vending machines

Around the world with 26 of the weird and wonderful.

And coming to a lobby near someone soon...

This isn't that modern, incidentally. 

According to wiki, a first century engineer and mathematician, Hero of Alexandria, invented a device that accepted a coin and dispensed holy water.  (The deposited coin fell on a pan attached to a lever;  the lever then opened a valve which let water flow out.)  Also, in the early 1600s, English taverns already contained vending machines that dispensed tobacco.

As for banned goods of the "weirder yet," an 1800s English bookseller named Richard Carlile devised a vending machine that distributed forbidden literature.  Mr. Carlile was an important champion for freedom of the press;  he was jailed in England for his writing, and prosecuted for publishing Thomas Paine's Common Sense, The Rights of Man and the Age of Reason.

*Photo credit, via Wikipedia, Minnesota Historical Society, "This vending machine was made by National Vendors, Inc., of 50555 Natural Bridge, St. Louis 15, Missouri, circa 1952, though there appear to be patent dates on the machine as late as 1960."

orange moon

Yes, that's what I am .. from Erykah Badu ..

the eclipse

Photos of last night's total lunar eclipse at the Weather Channel.

The eclipse was the first of four consecutive total lunar eclipses, known as a "tetrad," between April 2014 and September 2015.

That's not all:

Astronomer Bob Berman, who hosted a live lunar eclipse webcast for the Slooh community telescope using views from Arizona's Prescott Observatory, said event was also one for the record books because of another bright object in the predawn sky.

"It was the most special one, I would say, of our lives," Berman said during the Slooh webcast. "What made it particularly extraordinary was that it happened on the same night as the closest approach of Mars to Earth in years."

Mars made its closest approach to Earth since 2008 on Monday night (April 14), coming within 57.4 million miles (92.4 million km) of our planet.

The star Spica was near too.

If you didn't stay up late - or it was too cloudy - join star gazers on youtube for what was a twelve and a half hour all-nighter in Los Angeles, or citizen scientists with the Gloria Project transmitting from Saksaywaman on the outskirts of Cusco, Peru, the former capital of the Inca Empire.

Hmmm.   More here on why yesterday night's event is called "a blood moon."

*Photo credit, via Dusty Diary,  poem by Ypsilanti poet-farmer William Lambie about the November 15, 1891 lunar eclipse, published in the November 20, 1891 "Ypsilanti Commercial."