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Showing posts from September, 2012

Monarch Migration Being

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It was very cloudy today.  Rain was coming up from the Gulf.  Dripped and drizzled off and on.  Jennifer and I happened to be outside looking up and noticed what I though were birds at first.  Then I realized they were Monarch butterflies , dozens and dozens of them, flying south for the winter.  Jennifer and I were in awe.  Neither of us had ever seen anything like this.  The migration lasted a very long time in the late afternoon and we could watch them at our leisure sometimes seeing as many as a dozen.  This shot contains only five.  Jennifer sent me this cool link on the Monarch migration paths . There are seven monarchs in this shot and you can see how low and high the variation of their altitude was.  The first photo is by me with our Canon.  This shot is by Jennifer who had our Nikon.  These photos go well with another migration I posted a photo of in 2010 , only the directions and times of year are opposites.

Hitchcock's Psycho

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Janet Leigh in the infamous shower scene before the attack.  Hitchcock worked in some sensual imagery to establish a completely different effect before the "murder/rape" sequence.   Alfred Hitchcock is one of the greatest film directors of all time. His 1960 thriller, Psycho , shocked audiences in new ways, as I eluded to in a recent post . I had the film in the back of my mind when I read last week that Anthony Hopkins , one of my favorite living actors, is portraying Hitchcock in a new film about the director's making of Psycho . The stars feel all aligned on this one (forgive the slight pun).  I'm really looking forward to it.  So, I decided to watch the original film again - for the first time in many years. The film begins with the conclusion of a sexual encounter between two unmarried lovers in a hotel room.   Psycho is a highly erotic film , reflecting the inner, probably frustrated, sensual nature of Hitchcock. Janet Leigh is another in a long

Gaming Bagration-Warsaw 1944

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The combined Bagration-Warsaw wargame set up on my gaming table.  Many of the later game units have not been punched out of their countersheets yet. Operation Bagration , as I have mentioned before , was one of the largest air-land military operations of World War Two. It was a complete triumph for the Soviet Union and the worst defeat the once-vaunted German Wehrmacht suffered through all of World War Two . The Germans lost roughly 400,000 men in about nine weeks of fighting. Army Group Center was destroyed as a cohesive fighting force. They also lost all of the Belorussian Region which it captured almost exactly three years earlier. After Bagration, the Russians were knocking of the door of the German Reich itself. As long-time readers know, one of my primary hobbies is to wargame historical military situations. My blog is sprinkled with posts on wargaming . In recent weeks, much of my free time has again turned to this lifelong hobby, in this case gaming the great Sov

Booting Badness Out of Benghazi

The inferior cultural nature of the jihadist movement in Islam which I exposed in my last post was overcome today by the majority, moderate Muslim perspective .  Libyan protesters forcefully drove all militias out of Benghazi , particularly the one supposedly responsible for killing Ambassador Stevens. Such violence against violence is perfectly compatible with Islamic reality.  In this case, the violent winds blew in the direction of a civilized society instead of a tribal warlike one.  Islam is a highly civilized ideology , if repressive in many ways.  It is, nevertheless, fundamentally full of goodness.  So, there is hope against the jihadists , and other fundamentalist Muslims, who are oh so full of hate. Meanwhile, in Nigeria today, protests over the recent video poo-pooing Muhammad motivated thousands to chant "death to America." So far, President Obama has not been hurt by this Libyan situation .  Secretary Clinton has now officially condemned the Libyan attack

As the World Burns

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Ethics, Libyan style. The Dalai Lama issued a statement on Facebook last Thursday acknowledging that “ the reality of the world today is that grounding ethics in religion is no longer adequate.   This is why I am increasingly convinced that the time has come to find a way of thinking about spirituality and ethics beyond religion altogether. ”   This is not a new view for His Holiness.   He has written a couple of books on the subject of non-religious ethics, one just last year . I am re-reading Friedrich Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil in preparation for future posts in my Nietzsche blog .   Nietzsche, of course, was no great fan of organized religion himself, though his critique of religion is from a different perspective than what the Dalai Lama posted.   Still, there is some common ground between some passages of Nietzsche and the Dalai Lama’s Facebook post. One thread running through all of Nietzsche’s work is how to attain “higher culture.”   Nietzsche firmly b

Seeing Jaws Again for the First Time

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Richard Dreyfuss, Robert Shaw, and Roy Scheider pushing their fishing vessel, the Orca, to its limit while being chased by a Great White Shark in Steven Spielberg's 1975 mega-hit classic Jaws . I am 16 years old, a rising high school junior.   It is the summer of 1975 and I am in Daytona Beach just as I have been almost every summer as long as I can remember.   My nose is sunburned and peeling.   I am otherwise golden brown from long days of swimming in the pool and body surfing the waves of the dark Atlantic ocean.   I am skinny and toned and full of budding dreams and desires. My uncle and I have gone down to the movie theater on Friday night in Daytona.   We stand in line for about 30 minutes to buy tickets but when we get to the ticket booth we discover the 7PM show is sold out.   They are selling tickets for the next show which will start after 9PM.   My uncle turns to me and asks if I want to wait and see it then.   Yes!   I have never seen so much buzz and anticip