Beelaba-Moonaba

When I was 2 years old, my chosen field was linguistics. This talent may have come upon me after dropping to the floor from a standing position on the high chair. I apparently did a perfect swan dive and slammed into the floor head first. Strange, since the Olympic try outs were years away.

Once my eyes returned to the forward-looking position, my gift for languages emerged. The word beelaba-moonaba has a fairly obvious translation, that being "moon."

But can you guess what the word "more" might have meant? It will be obvious once I tell you, but think about it.

Ok ... that's long enough. I invented the word "more" to mean "water" ... I would say "more" and the glass would be refilled. But it had to be water, so it is clear that I did not mean "give me more water", but rather, "give me *more*" ...

I had one other word in my prospective language, that being "flourentine." This word is also quite obvious, once you hear the translation -- "Corn Flakes" ... I'll let you connect the dots.

My talent apparently faded as I grew, and I chose to adopt English as my mother tongue. I believe that parts of my language did find a home in the Klingon language, and I am fairly sure that anyone who can actually speak that language is a toddler at heart, if not in mind :-)

All that effort just so I can show you an image of the moon that I shot back in June of 2008. I found this in my archives and thought it looked promising. It is so sharp that I am showing you here a 100% crop. That is, each pixel on the screen is the same size as it is on the sensor. So there is no free sharpening factor from the downsizing.

beelaba-moonaba

I believe that may be the only image of the actual beelaba-moonaba in existence.

It was shot with the Nikon D300, Nikon 300mm F4 AFS and Nikon TC17e teleconverter. That makes for 500mm, which is 750mm equivalence to a full frame camera. Which is to say, a small telescope.

By the way ... the story above is true ... I did speak that language at that age. And yes, I was dropped on my head as a child ... as anyone who knows me can easily attest.