A photo of the oldest recorded supernova

For something a little more romantic for Valentine’s Day, a panorama of the U.S. East Coast. I can almost hear Louis Armstrong singing now.

Today we had our biennial (I think that’s the right word. Once every two years. For some reason I find it impossible to get biennial and semiannual straight) CPR and AED training at work. You probably all know what CPR is. An AED is the defibrillating machine various institutions (including ours) keep available in case of emergency.

I was deeply embarrassed to realize I had only a vague recollection of the previous training. If somebody had dropped in front of me with a heart attack yesterday, I’d have been useless. Now I’m up to speed again (sort of) and the instructor told me where to look on YouTube for a refresher video.

Old dog. New tricks. It’s a challenge.

The term “light bill” came to my mind today. Do you young folks know what a light bill is?

When I was a kid, my dad used to talk about paying the light bill. He meant the electric bill. Because back when rural electification came in, in the wake of World War II, that’s what everybody called it. There was one main purpose for getting your house hooked up to the grid, and that was to run electric lights. No more oil lamps (I don’t think they used gas in the country. That was a city luxury) with their smudge and bother and fire risk. Suddenly you could bid the fair day linger a while indoors, and read into the night.

Even then they did other things with electricity, of course. I believe they had a radio before they got electric power, but now they could feed it off an outlet, rather than buying batteries. I’m not sure what else they would have run off electricity in the early days. Ice boxes kept food cold, and clothes washing was still done by hand, at least at first. Dr. Heppelmeyer’s Patent Miracle Nerve Panacea and Hair Growth Stimulator might have warranted a plug-in, at least until it turned the cat’s hair white.

My great-grandfather, whose farm was across the road from ours, was one of the first farmers in the area to have electric light (he was a strict pietist, but loved technology and innovation. This was not uncommon), but he ran his off a battery of batteries, kept up in the attic. When I showed the Norwegian relatives that house at Christmas, one of them asked how they recharged the batteries, and I hadn’t the faintest idea. Perhaps they had to refresh the acid periodically, or scrape off the lead plates. Probably it was something else.

Charles-Antoine Perrault shows us photos from another side of Paris, one Gene Kelly never danced in. “In the end, these projects are yet another utopian attempt by modern architects to find solutions to economic and social issues through design. Focusing exclusively on form, they failed to create a sense of place, producing environments that are all but vibrant.”

Photo by Faucon

Honestly, I never meant to kill them all.

I’m talking about fish, of course.

If you’re new to this blog, you may not know that I occasionally report on my fish keeping adventures. I don’t own fish myself. But for reasons I won’t bore you with, the library I manage has a fish tank, and I care for it.

There are challenges. For one thing, the local water is highly alkaline, resistant to any pH altering treatment, so a lot of fish just don’t like it, and express their disapproval through dying.

But over the years I’ve found a couple of species that do well. One is the Harlequin Rasbora, and the other, discovered more recently, has been the Tiger Barb. Both varieties seemed to do fine with the water (does their orange coloring have anything to do with it? Probably not), and I do my part by keeping the aquarium clean and the fish food coming.

But on Tuesday morning I goofed up. One of the frustrations of keeping fish is measuring out fish food. The containers come with little sliding apertures, and you open them as far as you consider prudent, then pour. Sometimes you get a lot less than you expected, and you have to shake the container. Sometimes you get a lot more than you intended.

That was what happened Tuesday. I immediately grabbed the net and and tried to fish the food out. But apparently I didn’t get enough.

Because the Tiger Barbs did what Tiger Barbs do (apparently the Rasboras are more prudent), and ate themselves to death. At the end of the day, I’d already flushed one Barb, and another was looking peaked.

This morning every single Tiger Barb was belly up. Every single one. Leaving the Rasboras (all of them) and the one other fish that was there when I came, which I’ve never actually identified, to survive.

I’ll get some more Tiger Barbs. They seem to do pretty well, when I’m on my game.

I’m just working on what level of shame and guilt I should feel.

I mean, I sometimes went fishing when I was a kid, and killed fish on purpose.

