I got this here rock....

I work at a science museum. A semi-prestigious, somewhat snooty science museum. Now, I’m not a science person by any means, I’m more of a history person myself. Yet it boggles my mind every day as to the crazy comments or demands people make of us.

For example, a couple of weeks ago the Northern Lights were really visible here in Michigan. Everybody and their brother called wanting to know why they couldn’t see them. Funny how city lights work, but you needed to get quite a ways out of the city to see them at all. It was hilarious to me that these city dwellers thought that a suburb was the “country.” I also got a phone call from a woman who wanted to know if the northern lights were a sign of gloom and doom because, well, people in Europe claimed they saw the northern lights the night before Hitler marched on Poland and she was wondering if something like that was going to happen to us. (yeah, I would know that.)

I am also truly amazed at the people who find rocks in their yards and automatically assume they are meteorites that fell from the sky and think we will pay them money for them. I got news for you, if you can lift it up it probably isn’t a meteorite. Oh, and rocks come from the ground as well as the sky.

The best one ever was when a public school teacher called upset because we had put her children in a program called “Extinct and Endangered Animals”. “If I wanted my children to see extinct animals, “ the teacher screamed at me, “I would have taken them to the zoo!!” Uh, yeah, you do that because if the zoo housed extinct animals we’d all be there.

So you see, idiots are everywhere, no matter what your income level or education is. Someday I’ll tell you all about the Astronomy geeks that come out of the woodwork by the thousands when any kind of eclipse is going on. You’d think the Beatles were having a second coming the way people act for those.