Happy Birthday, Li

Today in 1965, in Shenyang, Liaoning, China, Gong Li was born. Star of a number of films including Ju Dou, Raise the Red Lantern, The Story of Qiu Ju, Farewell My Concubine. and Curse of the Golden Flower, Gong is a stunning and brilliant actress.

The Week in Entertainment

Film: Argo, exceptionally gripping and fascinating. Monsters, Inc, since it turns out my friend here hadn't ever seen it!

TV: The Snowmen, the Doctor Who Christmas special. I was wondering if they were making an in-joke out of the souffle reference, but it was so much more than that. I'm intrigued. The last Leverage episode - I am going to miss the hell out of this show, but that was such a good ending.

A few more birds

Some more birds from this week, including some from the Great Backyard Bird Count. I also saw crows, vultures, lots of sparrows, titmice, a nuthatch, mallards, lots of white ducks, and Canada geese. First, a mockingbird

A slightly fuzzy rufous-sided towhee

A Carolina wren

A blue jay

A Carolina chickadee

A winter flock of robins

A sparrow (white-throated, I believe)

A female cardinal

And her mate

Another wren

Coots

A couple of manky mallards

Same bird - see how green in the sunlight!

And a great blue heron

Happy Birthday, Carol

Born today in 1906, the great director Carol Reed, who gave us (and was knighted for doing so) such classics as The Third Man, The Stars Look Down (which I always remember from the Lord Peter Wimsey story where his mother is reading the book under the misapprehension that it's a sweet Christmas tale), Odd Man Out, The Fallen Idol, the very funny Our Man in Havana, and The Agony and the Ecstasy.

Happy Birthday, Bo

Born today, in 1928 in McComb, Mississippi, The Originator, Bo Diddley.

He died four years ago, just shy of 80, and he is missed.

Happy Birthday, Rudyard

Today, in Bombay in 1865, Rudyard Kipling was born. His parents sent him "back" to England to avoid the typhoid and cholera, and he used his school experiences in several of his works, the horrifying 'Baa Baa Black Sheep' and the delightful Stalky and Co. particularly. After school he went back to India and became a reporter, writing fiction and poetry in his spare time. Celebrity came after six years, and he returned to England. But he didn't like living there, and after a few years spent traveling the world, he settled in Vermont - and it was there he wrote The Jungle Book, probably his most well-known work.

Here's another:

Eddi's Service
AD 687


Eddi, priest of St. Wilfrid
     In his chapel at Manhood End,
Ordered a midnight service
     For such as cared to attend.

But the Saxons were keeping Christmas,
     And the night was stormy as well.
Nobody came to service,
     Though Eddi rang the bell.

"'Wicked weather for walking,"
     Said Eddi of Manhood End.
"But I must go on with the service
     For such as care to attend."

The altar-lamps were lighted, --
     An old marsh-donkey came,
Bold as a guest invited,
     And stared at the guttering flame.

The storm beat on at the windows,
     The water splashed on the floor,
And a wet, yoke-weary bullock
     Pushed in through the open door.

"How do I know what is greatest,
     How do I know what is least?
That is My Father's business,"
     Said Eddi, Wilfrid's priest.

"But -- three are gathered together --
     Listen to me and attend.
I bring good news, my brethren!"
     Said Eddi of Manhood End.

And he told the Ox of a Manger
     And a Stall in Bethlehem,
And he spoke to the Ass of a Rider,
     That rode to Jerusalem.

They steamed and dripped in the chancel,
     They listened and never stirred,
While, just as though they were Bishops,
     Eddi preached them The World,

Till the gale blew off on the marshes
     And the windows showed the day,
And the Ox and the Ass together
     Wheeled and clattered away.

And when the Saxons mocked him,
     Said Eddi of Manhood End,
"I dare not shut His chapel
    On such as care to attend."

Happy Birthday, Linus

Linus Torvalds, chief architect of Linux, was born today in 1969 in Helsinki, Finland.

"Basically, it is short and sweet. It won't give your life any meaning, but it tells you what's going to happen. There are three things that have meaning for life - for anything that you do or any living thing does: The first is survival, the second is social order, and the third is entertainment. Everything in life progresses in that order. And there is nothing after entertainment. So, in a sense, the implication is that the meaning of life is to reach that third stage. And once you've reached the third stage, you're done. But you have to go through the other stages first."

Happy Birthday, Stan

Born today in 1922, the one and only Stan Lee.

