Magazine Posts

My blade is sharp,
as is my tongue.
Are you the person?
Are you the one?
I've searched hard,
in this life of mine,
to find someone
who is considered kind.
For I miss the comfort,
I no longer have or need
for as my life wanes
with no prayers to feed.

Into the night of infamy,
depriving the citizens of liberty,
under the guise of "I know best",
he's trampled on the Constitution
and the laws of human kindness.
Not handling the Virus, I must confess,
the loss of life of 180,000, today
due to his negligence, won't go away.
I know it hurts and you do too,
for in November, please vote Blue.

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

In brush strokes of interstellar dust and glowing hydrogen gas, this beautiful skyscape is painted across the plane of our Milky Way Galaxy near the northern end of the Great Rift and the constellation Cygnus the Swan. Composed using 22 different images and over 180 hours of image data, the widefield mosaic spans an impressive 24 degrees across the sky. Alpha star of Cygnus, bright, hot, supergiant Deneb lies near top center. Crowded with stars and luminous gas clouds Cygnus is also home to the dark, obscuring Northern Coal Sack Nebula, extending from Deneb toward the center of the view. The reddish glow of star forming regions NGC 7000 and IC 5070, the North America Nebula and Pelican Nebulas, are just left of Deneb. The Veil Nebula is a standout below and left of center. A supernova remnant, the Veil is some 1,400 light years away, but many other nebulae and star clusters are identifiable throughout the cosmic scene. Of course, Deneb itself is also known to northern hemisphere skygazers for its place in two asterisms -- marking the top of the Northern Cross and a vertex of the Summer Triangle. Follow APOD on: Instagram, Facebook, Reddit, or Twitter

Photo by Alistair Symon

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

What would it look like to circle a black hole? If the black hole was surrounded by a swirling disk of glowing and accreting gas, then the great gravity of the black hole would deflect light emitted by the disk to make it look very unusual. The featured animated video gives a visualization. The video starts with you, the observer, looking toward the black hole from just above the plane of the accretion disk. Surrounding the central black hole is a thin circular image of the orbiting disk that marks the position of the photon sphere -- inside of which lies the black hole's event horizon. Toward the left, parts of the large main image of the disk appear brighter as they move toward you. As the video continues, you loop over the black hole, soon looking down from the top, then passing through the disk plane on the far side, then returning to your original vantage point. The accretion disk does some interesting image inversions -- but never appears flat. Visualizations such as this are particularly relevant today as black holes are being imaged in unprecedented detail by the Event Horizon Telescope.

There is a can.
There is a jar.
There is no time.
There is no car.
We will now leave
For we must bereave,
The loss of life of
A long time friend.
The word, an amend
For a life cut short,
One more time; again
As we honor him
For a life led.
I know this day,
lies in quiet dread,
The finality of life.
He died so alone,
Without a wife.

I sometimes wish, I had been born blond.
Wait; I was that color when I was young.
The hair I have, is now quite grey,
It could be white, some people say.
I love my hair but it is so fine,
It floats in my face, time after time.

Has this life made you a grump,
due to the rhetoric of one, Donald Trump?
I hate saying this about this clown,
for this coming election, he must go down.
If you continue support, like many do,
I hope all will vote for Blue.

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

How come the crescent Moon doesn't look like this? For one reason, because your eyes can't simultaneously discern bright and dark regions like this. Called earthshine or the da Vinci glow, the unlit part of a crescent Moon is visible but usually hard to see because it is much dimmer than the sunlit arc. In our digital age, however, the differences in brightness can be artificially reduced. The featured image is actually a digital composite of 15 short exposures of the bright crescent, and 14 longer exposures of the dim remainder. The origin of the da Vinci glow, as explained by Leonardo da Vinci about 510 years ago, is sunlight reflected first by the Earth to the Moon, and then back from the Moon to the Earth.

Photo by Miguel Claro

It will soon be the Fall season,
for testing the last bastion of reason.
Here is what we must do;
Get out the vote, please vote Blue.

A Mind can be a terrible thing
for the wildest thoughts it can bring.
Do you agree? Can you not see
when sometimes it gets the best of me?

After the Big War, WW II, my Father
purchased a trailer park on 140th,
in Riverton Heights and thus
My friends and I would ride our bikes,
to Angle Lake, where we could swim.
Going south on Highway Route 99
to swim, is a great memory of mine.
There wasn't a Sea-Tac Airport then,
so on our bikes, we would go,
to swim. A beautiful area I recall
with water cold and sand warm.
A lifeguard, kept all of us safe.
I loved this place. Those were the days.