March 24, 2008: Deadline to Register to Vote in PA Primary!

NOTE ADDED SEPTEMBER 8, 2008: The information below was about the 2008 PRIMARY Election. For information on the deadline to register to vote for the PRESIDENTIAL Election in Pennsylvania in 2008, go here.

As long as I've been registered to vote I've been a registered Independent. I blame this as much on J.A. Panuska, S.J. , the President of the University of Scranton during my days there, as on anything else. In an interview published in the weekly campus paper, The Aquinas, Fr. Panuska revealed that he had been a lifetime registered Indepedent, so that he would never be beholden to any political party, any more than they could presume his automatic support. It seemed like a good, principled stand to take on a fairly basic issue, so I decided to adopt it for myself.

Besides, I live in Pennsylvania. Just about the only thing being registered for a particular party means (for non-politicians, or those not seeking political favors) is that you get to vote in that party's Primary election to decide who runs in the General election. For the most part I simply trusted my fellow Pennsylvanians to decide for themselves who would best represent their party in the General election. The only election that I seriously cared deeply and passionately about was the Presidential election. And since Pennsylvania's Primary comes so late in the season, it pretty much never made a difference. The candidates were already selected long before Pennsylvania, one of the largest and most diverse states in the Union, ever got a chance to give its opinion.

2008 is different. In 2008 Pennsylvania's vote matters in the Primary race, on the Democratic side at least.

And here I am, a registered Independent. Unable to cast my vote.

Or so I thought.

As I pulled up to my house this afternoon to check for storm-related damage (there is none! HOORAY!) I heard a brief news clip that said that the deadline to register to vote in the Primary is March 24.

Huh? I had always thought it was sometime last November.

I can has chance to vote in Prezdenchal Primerry? Excellent!

I called the Luzerne County Courthouse, intending to run up directly to change my party affiliation. And they told me that, yes, I could run up and fill out the form right away...or I could log on to the series of tubes known as the Internet, go to the county's site, print out the form, send it in, and be all done!

So that's what I did. Here's the link:

http://www.luzernecounty.org/county/departments_agencies/bureau_of_elections/register_to_vote

Of course, this is only good for those of us who live in Luzerne County. If you live in another county, you will have to go to your specific county's website, or fill out the form however it is filled out where you live.

In 2008, Pennsylvania has a chance to determine who will be the Democratic candidate for the President. Don't miss out on your opportunity to be a part of that. But hurry - deadline for registration is March 24, 2008!

A day at the beach

...err, "Reach." I didn't realize that sign didn't say "Beach" until I was getting this photo ready to post.

As I mentioned yesterday, I scheduled today off so I could take my mom for a follow-up to her cataract surgery. Her last appointment took a while, during which time I did a fairly good impression of some homeless bum dozing in the waiting room of an eye clinic, so this time I resolved to spend the time out and about getting photos in the general vicinity.
My first stop was a sad one. I had planned on visiting the Tudor Book Shop one last time today, but I got an e-mail over the weekend telling me that this past Tuesday would be their last day. So it turns out my last visit was the Saturday before last, when I stopped in while killing time before picking up my friend to go see RENT. I didn't even buy anything that day. Now they're gone.

After that I headed for the Susquehanna River, which forms the border between Kingston and Wilkes-Barre. I parked on Pierce Street on the Kingston side and walked across the bridge to get some pictures of the swollen river. Here are some trees that are usually well above the river's edge.

Here's a shot along the Pierce Street Bridge looking South towards the Luzerne County Courthouse.
Here's another view of the Courthouse and the other buildings along the riverfront. To the left of center you can just make out a statue - I think it's Christ the King (though it may be the nearly-identical Christ the Redeemer) atop the Administration Building at King's College.
Turning further to the West, here is the Market Street Bridge. (Compare this to the third image on the linked post, which was a shot of the Pierce Street Bridge from the Market Street Bridge!)
Finally, as I headed back to the car something else caught my eye and I grabbed one last image. To the East, dimly visible, are the local windmills - err, the wind-driven electrical generators, or "wind generators" for short. Here are three of them (I think out of a total of eleven) lurking behind a Martian Tripod cleverly disguised as a water tower.
Blown-up version:

The windmills are currently turned off - perhaps as a precaution because of yesterday's storms, or perhaps because of the presence of migrating birds in the area, birds whose presence was made obvious by the enormous quantity of droppings that now coated the car. Someday when the air is drier (and there are fewer large migratory birds in the area fueling up for the last leg of their journey North!) I will have to go back and try to recreate this shot.

Pumping and mopping

I hate taking days off from work. I value my vacation days and hoard them for things like vacations, when I take them.

My mom had cataract surgery on her second eye today. My brother had the day off, so he agreed to take her to and from surgery. I scheduled tomorrow off to take her for her follow-up surgery.

It turned out I had to take today off, too.

A huge locomotive of precipitation rolled diagonally through much of the Northeast yesterday. Upstate New York got some of the ugliest of it in the form of snow and ice, but Northeastern Pennsylvania was treated to heavy and nearly continuous rain. It lightened up a bit yesterday afternoon and evening, and when I went to bed our basement was still dry. I hoped for the best and failed to prepare for the worst.

I woke up this morning at 4:30 and put my sleep-sensitized hearing to work. No tell-tale bubbling of water seeping through concrete anywhere. I switched on the TV and watched the weather for a bit. I got up and out of bed at 5:00 and headed for the bathroom. As usual, my cat Nicky raced ahead of me, wanting to get into the bathroom before me.

He made it two feet into the bathroom and stopped. I didn't need to switch on the light to know why.

The "unfinished" part of the basement was full of water. Just a thin film in most spots, about three-quarters of an inch at its deepest in the corners. The bathroom had water that had seeped in from the bordering section of the basement - again, just a thin film.

Dammit.

I could have set up some towels on the floor in preparation - wet towels serve as fairly effective barriers to water flow, for a little while anyway. I could have gotten up at 2:00 or 3:00 and checked to see if I needed to set up the pumps. I could have done a few things. But I hadn't.

I got out my pumps and extended the hoses out through the garage door. I fired them up and started pumping. I grabbed some junk towels, and some beach towels that have only seen the beach once in the past four years, and started sopping up the standing water. I noticed that the water levels were rising, and that the water in the bathroom had now flowed out the bathroom door.

Fine. I would have to call off.

Six hours later I'm still pumping. We had one final burst of rain around 7:00 this morning, but now it's done, and it was downright sunny not too long ago. The first towels have already been in and out of the washer and dryer and are about to be pressed into service again; towels in the dryer wait to replace them, and towels in the washer are waiting for their turn in the dryer.