When I was growing up, you read either Marvel or DC comics. I read Marvel. The Fantastic Four, The X-Men, Spiderman - I was there for them all. That first incarnation of X-Men was genuinely amazing. And they didn't read like kid's books, either; as Stan said once,

"If a kid has to go to a dictionary, that's not the worst thing that could happen."

I vividly remember walking over to the drugstore every Saturday to get the new issues and reading them on the way home. Those guys all seemed so real to me.

Thanks, Stan. Thanks so much.

Happy Birthday, Louis

Born today in 1822 in Dole, France - Louis Pasteur.

If you're like me, you think of pasteurized milk, and maybe beer ... but the man was a workhorse of applied science. Louis Pasteur brought about a veritable revolution in the 19th-century scientific method. By abandoning his laboratory and by tackling the agents of disease in their natural environments, he was able through his investigations to supply the complete solution to a given question, not only identifying the agent responsible for a disease but also indicating the remedy.

When in 1881 he had perfected a technique for reducing the virulence of various disease-producing microorganisms, he succeeded in vaccinating a herd of sheep against the disease known as anthrax. Likewise, he was able to protect fowl from chicken cholera, for he had observed that once animals stricken with certain diseases had recovered they were later immune to a fresh attack. Thus, by isolating the germ of the disease and by cultivating an attenuated, or weakened, form of the germ and inoculating fowl with the culture, he could immunize the animals against the malady. In this he was following the example of the English physician Edward Jenner in his method for vaccinating animals against cowpox. On April 27, 1882, Pasteur was elected a member of the Académie Française, at which point he undertook research that proved to be the most spectacular of all—the preventive treatment of rabies. Having detected the rabies virus by its effects on the nervous system and attenuated its virulence, he applied his procedure to man; on July 6, 1885, he saved the life of a nine-year-old boy, Joseph Meister, who had been bitten by a rabid dog.

Among his other discoveries - the theory of molecular asymmetry, showing that the biological properties of chemical substances depend not only on the nature of the atoms constituting their molecules but also on the manner in which these atoms are arranged in space. By means of simple and precise experiments, including the filtration of air and the exposure of unfermented liquids to the air of the high Alps, he proved that food decomposes when placed in contact with germs present in the air, which cause its putrefaction, and that it does not undergo transformation or putrefy in such a way as to spontaneously generate new organisms within itself.

He showed that milk could be soured by injecting a number of organisms from buttermilk or beer but could be kept unchanged if such organisms were excluded. After laying the theoretical groundwork, Pasteur proceeded to apply his findings to the study of vinegar and wine, two commodities of great importance in the economy of France; his pasteurization process, the destruction of harmful germs by heat, made it possible to produce, preserve, and transport these products without their undergoing deterioration. In 1870 Pasteur devoted himself to the problem of beer. Following an investigation conducted both in France and among the brewers in London, he devised, as he had done for vinegar and wine, a procedure for manufacturing beer that would prevent its deterioration with time. British exporters, whose ships had to sail entirely around the African continent, were thus able to send British beer as far as India without fear of its deteriorating.

In 1865 he undertook a government mission to investigate the diseases of the silkworm, which were about to put an end to the production of silk at a time when it comprised a major section of France's economy. To carry out the investigation, he moved to the south of France, the centre of silkworm breeding. Three years later he announced that he had isolated the bacilli of two distinct diseases and had found methods of preventing contagion and of detecting diseased stock.

In 1854 Pasteur became dean of the new science faculty at the University of Lille, where he initiated a highly modern educational concept: by instituting evening classes for the many young workmen of the industrial city, conducting his regular students around large factories in the area, and organizing supervised practical courses, he demonstrated the relationship that he believed should exist between theory and practice, between university and industry. A skillful experimenter endowed with great curiosity and a remarkable gift of observation, Pasteur devoted himself with immense enthusiasm to science and its applications to medicine, agriculture, and industry.

"Science knows no country, because knowledge belongs to humanity, and is the torch which illuminates the world. Science is the highest personification of the nation because that nation will remain the first which carries the furthest the works of thought and intelligence."

info and many sentences from: "Pasteur, Louis." Encyclopædia Britannica. 2006. Encyclopædia Britannica Online. 27 Dec. 2006 < http://www.britannica.com/eb/article-12562 >.

