Day 79, Level 1: Boxing Day, cricket, racing, burgers, night sky and scientific bamboozlement!

Boxing Day 2020. Saturday. Stunningly beautiful weather. 

A mellow morning. Coffee, paper, lounging around, sunshine, doors open. Perfect.  

The Boxing Day cricket Test match between NZ and Pakistan was on so Brett and Michael tuned in. I have to admit I do "get" cricket - thanks to having two sons who have played for years. Before that I knew nothing but now I know rather a lot and it's a game I've come to enjoy. How some of those guys catch that small hard unforgiving and speeding ball is unfathomable. Hand-eye coordination to be in utter awe of. 

I did some horseracing study as the cricket played out and we had ham rolls for lunch as the sun shone strongly. 

Brett and Michael went off to golf around 2.30pm and I went into Matakana. Called into the sports bar to watch a few races - the usual crew were there. Good fun, loads of laughs. I had several friends with horses running at Ellerslie but alas none of them came anywhere - as expected, most of them were paying plenty and not favoured. One of them ran a great race though, out of her class. One to watch. 

Boxing Day is huge in horse racing here and today was a day of hot favourites and top jockeys winning at every turn. A little predictable but the races showcased in-form horses, riders and trainers at their best. Some great fields and we enjoyed all the exciting racing action.

Got some supplies then headed home - stopping off at various vege stalls along the way, including a quick lurch to the side of the road when I spotted some young kids with handmade signs saying "Avocados and plums". Yes please, all grown along the road. I got some of each and continued on to another stall to pick up some home grown capsicum and tomatoes from a friend's stall. So good. 

By the time I got home, around 5pm. the wind had got up a bit and the temperature was chilling down considerably. When Brett and Michael got home from golf, it was "cold" (relatively speaking!) and we were reaching for sweatshirts and closing doors. They settled in to watch more cricket - this time Australia versus India, test match in Melbourne. 

All eyes on the cricket

Chicken/bacon/avocado burgers for dinner, and I pottered about in the kitchen with a semi-eye on the cricket. Not quite so interested if it's not the NZ Black Caps - who, incidentally, put in a good day today by all accounts. 

It was a make-you-own burger style dinner with a platter of goodies to put inside the lightly toasted burger bun! Served with home-cooked chips - a mix of potato and kumara. 

We blobbed out and watched "The Theory of Everything", the movie about Stephen Hawking. It was okay, but didn't have me fully engaged for some reason. I have some reservations that are hard to explain.

I wandered out half-way through to check up on the Jupiter/Saturn "great conjunction" in the sky - there it was, hanging low and bright in the south-west sky. They say this combo could have been "the Star of Bethlehem" or Christmas Star that the Three Wise Men followed all those years ago. Maybe. It is bright, but not in the way a star is. More dense. And when you look through binoculars you spot two objects not just the one you see with the naked eye. There they are, right there - Jupiter in front and Saturn behind. Phenomenal.

I got the telescope out tonight - it's a bit rickety on it's tripod so a bit hard to hold it steady but I managed to get the thing trained on it and in focus before it disappeared down behind a clump of trees. There is a very small window of opportunity to capture this "conjunction" between nightfall and it descending below the horizon. I timed it just right tonight! 

The moon was very bright in the sky - it's currently an 87.4% waxing gibbous moon - coming into Full Moon (due 30th Dec). The telescope picked it up a treat but it was so bright we almost needed sunglasses! Short viewing bursts only. Oh the detail of that pitted surface. 

And to its west was a very bright Mars, glowing with its red hue. 

Yes, that's the Jupiter/Saturn "great conjunction" in the south-western sky above Omaha Beach, NZ - looks like a white blob!

So it was quite apt to be doing a bit of galaxy-gazing while watching the Stephen Hawking film. I have to say, whatever it is he espoused during his life, whatever his theories are/were, I still can't quite  grasp exactly what he was saying. It's all bamboozle talk to me. No matter how much I've googled, read, and now watched in the film - I'm still none the wiser about it all. Are you? 

Perhaps I need to read "A Brief History of Time" - but despite my interest in stars, galaxies, space, the moon - and definitely time and infinity - I'm not sure it will clarify things for me! I've looked at the few excerpts of the book and just shook my head. Bamboozle talk! 

But then, again I'm not a quantum physicist and science is not my gig. 

But then again, I am a "creativationist" (my self-coined term for all things creative) and envisaging the world beyond four small corners, and grappling with bigger picture stuff, is all part of that. 

Black holes, quantum physics, theories of time, particles colliding and the evolution of the universe - if a physicist says it's fact, who can argue?! 

If a mere creative were to suggest it as an idea, I'm sure everyone would dispute it!

One of my creative premises is: "Envisage the unknown to create the unexpected". Perhaps that's ultimately what he was saying. Who knows!

The most interesting thing about it all is that it is really just pure speculation - or has someone actually been and seen and investigated those black holes and proved the big bang theory and come back to tell the tale with evidence and proof? Don't think so! Space is too expansive and ever-changing and remote a place to offer up things like evidence and proof. How are we to truly know what is? In fact, the universe seems to delight in creating bamboozlement that humans seem to delight in trying to solve, yet only get so far.

Since I was a kid I've tried to get my head around "what lies beyond the universe" but it's just too big and cumbersome a thought and to this day I've got no closer to an answer, despite trying to stretch my thought capacity to the nth degree. Some minor grappling with quantum physics stuff hasn't got me there either!

SHARE-NOTE OF THE DAY:
Bamboozlement ...

The essence of a black hole lies in the transitional nature of the spheres of intrinsic neutrons and protons that surround the nucleus which in turn is the engine of the oblique mass that exponentially filters the dense particles that form the energy helix that pulls the centre of the black hole from within itself and, in turn, enables it to implode so as to create a vortex that exhumes vast matter from the internal cortex and releases it into a celestial prism which then gets carried into cosmic hyperspace before flowing through an inter-galactic channel and emitting its potent collateral complexities, after which, in time, collapse is inevitable. 

Make sense? No?  Bamboozled? Yes?

Exactly! I just made it all up! 

It reads like an exerpt from a quantum physics textbook but is utter garbage!

OMG my head is about to both implode and explode after all that, even though it took less time to devise than a paragraph in a short story or travel article! Note it is all one sentence!

Time for sleep, haha!