ll add that one of the main reasons I started writing for The Huffington Post is that I knew it would increase the audience, get more people aware of not just science, but of those who would destroy it. An entry I wrote the other day (mentioned here) got onto the front page of HuffPo as well:

These issues are not just the blatherings of some blogger somewhere; these are critical issues which affect us, our friends, our family, and our future. This is not hyperbole. This is cold, hard fact.

It’s been a year, and more than a half million visits. But I have a lot more to say, and you can count on me saying it here for some time to come.’

At 18:26 Universal (Greenwich) time today, March 20, the center of the Sun will be at Right Ascension 0^h0^m0^s and a declination of 0^o0^m0^s, which means it will pass directly over the Earth’s equator as it moves north in its annual path around the ecliptic.

You and I call that the vernal equinox. OK, I call it that. You’d probably call it the first day of Spring. I wouldn’t call it that, but hey, semantics.

Around the United States today, kids in their classrooms will be standing eggs on end, or at least newsrooms will be talking about it. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, then read this, and then this, and if you’re really enjoying yourself, this.

And if you are really a glutton for punishment, see when the equinoxes, solstices, perihelia, and aphelia will be for the next 14 years.

You know, I have a whole book about stuff like this, too.

‘Tomorrow I head out for a business meeting, so I’ll leave you this for Friday night/Saturday silliness.

Albert and I go way back.

And if you don’t believe that, then maybe this will be more credible:

‘