Magazine Posts

When you try to be clever,
like you often do,
the results can be fatal,
because of you.
Your failure to take action,
for months on an end.
Happened on your watch.
Is this too deep a subject
for you to put in your steeple?
Turn the action over now
to the Medical People,
now, before you "bunch up" your shorts.
Take action with a plan or just Abort.

Photo by Joan B

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

NGC 2359 is a helmet-shaped cosmic cloud with wing-like appendages popularly called Thor's Helmet. Heroically sized even for a Norse god, Thor's Helmet is about 30 light-years across. In fact, the helmet is more like an interstellar bubble, blown as a fast wind from the bright, massive star near the bubble's center inflates a region within the surrounding molecular cloud. Known as a Wolf-Rayet star, the central star is an extremely hot giant thought to be in a brief, pre-supernova stage of evolution. NGC 2359 is located about 15,000 light-years away in the constellation of the Great Overdog. The remarkably sharp image is a mixed cocktail of data from broadband and narrowband filters using three different telescopes. It captures natural looking stars and the details of the nebula's filamentary structures. The predominant bluish hue is strong emission from doubly ionized oxygen atoms in the glowing gas.

Photo by Martin Pugh

FALLS CITY, ORE. — A few hundred feet past this Oregon timber town, a curtain of Douglas fir trees opens to an expanse of skinny stumps.
The hillside has been clear-cut, with thousands of trees leveled at once. Around the bend is another clear-cut nearly twice its size, then another, patches of desert brown carved into the forest for miles.

Logging is booming around Falls City, a town of about 1,000 residents in the Oregon Coast Range. More trees are cut in the county today than decades ago when a sawmill hummed on Main Street and timber workers and their families filled the now-closed cafes, grocery stores and shops selling home appliances, sporting goods and feed for livestock..........Read more

When I loved myself enough

I quit settling for too little.
I came to know my own goodness.
I began taking the gift of life seriously and gratefully.
I began to know I was in the right place at the right time and I could relax.
I felt compelled to slow down way down. And that has made all the difference.
I came to love being alone, surrounded by silence awed by its spell, listening to inner space.................

Poster's Note: These are selected Stanzas from Kim McMillen's book "When I Loved Myself Enough”  -  Published posthumously in English by her daughter Alison McMillen. The beautiful short writing underwent a couple of language translations by others and much of her writing has over time been copied, changed, and miss-attributed to Charlie Chaplin on the Internet. In addition to the Numerous websites have reproduced this poem in full, attributing it to Chaplin, parts of her poem have also been used to create share-worthy memes featuring the famous actor’s image. Her book is still available in print and electronic form.

Off in the distance,
another loud roar.
I have heard this sound
many times before.
The noise keeps building,
approaching the door.
The clap of Thunder rattles
the window pane.
A darkening day now;
here comes the rain.

I was a police officer for nearly ten years and I was a bastard. We all were.

This essay has been kicking around in my head for years now and I’ve never felt confident enough to write it. Read more

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

Big, beautiful, barred spiral galaxy NGC 1300 lies some 70 million light-years away on the banks of the constellation Eridanus. This Hubble Space Telescope composite view of the gorgeous island universe is one of the largest Hubble images ever made of a complete galaxy. NGC 1300 spans over 100,000 light-years and the Hubble image reveals striking details of the galaxy's dominant central bar and majestic spiral arms. In fact, on close inspection the nucleus of this classic barred spiral itself shows a remarkable region of spiral structure about 3,000 light-years across. Like other spiral galaxies, including our own Milky Way, NGC 1300 is thought to have a supermassive central black hole.

I'm not afraid and yet,
I fear for all children
and what we have beget.

What kind of World, will this be,
if all citizens are not free?
Where must they go
to be treated with equality?

When the music stops
but the dance goes on,
the life we know is over
and our friends are gone.

When the music stops,
in this World so grim,
it will be the time
to think of him.

Where is the music?
Where is the show?
Where are the places,
We once did go?
Where are the sports,
We so adore?
They aren't here;
Not anymore.
Where are the friends,
We all knew?
What can we do
To start anew?