The other day I got to thinking about the future of the country under the next four years of an Obama administration. That we are headed for unsustainable debt for future generations I take for granted. That’s where the morality of the leadership of this president comes into question. As regards his overall leadership, Karl Rove had some thoughts on the subject recently. More
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Monthly Archives: January 2013
Where is the head of the president?
Posted in Theology Today & the World
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Football Lexicon
Watching football is much more meaningful if you have a lexicon to interpret the announcer’s comments. Without such help the viewer will be irretrievably lost:
- Offensive player: Almost all football players are offensive, particularly after losing a game … or even after they win one if you catch them in the locker room before they shower. More
Posted in Variations on a Theme
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The Road Home
The first time I saw it, there was grass growing down the middle, and it was permanently rutted with 4×4 tire tracks from trucks that flew mercilessly through the mud holes after a spring rain. It was barely wide enough for two cars to pass; one had to swerve into the brush on the side and motion for the other to come through. We eventually met our neighbors through this frequent act of road compromise. We almost got hit a few times by drivers who didn’t know the rules. More
Posted in Good News
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Living on Two Continents
When you live with one foot on two separate continents, life takes on a different dimension. Regular readers of this blog will remember that I did several posts last year, with the theme of “here and there”.
I recently visited with the English woman who is basically responsible for my being here in France. It was while working for her that I began considering Saignon and the Luberon area my second home. During our recent visit, we had a good conversation about the notion of parallel lives; lives lived with equal depth, intensity, and meaning, in two geographically distant places. More
Posted in Letters From France
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Donkeys to Roses: Connecting with the Land and People
Useful little donkeys, wildflowers beneath olive orchards, roses at the end of vineyard rows, these are snapped through the bus or car window with our cameras set to “action” or “sport” mode. The picture quality is not always sharp, but it helps capture the flavor of what we see. Other images remain in our mind’s eye, influencing our total picture of the country.
At the end of the day we pass a man walking home with his donkey loaded with sticks for the fire that heats his home. (Please click on the pictures to enlarge them.) More
Horace: Requeiscat in Pace
Well, Uncle Horace Scherzer died last week; he was 88 years old but that’s a bit early to go for a Scherzer. Most all Scherzers make it to the late 90s. Of course by then they don’t see too good and most don’t hear at all, but hey they can still breathe in and out and that’s what counts. Doc Patterson said that Horace’s heart just give out, that he shouldn’t have been running at his age. More
Posted in Variations on a Theme
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Processing solar images
It’s one thing to photograph the sun and get images. It is quite another thing to process the information the cameras yield to enhance the data. I think most people who have point and shoot digital cameras have changed terrestrial photos with tools such as crop, lighten or darken, etc. The more proficient one becomes with digital cameras nowadays, the more interesting the photos become. More
Posted in Ed's Astronomy
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In Like A Lamb
We usually say that it’s the month of March that can come in like a lamb (or a lion). This year, however, January in the Luberon has come in like a lamb.
New Year’s Day was uncharacteristically gray and rainy. It seemed foreboding, a harbinger of bleak January days to come. Then voilà, on the second day of the new year, the sun came out and the last eight days have been very nice. Oh, it gets cold at night, and there’s likely to be frost on the windshield and roads in the morning. Once the sun comes up, the frost melts, and the day moves on warm and wonderful. More
Posted in Letters From France
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Hypocrisy in Sotomayor’s rulings
I don’t pretend to be a federal court lawyer, or even a lawyer, but like many HS social studies teachers, I taught law to upperclassmen in a public school. I caught a news bit from Reuters that read: “U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor has refused to block enforcement starting next week of a requirement in President Barack Obama’s 2010 healthcare overhaul that some companies provide insurance coverage for contraceptive drugs and devices.” More
Posted in Theology Today & the World
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Lunar Imaging with the DMK 41AU02
On the afternoons of Dec. 18th and 19th, in broad daylight around 3:00 pm or so, the skies cleared so I was able to experiment with my new camera, DMK 41AU02, a monochrome CCD unit. I attached it as a straight-through imager to my 14” Celestron scope. The moon was nearly at quarter-moon waxing and it was visible against a blue sky. More
Posted in Ed's Astronomy
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