This isn't as bad as past floods, and it's the first flood we've had since we - and a helpful Nanticoke city official - convinced our neighbor to stop directing all of his downspouts onto our property. (Now he is merely directing most of his downspouts onto our property.) I had hoped we would get away without basement flooding this time, but I guess that was just unrealistic.

Soon the pumps will go dry, and the towels will have absorbed as much remaining water as they can, and it will be time to break out the mops and buckets and disinfectant again. I wonder if I'll have to just use bleach again? Hooboy...


UPDATE, 7:20 PM: All done. That only took me...all day.

Well, most of the time I wasn't actually doing anything. Set up pumps, let run. Throw down towels, sop up water, wash towels, dry towels, repeat. Mop floor, let dry, repeat, repeat, repeat.

Damage was minimal. Well, nothing actually got damaged, though there's always the chance of mold and mildew down the road, despite my use of bleach as a disinfectant. (I finally got to use those stupid white sweatpants that look ridiculous whenever I'm doing anything that doesn't involve mops and bleach!) You learn a few things after going through this drill a dozen or so times. If you haven't learned from hard experience, Ashley from Ink On Paper wrote an excellent article for Associated Content called "What to Do about Basement Flooding." It's a must-read for anyone who has ever had to deal with this problem, or anyone who may be dealing with it in the future.

Gary Gygax is dead

I forgot to get gas on the way home today.

I was in a hurry to get to my house to see if the heavy rains we're experiencing today had managed to flood my kitchen by way of the water leak which has almost-inexplicably appeared in my stove. (Melting snow dripping down the chimney and snaking through the stovepipe into the inside of the oven and gathering in the bottom of the body of the stove, which eventually sprung a leak...what, do you have a better idea?) There was no flood when I got there, so I took a leisurely inspection tour of the house, stopping in the bedroom to take my Garmin GPS thingamajig out of the suitcase I keep up there. (Garmin GPS thingamajigs are easy to lose or misplace; suitcases are not.) I was planning to use the data stored in there as the basis for today's post, after I stopped downtown to fill up.

As I rolled down the hill to the older of Nanticoke's two traffic lights a story came on NPR's All Things Considered about Margaret Jones' Love and Consequences, the latest fake memoir scandal to hit the publishing world. This one sounded semi-interesting; as opposed to James Frey's A Million Little Pieces - which, when presented as fiction, attracted very little interest from publishers, but which became a bestseller when recast as a memoir - this new book was apparently an elaborate hoax from the word go.

I left the radio on while I was pumping gas. (Don't worry; that won't blow up your car any more than using a cell phone while pumping gas will. Leaving your car running or getting in and out of it while pumping gas will put you and anyone around you in some danger, though.) I only heard bits and pieces of the report, but as I was finishing up I heard these ominous words on the radio:

"E. Gary Gygax, co-creator of the fantasy role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons..."

Oh, crap. They're probably not introducing him for an interview. Did he die?

Yes. Yes he did.

I first heard about Dungeons & Dragons from a Parade Magazine article back in 1980 or so. It gave some descriptions of a game in progress, some background, the requisite "college student found wandering in the sewers last year" warning. I thought it was interesting. I decided I wanted to see what it was about.

That Christmas (well, a day or two after) , I took a bus into Wilkes-Barre with my brother and sister. We were 16, 13, and 12 at the time - back then such things were not inconceivable - and our pockets were stuffed full of Christmas loot to buy the things that Santa forgot to get us. I forget what my brother and sister got, but I picked up the boxed edition of what was called "Basic Dungeons & Dragons" (a.k.a. the "Blue Book" version - according to the current revision of the Wikipedia article, this would have made this 1981.)*

The contents of the box were...interesting. A blue book of rules and information something like a thick magazine, an introductory adventure ("The Keep on the Borderlands"), and an array of numbered squares (or "chits") printed on glossy cardboard. These "chits" were designed to serve as random number generators, and came with a little treatise on normal distributions and whatnot. I believe there was also a coupon included which allowed you to order "polyhedral dice" for the princely sum of $2. (I think the game had cost me $9. I had originally paid $12 for it in one store, but returned that one when I realized I could save 25% by buying at another nearby store.)

I was a little excited by this, as the "polyhedral dice" came in the shapes of the Platonic Solids that Carl Sagan discussed in one of the appendices to Cosmos. The tetrahedon, or four-sided pyramid; the cube; the eight-sided octahedron; the twenty-sided icosahedron; and, most precious of all, the dodecahedron, the twelve-sided die whose faces were pentagons. (All of the other dice, except for the cube, had triangular sides.) In D&D terms, this set was made up of a d4, d6, d8, d12, and d20. No d10 for us, baby! Back in my day, sonny, the d20 was numbered 0 to 9 twice, and you had to color one set of the faces to designate it as "plus ten". But this die could also serve as a ten-sider, and if you rolled it twice, or if you were rich and had two of them, you could use it as "percentile dice" to randomly generate numbers from 0 - 99 (or 1 -100, if you counted "00" as 100.) But a d20 was the essential die for "saving throws", those little chances that maybe you got lucky and managed to avoid getting hit by the point-blank shot, or happened to be immune to the poison, or didn't get fooled by someone's persuasive words.

And that was it.

Basic rules. Some funny-looking dice. Pencil and paper. Some friends. And lots of imagination.

Remember, this was a long time ago. The Atari 2600 and Commodore Vic-20 (with its super-fast cassette tape drive) were state-of-the-art back in the early 1980's. Video games were primitive things.

Fantasy role-playing games like D&D presented kids with the opportunity to flex their imaginations and their creative skills. At its most basic sense, the game was a form of collective storytelling. One person - the "Dungeon Master", in D&D terminology - would set the stage and provide the backdrop and plot twists; the other players would decide how the story would play out through their characters' actions. Some people played without dice. Some people played without rules. Some people played without pencil and paper. The game was flexible like that.

People who played D&D were looked down upon as freaks and weirdos, geeks and social outcasts. And maybe this was true, to an extent. Maybe the level of imagination and creativity required by the game set players apart from most kids their age. But at its heart, D&D was a social event, even if the people you were socializing with were not generally accepted by a lot of society.

The game spun off. Advanced Dungeons & Dragons came out a little while later, with more complicated rules and more expensive books. The game was revised several times, and the "rules" evolved from flexible "guidelines" to hard and fast "rules" that ensured portability of play. It waxed and waned in popularity. Ownership passed from Gary Gygax's TSR to Wizards of the Coast, the people who made the Magic: The Gathering card game. In 2000 it was revised again as part of the d20 System, a codification of rules that aimed for uniformity of rule structure across role-playing game formats and platforms.

