I just got to say I love that word, disambiguating.
Anyway, here’s Old Sol today.
And here he is October 23, 20o5.
Planetary positioning today
Planetary positions October 23, 2005, with particular emphasis on Saturn, Uranus and Earth/Mars positions.
Please don’t in any way interprete this to mean I believe you’re interested, or that I’m offering any sort of theory, opinion, statement or hypothesis. I’m just posting some images of Old Sol’s face and the concurrent locations of celestial bodies relative to one another.
Good morning readers. I’m obliged you came by for a read. I wasn’t going to make another post for today, but I thought I’d better in case some of you haven’t been visiting spaceweather.com to keep current on news events.
As you can see, Old Sol has a few magnetic field issues he’s trying to work through. Astrophysicists and Mayan priests are trying their best to walk him through the tough spots and get him back on track.
You’ve also probably been having nagging questions about what else is going on in the solar system. Nothing to get excited about though. Uranus and Saturn are standing off opposite one another with their seasonal spin axis configurations and their ‘not fully understood’ offset magnetic fields whirling around firing something a bit strange at one another and Old Sol just found himself downrange. No big deal. It will pass.
If you’re like me, you’ve probably also been asking yourself what the Galilean moons are up to today. As you can see, Europa and Ganymede are somewhat lined up down-orbit, Io’s sort of off to the side and Callisto’s way-to-hell-and-gone back the other side of Jupiter.
Other than that, there’s not much going on. I hope this helps you through the day.
All that’s over there until the first post tomorrow is the single-post archive migrated from Facebook. But if you’d care to go for a look at the archive it might give you an insight into the general drift.
I’m posting this today in hopes of discovering whether anything needs changing, whether the navigation works, and to just give anyone interested a gander at it. If you click it and find there’s a problem of any sort I’d be obliged if you’d send her an email, post it here, or let us know by mental telepathy.
Seems the advantages of being out of sight and out of mind for most of the population aren’t necessarily advantages when the out-of-sight geography includes something a multi-national corporation wants. All those city folks needing to keep the air conditioners turned down to 70 and to be able to light up the hair dryers every morning probably never ask themselves where the electricity popped out of the ground and hopped into the wires they plug things into.
One more bug on the windshield of civilization. Old Jules
[The following letter was written by former Hopi Tribe chairman Benjamin H. Nuvamsa from Shungopavi. He presented the letter to the Hopi Tribal Council on Friday January 13, 2012]
January 13, 2012
Hopi Tribal Council
Hopi – Tewa Senom
It is time we have a serious discussion about coal mining on our reservation, our water rights and our environment. For far too long, we have pushed these issues aside, not willing to talk about how these issues impact our lives. We must talk about how the Peabody Western Coal Company and Navajo Generating Station are affecting our lives. Since the mid 1960’s, Peabody Coal has been mining our coal, pumping our precious Navajo Aquifer water and paying us pennies on the dollar in return. Navajo Generating Station is emitting dangerous and harmful particulates into the air we breathe. Our coal resources are being depleted. Our Navajo Aquifer has been damaged…
Good morning readers. Thanks for coming by for a read this morning.
Yesterday I got an email from someone called himself Rob, AKA ‘Nifty Chicken’ of the Backyard Chickens newsletter telling me I need to re-register.
“This is Rob, AKA “Nifty-Chicken” of www.BackYardChickens.com. I noticed that you’re registered for our newsletter, but can’t find you in our community membership. This quick note is to let you know of some important changes and to help you get re-registered so you can continue receiving the BYC Newsletters.”
Naturally, I’m deeply suspicious about this. Someone’s wanting me to become a part of their ‘we’ over there without me having done anything to deserve it, other than subscribing to their newsletter for several years.
Then I went over to the site instead of clicking the ‘register’ part of the email and the first thing I saw was:
Hi Peeps, Welcome to the new & upgraded version of the BackYardChickens.com website! There are a ton of exciting new features and areas of the site for you to explore. To help get started we suggest you… » read more
Can you imagine that? I go over there with more-or-less neutral intentions, other than a few suspicions about what manner of ‘we’ someone was demanding I include myself in, and the first crack out of the box he calls me a ‘Peep’? The guy thinks people joining his ‘we’ are peeps.
Whatever the hell a peep is. Strikes me this might be a group of ‘we’ folk who go around looking through windows trying to see naked women. Nothing whatever to do with chickens.
