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Italian Inventions
Telescope
Hello my dear! I'm Grandpa McCloud and I want to tell you how to check out the stars.
I love clouds much better, but stars! oh boy. they are so gorgeous that sometimes at night we the clouds cover them to keep them clean and shining. Oh boy! I'm babling now. Let's begin with him:
Do you know this man?
He is Galileo Galilee.
He didnt care much about the clouds. I guess I was just over his head.
Actually he couldnt wait until I left his town, so that he could look at the stars.
Poor Galileo! 
You know, in Italy they had a lot of religious fanatics those days, thats why they paid a lot of money to artists to draw religious pictures in churches and booksmost of those artworks have nothing to do with actual religious figures. You see, in the land of the prophets, not many people walked naked as you see in those pictures in Italy.
You must have heard of David and Goliath, hey?
I mean, if David was going to attack him with a sling, dressed like this, Goliath wouldve thrown him a pair of pants, not a stone. Also, look at Michelangelo's Moses__with horns. All the popes and religeous people back then, didn't raise any eyebrow about that because they had no clue of who the prophets were.
Here, in these dark ages, comes Galileo Galilee.
Galileo was curious to find out about the stars, and he found out that the earth was NOT the center of the universe as the religious books had said. It was NOT flat as the Popes had said, and that the sun was NOT turning around the earth as the book had said. So far as the church was concerned, shall we say, he was the Man Who Knew Too Much. So they decided to get rid of him.
o you know how he found out so much? There is a play by my favorite playwright, Bertolt Brecht that once Galileo saw a cheap Binocular that had become fashionable in Venice, he invented the Telescope with a tube--such as a paper towel holder, and a couple of lenzes he had bought in the market.
Now he could adjust the distance between the lenzes in the tube and see as far as he wanted to. Telescope in Latin means "see far".
Galileo went through a lot of trouble because he proved that:
One. All the Universe is not circling around the Earth.
Second, That the earth is round and it goes around in circle around the sun, despite the popular teachings.
and Third, the earth is NOT the center of the universe but a dust in the universe that has millions of planets such as earth in it.
 The church Inquisition chapter tortured him to "confess" he had been wrong,
and the "Book" and the "Pope" had been right all along.
He went through all that so you dont have to.
Grandpa McCloud hopes that there is a day named after Galileo as an international holiday.
Anyways, if you got one of those telescopes, see what else YOU can find in the sky that Galileo missed--and ENJOY your discoveries!
Copyright, 2004 Global Education a Not for Profit 501(c)3 organization in Miami, Florida, focused the global understanding, through arts and literature wrapped in geography education. www.globalkids.info
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