Keep Looking Up

Valentine’s day is now well, well behind us, but in this household it was a late bloomer. In a reversal of 50 years’ tradition, Brigitte decided to give me a Valentine’s Day present for a change, and she decided to give me the stars. The package took a long time arriving, so we celebrated late.

But let me unwrap this. Decades ago now, in the late 1970s, Jack Horkeimer appeared on Public Television in brief vignettes about the stars—and how to make the most of them by looking up with naked eyes. The program then was called Jack Horkheimer: Star Hustler, but Horkheimer changed the name to Star Gazer thanks to the inadvertent influence of the Internet. Children looking for his videos using a search engine got the wrong kinds of sites when they typed in the phrase “star hustler.” Rolling my eyes. In any case, Brigitte got me Horkheimer’s most recent disk, Space Oddities, which is a collage, with linking commentaries, of his recent and some older brief video “articles”—and it is a delight. The place to go to is here. And here you will find a YouTube broadcast of one of the shortest kinds of items Horkheimer produces for PBS, a one-minute snippet.

Jack Foley Horkheimer is the Executive Director of the Miami Space Transit Planetarium at the Miami Science Museum and has been at his job for more than 35 years. Each of his episodes ends with the phrase “Keep looking up”—very good advice at any time, not least in this day and age.