This past weekend a friend mentioned Mazes & Monsters to me. This is an ancient Tom Hanks TV-movie, a cautionary tale which, I think, involves college kids going nuts playing role-playing games and winding up wandering in the sewers. It's laughably bad, I have heard, and is watched mainly for entertainment value. My friend said that coming across this movie on the TV listings made him think of Dungeons & Dragons. He hadn't thought of it in years, since a bunch of us would get together and play it at my mom's house. I was the Dungeon Master...

Maybe I'll dust off the old books and bring out the dice sometime. I'll draw up an adventure, and a few of us will get together and pull an all-nighter, just like in the old days. Maybe even introduce a few members of the younger generation to a "game" that doesn't require an X-Box or PS3. Just some rules, some dice, some friends, and some pencil and paper. And lots of imagination and creativity.

Thanks, Gary Gygax.


*My own introductory experiences parallel those of "Unseelie" on this discussion board. I wonder where in Pennsylvania Unseelie lived?

Tomorrow, tomorrow...

Tomorrow is the big day. What happens in Texas and Ohio will almost certainly determine whether or not Pennsylvania's primary will be relevant to determining who will be the Democratic nominee.

Tomorrow is also the day that work begins on some bridges on I-81 between Moosic and Avoca. Just some maintenance work, safety stuff, some traffic tie-ups and delays. Should be done in...about two years. I kid you not.

Yes, it's a pain in the butt. But we all remember what happened in Minnesota last August, don't we? No, we probably don't. It took me a minute to remember just which state the bridge was in. Well, this work is to make sure images like this one, of I-81 just North of Avoca...
...remain just amusing glitches on Google Earth that result when the program tries to display non-terrain features in 3-D mode. That's a big drop, and I drive over those bridges twice a day - and all the other ones they'll be working on, too.

So I already set my alarm a half-hour earlier, to 4:30 AM. I'll bump it back even earlier if need be. I'd rather do that than plummet to my doom in some scenic gully or mountain pass in Northeastern Pennsylvania!

UPDATE: Thanks to Michelle, I now know that these repairs have been put off until next...Sunday??? From WNEP.com:

Major I-81 Bridge Project Delayed
Last Updated: March 3, 2008 08:06 AM EST

The start of a $7 million bridge project on Interstate 81 has been postponed until March 9. Four interstate bridges, two northbound and two southbound between Avoca and Moosic will be under construction. For the first week, expect night-time southbound lane restrictions. After the first week, expect possible on-and-off lane restrictions southbound and no lane restrictions northbound. On-ramps from Moosic to Interstate 81 southbound will be controlled by a stop sign. Crossovers are being built in the median but they probably won't be ready until late this year or spring of 2009.

Super.

YouTube Weekend: The Meme

A lot of people have the wrong idea of what a "meme" is. Somehow the definition has gotten distorted and corrupted to mean "a thing that gets passed around on the Internet that requires you to perform some function and then pass it on to somebody else." But that's pretty far from what the word was coined to refer to.

Richard Dawkins originally used the term in his book The Selfish Gene to refer to a unit of information that is capable of reproducing itself. Memes are concepts, ideas, ways of doing things that are copied and replicate and spread from individual to individual. As he writes in Chapter 11 of his book:

Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation. If a scientist hears, or reads about, a good idea, he passed it on to his colleagues and students. He mentions it in his articles and his lectures. If the idea catches on, it can be said to propagate itself, spreading from brain to brain. As my colleague N.K. Humphrey neatly summed up an earlier draft of this chapter: `... memes should be regarded as living structures, not just metaphorically but technically.(3) When you plant a fertile meme in my mind you literally parasitize my brain, turning it into a vehicle for the meme's propagation in just the way that a virus may parasitize the genetic mechanism of a host cell. And this isn't just a way of talking -- the meme for, say, "belief in life after death" is actually realized physically, millions of times over, as a structure in the nervous systems of individual men the world over.'

It's rare that you witness a meme at its birth. But I think I have. Marc from Wilkes-Barre Online has made me realize that with this post.

I don't know how long Gort at Gort42 has been doing his "YouTube Weekend" posts, but it might possibly have been since before my friend John built me a computer that was capable of playing YouTube videos. It may go back to this post, which doesn't actually contain an embedded video, or it may have started even earlier.

The idea is pretty simple, as contained in this post:

It will be another light and lazy weekend. I'll just surf YouTube and share what I find just like last weekend.

(Oddly enough, the YouTube videos Gort had posted the previous weekend were a clip of the Zapruder film of John F. Kennedy being shot in the head, and "Seconds" - a song/video that incorporates bits about JFK's final hours - by the Human League. Not exactly the fun stuff I've come to associate with Gort's YouTube Weekends.)

Like Garfield Minus Garfield, this idea has legs: instead of doing a full post for a weekend, just do a quick post that includes a favorite video for the weekend. I've been doing it for a while, inspired in part by Gort, and in part by Michael Plank's Content, which has long featured YouTube videos - though, like Michael Plank, I don't restrict my video postings to weekends, and I often do the video posts in addition to, rather than in place of, my regular posts. (Some of my video posts are wordier than my non-video posts!)

Jen has gotten into the act at Jennifer D. Wade Journal. Marc at Wilkes-Barre Online has put his own spin on the YouTube Weekend with his Video Flapdoodle - see the first two entries here and here. Now even Bill at Bill's Notes has taken to posting YouTube videos with this weekend's posts. Twenty-seven YouTube videos, over the course of seven posts, all posted today. That's...rather a lot.

I'll leave you with a video. This is a home-made video, by a teenage girl in Glasgow, Scotland. It's a video for "When You Sleep" by My Bloody Valentine. "When You Sleep" is possibly MBV's most upbeat song. I've always thought of it as a "Summer Song", the sort of song I could imagine blasting out of a car as it rolls down the street, or out of a boom box while you're washing your car. The video is just her and her friends screwing around, but the style, the blocking, the editing, the matching up of video to audio, the use of in-camera imagery and speed changes to create special effects (check out the trampoline-and-lens-flare starting at 2:08), the everything is just gorgeous. It perfectly captures the feel of the song. If this girl does not go on to pursue a career in this, the world will be the poorer for it.

"When You Sleep" by My Bloody Valentine , video by lithiumkx:

Photos on MySpace

I've just uploaded nearly a dozen additional photos to my MySpace site. (This link should take you directly to the photos, though your life will be vastly enriched and encoolend by hanging out on my main page and listening to all of "It's Bad You Know" by R.L. Burnside.) These photos are, for the most part, nothing that hasn't already been posted on this blog. (And I just realized you might not be able to see them at all unless you have a MySpace account and have signed in. Damn you, Rupert Murdoch!)

