Magazine Posts

Of this I am certain,
from this I know,
if you don't step forward,
you've nowhere to go.

In the beginning,
take one step at a time.
Have some cheese and crackers
and a bottle of wine.

Alone,
she sits.
No one at the table.
How must this feel?

She doesn't know
or understand
and yet, when
I go to leave,

I see sadness,
but the words
won't come
to her.

Does she understand,
but can't explain?
I don't know,
but what if

she does know?
Is that
a tenable issue?

Upward, the wind burst,
into the sky.
Upward the kite flew,
on winds up high.

It did rain,
plants wet with dew.
Thinking of memories,
about me and you.

Fill the pot slowly,
before I can't
have the strength.
Should I now rant?

Rant about things,
out of our control.
A wasting of life,
oh, what a toll.

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

Sometimes lightning occurs out near space. One such lightning type is red sprite lightning, which has only been photographed and studied on Earth over the past 25 years. The origins of all types of lightning remain topics for research, and scientists are still trying to figure out why red sprite lightning occurs at all. Research has shown that following a powerful positive cloud-to-ground lightning strike, red sprites may start as 100-meter balls of ionized air that shoot down from about 80-km high at 10 percent the speed of light. They are quickly followed by a group of upward streaking ionized balls. Featured here is an extraordinarily high-resolution image of a group of red sprites. This image is a single frame lasting only 1/25th of a second from a video taken above Castelnaud Castle in Dordogne, France, about three weeks ago. The sprites quickly vanished -- no sprites were visible even on the very next video frame.

Photo by Nicolas Escurat

André Paul Guillaume Gide (1869 - 1951)  French author known for his fiction as well as his autobiographical works. He authored more than fifty books and he was the winner of the 1947 Nobel Prize in Literature. Gide was brought up in isolated conditions in Normandy and became a prolific writer at an early age. He published his first novel, "The Notebooks of André Walter" (French: Les Cahiers d'André Walter) at the age of twenty-one.

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

A good place to see a ring-of-fire eclipse, it seemed, would be from a desert. In a desert, there should be relatively few obscuring clouds and trees. Therefore late December of 2019, a group of photographers traveled to the United Arab Emirates and Rub al-Khali, the largest continuous sand desert in world, to capture clear images of an unusual eclipse that would be passing over. A ring-of-fire eclipse is an annular eclipse that occurs when the Moon is far enough away on its elliptical orbit around the Earth so that it appears too small, angularly, to cover the entire Sun. At the maximum of an annular eclipse, the edges of the Sun can be seen all around the edges of the Moon, so that the Moon appears to be a dark spot that covers most -- but not all -- of the Sun. This particular eclipse, they knew, would peak soon after sunrise. After seeking out such a dry and barren place, it turned out that some of the most interesting eclipse images actually included a tree in the foreground, because, in addition to the sand dunes, the tree gave the surreal background a contrasting sense of normalcy, scale, and texture. On Saturday, October 14, a new ring of fire will be visible through clear skies from a thin swath crossing both North and South America.

Photo by Maxime Daviron

October unfolds with moments of conquest, reform, catastrophe, and renewal. Alexander the Great secured victory at Gaugamela. William the Conqueror triumphed at Hastings. Martin Luther’s Ninety-five Theses sparked the Protestant Reformation. Revolutions ignited, from the women’s march on Versailles to political transformations that reshaped Europe.

The month has also witnessed profound tragedy. A devastating earthquake and tsunami leveled Lima and Callao. The Haiphong cyclone claimed hundreds of thousands of lives. Yet October carries symbols of renewal as well—the dedication of the Statue of Liberty, the founding of the United Nations, and Nelson Mandela and F.W. de Klerk sharing the Nobel Peace Prize.

Across eras, October reflects both upheaval and resilience—moments when history pivots and new chapters begin.

Explore the full collection of Today in History events that occurred in October, or navigate directly to a specific day—from October 1 through October 31—to see what happened on this day in history.

Use the timeline to uncover the defining events that give October its enduring place in world history.

When did lying
become an acceptable
practice? When is someone,
responsible for what they say?

What sayeth you
to the one in charge?
asking questions from above,
either small or large.

Do you think I'm a fool,
without a clue?
What do you say?
What about you.