Happy Birthday, Johannes

Today in 1571 Johannes Kepler was born in Wurttemberg, Germany. Kepler was born to Lutheran parents, but never subscribed fully to the doctrine of "the real presence" and refused to sign the Formula of Concord; therefor he was excluded from the sacrament. Being unaccepted by the Lutherans and not a Catholic, either, Kepler had no refuge during the Thirty Years War and the counter-reformation, which meant he was forced to move over and over again to stay alive.

I quote from the biography of Kepler on NASA's Kepler Mission page, where you can go for more details on his work and his three laws (my emphasis):

Kepler was forced to leave his teaching post at Graz due to the counter Reformation because he was Lutheran and moved to Prague to work with the renowned Danish astronomer, Tycho Brahe. He inherited Tycho's post as Imperial Mathematician when Tycho died in 1601. Using the precise data that Tycho had collected, Kepler discovered that the orbit of Mars was an ellipse. In 1609 he published Astronomia Nova, delineating his discoveries, which are now called Kepler's first two laws of planetary motion. And what is just as important about this work, "it is the first published account wherein a scientist documents how he has coped with the multitude of imperfect data to forge a theory of surpassing accuracy" (O. Gingerich in forward to Johannes Kepler New Astronomy translated by W. Donahue, Cambridge Univ Press, 1992), a fundamental law of nature. Today we call this the scientific method.

In 1612 Lutherans were forced out of Prague, so Kepler moved on to Linz. His wife and two sons had recently died. He remarried happily, but had many personal and financial troubles. Two infant daughters died and Kepler had to return to Württemburg where he successfully defended his mother against charges of witchcraft. In 1619 he published Harmonices Mundi, in which he describes his "third law."

In spite of more forced relocations, Kepler published the seven-volume Epitome Astronomiae in 1621. This was his most influential work and discussed all of heliocentric astronomy in a systematic way. He then went on to complete the Rudolphine Tables that Tycho had started long ago. These included calculations using logarithms, which he developed, and provided perpetual tables for calculating planetary positions for any past or future date. Kepler used the tables to predict a pair of transits by Mercury and Venus of the Sun, although he did not live to witness the events.

Johannes Kepler died in Regensburg in 1630, while on a journey from his home in Sagan to collect a debt. His grave was demolished within two years because of the Thirty Years War. Frail of body, but robust in mind and spirit, Kepler was scrupulously honest to the data.

What a tremendous epitaph that is.

Squirr- er, Bear and Moose

Winter Solstice, Camelot Station

This is one of my favorite poems of all time.
Enjoy it and the day...

Winter Solstice, Camelot Station

John M. Ford


Camelot is served
By a sixteen-track stub terminal done in High Gothick Style,
The tracks covered by a single great barrel-vaulted glass roof framed upon iron,
At once looking back to the Romans and ahead to the Brunels.
Beneath its rotunda, just to the left of the ticket windows,
Is a mosaic floor depicting the Round Table
(Where all knights, regardless of their station of origin
Or class of accommodation, are equal),
And around it murals of knightly deeds in action
(Slaying dragons, righting wrongs, rescuing maidens tied to the tracks).
It is the only terminal, other than Gare d'Avalon in Paris,
To be hung with original tapestries,
And its lavatories rival those at the Great Gate of Kiev Central.
During a peak season such as this, some eighty trains a day pass through,
Five times the frequency at the old Londinium Terminus,
Ten times the number the Druid towermen knew.
(The Official Court Christmas Card this year displays
A crisp black-and-white Charles Clegg photograph from the King's own collection.
Showing a woad-blued hogger at the throttle of "Old XCVII,"
The Fast Mail overnight to Eboracum. Those were the days.)
The first of a line of wagons have arrived,
Spilling footmen and pages in Court livery,
And old thick Kay, stepping down from his Range Rover,
Tricked out in a bush coat from Swaine, Adeney, Brigg,
Leaning on his shooting stick as he marshalls his company,
Instructing the youngest how to behave in the station,
To help mature women that they may encounter,
Report pickpockets, gather up litter,
And of course no true Knight of the Table Round (even in training)
Would do a station porter out of Christmas tips.
He checks his list of arrival times, then his watch
(A moon-phase Breguet, gift from Merlin):
The seneschal is a practical man, who knows trains do run late,
And a stolid one, who sees no reason to be glad about it.
He dispatches pages to posts at the tracks,
Doling out pennies for platform tickets,
Then walks past the station buffet with a dyspeptic snort,
Goes into the bar, checks the time again, orders a pint.
The patrons half turn--it's the fella from Camelot, innit?
And Kay chuckles soft to himself, and the Court buys a round.
He's barely halfway when a page tumbles in,
Seems the knights are arriving, on time after all,
So he tips the glass back (people stare as he guzzles),
Then plonks it down hard with five quid for the barman,
And strides for the doorway (half Falstaff, half Hotspur)
To summon his liveried army of lads.

