Spilling over the church wall. I thought I knew the name of this flower. But when I looked it up, it was a different flower. At some point in the future we should be able to submit photographs to Google and find out what we’re looking at. That seems like something to avoid, but sometimes we really just want to know what we’re looking at. My neighbor spends a lot of time at garden centers and comes home with the names of plants that seem almost made up. I suppose I’ve spent my entire life trying not to pay close attention to the names of plants. They seem arbitrary and about to change. We might see a hundred bugs in a day, or a hundred flowers and not know the exact name of any of them. Bugs and flowers are bugs and flowers.

Louis XIV was the founder of the Observatoire de Paris in the year 1667. If I remember correctly, the king visited the observatory run by Gian Domenico Cassini, a name I owe to Google, and looked through the telescope. It was focused on something interesting and Cassini gave him the name of it. The king looked again, looked cautiously around him, and then said rather quietly, “Yes, but what’s its real name?”

My college French teacher had a theory about that question. Usually the story is repeated by anti-royalists to indicate what a moron the king was. But her theory… The more I try to remember her theory the less it comes back to me. She was a great believer in royalty. But that's all I remember. It's rather hard to think of Louis XIV as an idiot if you can't quite remember why he wasn't.