One thing hit me while posting them.

Photos like this represent a moment in time captured photographically. This was a Saturday afternoon in November of 2005 - November 12, to be exact. I had just given my 72nd pint of blood and had decided to stop and take advantage of the beautiful Fall weather and the still-bright leaves on the ground while coming back with my traditional post-donation Chinese food. As I was heading back to my car after taking the photos a friend's father stopped by and asked what I was up to. We chatted for a while. Then I went home and almost immediately posted the photo.

My realization today was that anyone can try to recreate this photo, if only they knew where to stand. Using Google Earth, I was able to work out the exact location of the intersection of Washington and Walnut Streets where I took this picture. To within a few yards, the picture was taken at 41° 11' 51.42" N, 75° 59' 48.77" W.

You may notice from the Google Earth image above (rotated to approximately match the photo's orientation) that to get this photo I needed to be standing in the intersection, risking my life for my art and your entertainment*. Should you decide to try to reproduce this photo and venture to this very spot, GPS tracker in one hand and camera in the other, be careful not to get your fool self run over. You have been warned.

*ARE YOU NOT ENTERTAINED?

Gotta launder my karma

Well, no, I don't. At least, I don't think I do.

I think of Michael Plank as an alternate-universe version of me. Not that we've led parallel lives or anything, but we have very similar tastes in music. My first thought on realizing this would normally be, "Well, that's Generation X for you", but other members of our demographically insignificant generation - including Gort, Jen, and Michael Plank's sister-in-law, Anne from Almost Quintessence - sometimes have very different musical tastes from my own.

(Which is not to say my tastes don't overlap with those others. They do, a lot. But more often than not I get even the most obscure musical references Michael Plank throws out.)

This video, which I have lifted from a recent post on Michael Plank's Content, isn't obscure. At least I don't think it is. It used to get heavy airplay on MTV back in the days when MTV etc. etc., you know how that sentence ends. It's a nice, fun little ditty, with a higher-than-average amount of BDSM imagery thrown in, and one naughty adjective cut out. The song is "Battle Flag" by the Lo Fidelity Allstars.


For some reason that song links in my mind to another, very different song. I think it's because I once put them on the same mix disc, one after another. That song is "Porcelain" by Moby.

Note: This is, I believe, an "unofficial" video for this song, though it looks all kinds of professional. I vastly prefer it to the "official" version of the video - I think it captures the feelings of longing, loss, emptiness, and hope in the face of hopelessness perfectly. I was originally planning on bemoaning my dissatisfaction with the "official" video, and was going to note that the beat brought the DNA remix of "Tom's Diner" by Suzanne Vega to mind, and that the imagery from that video seemed to fit the Moby song better than the eyeball-in-space stuff. But this "unofficial" video made such a comment unnecessary. Almost.

Finally, for some reason "Battle Flag" brings another video to mind, from the days of MTV's 120 Minutes and Alternative Nation. It's a brilliant video for an OK song. But it's by Spike Jonze, so would you expect anything less? The band is Wax, the song is "Southern California":


BONUS BONUS BONUS: Because I love this commercial (which I only ever saw once on TV) so much, and because it took me a while to think of searching for "Spike Jonze Y2K" on YouTube, I'm throwing this Nike commercial by Spike Jonze in as a bonus. This commercial was one of the things I thought of whenever I saw commercials for Cloverfield, and it probably helped inspire bits of Shawn of the Dead:

One year ago yesterday...

...I lost my job.

Every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end

It's been a long, rough year since then. I never imagined that I would someday find myself collecting Unemployment, but in fact I did, for quite a long while. I always somehow thought there were other, comparable jobs in this area that I could step into with relative ease...but there aren't. Things on the outside world are a lot harder and scarier than I would have believed.

It wasn't just me, of course. A lot of people lost their jobs at my company on February 27, 2007. Besides me, four other people from my department (which had had 13 employees, down from a high of about 20 in our heyday in 2001 or thereabouts) also were informed that their services would no longer be needed.

Two of us eventually went back to work at the company in other positions, for considerably less pay. Two others have found jobs outside the company. The fifth, I believe, has decided to take the opportunity to be a full-time grandmother, though I don't know exactly what she is up to right now.

It's hard. The company lost a lot of talent a year ago, and a vast amount of goodwill and employee loyalty. And those of us who have been forced to take jobs that pay less than we were earning back then - 1/3 less, in my case - are facing at the very least financial hardship in the form of greatly reduced discretionary income, the spreading-around money that goes into savings or, as is more often the case, is pumped back into the economy. And when less money is being saved and less money is being spent, the economy as a whole suffers.

(I almost completely forgot about this anniversary until a friend reminded me of it. My current job involves day-after data analysis for our facility, so I tend to be living one day in the past. But, honestly, today I would have remembered it. Besides, another post topic came up yesterday.)


Enough of this glum stuff! Time to jump on the bandwagon for something I've known about for a while. Last Friday, Michelle from mhryvnak.net/blog/ sent me this message:

mhryvnak (6:53:28 PM): i think you'd like this
mhryvnak (6:53:30 PM): http://garfieldminusgarfield.tumblr.com/
mhryvnak (6:53:35 PM): i got it off of a fellow blogger
DataBoy Echo (7:12:55 PM): Oh MY GOD! That's brilliant! Who would've thought that Garfield was the strip's lone anchor to sanity?
mhryvnak (7:16:57 PM): lol
mhryvnak (7:17:06 PM): i knew of all people you'd appreciate it
DataBoy Echo (7:17:49 PM): I have to pass that on to the Comics Curmudgeon crowd! Can I credit you, and post your blog address?
mhryvnak (7:18:06 PM): if you want, but really i grabbed it from loafe.com

So pass it on I did.

Harold, Christian Single und die Rheintöchter says:
February 22nd, 2008 at 7:54 pm
I just got this from a friend, and a Google site search suggests that it hasn’t been mentioned here before…

What do you get when you remove Garfield from Garfield? You get the site Garfield Minus Garfield!

http://garfieldminusgarfield.tumblr.com/

“Who would have guessed that when you remove Garfield from the Garfield comic strips, the result is an even better comic about schizophrenia, bipolor disorder, and the empty desperation of modern life?”

It’s a lot scary to think that Garfield is this strip’s main anchor to reality!

This past Tuesday, Josh at The Comics Curmudgeon featured the Garfield Minus Garfield site in a blog post. That same day Francesco Marciuliano, writer of the comic strip Sally Forth, also featured the site on his blog and put his own spin on it: Sally Forth Minus Sally Forth. And today Bill at Bill's Notes posted about the site, which he heard about from here.

