Microinspection of Andy Reid and Deshawn Jackson

I know I can't get it, but damnit why can't everybody be just a little more like me?

Somebody made a judgement and chose to call Jackson's move a fumble. Head coach Andy Reid chose not to use his protest flag. Haven't seen it? Take a look:

Oh, screw it. I couldn't find one.

It was a close call. The coaches, players and refs work without the benefit of instant replay. Can't we all just get along? Come on, let the zebras do their job! We should do ours and cheer.


Instant replay is killing the game, but not on its own. It is being ferried along by the well-meaning but misguided fans who watch this stuff over and over again and talk the poop out of it until there is no other issue and the game is over.

Our grandcestors gave us a fantastic game. Let's keep it in shape good enough to pass on to our following degene/rate children. The only way this game survives is with us avoiding the urge to tear it apart to win a $050 over/under.

Tonight's eclipse

Very good pagan stuff, this. Can you imagine the last one in 1638? We are all huddled around a fire, waiting out the longest night of the year, when a loud voice proclaims "god is bathing the moon in blood!" We run outside shivering and terrified of the cold and the darkness that protect the wolves and wildcats that lurk in the dark, hoping to make a meal of us. Up we look to the sky and see it: a disk floating where the moon would be, but orange and pink instead...

Eclipse tonight!

Tonight's lunar eclipse will mark the first time since Shakespeare died that we have a full eclipse coincide with the winter solstice. Let's see if there is any after effect. The last time this happened the world was a very different place.

The people that were here in what we now call North America were very different and doubtless had something to say about a blood covered moon on the longest night of winter, but I don't know what that was...

Before last timehttp://www.brainyhistory.com/years/1638.html

After last time  http://www.brainyhistory.com/years/1638.html

Elizabethan versus Victorian

Just got back from the Dickens Fair at Cow Palace. I think I now know the difference between the Victorian age and the Elizabethen.

And what does In Excelsis Deo mean, anyway?
http://www.sacklunch.net/Latin/G/gloriainexcelsisDeo.html

Not much. But about 200 years.

Gotta go. She is on the silent rampage.

Pigeons

What a bad rap the pigeon has had. Ken Kesey called them "rats with wings." All over every city there are wires and fences and plastic owls with the expressed intent of preventing these rock doves from congregating. Any yet live, they do. In numbers ever increasing.

A gullible person is a ___
Myself, I have heard MYSELF say this a hundred times or more, "(gazing up at some avian acrobat "...is it? No, just a ______."
These super survivors are spectacular evidence of what Whitman meant when he said, "...on and on and on, forever the urge to live..." or something like that.

More later...

Looking for Uncle Ruthie

Looking for Uncle Ruthie, and her soft introduction to the weekend Saturday morning LA broadcast of children's songs and stories, I instead came upon this piece recounting a Manhattan morning years ago: http://www.halfwaydownthestairs.net/index.php?action=view&id=243

I still haven't found Ruthie. Her broadcast had been overtaken by a pledge drive show, and her archives are eluding me.

Europe 1930 San Francisco 2010

Bill Nye Science Guy
Chabot Space and Science Center

Insurgency

Fascism

3rd Reich

Haili Salasi

King Emperor of Ethiopia