The biggest and the brightest

Astronomer Bart Simpson wants to remind you that we'll have a blue moon tonight at 9:35 PM. It will be the biggest, brightest full moon all the year long, and it's a blue Moon because it's the second full Moon of this calendar month.

That term came into being to describe something that just could not be, like a John Mayer song people would want to hear twice, or a bad filet mignon. In the 16th century, since there was no real entertainment available, people amused themselves by saying “the Moon is blue,” and then everyone laughed.

But in 1883, after the Krakatoa volcano in Indonesia blew its stack, people all over the world said their sunsets were oddly-colored, and that their Moon looked blue. But with no crackpot radio shows to call into, people shrugged off their blue Moon and stuck an orange in it.