Victorians were obsessed with the moon

spectator.co.uk

38 points·hoffmannesque··8 comments

One of the biggest reasons for the interest is that the first telescope was developed that could see birds and people on the moon. That would be like television shows every night. http://hoaxes.org/archive/permalink/the_great_moon_hoax

Interesting article but doesn’t really support the headline. You could probably collect a bunch of still lifes and ask why Victorians were obsessed with bowls of fruit.

Indeed, why were they obsessed with bowls of fruit?

I can't easily find any sources to support this, but AFAIK the reason so many old photos/paintings have fruit bowls in the background is a display of wealth. Because fruit was harder to come by, having them showed you were doing well. People would even rent fruit bowls for portraits. The practice is kind of similar to renting expensive cars for music videos nowadays I guess.

Doubly so for pineapples...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pineapple#/media/File:Charles-...

> People would even rent fruit bowls for portraits.

I find it kind of refreshing to know that this kind of behavior did not start with Instagram influencers.

Bowls of fruit stay untouched long enough for one to draw a picture. Boxes of donuts, on the other hand...you haven't seen many still lifes of them, have you?

Light pollution in modern cities is truly a shame, and I wonder if we can even do anything about it.

If self-driving cars become universal, will this mean we can do away with headlights and most streetlights? We'd need to actually ban human drivers before that point. Seems quite far fetched.

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