Or he’s an agent provacateur for Homeland Security trying to identify all the people who’d be gratified to belong to a ‘we’ that considered itself peeps.
I’ve donealready got plenty of ‘we’ stuff in my life. I ain’t including myself in any we bunch of peeping toms even if they’re peepers that like chickens. Heck, maybe it’s chickens they’re sneaking around spying on. Maybe they’re trying to find out where I am so they can come in here nights spying on the Great Speckled Bird and the hens do and talk about when I shut them up in the fortress nights.
Or more sinister yet, maybe they’re trying to see if I gather the eggs every day. Or whether they’re doing okay on the milo feeding I’ve been doing lately to save money. Or somebody over there read the post, Shame and a Confession About Inter-Species Sexand thinks because I have a perverted chicken I’d want to draw my circle of ‘we’ bigger and feel a part of some group of peepers.
I think it might well be one of those government traps like the one they did in Colorado a few years ago, sending in agents to open up a taxidermy shop, putting out the word they’d buy endangered species carcasses under the table. After a couple of years they’d bought and paid for hundreds of otherwise healthy endangered birds and animalcules and collected names dates and places of the folks killed them because there was suddenly a market.
Indicted half the community before it was over.
I ain’t joining no government plot to arrest my rooster. As far as I know he can’t even get out nights to do any peeping.
Good morning readers. Thanks for coming by this morning.
That’s not my High Roller because I still have to migrate my Dropbox folder over to the spanking new E Dell Machine, and I’m typing this on the old one. But I’m confident later today will find me pushing this guy aside, re-plugging my heavy lifter, and getting back to where I left off a few days ago.
Came a bull-goose mano daddy-longlegs thunderstorm here last night. Sounded as though things were falling on other things to create the illusion the underneath stuff was being crushed, but I just crawled out of bed, turned off the computers and listened to the roof holding up as well as could be expected.
There’s something thought-provoking listening to an attack by the sky on a metal roof, provided the roof doesn’t distract things by letting it pour through onto the bed. But I’ve shown you pics before of how I prevent that with sheets of black plastic stapled to the ceiling to move the water over to the downhill wall before releasing it.
So I did a lot of thinking about all manner of things while the night and the roof talked to one another about how frustrating that sheet of plastic makes things for them.
One realization I came to involves having to go back and adjust times in the past when things didn’t happen, which is going to be a lot of work. I’ve avoided allowing myself to consider that a need for this project because of the amount of labor intensive format manipulation required to get the data into something I can use. Now the stress of not relying on a dying machine is reduced and the heavy lifter’s going to be back lifting I’ll probably be getting things prepared for that today.
Which beats the dickens out of stomping around in mud. The other alternative.
The invader cat came in last night, was up on the porch chowing down on the cat food the regular army didn’t eat. At least it ran off without any exchange of greetings.
Several other matters are begging to be brought up and typed, but my coffee cup’s empty, the temperature’s dropping and I sense I’m going to have to put on another layer of clothing. Probably need to hunt down that pair of gloves with no fingers, too.
So thanks for reading, if you have, and maybe I’ll post something that makes more sense later if I’m feeling up to the task.
I’ve spent most of a lifetime avoiding virtue successfully without having to devote a lot of energy to doing it. But it’s gotten a lot more difficult.
For instance, I predominantly eat veggies along with some rice. If I feel the need for protein I throw in some eggs. Sounds harmless enough. I’ve got a rice steamer with a platform compartment in the top allows me to steam a mess of veggies and rice faster than I can tell it. I love it, and it’s easy to clean afterward without using any water. I run a 1.1 penny US baby-wipe wipe over it after I pour out the vittles and it’s ready to run another race.
But suddenly I’ve discovered not eating meat is at least a virtue, in some cases, a religion. Wedges me firmly between a rock and a hard place. I’ll eat a bit of meat sometimes when I can afford it, but honestly I feel better saving the money against the possibility of something coming up so’s I need money.
I’ve got a little sausage in the freezer I had Gale pick up for me last time he was in San Angelo, but in some sense it’s like the quarter-bottle of Y2K Jack Daniels Black Label sitting on the microwave drawing dust. It’s just too good to use, except on special occasions.
So, for the purposes of not being virtuous, the sausage doesn’t help much more than the Jack Daniels. I need to come up with some cheap, non-virtuous things I can do that don’t require burning any gas, borrowing a vehicle, or glutting myself more than I do when I cook up a nice Idaho potato, chop up some jalapeno, onion, half-stick of butter and smother it in yogurt or cottage cheese.
