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Magnet #663 - Caroline Herschel

Ok. Just so you all know...one day, I'll be telling my great-grand-nephews and -nieces-to-come about the day that I wifi'd and magnetblogged up in the air. (More likely, we'll be looking up this magnetblog entry in the Internet Archives, but whatever.)

And when I tell them, I'll say, dang, why didn't I take a picture of that 787 Dreamliner airplane magnet I just bought after my Boeing tour last week? Instead, I had to use the most closely tied in magnet that I already had photographed and loaded in my photobucket.

But, I suppose, as far as stand-in magnets go, this one's pretty damn good.

Caroline Herschel, was a German astronomer who looked to the heavens and not only wondered what was there, but discovered several comets to her name. And for a woman in turn of the 18th century, that's pretty freakin' spectacular.

I bought this Herschel magnet at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, where one of their permanent exhibitions is Judy Chicago's Dinner Party, a fantastic installation that's basically a giant triangle table with beautifully themed and personalized place settings for the 39 most important women in the history of humankind, with another 999 women inscribed in gold on a plaque.

You can spend hours there reading about all of them. Do it - it makes you want to run out and scream, "I am woman, hear me roar!" Actually, for me right now, it's "I am woman, hear me type and chat and post and Tweet and magnetblog!"

Right from the very skies that Herschel stared at almost 300 years ago.

Oh, c'mon. I know I sound like I'm 90 years old right now, but, honestly, you can't tell me that the Wright Brothers knew that we'd get to this point some day.