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Showing posts from 2010

First White Christmas

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We took a decoration from our tree and posed it outside. The decoration is an original of a set given to us by my parents. My mom decorated her trees when I was a child with this Christmas ball . The snow was steady and abundant, loud in the silence of the windless still day. Back of our house facing west. Same angle as the snow from February this year. Looking from our bedroom down our driveway. Walking in my first White Christmas. We ended up with about two inches, wet and packed. Yesterday was my first white Christmas. My daddy tells me that he and mom went to the back of my grandparent’s farm in 1957 and cut a small pine tree for Christmas. It snowed that day, but it was gone by Christmas here. In 1993 there was allegedly a dusting of snow at Christmas here but Jennifer and I didn’t live here then. We were in the metro Atlanta area and it didn’t snow that far south. According to what I can gather, this is otherwise the first White Christmas here since the 1880's. So, yesterday

Toys Not Included

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Red Moon at Solstice

Last night while I slept something happened that has not occurred in several hundred years. I have found different dates online for the last time Earth experienced such an event, depending upon where you live in the world I suppose. But, the most recent date is 1638 . The next time it will occur in the US is 2094 . The event was a total lunar eclipse on the Winter Solstice . This is a significant, rare astronomical occurrence . According to Jennifer, it means big things astrologically too . But, I usually let her fill me in on those details . It has always fascinated me that the relative sizes of the Earth, the Moon, and the Sun allow for total eclipses. Think about it. The Sun is about 93 million miles away, the Moon is about 240,000 miles away. And yet the Moon can near-perfectly blot out the Sun on certain occasions. The Sun happens to be about 400 times the size of the Moon and is almost 400 times the distance of the Moon from the Earth. If there is a case to be made for divine

My Lovecraft Fetish: Part Three

My other favorite H. P. Lovecraft short story is The Colour Out of Space which is about a meteorite that crashes into an out of the way ordinary family farm 20 miles or so outside the city of Arkham . Scientists from Miskatonic University take samples of the meteorite and notice in the globular nature of the specimen an indescribable but definitively strange and unique color. Gradually, the unfortunate, common farm family suffers hardship after hardship though they are innocent and undeserving of their plight. Their animals get sick, the fruit trees bare foul tasting juices, other trees turn grey, grass dies, and eventually even the family’s dogs are all dead. Meanwhile, the family members, one by one, go crazy. The mother first, gibbering mindless sounds. The farmer locks her in the attic and feeds her. She screams a lot. Then one of the farmer’s boys ends up the same way. He, speaking gibberish too, ends up in a separate room of the attic. Mother and son scream undecipherable utte

My Lovecraft Fetish: Part Two

“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of disassociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.” – The opening paragraph from The Call of Cthulhu (1926). Just an extraordinary piece of prose, reflecting of H.P. Lovecraft’s unmatched talent to disturb. The Call of Cthulhu is one of my favorite short stories of all authors and times. Cthulhu (see here for pronunication ) is the cornerstone of spiritual terror , it has no literary precedent and yet many imitators and mimickers. With Cthulhu Lovecraf t

My Lovecraft Fetish: Part One

There was a time long ago when my spiritual path took me through occult ways for about two years. It was a rather intense period, virtually all of which I now reject, but I learned a lot, chiefly about how human psychology is of greater power than most people realize. By now I have forgotten much of the occultism that I used to think I knew.  One thing I still retain is an interest in Aleister Crowley’s Thoth Tarot . I have several guides on that subject and still occasionally dabble with the cards, often surprised at them, always entertained from a strictly intellectual perspective – as I am with most any system that stakes a claim to insight.   It was around this time that I started reading the stories of H.P. Lovecraft . I found most of his tales highly entertaining and still do. My original mass-market paperbacks from that earlier time are on my bookshelf, appropriately filled with notations made through the years. The paperbacks have become rather atmospheric in themselves, th

My Vote for Person of the Year

Seems that 2010 will be the Year of WikiLeaks . In the spirit of the times, I wish to nominate Julian Assange to be Time Magazine's Person of the Year . But it isn't for reasons that you might think. WikiLeaks has by now established itself as a rather unique place in cyberspace. Perhaps it is the ultimate expression of freedom that the internet makes possible ; the disclosure of worldly secrets to an unknowing and largely ill-informed public . 2010 has marked a banner year for the whistle-blower web site with classified information on the Iraq War and the Afghan War being disseminated worldwide. This was followed by the dumping of more than 250,000 classified US diplomatic documents beginning on November 28. There were a few rather major revelations that are no doubt embarrassing to the Obama Administration . If nothing else, it adds fuel to the fire that the president is inept in the way he conducts the business of the nation. Mostly, the documents strike me as rather b

Of Cuivienen near a Blue Moon

Note: I am a J.R.R. Tolkien fan. This post refers to a lot of Tolkien that I make little attempt to explain. As such, at times it can be like a baseball fan reading the details of a cricket match. Sorry about that if it makes the post more difficult for you. There are plenty of links to get lost in if you want to explore any of it. Last Saturday, just after sunset on what turned out to be a bright open sky adorned with small tears of clouds in a reflected orange hue, I lit another camp fire in our newly designated fire pit behind our house. It burned warm and strong as the stars came out and what was close to a Blue Moon rose behind us. Vega and Deneb appeared in the darkening blue near the zenith. Jupiter had been shining for awhile. Jennifer and I sat by the fire. We talked and drank and watched the vista of fall color trees on the ridge to our west fading against a twilight glow. I had a beer. She had a Gentleman Jack . The fire peaked and died down after it got dark. I wanted to

Catching Jupiter Live

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Jupiter and some of its moons, roughly as viewable through my telescope at higher magnification (9mm) last night. This pic is part of a screenshot from my Starry Night software. Labels for the moons as given in Starry Night. Thebe was too faint for us to make out last night through my telescope. I have a 150mm Newtonian telescope made by Celestron that I haul out rather infrequently to check out various astronomical delights first hand. Last night I set it up for Jennifer's parents, my daughter and her boyfriend. It was the first time most of them had seen Jupiter and several of its moons live. My daughter and her boyfriend thought it was, just perhaps, cool. Jennifer and her parents showed a bit more interest. I have wandered through the night skies often since my teens. The thrill of seeing far away objects in our universe is something special to me (especially spotting them for the first time). I recall, for example, the first time I ever saw Jupiter's moons, many years ag

The Return of Memento and the Toys

Last weekend was a bit of a movie weekend at our home. My daughter watches a lot of movies with her friends through Netflex on the PS3. But, late Saturday afternoon she and her boyfriend found themselves acutely afflicted with boredomitus , boredom being the national epidemic of this country, apparently. I was telling them that I had just purchased Toy Story 3 on Blu-Ray, but Jennifer was off playing in a near-by tennis tournament so we were saving that one for a Sunday evening family viewing. I buy everything on Blu-Ray these days, as long as there is a “digital copy” packaged with the film. My PC doesn’t play Blu-Rays yet so I need a DVD copy for those repeat viewings that often drive my wife and child mad. Anyway, the conversation drifted toward the last pure DVD I bought – The Dark Knight . As long-time readers know, Christopher Nolan is my favorite contemporary film director. I was truly impressed with his last film, Inception , which I saw in IMAX this past summer. Anyway, the