This thing, as they say, has legs - a phrase which has nothing to do with walking and everything to do with hard liquor. But that is a post for another time. For now, just kick back and enjoy Garfield Minus Garfield. And thanks for letting me know about it, Michelle!

The Courage of a Priest

This is an open letter to Joseph Martino, Bishop of the Diocese of Scranton, which appeared in today's Citizens' Voice. It was written by Reverend Patrick Sullivan, who, according to the information tagged at the end,"teaches sociology and theology at King’s College with an emphasis on labor issues (and) has written two books and is working on two more." The tag fails to mention that he occasionally fills in to say Mass at congregations where forced retirements are creating an artificial priest shortage, such as at my own. It also fails to mention, for some reason, that one of his sermons once once inspired me to write a blog post ("Shepherds and Sheep", February 3, 2007.) His letter concerns an ongoing dispute between the Bishop and the Catholic teachers of the diocese.

(Note: I do not know if a few apparent typos were in the original, or were perhaps introduced when the letter was reset for publication - perhaps by a dim-witted spellchecking program. I have refrained from correcting them.)

Bishop should allow teachers to belong to a real union
02/27/2008

Editor: The following is a letter I (Reverend Sullivan) wrote to Bishop Joseph Martino, head of the Diocese of Scranton.

Dear Bishop Martino:

I write you publicly with great reluctance, as a priest of more than fifty years and as a teacher, researcher and activist of the Catholic Church’s ministry in labor-management relations for more than thirty years. However, after four efforts – offering assistance to your education staff, a personal letter to you, a letter to the Papal Nuncio, and a telephone request to chat with you, there has been only silence or refusal. I would have preferred to chat with you privately, person-to-person.

Your public statement reveals the handiwork of the management consultant firm hired to establish an “Employee Relations Program,” which is widely recognized simply as a “company union.” The phenomenon appeared in the early 20th century with the so-called “American Plan,” well articulated by oil magnate John D. Rockefeller. Patricia Cayo Sexton’s The War on Labor and the Left said, “Under the labor relations plan advanced by Rockefeller, barriers between employers and employees would dissolve, and the two opposing teams would become one – the company’s. Representing this solidarity would be the company unions.” [p. 209]

I need not rehearse the teaching of Leo XIII, the U.S. Bishops’ 1919 Pastoral, Pius XI and John A. Ryan in support of real unions. However, do recall that the 1971 World Synod of Bishops said those who preach social justice must first be just in their own
eyes, a corollary of which is support of real unions in Catholic institutions. The U.S. Bishops issued a pastoral on health care in the 1970s, which affirmed the right of all hospital workers to form their own union, despite financial challenges to those institutions. When Southeast Bishops (Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Virginia) endorsed the J. P. Stevens Boycott in 1980, they did not support a “company union” but a real union, the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union. In 1981 when Pope John Paul II wrote Laborem Exercens (Human Labor) and said labor unions are indispensable in an industrialized world, he did not mean “company unions.” When the U.S. Catholic Bishops issued their 1986 Pastoral, “Economic Justice for All,” they supported real unions, not “company unions.”

“Company unions” abound in recent experiments in labor-management relations programs with such attractive titles as “Quality Work Circles,” “Human Resource Departments,” etc. Some have been successful when employees have a “bona-fide” grievance procedure, i.e. recourse to independent “outsiders” or to arbitration. Too often, such “company unions” gladly accept employees’ creative ideas but reluctantly their grievances. In your Employee Relations Program not only is the moral right of workers to form their own union taken away, but their moral right as adults to negotiate their wages, benefits, working hours, working conditions, job tenure (hiring and firing) and grievance procedure. Without those rights, the employees’ jobs and livelihood are at stake and they are afraid to speak out, to protest, to strike. Such company unions are referred to as modern day feudalism or worse. This intrinsic human right of workers to organize themselves was derived in no small measure as an antidote to the fear and intimidation which workers suffer in the policies and treatment of unfair, unjust, dictatorial and other oppressive employers.

You insist that the financial status of the Scranton Diocese is so fragile that a real union might bring about the collapse of the entire diocesan educational system. Yes, there is fragility, but why must the teachers have to suffer financially and be denied not only their moral right to unionize, but also their moral right to an adequate living wage – a bedrock of Catholic social teaching? Granted parents have a right to the Catholic education of their children. However, if parents cannot pay more tuition and the wider Catholic population of the diocese is unwilling or unable to contribute more money to the costs of its school system, the teachers still have a right to ample and detailed information, to forego their moral rights to form a union and to receive an adequate living wage. Your action pits the one right of parents against the two rights of the Scranton Diocesan Association of Catholic Teachers (SDACT) members. Furthermore, many teachers are already holding two jobs or living in four or five income families. Thus, a third right is challenged – the practice of Catholic family values.

Consequently, in canon law and justice there is an even greater burden of proof than alleged in the original and subsequent public statements. Records should be available not only to these dedicated teachers seeking a union, but also to the entire community. Otherwise, credibility is at stake. In your original statement you referred to the teachers’ association as selfish (recently revised to “self interested”) and unconcerned about the financial viability of the diocesan educational “ministry” -- the usual “pitch” of management consultants! The proof of such an outlandish charge beggars, unless the records of negotiation sessions and financial details are presented to the public. Otherwise, an unjust accusation is made about the teachers. Thus, what steps has the diocese taken to establish or enhance an endowment for Catholic education, as some dioceses have done? What steps has the diocese taken to enlist the support of interested and competent lay people to contribute and/or elicit donations and to guide diocesan financial and personnel policies, without the bias of a profit-making management consultant firm?

Such statements also reveal the management consultants’ slight-of-hand about unions today as passé, especially in non-profit organizations and/or service industries, such as education and health care. In the early 1970s the U.S. government did not think so when it placed health care under the Wagner Act.

Also, public and non-religious educational institutions are covered by many state laws. The United States Supreme Court decision to exempt religious schools from coverage by the National Labor Relations Board was based not on separation of church and state, but the failure of the Wagner Act to cover religious elementary and secondary education. The court punted! However, immediately after that decision there were weak efforts to seek an amendment to the Wagner Act and to establish diocesan personnel programs which included real unions, not “company unions.” However, such never ensued, because Catholic educational administrators in most dioceses failed to heed the urgings of the U.S. Catholic Conference (USCC) and the National Catholic Education Association (NCEA).

