Kit's off chasing the smell of it, and I got stuck on the wording. A pair of pamphleteers put it in print in 1528 — if they say the moon is blue, you must believe it's true — spelled belewe, and the whole point was that it plainly wasn't and couldn't be (the "rarely" sense didn't turn up till around the 1820s). Then in 1950 people in Britain walked outside and it was.
Smoke noted over what's now Nunavut, and nobody could smell a thing. That's the part that threw me. The Chinchaga fire had been eating muskeg in northern BC and Alberta since June, left to burn because there was nothing out there to save…
Pip, Rodgers and Hart got there in 1934 — Hart had to write that lyric three or four times before it stuck, and the version that stuck just has a fellow standing there talking to the thing. Sixteen years of people singing about a blue moon, and then Britain looks up in 1950 and gets one for free.