* * *

Bors arrives behind steam, riding the cab of a heavy Mikado.
He shakes the driver's hand, swings down from the footplate,
And is like a locomotive himself, his breath clouding white,
Dark oil sheen on his black iron mail,
Sword on his hip swinging like siderods at speed.
He stamps back to the baggage car, slams mailed fist on steel door
With a clang like jousters colliding.
The handler opens up and goes to rouse another knight.
Old Pellinore has been dozing with his back against a crate,
A cubical, chain-bound thing with FRAGILE tags and air holes,
BEAST says the label, QUESTING, 1 the bill of lading.
The porters look doubtful but ease the thing down.
It grumbles. It shifts. Someone shouts, and they drop it.
It cracks like an egg. There is nothing within.
Elayne embraces Bors on the platform, a pelican on a rock,
Silently they watch as Pelly shifts the splinters,
Supposing aloud that Gutman and Cairo have swindled him.

A high-drivered engine in Northern Lines green
Draws in with a string of side-corridor coaches,
All honey-toned wood with stained glass on their windows.
Gareth steps down from a compartment, then Gaheris and Aggravaine,
All warmly tucked up in Orkney sweaters;
Gawaine comes after in Shetland tweed.
Their Gladstones and steamers are neatly arranged,
With never a worry--their Mum does the packing.
A redcap brings forth a curious bundle, a rude shape in red paper--
The boys did that one themselves, you see, and how does one wrap a unicorn's head?
They bustle down the platform, past a chap all in green.
He hasn't the look of a trainman, but only Gawaine turns to look at his eyes,
And sees written there Sir, I shall speak with you later.

Over on the first track, surrounded by reporters,
All glossy dark iron and brass-bound mystery,
The Direct-Orient Express, ferried in from Calais and Points East.
Palomides appears. Smelling of patchouli and Russian leather,
Dripping Soubranie ash on his astrakhan collar,
Worry darkening his dark face, though his damascene armor shows no tarnish,
He pushes past the press like a broad-hulled icebreaker.
Flashbulbs pop. Heads turn. There's a woman in Chanel black,
A glint of diamonds, liquid movements, liquid eyes.
The newshawks converge, but suddenly there appears
A sharp young man in a crisp blue suit
From the Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits,
That elegant, comfortable, decorous, close-mouthed firm;
He's good at his job, and they get not so much as a snapshot.
Tomorrow's editions will ask who she was, and whom with...

Now here's a silver train, stainless steel, Vista-Domed,
White-lighted grails on the engine (running no extra sections)
The Logres Limited, extra fare, extra fine,
(Stops on signal at Carbonek to receive passengers only).
She glides to a Timkin-borne halt (even her grease is clean),
Galahad already on the steps, flashing that winning smile,
Breeze mussing his golden hair, but not his Armani tailoring,
Just the sort of man you'd want finding your chalice.
He signs an autograph, he strikes a pose.
Someone says, loudly, "Gal! Who serves the Grail?"
He looks--no one he knows--and there's a silence,
A space in which he shifts like sun on water;
Look quick and you may see a different knight,
A knight who knows that meanings can be lies,
That things are done not knowing why they're done,
That bearings fail, and stainless steel corrodes.
A whistle blows. Snow shifts on the glass shed roof. That knight is gone.
This one remaining tosses his briefcase to one of Kay's pages,
And, golden, silken, careless, exits left.

Behind the carsheds, on the business-car track, alongside the private varnish
Of dukes and smallholders, Persian potentates and Cathay princes
(James J. Hill is here, invited to bid on a tunnel through the Pennines),
Waits a sleek car in royal blue, ex-B&O, its trucks and fittings chromed,
A black-gloved hand gripping its silver platform rail;
Mordred and his car are both upholstered in blue velvet and black leather.
He prefers to fly, but the weather was against it.
His DC-9, with its video system and Quotron and waterbed, sits grounded at Gatwick.
The premature lines in his face are a map of a hostile country,
The redness in his eyes a reminder that hollyberries are poison.
He goes inside to put on a look acceptable for Christmas Court;
As he slams the door it rattles like strafing jets.