Lessee.
pride…. heck, I’m already up to my Adam’s apple with pride. Any more pride might be a hazard to my health.
covetousness Maybe that’s a possibility. Maybe I can think of something to want really badly. Nothing much comes to mind, but this is too important to reject out of hand.
envy … That would be pretty cool, finding someone to envy. But I can’t recall running across anyone I thought was enviable in so long I’m not sure I ever did.
lust … Nope. Donealready beentheredonethat with lust. I ain’t going there again.
anger …Took me 50-odd years to figure out I was an angry person, same as everyone claimed I was. Big job of work getting rid of it once I figured out I was. Anger needs to make a home in people who don’t know the tricks. I don’t think I could hold onto anger in a way it would find palatable.
gluttony . . . Gluttony might work. I’ve got 100 pounds of milo maize out there. Maybe boil some up, put some butter on it, maybe some pepper and onions. Curry. But I’d have to drop in some sausage to keep it from metamorphosing into something virtuous. Something to think about, anyway.
sloth … Sheeze! Sloth is absurd. It’s a red herring they hang out there pretending to offer up hope in case a person can’t avoid virtue some other way. But hells bells! When’s a person supposed to find any time for sloth when there’s only 24 hours in a day? Sloth is BS. Forget it.
That milo’s looking better and better. At least until I can think of some more respectable way to clear my conscience without bankrupting myself.
Good morning readers. I’m grateful you came by. Lots of important stuff bogging down my fingertips this morning and I doubt I’ll get it all in here. But the sooner begun, the sooner left unfinished, I reckons.
I’m not going to insult you by offering an explanation for this. Undoubtedly you know the explanation already.
Later this morning I’ve got an emergency meeting with the feline and poultry astrophysicists here to kick around whatever needs kicking around about it.
He took a cheap shot, not only at us, but at Mars. But that ain’t the half of it.
“INCREASING SOLAR ACTIVITY CLEANS UP SAT-DEBRIS: Earth’s atmosphere has been puffing up in response to increasing levels of UV radiation from sunspots. This is good news for satellite operators, because a puffed up atmosphere helps clean up low-Earth orbit. “The number of cataloged debris in Earth orbit actually decreased during 2011,” reports Nick Johnson in NASA’s Orbital Debris Quarterly newsletter. “[The figure below] illustrates how the rate of debris reentries from the Fengyun-1C anti-satellite test of January 2007 increased during the past year.” http://spaceweather.com/
So, we’ve got two issues here. First, Old Sol’s got the planet Earth [that’s US] all puffed up, which is to say, even though he might be too convoluted and subtle to come out in the open and say it, Earth has it figured out. If Earth’s puffed up about it, we can be assured we should be puffed up about it too.
Secondly, he’s screwing around with our space debris, shamelessly knocking it out of orbit. Which really has the people who put it up there in a ring-tailed tizzy. Humanity spent a lot of money and effort getting that stuff up there. Then, in one year, Old Sol takes it upon himself to knock-it-the-hell out of the sky.
This puts a serious burr under my saddle and it should put one under yours, as well. Just who the hell does he think he is, anyway? We’re not talking committee decision here. We’re talking unilateral usurpation of the Rights of Man to stick garbage in orbit and keep it the hell there as long as it suits our fancy.
But this has gotten longish. I’m going to have to get into the other fingertip pile stuff in another post. Maybe later today, maybe not.
Good morning readers. Thanks for coming by for a read.
WordPress is being a communist this morning. Or maybe the world came to an end last night sometime but it hasn’t gotten to me yet because I’m so far out in the country.
I was going to regale you this morning with some things I dug up online about building and retrofitting hydrogen generators to internal combustion engines yesterday but on the off chance the world ended last night, I won’t. The whole thing might be a moot issue. Talking Our Way Into Oblivion – Hydrogen and Hot Air
I’d also thought I’d share with you a couple of interesting things that appear to occur when the center of mass of a system of orbiting bodies changes, but if the world ended there’s no point getting into that, either. I suppose I’ll be obliged to break my iron discipline and focus to tell you about a couple of things happened here a while back.
A while back this dove flew in here and spent a few weeks sharing the chicken feed on the ground.
