Thucydides Mooning

Now that's a moon. For all the cloud. Possibly on the equator there can be no size to the old cheese, angles, math and all that. Always up in the east here, at least this time of night. And almost completely disappeared in this. Imminent.... Yes indeed, entirely and without trace. There you are.... Quickly in and out, nice fun and games. Bright evenso behind a range of screening.
         The delightful non-English speaker from Shandong Little Kitchen keeping up a high, energetic wave from the inside footpath while her old friend passed in the other direction on the road. Big smiles. Big. A gallant and a half. Mid twenties, no more. Yet like so many others from where she hails, such settled confidence and ease. Reads kindly disposition straight as a die, easy as pie.
         — Wow! Where that gleam come from? Half rat-power at its brightest earlier. Bright as the advertising. Brilliant.
         Again. A power. Part possibly from this blacker than usual pitch. An unknown.
         Single day from full, if that. No more. Again bottom end faintest of dints.
         Two flashing cops down Lorong 24. An earlier passing without flash, unknown whether it took 24. Here's a third too, flashing but not hurtling.
         Still shining. Possibly rising a trifle while it shines.
         Marginal if there's been any rise. All to do with margin however, as the Chinese here know.
         Mary Beard is continuing full of wonderful suggestion, insight, captivation on these ancients, currently Thucydides. J.F.K. did some kind of thesis at Harvard on a re-interpretation of Churchill's study of England between the wars: the latter's "How England Slept" turned by the Pres. to-be into "Why England Slept?" The relevance to the Greek master in the comparison of the Athenian example in its tussle with Sparta. Marvelously tantalizing little studies on Caesar, Cleo, Augustus and the rest from the back issues of the Review on-line. In lieu of other reading in this out-of-place place, wholesome fare.
         Absolutely and utterly blanketed gone quart ten. Dim black. One barely illuminated fringe of white cloud the only semblance. And indeed, here she flies! Mighty and high. Easy to see how the ancients a few millennia prior to the astronomer ancients of Greece might have danced in the forest glen under the great lamp's beam. How the Chinese NY in precisely three weeks fits this sky-gazer will be damned if he can say.... Hang about! It'll be a new moon of course! What else?
         And another cop out of 24A, the female in the passenger seat putting up her hair. Back to the routine of the evening shift after the earlier high-jinks. Sundays fairly racy here with the workers often resting. The biggest night of the week for Shandong Little Kitchen. One fella short while ago needed supervision on the roadway trying to hail a cab. Soon got jack of being ignored. A glance told the cabbies enough.
         A number of street decorations up along Geylang Road too now. The long Dragon went up in Chinatown a week ago with the PM lighting the torch and cutting ribbons. But that Chinatown is for the tourists. Geylang is the real Chinatown in this neck of the diaspora. No doubt. On the walk back a small high red balloon or lantern with a naked flame beneath surprised flitting by, and very rapidly, carried by the stronger currents above. A reminder of the poor devils in NZ over the weekend in their balloon.

NB. Mary Beard covers the Greeks and Romans for the New York Review of Books.