I noticed that yesterday I wrote ‘gray’ and on January 25 ‘grey’.  Both are correct.  One is the English spelling and the other American.  I can never remember which and being exposed to both, use them interchangeably.  I just looked it up and ‘grey’ is British. 

        I thought it was George Bernard Shaw who said, “England and America are two great countries divided by a common language.”  And so he did, but Oscar Wilde may have said it first. 

        In checking that out I also discovered that, “There are lies, damned lies, and statistics,” which I attributed to Mark Twain actually comes from Benjamin Disraeli, of whom I am presently reading in a book about his rivalry with Gladstone, THE LION AND THE UNICORN.

        The use of grey/gray twice recently was justified by Chicago tying an all-time January record for seven consecutive days without sunshine; the month being the seventh gloomiest January on record; and this the most severe winter in Chicago for more than three decades.

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        One of the websites I visit each morning is The Astronomy Picture of the Day at http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html.  It keeps things in perspective.

        Today’s looks like a sky full of fireflies, a cloud of fireflies.  But they aren’t fireflies, they are galaxies. 

        There are times when I almost think the universe may not be about us.