I’d never seen a white dove before. It’s forty miles to the nearest town of any size, fifteen miles to a village big enough to have a gas station/convenience store. So I didn’t figure it was a pet.
But when I approached it on the ground it didn’t fly. At first I thought it was injured or sick.
It had no fear at all. Nothing seemed to be wrong with it.
A week or two after these pictures were taken it began spending more time higher in the trees and less on the ground. Then it evidently just decided to move on to whatever was waiting for it somewhere else.
A free spirit. Sort of reminded me of the Rainbow folk I’ve shared campsites with in remote places and occasionally picked up as hitch hikers. Didn’t have much in common with the wild doves around here and nothing at all with birds somewhere else in houses with cages. Marching to her own drum, not letting anything get into the way of doing it. But not living in fear.
Which behooves me to tell you a bit about the Rainbow Family.
I first attended a Rainbow Gathering as part of a team of New Mexico Emergency Management Planning and Coordination [EMPAC] personnel assigned to be there with the National Guard during the Taos gathering of the early 1990s. I’d never heard of the Rainbow group prior to that, had no idea what to expect because neither did anyone else in New Mexico government.
What I observed was Woodstock without the music, a lot of folks who reminded me of my own younger times of long hair, protest, sex, drugs and rock and roll on the family side of things.
On the other side I saw National Guard troops loaded with live ammuntion and no clear instructions and rules of engagement being frequently hassled, treated with condescension alternately with re-enactments of some flower-chile ‘Come Join Us’ pleas from earlier times. ‘Family’ members running alongside government vehicles engaging in every form of engagement except disengagement.
And to complicate matters further, a civilian group of Taos Hispanics who wanted nothing so much as the gathering broken up and out of those mountains they considered their own.
I spent a harrowing week or two up there trying to keep my mind from falling into a state of spacial-time disorientation. When it was all over we drove back to Santa Fe wiping our brows in relief that nobody’d been shot, beaten to death by locals, no major incidents. My thoughts at the time were as far from ever wanting to see another Rainbow Family member as they could get and stay on the planet Earth.
I count myself lucky to have encountered many of Family members in other settings during the two decades afterward, picking them up hitch hiking, sharing remote campsites, discovering there’s a side to some part of the Rainbow Family membership I hadn’t noticed in the Taos experience.
Gypsy-like free-spirited, thoughtful and considerate people just doing their own thing, trying their best not to leave any bigger mark where they’ve been than they absolutely must. Good pleasant folks to spend some time with.
So long, I’d have to add, as a person stays clear of the party-animals and really cool people drawn to the mass gathering.
I mentioned the other day how Shiva the Cow Cat dropped the ball while we were praying up Old Sol. I’m not going to say with certainty Shiva’s responsible for this, but if she is, I’m going to give her a special scratch behind the ears as a reward.
“CORONAL HOLE: NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory is monitoring a dark gash in the sun’s atmosphere–a coronal hole. It’s the dark vertical feature in this extreme UV image taken on Jan. 13th:
“Coronal holes are places where the sun’s magnetic field opens up and allows the solar wind to escape. This yawning hole is about 120,000 km wide and more than a million km long. Solar wind flowing from its UV-dark abyss will reach Earth on Jan. 16th or 17th, possibly sparking auroras for high-latitude sky watchers.”
Mayan calendar enthusiasts, on the other hand, choose to ignore the coincidence of Shiva’s lapse and attribute the hole to the obvious sinister consequences of the rock calendar having runned spang out of numbers.
Meanwhile, astrophysicists, unaware of Shiva’s blink, speculate it’s the work of Proxima Centauri, a hot tempered red dwarf cholla who hangs out in the same honkytonks as Old Sol, and who has a long history with a switch-blade.
I’m leaning to Shiva doing it, but what the hell do I know?
74 years old, a resident of Leavenworth, KS, in an apartment located on the VA campus. Partnered with a black shorthaired cat named Mister Midnight. (1943-2020)
Since April, 2020, this blog is maintained by Jeanne Kasten (See "About" page for further information).
https://sofarfromheaven.com/2020/04/21/au-revoir-old-jules-jack-purcell/
I’m sharing it with you because there’s almost no likelihood you’ll believe it. This lunatic asylum I call my life has so many unexpected twists and turns I won’t even try to guess where it’s going. I’d suggest you try to find some laughs here. You won’t find wisdom. Good luck.
So Far From Heaven 