Magazine Posts

Enfrijoladas has roots in Oaxaca, though it’s popular throughout Mexico. It is made with corn tortillas and bean sauce and it is a quick and healthy dinner. Click to read Katie Morford's article.

They knew the neighborhood would revolt. It was early May, and officials in this Northern California city known for its farm-to-table dining culture and pumped-up housing prices were frantically debating how to keep covid-19 from infiltrating the homeless camps proliferating in the region’s celebrated parks and trails. The number of people living homeless in Santa Rosa and the verdant hills and valleys of broader Sonoma County had surged, exacerbated by three punishing wildfire seasons that destroyed thousands of homes in four years....... Read more

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

The multicolor, stereo imaging Mastcam-Z on the Perseverance rover zoomed in to captured this 3D close-up (get out your red/blue glasses) of the Mars Ingenuity helicopter on mission sol 45, April 5. That's only a few sols before the technology demonstrating Ingenuity will attempt to fly in the thin martian atmosphere, making the first powered flight on another planet. The historic test flight is planned for no earlier than Sunday, April 11. Casting its shadow on the martian surface, Ingenuity is standing alone on four landing legs next to the rover's wheel tracks. The experimental helicopter's solar panel, charging batteries that keep it warm through the cold martian nights and power its flight, sits above its two 1.2 meter (4 foot) long counter-rotating blades.

Last night you talked to me.
Your words got in the way.
You kept calling me Joe,
and then you said Scott,
then back to saying Joe.
I know I shouldn't have,
but it is what I did;
I asked you for my name
and you said, "It's Joe."
It isn't my name,
and I told you so
but you continued
to call me Joe.

From the cold waters of Lake Lenore,
come the voices from a bird haven.
Dark as night, not a Crow but a Raven.
A bird who will blot the Sun from the door,
saying over and over again, "Nevermore."
What sayeth now? I asked of him.
He wouldn't say but he looked grim.
"I have no words, to say to you,
for I know you always abhor,
a bird who talks, saying, Nevermore.?"

I don't give a dime
for your thoughts today
or any amount of money
to hear you say.
"I don't want any money,
just your input,
but at the end of your request,
you ask for more money.
Every request I hear
is stated as if its the
end of the World.
You need to understand,
the old fable of
"The Boy Who Called Wolf."
Too many urgent requests
loses the intensity of
being truly an emergency.

Sunlight drifting, near and far,
touching grass, across the yard.
Why does the Sun I see
bring forth a serenity?

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

Found in far southern skies, deep within the boundaries of the constellation Dorado, NGC 1947 is some 40 million light-years away. In silhouette against starlight, obscuring lanes of cosmic dust thread across the peculiar galaxy's bright central regions. Unlike the rotation of stars, gas, and dust tracing the arms of spiral galaxies, the motions of dust and gas don't follow the motions of stars in NGC 1947 though. Their more complicated disconnected motion suggest this galaxy's visible threads of dust and gas may have come from a donor galaxy, accreted by NGC 1947 during the last 3 billion years or so of the peculiar galaxy's evolution. With spiky foreground Milky Way stars and even more distant background galaxies scattered through the frame, this sharp Hubble image spans about 25,000 light-years near the center of NGC 1947.

When our first sunny day,
slowly fades to night.
We'll see all the birds
leave, as they take flight.
The Sun slowly slides
down the edge of the sky
with a beautiful sunset
and I ask, "Why?"

I love the noise
of waves, a crash.
The smell of air,
with a salty taste;
The feel of cold
sand beneath my feet;
The cries of Seagulls,
in aerial flight,
as Sunlight brings
the shore alive.

I'm alone in the dark,
years before cell phones.
A small flashlight,
it's called a "pen",
for it resembles,
the instrument
of its name.
Not much light
but I can still see,
the small patch
of ground, near my feet.
Not much help,
not to me,
but anything will do,
at a quarter to three.

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

Is this just a lonely tree on an empty hill? To start, perhaps, but look beyond. There, a busy universe may wait to be discovered. First, physically, to the left of the tree, is the planet Mars. The red planet, which is the new home to NASA's Perseverance rover, remains visible this month at sunset above the western horizon. To the tree's right is the Pleiades, a bright cluster of stars dominated by several bright blue stars. The featured picture is a composite of several separate foreground and background images taken within a few hours of each other, early last month, from the same location on Vinegar Hill in Milford, Nova Scotia, Canada. At that time, Mars was passing slowly, night after night, nearly in front of the distant Seven Sisters star cluster. The next time Mars will pass angularly as close to the Pleiades as it did in March will be in 2038.

Photo by Kristine Richer