Outside the Station proper, in the snow,
On a through track that's used for milk and mail,
A wheezing saddle-tanker stops for breath;
A way-freight mixed, eight freight cars and caboose,
Two great ugly men on the back platform, talking with a third on the ballast.
One, the conductor, parcels out the last of the coffee;
They drink. A joke about grails. They laugh.
When it's gone, the trainman pretends to kick the big hobo off,
But the farewell hug spoils the act.
Now two men stand on the dirty snow,
The conductor waves a lantern and the train grinds on.
The ugly men start walking, the new arrival behind,
Singing "Wenceslas" off-key till the other says stop.
There are two horses waiting for them. Rather plain horses,
Considering. The men mount up.
By the roundhouse they pause,
And look at the locos, the water, the sand, and the coal,
They look for a long time at the turntable,
Until the one who is King says "It all seemed so simple, once,"
And the best knight in the world says "It is. We make it hard."
They ride on, toward Camelot by the service road.

The sun is winter-low. Kay's caravan is rolling.
He may not run a railroad, but he runs a tight ship;
By the time they unload in the Camelot courtyard,
The wassail will be hot and the goose will be crackling,
Banners snapping from their towers, fir logs on the fire, drawbridge down,
And all that sackbut and psaltery stuff.
Blanchefleur is taking the children caroling tonight,
Percivale will lose to Merlin at chess,
The young knights will dally and the damsels dally back,
The old knights will play poker at a smaller Table Round.
And at the great glass station, motion goes on,
The extras, the milk trains, the varnish, the limiteds,
The Pindar of Wakefield, the Lady of the Lake,
The Broceliande Local, the Fast Flying Briton,
The nerves of the kingdom, the lines of exchange,
Running to a schedule as the world ought,
Ticking like a hot-fired hand-stoked heart,
The metal expression of the breaking of boundaries,
The boilers that turn raw fire into power,
The driving rods that put the power to use,
The turning wheels that make all places equal,
The knowledge that the train may stop but the line goes on;
The train may stop
But the line goes on.

Happy Holidays

Merry Christmas, Good Yule, Happy Solstice, Midwinter Joy, Happy Kwanzaa, Happy Hanukkah ... however you celebrate the returning light in this midwinter season, may it fill you with joy.

At the Library

(cell phone image)

Commenting policy update

Well, I got over 100 spam comments today - so far. They've been picking up a lot in the last couple of weeks, so I have put a capcha on the comments. I'll try taking it off after a while and see what happens.

Nuthatch!

Look who came by and spent some time!

Uniquely vile

I find myself wondering why the NRA and its Republican allies believe that America is such a uniquely vile country, filled with such a huge number of evil and/or sick individuals.

Because if it's not the easy access to guns that allows the disturbed individuals like those who shot up places in Newtown, Clackamass, Pittsburgh, Miami, Tulsa, Brookfield, Oak Creek, Texas A&M, Minneapolis, Aurora, Seattle, Oakland, Cleveland, Norcross, Webster, and Frankston Township - four schools, two malls, two health spas, a theater, a temple, a Protestant church, a hospital, a funeral home, a soccer stadium, a house fire, and just random strangers on streets - to do their killing, if the guns have nothing to do with it, well, then we have to wonder why we have 15 mass shootings (and two others that were committed by more than one shooter and were probably "purely" criminal) in one year - one year - and other countries far more secular, or at least far less Christian, than we have so many fewer. Europe, for instance, hasn't had that many in the past twenty years.

If it's not the guns, then why is so overwhelmingly only Americans who do it? Is it something about us, that makes us so full of "genuine monsters — people so deranged, so evil, so possessed by voices and driven by demons that no sane person can possibly ever comprehend them"?

Maybe we should look into that.

(And anyway, all the armed cops in the world - and they were present at several of these incidents as well as others through the years - won't stop the children who shoot themselves with dad's/grandad's/uncle's loaded gun just lying around the house. But that is, I suppose, a different argument.)


(Note: this list at The Nation was published Dec 15 - too early to get this one or (sheesh) the very latest one)

The Week in Entertainment

Film: Rise of the Guardians which is both beautiful to look at and very entertaining.

DVD: Brave, entertaining, too.

TV: Leverage, a really good episode - better than last week's for sure, even without a good Elliot fight. I hate to think it might be ending... A couple of Christmas Carols, including the Disney one, which was ... odd, though it did give us some things that most don't, like the couple who have an emotion connected with Scrooge's death - joy.