Now is the time for the Scranton Diocese to be creative. Whatever the arguments and differences, the feelings and memories of the past, let there begin again negotiations with mutual respect and cordiality. Add to the admonition that unions in Catholic institutions should be of a higher caliber than in industry or commerce, that so should the employers! If it means conciliation, meditation or arbitration, let the Scranton Diocese take the steps necessary to recognize and negotiate with the Scranton Diocese Association of Catholic Teachers.

An effective response would be to implement the creative “gain sharing” model of the respected former President of Scranton University and Catholic University, the distinguished economist and ethicist of “work and management,” Fr. William Byron, S.J., in Labor-Management Relations: A Catholic Perspective, edited several years ago by the present Cardinal of Detroit, Adam Maida.

Otherwise, the Diocese of Scranton will fail to heed the 1976 warning of the U.S. Catholic Church’s labor-management expert, the late Msgr. George G. Higgins.

Namely, in stalling for time in dealing with collective bargaining Catholic school administrators “will be asking for serious trouble and will do irreparable harm to the reputations of the Catholic school system and of the Church as a whole in the United States.”

One year later in 1977, the United States Catholic Conference, Subcommittee on Teacher Organizations’ conclusion, with the Administrative Board’s approval, was that the concept of the “community of faith” – to teach as Jesus teaches — should persuade school administrators to accept and welcome employee initiatives, to establish their own teacher organizations.

The church has already suffered from too many losses and scandals. May we not add more pain and shame!

(Rev.) Patrick J. Sullivan, C.S.C., Ph.D.

(Rev. Sullivan teaches sociology and theology at King’s College with an emphasis on labor issues. He has written two books and is working on two more.)

My own perception of Bishop Martino is that he is a shutdown manager, in the model of "Chainsaw" Al Dunlap. Dunlap was brought in as a crisis manager to companies in distress, whereupon he would make deep cuts, fire large numbers of people, and often leave the companies in worse shape than they were when he came to them. Martino has come to a diocese undergoing a transitional period, as a large proportion of many congregations...well, is old and dying, to put it bluntly, and the younger parishioners are moving out of the area almost as fast as they are leaving the Catholic Church, for reasons related more to a general crisis in the Church than to anything specifically happening locally (though the national scandal of pedophile priests has also struck home here), and at the same time a large number of immigrants - many of them legal, and from New York City - are placing an added burden on diocesan services.

Martino has responded to these crises by cutting back on services to the sick and elderly, closing parishes - again cutting back on services to those too old or infirm to travel to any parish church other than the one they had been attending - and consolidating Catholic schools throughout the Diocese into a centralized location, requiring miles of bus rides for students from outlying areas. (When it was pointed out that the student capacity of the consolidated school was considerably less than the combined attendance at the schools being consolidated, Martino - or his representative, I don't recall - simply noted that they were counting on a lot of students not staying in the Catholic school system after consolidation.)

On a personal note, I attended my cousin's son's Confirmation last year. It was a combined-parish Confirmation, and it was held at the church with the largest seating capacity in the area. But when these churches were built, having a parking lot with spaces to hold all the cars that would be used by all the people in the church was not a consideration - so people wound up having to park up to several blocks away. Elderly and infirm grandparents had to hobble through the rain just to get to the church - only to find that the church was filled beyond capacity, and was now standing room only. (Church pews do not make it easy for anyone not at the ends to give up their seat to someone whose need is greater.) To add insult to insult, the bishop - Martino himself, deigning to grace the boondocks with His Most Excellent Presence rather than sending an assistant bishop - decided to be fashionably late, strolling into the church a good ten or fifteen minutes after the designated start time for the Mass. He then commented on how wonderful it was to see the church so full of people, apparently not bothering to notice all the old folks forced to stand in the back whom he had just made stand even longer.

One criticizes a member of the Church hierarchy only at grave peril to your own standing as a Catholic - for the Bishops have the right to excommunicate those whom they so choose. Criticism is always welcome as a way of presenting yourself for chastisement - the correction of errors on the part of the flock by the priesthood. For a priest to criticize a bishop in so open a manner is almost unheard-of, and will likely lead to grave consequences. I salute his courage.

Scooter progression

It's been only a little more than seven months since Scooter came into our lives. I don't think I've shown these photos before.

This is Scooter on July 17, 2007, when he was just a few weeks old and had just been ripped from his mother by a neighbor who hated stray cats. (That's a paper towel he's on.) He spent most of his time at this stage in a rigid state of tonus, his neck arched back and his front legs fully extended. At this point he wasn't Scooter yet. He wasn't even Wiggles. We actually didn't think he had much chance of living, and were just providing him with a safe and comfortable place to die.

He didn't.

Your forehead has a flavor.

Here's the thanks I get for months of tender loving care, including holding the little guy inside my shirt and letting him fall asleep curled up against my heart. This is Scooter a little more than four months later, on Thanksgiving 2007. I would submit this to I Can Has Cheezburger?, but it's too blurry. (It was taken with my nephew's camera phone.)

Here's Scooter ten days ago, on February 16, 2008. He looks somewhat wary in this picture, perhaps even calculating. In fact he was probably just half-asleep. Not bad for a cat who wasn't expected to live at all!

The Mysterious Brown Puddle

I stopped at my house yesterday to do my weekly furnace dump and chimney sweep. My new, normal, Monday-through-Friday schedule means that I'm not spending as much time at the house as I'd like. When I was unemployed, I could have gone to the house whenever I wanted, yet I kept myself away for some reason...like, I felt like I didn't deserve to lounge around (or even get a night's sleep) at my own house until I had secured a job. I'm sure I must have spent a few nights there, but honestly I can't recall. (I'd have to check the blog records!) And during the nearly six months that I was on the 4x4 schedule, I could also have spent lots of time there - but didn't. Now pretty much the only night I can spend there is Friday, and I haven't done that yet.

Which doesn't mean I haven't been over there. I've been there several times this past week, to shovel the snow, salt the sidewalks, set up a new lamp on a timer, check the mail, and make sure everything was in order.

Yesterday when I went over there, everything was not in order.

I didn't sense anything was wrong when I entered the house. The thermostat was still set around 60 degrees, right where I had left it. Lights worked, windows weren't broken, doors were intact, heat came on when I turned the thermostat up (so nobody had stolen the water pipes yet), big brown partially dried-up puddle in the middle of the kitchen floor...

Wait. My mind leaped into action. That shouldn't be there.

OK, this is now a crime scene. Move nothing. Touch nothing. What do we see, what do we smell? Spider-Man's first rule: People never look up. Look up. No leak from the bathroom above...besides, there would be a bedroom above that spot, not the bathroom. The bedroom where my Uncle died. Whatever. There was nothing to indicate a leak from the ceiling.

