Everything’s always brighter at night.

“It’s the poor bastards on the ground I pity,” Trevor said. “They go into the military with no education and come out with even less. And that’s if they come out.”

I figured this was one of those occasions when it was best to keep my mouth shut, so I did.

“They’ve stopped trading,” he said. “I heard their supplier went out of business.”

As I continued down the street, I wondered whether I was the victim of a macabre joke.

What’s the name of the hole in your eye that admits light?

1. Iris
2. Choroid
3. Lens
4. Retina
5. Sclera
6. Pupil
7. Cornea

(Answer on page 49.)

I was so frustrated by my ignorance that I threw the magazine in a rubbish bin instead of turning to page forty-nine. Although I remain ignorant, the hole in my eye that admits light still works just fine, even if I don’t know what it’s called.

To his credit, though, at least the would-be artist at least had the sense not to display his work beside the row of magnificent porcelain urinals.

Adam showed me some landscape photos he made, and asked me why the backgrounds are completely black, with no detail whatsoever. I put the negatives in a densitometer and, sure enough, the area of film that should have contained pictures of huge mountains had apparently never been exposed to light. Nevertheless, the daffodils in the foreground were properly exposed.

After a lengthy investigation, I finally discovered what the problem was. Adam was using his fancy camera’s top shutter speed of one sixteen-thousandth of a second. Since light travels at 299,792,458 meters per second, it only travels 18.737 kilometers at Adam’s fastest shutter speed. And thus the light from an object over nineteen kilometers away doesn’t have time to reach the film.

I told Adam he should probably use a slower shutter speed, and should definitely never, ever make a photograph with daffodils in the foreground.

One of the reasons I enjoy Vestal’s writing is that he never hesitates to add interesting observations that have nothing to do with the nominal subject of the piece. In his “Filing Negatives” article, for example, he throws in this parenthetical aside.

(Etymological note: in Portuguese, the word for “archive” is “acervo,” which means “heap.”)

I considered, then ignored, the criticism; that policy has always served me well. And anyway, most of what I do shows bad judgment, poor taste, gross insensitivity, and so on.

As for the seven late astronauts (or fourteen, going back to 1986), I think I’d be willing to give my life for a trip into space. Maybe when I’m pushing eighty. According to urban legends, some Inuit communities say goodbye to their old and infirm by sending them out to sea on an ice floe. To answer Robert Frost’s fire or ice question, I think a one-way trip to the sun would be a brilliant way to go.