Lighting The Corners Of My Mind....

Very Watchmen to close out 2021 https://t.co/TeuIgA9ZNz

— Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) January 3, 2022

I had a book from the Smithsonian Center for Short-Lived Phenomena that compiled all manner of strange events (not just volcanoes and new islands, but rains of frogs or fish) that were apparently quite common.  They just didn't occur where Europeans (or Americans; same thing) lived and reported on them.  So they seemed not only weird, but flatly impossible.

This was the book:

Don't know what happened to it.  I got it as a gift in high school, so the passage of time was not kind to stuff that old.  Probably I had to get rid of books, so I dumped it.  Pity.  It was the first indication, in the blinkered years of the '70's when film was still being shipped from Vietnam to New York to be processed, edited, and shown on the evening news the next day (news of the war was always a bit behind reality, even not accounting for the International Date Line), that the world was far more complex and dynamic than we in America/Europe imagined. Actual reporting on what was going on in the world beyond the reach or boundaries of the "white world" was simply non-existent.  Much of the world was still terra incognita, which that book alerted me to.  It was actually more influential on me than The Last Whole Earth Catalog, which I still have.

Damn, I wonder what I did with that book....

We live on an incredibly dynamic planet, and still treat the parts we don't see as non-existent (waste dumps, mostly, for our first-world convenience).  As Annie Dillard later taught me, "out of the way" is a matter of perspective, not reality.  And it's a pretty damned blinkered perspective.  We joke about New Yorkers thinking the rest of the country is "out of the way," or Texans who think the rest of the country is just an adjunct of the state.  But we're all pretty parochial in our own ways.  Nothing about the internet or satellite TeeVee or e-mail or international calling has really changed that.

Besides, rains of frogs or fish are signs the world is just a bit weirder than we allow for....