Water sources? The kitchen sink was over thataway about twelve feet. The sink has a slow leak, and a leak in the drainpipe would really ruin my day...but there was no sign of a leak under the sink, no trail of water from the sink to the middle of the floor. Ditto on the radiator by the back door, and the window on the other side of the kitchen table.

The stove? Mmmmaybe. The water seemed to lead back to the antique coal/gas stove that I still use to make tea. Bernie warned me about condensation in the gas lines. However, the house was not full of gas, so I discounted this possibility.

The chimney? Again, a big mmmmaybe. But a scan under the stove in the direction of the place where the stovepipe joins the chimney didn't show any obvious telltale signs of water being on the floor.

Me? Could I have tracked in snow on a previous visit, snow which had melted and not yet evaporated? It seemed unlikely, since I hadn't stood in that spot recently. And why would it be brown? I have washed the floor several times since I bought the house. Water on the floor should not turn brown.

Intruder...with coffee? Not likely, unless they were very neat about breaking and entering. Besides, the whole place should smell of coffee if that were the case. It didn't.

I chalked it up to just one of those things, and got some damp paper towels to clean up.

I sniffed at the brown stuff that I picked up on the paper towels. Traces of coffee...and iron. Rust?

Whatever. I cleaned it up as best I could. It looked like it had left a stain.

Today I stopped at the house after work to see if the Mysterious Brown Puddle had reformed. It hadn't. But the previous puddle looked like it had possibly taken the gloss off the linoleum floor. Acidic? Maybe. I slipped an old paint tray under a point on the stove that I decided was as likely a spot as any for trapped, condensed water to be seeping out, carrying the residue of ten thousand breakfasts with it.

Just one of those things, I guess. Just another thing you'll encounter while trying to rehab an old house. I'll keep an eye out for further developments.

RENT review

I forgot something I learned after writing about seeing Les Miserables in London in March of 2006: actors sometimes Google themselves to see what people are saying about their performances. So with that in mind, I offer this brief (and name-filled) review of RENT.

I saw RENT with a friend at the 2:00 matinee on Saturday, February 23, 2008 at the Scranton Cultural Center (formerly known as the Masonic Temple.) We sat in the third row on the extreme left - close enough to see up the actors' nostrils, though some of our view of the far left of the stage was obscured by a tower of lights and speakers, and at times a light picking out things happening on the far right of the stage shined directly in our eyes. (This is, however, the best place to sit for a closeup view of Maureen's bare butt - portrayed by Christine Dwyer's bare butt - when she drops trou to send a message to Benny the landlord, played by John Watson.)

Briefly put, everything about this production was fantastic, and I regret that this may have been my only opportunity to see the show, since it is closing on Broadway on June 1.

Real standout performances were given by Heinz Winckler as Roger and Kristen-Alexzander Griffith* as Angel. The part of Roger is very vocally demanding, and Winckler was more than equal to the task. Angel is perhaps the most physically demanding role, and Griffith performed fabulously.

Also notable were Anwar F. Robinson as Tom Collins and Jennifer Colby Talton as Mimi. Tom Collins (the only character called by both his first and last names throughout the story) is a character who provides a sort of emotional compass for the story, while the role of Mimi is as vocally demanding as Roger and nearly as physically demanding as Angel. Both Robinson and Talton gave wonderful, memorable performances.

I found the character of Mark, performed by Jed Resnick, to be the weakest link in the chain of RENT. Perhaps the character, who serves as the narrator, is written that way; having never seen any other portrayal, I have nothing to compare this performance to. Resnick's vocal performance was less powerful than those of Winckler and Talton, though his duets were beautiful and richly nuanced throughout the show.

As the story progressed, you really cared about these characters. The death of one of them brought real tears to the eyes of even the biggest and toughest audience members - not because a fictional character had died as the script demanded, but because the portrayal of the character's passing evoked memories many, many deaths that had been experienced in the real world.

It is possible, I suppose, to buy your ticket and go to see a play, or a movie, or a concert, and then walk out of the venue and carry on your life as though nothing had happened. It is a characteristic of a performance that is more than mere entertainment that the experience of what you have witnessed stays with you, and dwells in your head and heart and soul long after the set has been struck and the tour has moved on. RENT is such an experience.

Tonight is the final performance in Scranton. From here the tour moves to Grand Rapids, Michigan on March 4 and 5, and then leaps back East for performances in Baltimore, Maryland on March 7 through 9. (Who the hell came up with that tour schedule? In fact, the schedule gets even crazier from there - two days after Baltimore they're in Tulsa, Oklahoma, on the 11th and 12th, then two locations in Missouri from the 13th through the 16th, then back up to Ohio for a single day, then a week in Ontario, then three days in Tennessee, six in Virginia, then a nice long stay in Florida...really, I get dizzy just looking at that schedule!)

If the RENT tour comes anywhere near your town, I highly recommend going to see it! Tell them that d.b. echo sent you, and you read about it on Another Monkey!

*There was some discussion between us as to whether this was an actor portraying the transvestite Angel, or an actress playing a man who dressed as a woman, or perhaps a transgendered man playing a transvestite. I had hoped that the website listed in the biography section, KristenAlexGriffith.com, might be of some help in clearing this up but unfortunately - and ironically, given the thematic content of this story - this site has been cybersquatted!

Will I?

One song that really hit home in RENT was "Will I?" It is a very simple song - a round, really, consisting of just three lines, overlapped by many voices:

Will I lose my dignity?
Will someone care?
Will I wake tomorrow from this nightmare?

Here it is from the movie version:

This song isn't just about people facing the future of living with AIDS. It applies to us all. As someone who has spent so very much time in nursing homes, hospitals, and the VA, when I hear this song I see my great-aunt, my grandmother, my father, my uncle - all of whom had family and friends who visited them every day - and hundreds and hundreds of others who did not have even that. Unless the way end-of-life care is handled in this world changes, I fear the answers to the three questions are Yes, Maybe, and No.

The point has been made in music before.

Elvis Costello, Veronica:


Moby, Natural Blues:


Death sucks. Have I mentioned that before? I think I have.

Do what you can to help others keep their dignity at the end of their lives.

"Sometimes we'd just sit there, and she wouldn't say anything, and I wouldn't say anything. And you can try and work out what was going on in her head. But I think it's something we don't understand. Not yet, anyway."

- Elvis Costello, spoken at the end of the Veronica video

RENT

Well, I saw RENT. So now I can understand a lot of references my friends are making.

I'm going to be replaying the play in my head for a while, trying to figure out what to make of some of the themes. I'm sure this will provide some good discussion material with my RENT-fan friends.

If you haven't seen it - well, this is your last chance. The show will close on June 1.

