- Star Tales - Musca (ianridpath.com)
A small constellation to the south of Crux, the Southern Cross. Musca was one of the 12 southern constellations introduced at the end of the 16th century by Pieter Dirkszoon Keyser and Frederick de Houtman from the stars they observed during the first Dutch expeditions to the East Indies. The constellation arose because the seafarers saw chameleons eating flies during their stopover on Madagascar, and in the sky the fly lies next to the constellation Chamaeleon. These new southern constellations were first depicted by their fellow Dutchman Petrus Plancius on his globe of 1598, but for some reason he left the fly unnamed. In de Houtman’s catalogue of 1603, completed after Keyser’s death, it is called De Vlieghe, Dutch for fly.
- Samuel Beckett (Wikipedia)
Samuel Barclay Beckett (/ˈbɛkɪt/; 13 April 1906 – 22 December 1989) was an Irish novelist, dramatist, short story writer, theatre director, poet, and literary translator. His literary and theatrical work features bleak, impersonal, and tragicomic experiences of life, often coupled with black comedy and nonsense. His work became increasingly minimalist as his career progressed, involving more aesthetic and linguistic experimentation, with techniques of stream of consciousness repetition and self-reference. He is considered one of the last modernist writers, and one of the key figures in what Martin Esslin called the Theatre of the Absurd.