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LIKE A HEATED FLASH
The over-advertised and long-awaited national eclipse came and went on Monday afternoon. The moon, passing across the sun and viewable through Lake Geneva’s bright sunny sky, appeared rough-edged instead of smooth and round. No, that perception didn’t come from the viewer’s eyes, it came from the distortions caused by the depth of the atmosphere and the bright daylight conditions as sunlight struck and was reflected around the moon’s surface. There’s nothing wrong with the moon and it didn’t give the impression it had horns or any of the other conspiracy theories that were rampant throughout the crowds that stopped to bend their necks back and view the event through some of the cheapest ‘glasses’ ever to grace the faces of mankind.
The air did grow a bit cooler, and the wind did pick up a bit in Lake Geneva at the appointed hour of 2:08. That lasted for five minutes, or so, and then it was over. Come and gone so fast it was unbelievable after this year’s national media buildup and the vast sea of advertising. Rumors at coffee shops abounded about the likelihood of the great rapture occurring in conjunction with the eclipse. There was talk of some planet members being taken to a passing comet or asteroid that had been kept a secret. It’s amazing what seemingly ordinary people can come to believe. Oh, the rapture was announced to be coming on April 23rd and the mistake in dates was caused by an ‘accounting’ error. Be ready to be raptured, pay what is owed, or be damned to wander the earth like you may have been doing all your life to date anyway.
Meanwhile, Todd ‘Krause, the new Lake Geneva mayor, was sworn in at eleven a.m. on Monday morning of this week. He, along with the other winners of the alderperson’s positions (MaryJo Fesenmaier had to teach so her official swearing-in is delayed a week). Mayor Mayor is gone, back to her neat picket fence home on Wisconsin Street. Ron Gemen, the happy-go-luckless cowboy assisting her, is kind of gone with her, but will still be around for miscellaneous rodeo stuff and his quarterly local magazine of whatever merit. Fred Gahl, another name not well known, but big in the passing administration, retreats to his ‘estate’ sale outfit at the north end of town.
Meanwhile, since none of the bad stuff happened with the coming and going of the eclipse, below, here on earth, the real fireworks are about to begin, and the quality of life is about to abound. No leaders of Lake Geneva have been elected to office with such a great swatch of the local population voting and making their votes count dearly. That Todd Krause was given a mandate was less true than the mandate of the former leadership was repudiated and then reclaimed.
The next total solar eclipse will strike North America in 2026, just in time for the next elections in Lake Geneva. How quaintly unexpected, although that eclipse will not come anywhere nearly as close to where this one tracked. Eclipses are much more common than people might think but then, astrophysics is not something most Americans have much interest in. The tremendous space program that took Americans to the moon back in the sixties and seventies did not fail, and fail it did after an unbelievably success beginning, because of aliens or competition or any other reason the public grew bored, and then the politicians took all the money away.
Even today, the entire U.S. space program gets less money than the new B-21 bomber fleet (NASA 54 billion, bombers 100 to 200 billion!). Local politics is doing better than that, however, and by the next eclipse, quite possibly there will be a warmer and more successful community below the moon’s traveling path of a darkening line than there was in 2024.
An eclipse is an unheated flash of a passing event while the leadership of the people the community elects is here for quite a long run.