Ashley has been posting RENT clips from YouTube on her site, so go there to see them. (Specifically: "Out Tonight" sung by Mimi; "Light My Candle", a duet by Roger and Mimi; and "Seasons of Love", sung by everybody.) As for me, I've decided to post a video of another sort, one that this play's themes of love and death brought to mind. It's a song I first knew as a cover by My Bloody Valentine (which is a complete departure from their usual style) from the Peace Together charity album, and only later as a song from the soundtrack of the 1969 James Bond film On Her Majesty's Secret Service. The song is "We Have All The Time In The World", performed by Louis Armstrong:

Snow tired

It snowed again. This was supposed to be a murder-death-kill of a storm, but so far it's been pretty routine - a few inches of fluffy snow topped off with a layer of ice crystals, just enough to weigh it down. I used a shovel and a broom at my house across town, and a snowblower here.

Now I'm tired.

I wasn't going to run the snowblower until the morning, but I'm glad I did it now. Tomorrow afternoon I'm going to see RENT in Scranton with a friend, and I'll have to spend a bit of time in the morning converting the car into a two-seater!

The Magic of Everyday Life

Today I walked out a work and saw a parhelion to the left of the sun, its rainbow of colors vivid in my polarized sunglasses. Sadly, there was no one leaving at the same time for me to point it out to.

As I drove home the parhelia - two of them, both to the left and the right - became more pronounced; the left one appeared to be a vertical pillar of light, though I know it was really a visible section of a ring of light around the sun, formed by a fortunate alignment of ice crystals in the atmosphere. My mom was on the road at the same time, and while she was some 40 miles away, she was also driving West at the moment I called her. So I got to share this with her.

I drove home with the parhelia and the setting sun ahead of me the whole way. As I pulled into Nanticoke the spell was broken; the sun passed into a thicker layer of clouds near the horizon, and the parahelia faded away.

The world is full of what I call The Magic of Everyday Life. That was very nearly the name of this blog, and it may yet turn out to be the name of a secondhand junk, gardening supply, and magic trick/joke shop sometime in the future. Last night was a prime example, as the Moon passed through the shadow of the Earth. Something so rare, but so mundane. A chance arrangement of ice crystals produces parhelia that flank the setting sun; another arrangement forms a different light show entirely, while a trick of light and raindrops produces a rainbow.

Sunrises. Sunsets. Sun Pillars. Shadows. Spiders. Weeds. Things that lurk in flowers. Clouds in the moonlight. Dark suns that rise in the East at sunset. All amazing and perfectly mundane things, easily overlooked as we go about our everyday lives, more incredibly magical than any bit of prestidigitation. All part of a world that exists all around us.

Here's a video that means a lot to me, and a lot of other people of my generation. It's from the children's program Sesame Street - according to information on the posting on YouTube, it actually aired in the second week that Sesame Street was on the air, though many people associate it with the death of Mr. Hooper.

I don't know if the video has a title, though a lot of people call it "Sad Flower." The story of how this video came to be on YouTube is pretty amazing: the original clip was pulled, possibly by the content owners (though why they would do this is beyond me), possibly by some nervous and risk-averse soul at Google, so a user reposted it from an ancient videotape he had made years before. The sound was bad, so another YouTube user replaced the audio - the second movement of Vivaldi's Guitar Concerto in D-Major - with a better version. Other users identified the location in the background (Exit 28, Westbound, of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway) and even the exact setting (the rooftop of 21 Clark Street in Brooklyn.)

Many people seem to associate feelings of sadness with this video, even those who saw it long before the death of Mr. Hooper. (I was 14 when he died in 1982, and only watched Sesame Street ironically at that point.) But I know that whenever my brother and sister and I saw this on TV, we just thought it was beautiful - and we would turn it up to hear the music better. (The song haunted me for years, as described in this post, and I only just found out its name a year or so ago.) In fact, I never had the impression that the flower was crying, though if it is it might be because it is so isolated from the rest of nature, growing in a crack in a rooftop in Brooklyn. (Those familiar with what vegetation can and eventually will do to all human construction may interpret these as tears of triumphant joy.) But seeing the water dripping from the center of the daisy-like (or sunflower-like) flower, I think I have identified what type of flower it is.

Your assignment: go out and find something magical that you have overlooked, something that even might have been there all the while, but you haven't noticed before. Then share it with someone else. Maybe even post it on your blog!

Happy searching! Good luck, and enjoy the Magic of Everyday Life!

ECLIPSE ECLIPSE ECLIPSE!!!

Go out and see the TOTAL LUNAR ECLIPSE tonight!

...so you can tell me about it, 'cause I probably won't get to see it.

Drat. Those clouds look like they probably won't clear up before the end of totality. Looks like Ashley and Supertiff in the Great Catcher's Mitt State of Michigan may have a chance. Lauren in Connecticut and Melanie in Massachusetts look like they're in worse shape than me. (I'm just above the "r" in Scranton, 30 miles southwest of that great center of culture and academia.)

Still, hope springs eternal, and even with heavy cloud cover there's still a chance that you'll catch a glimpse of the eclipsed Moon through a break or a thinning in the clouds. Go out and have a peek -maybe you'll get lucky!

UPDATE, 8:44 PM (one minute into start of Penumbral phase): it's SNOWING! #$@%*&! And it doesn't look like the clouds have budged at all on the current radar!

UPDATE, 9:15 PM: At Anne's encouragement, I peeked outside - and the Moon was just emerging from thick clouds. Half of it is in shadow! 45 minutes to Totality!

UPDATE, 9:35 PM: Going...going... Even through cloud cover, I can still see it! The shadow of the Earth is showing a distinct reddish tinge in the upper part of the Moon. BONUS! To the lower left of the Moon is bright Saturn, and just above the Moon is Regulus in Leo! (Brave Regulus, a Death Eater who had the 'nads to stand up to Voldemort! Look upon his star and remember him!)

UPDATE, 10:43 PM: I SAW IT!!! The clouds broke up a few minutes before Totality, and I was able to squeeze off seven shots with my camera poised on the roof of my car. Here's the first one, with the Moon at its reddest. (Thin clouds darkened the Moon in subsequent images.) Note Saturn in the lower left, and Regulus above.A solid bank of clouds rolled in at the moment of Totality, and I figured I was done for the night. But the clouds broke up again at mid-Totality, and I was able to race out and get off two more shots before the next cloud rolled in.

Saturn, the Moon, and Regulus, 10:30 PM, 2/20/08

So I did get to see it! The last Total Lunar Eclipse visible anywhere until December of 2010! I hope you saw it, too!

Keep up-to-date with my personal weather situation with WNEP's Regional Doppler Radar with Satellite!