More Sky Watching

[muninnhuginn]

"I saw two shooting stars last night
I wished on them but they were only satellites
Is it wrong to wish on space hardware
I wish, I wish, I wish you'd care"

Billy Bragg, A New England

"Seen a shooting star tonight
Slip Away.
Tomorrow will be another day.
Guess it's too late to say the things to you
That you needed to hear me say.
Seen a shooting star tonight
Slip away."

Bob Dylan, Shooting Star

We did. Walking across Coldham's Common (and let us confirm that our hams were chilled) at about 11.10 pm, we saw something shoot silent across the sky before blinking out somewhere over the Whitehill Estate. For the first instant, we thought "weird 'plane", since it was heading roughly in the direction of the airport. Then we thought "it's really too late for a final November 5th firework". Then we noticed the silence. And the arc its tail made across the sky. A brief moment of celestial splendour.

We've never seen one before.

We didn't wish.

It was a tad too late for Looby Loo's Nativity play earlier this afternoon.

[Odd. We've never looked at the lyrics for A New England before, learning them from the Kirsty McColl single and then the track on the Billy Bragg LP. We'd always heard that third line as a statement: "It's wrong to wish...." It was a question all along.]

Comments

[the-magician.livejournal.com]

I only found out about that question about a week or two ago when some meme asked for a special song lyric, and that was precisely the one that sprang to mind ... so I looked it up on the web and discovered that Billy had written it as a question but Kirsty had indeed rephrased it as an answer.

Not sure that under the normal "cover version" permission that that's allowed. You *are* allowed to make minor textual changes to alter, say, the gender of the person/people referred to in the song ... e.g. "I put you on a pedestal, I put you on the pill" becomes "I put you on a pedestal, you put me on the pill", which I think works *better* in the Kirsty version.

I've seen several (?many?) shooting stars, but it *is* so much easier to see them outside of major cities (and to see them during the Leonids etc.)

[muninnhuginn]

One of the (few?) benefits of Cambridge is the relatively large number of open spaces that do get sufficiently dark late at night even with all the street lamps working. Lots of sky, too.

[pickledginger.livejournal.com]

Huh. I'd thought it was an assertion of wrongness, too. Not at all certain which I prefer.

Glad you've finally seen a shooting star!
Ever spot an aurora?

[muninnhuginn]

I played the track in BB's version over several times today and from that it's impossible to hear a question. The "is" is inaudible and doesn't fit the scansion and there's nothing in his tone of voice to indicate anything other than a statement of fact. Still, they're his lyrics: I'll just continue to (willfully now) mishear them>

Nope. No auroras... yet.