Ummagumma

Part of the "creation sequence" from The Tree of Life . Part of the "into the monolith sequence" from 2001 . I have been a Terrence Malick fan for years. My first exposure to him was seeing Days of Heaven (1978) in college. While the film impressed me as sort of a “landscape movie” I did not fully appreciate Malick’s style – which was still emerging at the time. The film remained on my mind for awhile, however. I just didn’t take much notice of that fact and eventually I forgot it. My next encounter with Malick came many years later when I saw his re-make of The Thin Red Line (1998). I experienced that film as a “psychological war movie,” unique in that genre. I first saw it on VHS and then later on DVD. It was a film I revisited regularly through the years because it haunted me. I did not understand why even though it was obviously very well made. It wasn’t until after I saw The New World (2005) that I began to grasp Malick as an

A new era may have dawned today .  This morning at 3:44 AM a Falcon 9 rocket owned by a private company known as SpaceX lifted off with an unmanned capsule full of supplies for the International Space Station .  If successful, this mission could mark a major step forward in  private space ventures .  The mission was scrubbed at literally the last second before launch this past Saturday .  But today's launch was flawless .  With government austerity threatening all manner of future space exploration, the privatization of space will likely take on a greater role moving forward.  This development meets with  NASA's approval .  This is as it should be.  It is only when the potential for economic gain in space (such as mining planets, moons, and asteroids ) fire humanity's innate passion for wealth, that space exploration will literally regain the momentum it has lost since the Cold War .  Scientific inquiry and political competition was enough to get things going. 

The Western US was treated to a rare Annular Eclipse tonight.  It was already dark here but I followed it on the internet.  I captured the image above while watching on my iPad.  At the time of my screen capture the Moon covered about 94 percent of the Sun's surface .  The eclipse started in Asia and spread across the Pacific Ocean to the Southwestern US .  The most recent eclipse to occur in the US was back in 1994  and it will be 2023 before our mainland sees another.

Jennifer recently asked our daughter for her opinion on what the president said last week about same-sex marriage .  "Oh my god mom, I am so sick of that.  It's all over Facebook.  It's like all people are talking about.  It makes me sick."  That is how my daughter responded before mentioning that she thought people in love should be able to marry regardless of their gender. I agree with my daughter, although it does not sicken me to experience the intense debate over this historic moment .  The much-hated liberals, rightly I think, are portraying it as a matter of civil rights .  The Left is  praising the president , of course.  The conservatives are spinning it as Obama playing politics in a way that is out of touch with mainstream America .  More honest conservatives are connecting their opposition with their religious faith . Last Sunday vice-president Joe Biden abruptly announced that he was "absolutely comfortable" with the controversial idea of

As follow-up to the previous post, I was going to say that JP Morgan seemed to me to come out of the financial crisis that triggered the Great Recession better than anyone except maybe for Wells Fargo . But it is announced today that JPMorgan must book a $2 billion dollar loss  on a single bad bet  that apparently happened over a brief period of six-weeks .  A staggering number for any company.  The banking company is referred to in The Wall Street Journal today as "the King of Wall Street."  Once more, a major US bank demonstrates how difficult it is to manage risk in current economic circumstances. Even with the loss, however, JP Morgan will still record a profit of about $4 billion for this quarter .  Not a shabby performance by most standards.  Risk being risky, the loss should perhaps not be as "shocking" as the media is making it out to be .  JP Morgan still appears to be responsibly managed in spite of the the huge hit to earnings. As suggested in

For a long time I have admired the PBS series Frontline for its outstanding reporting.  On May 1, the program aired the second-half of a huge four-hour documentary on the origins the Great Recession entitled Money, Power, and Wall Street .  The situation obsessed me and my blog posts back in 2008 – 2009.  Economically, nothing compares to it in my lifetime.  In this post I will attempt to summarize this superb four-part Frontline . Wall Street is the largest sector of the American economy.  It is almost double the size of America's manufacturing sector.  Ultimately, the 2008 financial crisis and resulting Great Recession cost the world economy $11 trillion dollars.  This is how it happened. It all started at a ritzy weekend resort in Boca Raton, FL in 1994.  A group of young bankers from JPMorgan , were celebrating the success of the company's derivative portfolios.  Young, very bright minds, partying a bit and meeting in small conference rooms hatched a new idea . These

A recent Newsweek cover story dealt with how sexual fetishism has become “mainstream.”  The article was inspired by the erotic trilogy 50 Shades of Grey  that has  sparked something of a furor , at least on the internet.  The Newsweek piece was read by a wider audience and it offended the tender, yet publicly strong sensibilities of two usually opposed interest groups: feminists and evangelicals.   For the first group, the suggestion that the female sexual experience should be in any way submissive and even mildly masochistic struck at the core of “equality.”   For the latter group, well, sex is for procreation alone and any hint of adventurous exploration of pleasure possibilities beyond the missionary position is just down-right sinful. Eroticism has always interested me.  I am a sexually active person by nature. Sex has always been an important aspect of my relationship with Jennifer.  I own a DVD of Basic Instinct , a movie I enjoy, along with a half-dozen or so other erotic

Cassini captured this incredible shot of Saturn's rings back in 2004.  This is one of many wonderful images included in the short video that came with my recent Solar Walk app update. A recent update of my beloved Solar Walk App contained a new "movie" made with the App.   The movie is a documentary of the journey of the Cassini spacecraft from the Earth to Saturn.  I have blogged about Cassini before .  It is a mission I have followed since before its launch in 1997.  The movie that came with the app update was a mind-blower for me. I have always known that Cassini used orbital assists from planets to gain enough speed to make the distant journey all the way out to Saturn.  But, it suddenly struck me how incredible this feat of space flight truly was.  Cassini flew around Venus twice, the Earth once, then used Jupiter to fling itself a billion miles out to Saturn.  I just never thought of it collectively before since it all happened many years apart in the span