Read: the latest Gideon Oliver, Dying on the Vine, which kept me fooled almost to the end.

Hall Display

ISS ... still up there

The ISS is still up there, and even has two Americans on board, along with a Canadian and three Russians.

It's very odd to me why we don't hear more about that. I know manned space flight is a waste of resources to a lot of people, and that the robots (Discovery, Curiosity, Spirit) are doing exciting work a lot further away, but ...

We have a space station! Not a big one, but it's there. That's really exciting.

Anybody know what this is?

This is a weird tree - possibly several? - on a street in Oak Ridge, where my father lives. Neither of us have the slightest idea what it is or why it looks so strange. Any help?

More Christmas birds

A few more birds from this past week. First, a bird on wire ... a male eastern bluebird, to be exact.

Next, a mockingbird in the Japanese maple

A slightly blurry blue jay

A white-throated sparrow, down from Canada, in the maple with the lights

A female northern cardinal, photobombing the bird in the background...

... this lovely female rufous-sided towhee

Here's her mate, who's less inclined to stay when he spots a person

Buzzards (vultures, for the purists - mostly turkey but probably one or two black as well) on the cell-phone tower

And finally, from a mixed flock of small birds (titmice, chickadees, and nuthatches) that comes through the back trees nearly every morning, first a tufted titmouse ...

... and then a black-capped chickadee (or maybe a Carolina one) from the previous day, when it was raining.

Happy Birthday, Edwin

Today in Head Tide, Maine, in 1869, Edwin Arlington Robinson was born. His poetry was unsuccessful to begin with, and he lived on the brink of starvation. Then one day, or so the story goes, Kermit Roosevelt read some of the poems and gave them to his father, Theodore Roosevelt. TR gave him a cushy job in a Customs House, saying, "I expect you to think poetry first and customs second." All Robinson had to do was show up, read the morning newspaper, and leave it on his chair to prove he had been in. In 1922, the first year the Pulitzer Prize for poetry was awarded, he won - and again in 1925 and 1928.

This poem is very long - 314 lines, too long to post it all - but it's my favorite of his. Select the title to read it all.

The Man Against the Sky

BETWEEN me and the sunset, like a dome
Against the glory of a world on fire,
Now burned a sudden hill,
Bleak, round, and high, by flame-lit height made higher,
With nothing on it for the flame to kill
Save one who moved and was alone up there
To loom before the chaos and the glare
As if he were the last god going home
Unto his last desire.

Dark, marvelous, and inscrutable he moved on
Till down the fiery distance he was gone,
Like one of those eternal, remote things
That range across a man’s imaginings
When a sure music fills him and he knows
What he may say thereafter to few men,—
The touch of ages having wrought
An echo and a glimpse of what he thought
A phantom or a legend until then;
For whether lighted over ways that save,
Or lured from all repose,
If he go on too far to find a grave,
Mostly alone he goes.

Who's this annoying?

Today's "Pearls Before Swine" features a comic trope that has always annoyed me.

In the first place, I think most people would actually answer Pig's question with "It rings the bell", but let that go. Who would simply continue repeating the answer that prompts "so, guess"? Who wouldn't say, "No, I mean it's the part that rings the bell" or "I don't have to guess; I'm telling you it's the part that makes the bell ring"?

Of course it was

So, the NRA's answer (warning, the link spawns video) is ... more guns. Many, many more guns. Guns in every single school in the US by the time Christmas break is over.

(Wow. That wouldn't come cheap - how many entitlement programs would be gutted to pay for that?)

(And let's not forget that Columbine, Va. Tech, and Fort Hood all had trained (not amateurs in two weeks), armed guards.)

Because nothing solves gun violence like more guns.

The NRA won't be happy until every man, woman, and child in the US is packing 24/7.

Considering just how far they've pushed their agenda over the last few years -

Hey, some guy went on a shooting spree in Pennsylvania yesterday, killing three strangers and then shooting it out with state troopers, three of whom were injured before he was killed. But of course if some random civilian had been armed, it would have all ended so much more happily, right?

Happy New B'ak'tun!

(are we still here? Right, then)

 Happy New B'ak'tun!



Don't forget to write 1/1/1/14/1/1 - it's the 14th baktun now!

Oh, did anybody pick up the new calendar? Does it have a jaguar kitten on it?

(tip of the hat to Phil Plait for the numbers...)

Lights in the Darkness

One of the things I love the most about Yule is the lights. On this longest night, people defying the darkness...