Ummagumma

Jennifer snapped this photo of the raccoon on our front porch yesterday.  I have spotted three raccoons on my property this year.  That is a rare thing.  I can count on one hand the number of raccoons (hither called coons) Jennifer and I have seen at all on our land and it has been several years since I saw the last one. Earlier this spring I caught a glimpse of one scurrying into the privet hedge.  I wasn't sure it was a coon, it could have been a opossum or maybe a large cat.  We have plenty of those. A couple of weeks ago I came face to face with another coon. I was walking the path down from the upper field, being quiet as usual on my walks, when a good-sized adult coon came running across our back yard near the woods and up the path toward me.  The coon was occupied with something and did not see me immediately.  I froze and watch it for maybe two seconds before it saw me.  It stooped, looked at me for a moment, then quickly return...

Cassino '44 fully spread out with the playing counters unpunched.  The map is artistically impressive but it is too big for my gaming table.  You can see Monte Cassino in the upper right.  The scenario I chose to play sets up on the two maps on the left. On May 15, 1944, two reinforced British regiments attacked a stitched together German kampfgruppe near Monte Cassino in Italy. The British attempted to cut a major road held by the Germans who were blocking supply from getting to the 8th Indian Division in the overall attempt by Allied troops to capture Monte Cassino.  The attack began in the predawn hours, with visibility limited by darkness. The road was taken but the Germans launched immediate counterattacks and control shifted back and forth until the British finally secured the area mid-afternoon with the assistance of heavy artillery fire and a few aircraft sorties. This was a small part of Operation Diadem . Long-time readers know that I enjoy mi...

April 2016 was unkind to my favorite sports team, the Atlanta Braves .  Or maybe I should say the Braves were unkind to April.  They sucked.  They experienced the worst 20-game start (actually extended to 21 games) in franchise history and ended the month at 5-18. This is baseball's oldest franchise, going back to 1876. So the absolute worst start in all that time is not only historic it is difficult to witness as a life-long fan. The closest season by comparison in my lifetime was the 1988 Braves , who experienced a 4-16 record and went on to lose 106 ballgames. At a family gathering in March I was asked how many games I thought the Braves would win this year.  My deadpan response was "61" (which means 101 loses).  This surprised the guy I was talking to. I guess he figured since I am an avid fan I would be more optimistic.  Well, perhaps I was too optimistic even with that dismal prediction.  Right now, the Braves are on a trajectory (or nose dive...

Note: This concludes my three-part essay critiquing Deepak Chopra's view of reality and consciousness. In this part, I attempt to articulate my personal views on the subject. “For we move – each – in two worlds: the inward of our own awareness, and an outward of participation in the history of our time and place. The scientist and the historian serve the latter: the world, that is to say, of things ‘out there,’ where people are interchangeable and language serves to communicate information and commands. Creative artists, on the other hand, are mankind’s wakeners to recollection: summoners of our outward mind to conscious contact with ourselves, not as participants in this or that morsel of history, but as spirit, in the consciousness of being.  Their task, therefore, is to communicate directly from one inward world to another, in such a way that an actual shock of experience will have been rendered: not a mere statement for the information or persuasion of the brain, but an effec...

Proof of purchase. Since my Wolfgang Rihm foray a couple of years ago, my classical music acquisitions have been sparse.  I feel my collection is fairly complete according to my tastes and will likely only add sporadically to it in the coming years.  I made one recent purchase, however, that shows how you can never really cease to fine-tune your music collection if you take such things genuinely. Before now I did not possess any oboe quartets in my collection of hundreds of classical CDs. The oboe competes with the clarinet as my favorite classical wind instrument.  I own a few excellent oboe concertos by various composers as diverse as Johann Sebastian Bach and Wolfgang Rihm.  The oboe shines in a few scattered compositions, such as Mozart’s brilliant Serenade for 12 wind instruments (1781).   George Fredric Handel also composed three wonderful sonatas for oboe (from around 1710) which I own. But the oboe quartet has gone unrepresented in my collect...

Note: This is part two of a three-part essay on reality and consciousness. Shortly after “God Makes More Sense Than Atheism," Chopra penned another Huff Post article entitled "God Is The New Physics."  This is certainly not a new idea.  My first experiences with reading material that attempted to mingle quantum physics with spirituality go as far back as God and the New Physics by Paul Davies in 1984, a book I still own in my library.  Numerous articles, books, blogs, etc. cover this subject.  It seems that the mysteries of consciousness cannot resist some of the wonky conclusions of contemporary physics. Since there are a plethora of theories about how the mechanics of the universe work, and very little is really proven, it is fashionable for modern spiritualists like Chopra to grasp at the ambiguities, to play along the nebulous seams of debate by creating a belief system that supports a non-materialistic, non-biological interpretation of consciousness and reali...