Constant As The Northern Star

1. The Northern Star Niu

But I’m as immovable as the northern star, whose stable and stationary quality has no equal in the sky. The sky shows countless stars. They’re all made of fire, and each one shines. I am constant as the northern star. With this speech, Caesar seals his fate. After arrogantly defying three separate warnings that his life would be in danger were he to go to the Senate this day (the ides of March), Caesar sits amid the noblemen (and would-be conspirators) and denies their request to repeal the banishment of Publius Cimber.

There's this girl who eats dinner with our group from time to time who converted to Judaism in order to please her boyfriend and his parents. She doesn't go to synagogue or anything like that now, but I think she's technically on the rolls or whatever.She's not of ethnically Jewish extraction, but because she's a convert, she considers it okay to do all that 'oy-vey!' Seinfeld stuff that's very stereotypically Jewish. The other day she made a joke about Jewish girls giving the best blowjobs, and when her boyfriend sent her a string of pearls for her birthday, she that she loved expensive things, because she's a Jewish American Princess, and that maybe next year he would buy her a nosejob. She also told me that she knew I was Jewish because of my nose, and she said something about the Holocaust that I can't remember butAll of this makes me seriously uncomfortable and I've told her so, but she always gets defensive and says, 'I can say that stuff because I'm Jewish!' And then says that because Orthodox Jews would consider her more Jewish than me, I shouldn't get to tell her that it makes me feel weird. Which, okay, I get it, she technically is, but she hasn't grown up in any sort of Jewish culture like I have, and, up until a year ago, she wasn't Jewish by religion or by heritage, which makes me feel like she doesn't get to co-opt the Jewish experience quite yet, you know?

Plus she converted for her boyfriend, which doesn't strike me as wholeheartedly embracing the faith.I don't know. Maybe I just really don't like her (she also always says, 'Hey, whore!' Whenever she sees me and tells me I should give Steve a blowjob because he bought me coffee one time) and I'm projecting this stuff onto her because I just find her character distasteful as a whole. I'm half-and-half so I would never profess to be an expert on Jewish culture, but every time she tells a Jewish American Princess joke (which are tired and not funny to begin with) or some crack about concentration camps my skin crawls. I have relatives that died in the Holocaust; she doesn't. I really do have family members that speak only Yiddish and do all the Borscht Belt stuff; she doesn't. At what point does her religion technicality meet my lived experience?All I know is that she's really fucking unpleasant and I don't particularly want to be around her anyway.

So when I go out dancing with my friends, the boys absolutely NEVER dance with me and another friend of mine. We were having a bitch session earlier in the week about why we thought this might be. I always thought it was because I'm not the average frat boy's definition of hot, but my friend is cute and peppy and conventionally attractive, so we decided it had to be another factory. We decided that it was:1.) We exude some kind of don't-fuck-with-me vibe that prevents the boys from going after us.2.) We can't dance.Honestly, it's a little demoralizing.

I'm not interested in any of the boys at school, and I certainly don't really want to dance with the douchebags, but I always feel like the fifth wheel when we go out and it's really not that fun at all. Is it a betrayal of my feminist values that I want to have someone to dance with just to take the edge off the awkwardness?I WANNA DANCE WITH SOMEBODY, WITH SOMEBODY WHO LOVVVVVVVESSSSSS ME.In related news, Annah and Alec are coming to the Harry Potter-themed Halloween party I'm throwing! YAY IT'S GONNA BE FUN AND I WILL BE WITH PEOPLE WHO ARE FAMILIAR WITH MY HIGH SCHOOL-ERA BULLSHIT.

Listen free to 荒武裕一朗 – Constant as the northern star. Discover more music, concerts, videos, and pictures with the largest catalogue online at Last.fm. Listen free to 荒武裕一朗 – Constant as the northern star. Discover more music, concerts, videos, and pictures with the largest catalogue online at Last.fm.

(NASA/HST)The sky’s most famous star? No contest: It’s Polaris, the North Star. And like most celebrities, it’s enveloped in misconception.People often assume, for example, that it’s brilliant. But Polaris is just medium-bright – about 45 th on the sky’s list of luminaries – capable of appearing over light-polluted cities but never brilliant enough to catch one’s eye.

Polaris may be amazing, but its brightness is not its calling card. Its uniqueness becomes clear only after it has been ignored for a few hours.By then, Earth’s rotation will have whirled the sky around, arcing the stars in their grand and endless ballet.

But not Polaris. Our axis of spin points in its direction, causing Polaris to appear glued in place. “Constant as the northern star,” said Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, longing perhaps to link to it his own dreams of immortality. AdvertisementIt’s an unlikely reality, this conspicuous distant sun sitting within a single degree of the celestial pole, the precise spot around which everything pivots. Given the 41,253 square degrees of sky, the odds against such a noticeable star occupying the right spot is nearly a thousand-to-one.

It’s then not surprising that those living south of the Equator, where Polaris is invisible, do not have a “south star” to mark the sky’s other pole.Polaris can be identified most easily right now, at nightfall in spring, because the Big Dipper hovers at its highest of the year. Follow its two leftmost “pointer” stars downward to the only star of the same brightness as they; that’s it. Over the centuries, the slow 25,780-year wobble of Earth’s axis allows a procession of stars to take turns being closest to the site around which the sky performs its counterclockwise spin. But never in those 26 millennia is there a star as bright and as close to true north as Polaris.

We live in the unlikely era of the best possible North Star. This implausible situation continues to improve as Polaris slowly creeps toward its half-degree flyby of the celestial pole 87 years from now.In one’s imagination, it’s fun to drop a stone straight down from Polaris, because it then touches true north to an accuracy of better than a degree. A compass, by contrast, follows magnetic lines of force and is badly in error from most locations. From the mid-Hudson Valley, compasses point a whopping 14 degrees to the left of north.Turns out, that distant celebrity to which Earth’s axis happens to point is remarkable in its own right. For starters, it’s not an ordinary sun but a “Cepheid variable”: a giant pulsating star shining with the light of at least 1,000 suns.This brightness varies over a four-day period by an amount too small for the eye to notice. The tiny flickering was unfortunate at first, since the entire system of measuring the brightness of stars originally used Polaris as its standard.

Polaris defined Magnitude Two. But you can’t have an unreliable standard star, and the system moved on.As if petitioning for another chance, its fluctuations have been strangely diminishing. While Polaris varied its light by.1 magnitude when the 20 th century began, in our new century the flickerings are less than.01 magnitude. One Canadian researcher has predicted that the North Star’s variations will soon come to a complete and permanent standstill, granting it yet another curious distinction: as the first Cepheid variable to give up its unsteady habits.Check it out during this month, when it’s simplest to find. Or put it off until whenever; Polaris is going nowhere. For, in every sense, “constant as the northern star” is becoming truer than ever.Want to know more?

The Northern Star Niu

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