I have little to say about today’s war sequence, but I got a lot to say about the FB ad that promoted it. This page came out shortly after the solar eclipse of 2017.

My goddaughter, her mother, and I had made a journey of it. We weren’t within the path of totality, the zone where you could see the full effect of the moon totally blocking out the sun. But we were only some hours’ drive outside of it, so we got in my car and headed south. It took an overnight stay in a hotel and some juggling of driving duties, but we made it to Columbia, South Carolina, close to the center of the path of totality. (Getting out would not be as easy as getting in, but that’s another story.) We stopped near the stadium called Spirit Communications Park then (Segra Park today). A minor-league baseball game was playing there, but tickets had been sold out for weeks, and we weren’t sure we wanted to experience the eclipse in an enclosed crowd, anyway.

So we climbed a nearby hill, which gave us a magnificent view, more or less level with the top of the stadium. We could look over at the stadium on one side of it (hearing music and announcements from its PA system), and on the other side was…an abandoned mental asylum, just to lend a little extra spookiness to the experience. There was already a little danger to spice things up…we knew that if we weren’t careful with the eclipse glasses, we could do real damage to our eyes in the midst of our celebrating.

Disclaimer: the video below doesn’t really show the sight of the eclipse. Nor can it render the amazing properties of the dimming and focusing and “hardening” light all around us. I was limited by my equipment, which was not designed for such an event. But it does capture some of our excitement.

FB: If you still have your vision after yesterday, celebrate by feasting your eyes on Guilded Age!