Anthony Esolen has written one of the best articles I’ve read in a long time about culture in general, and art in particular, for Crisis Magazine. What Makes Norman Rockwell Possible?

And that sense of wonder, especially at what is but small or homely or unregarded, is everywhere to be found in Rockwell’s paintings. For the Christian world, properly understood, is the only real haven for man, because in it we learn not only that man is made in the image of God, but that God so loved the world that He gave us His only begotten Son, born of a virgin and laid in a manger. Every man we meet bears within himself the mysteries of Christmas, and Good Friday, and Easter, whether he is aware of it or not, and we find these mysteries most clearly manifest in the meek and the lowly.

On some level I believe that Norman Rockwell understood this. Some critics try to shore up his reputation by pointing to the “serious” political paintings he executed: the small black girl escorted to school in the midst of National Guardsmen, or the man standing up in a town meeting to exercise his freedom of speech. I don’t wish to deny the success of those works. I think they are very good. But Rockwell’s heart lay elsewhere.

Today is the day Wikipedia blacked itself out to protest the SOPA legislation. I am not taking a strong line on the subject, but I believe those who say it’s a bad law, destructive of freedom (most of them seem to be, these days). On the other hand, I’m a copyright holder myself, and favor intellectual property rights in general. As I believe many people protesting SOPA are.

Somebody on Facebook linked to a Twitter discussion where people were panicking–“THEY SHUT WIKIPEDIA DOWN? HOW WILL WE LIVE?” “HOW CAN THE GOVERNMENT DO THAT?”

I suppose these people’s problem is that Wikipedia is their only source of information about the world, and they couldn’t check the news on Wikipedia.

Because apparently it can’t do anything else well. Today, Wikipedia and other sites and web personalities are closing their windows for a while in protest of The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA), misguided efforts by our congressmen to hod taxpayers over a barrel. I’m sorry. That’s what they are doing with federal spending and raising the U.S. debt ceiling. What they are going here is an effort to stop the scams and piracy we all enjoy online. Just the other day, I laughed myself into a seizure because my folks sent their savings to a Nigerian who needed to get out of a hotel bill he mistakenly run up while a working on his uncle’s million-dollar estate. Now, they’ll be living with us. Too funny.

Congress has some bills up to deal with this touchy bit of humor, but Paul Rosenzweig of The Heritage Foundation says that while they are asking the right questions, their answers “would make the Internet generally less secure for everyone.” As he describes the proposed legislation, Congress would be censoring select parts of the Internet and undermine any future freedom of speech arguments which could arise while making real Internet security efforts more difficult to implement.

Confessional in Sint-Pauluskerk,Antwerp

I wrote the other night of my current state of heightened diplomatic tensions with Time. That state persisted yesterday and today, in the form of a titanic struggle with instruments of time measurement.

Or to put it in layman’s terms (I am, after all, a layman), I had to buy a new alarm clock.

For the last few years I’ve had an alarm clock that pleased me more than any I’ve ever owned. I got it in a special offer from my credit card company. It received a radio signal from the atomic clock in Colorado to keep the time accurate and, as a special bonus, it projected the time on the ceiling in red light (I’ve always loved projection clocks, but have only had a use for them since I got Lasik surgery). But lately that clock has been doing funny things, and I decided to get a new one. I thought finding another atomic/projection clock at Target was probably too much to ask, and of course I was right. I did buy a clock which seemed to suggest it was radio controlled (it wasn’t) and I tried it out last night.

I’d failed to note that it actually had a special feature—a built in Fresnel light, which threw a stark blue blaze over the whole room, inclining me to dreams of being a cornered fugitive, spotlights from cop cars blazing in all the windows, and a voice on a bullhorn yelling, “Come out with your hands up, Baby Face! Nobody has to get hurt!” Continue reading Time travail →

Localized Australian black-tip sharks have mated with the broad-range common black-tip sharks, and a scientific researcher says, “This is evolution in action.” Really? When the neighborhood dogs do the same thing, is that evolution in action too?

Far more compelling to evolution deniers like myself would be dolphins using tools, like sponges for example.

Eric Metaxas asks, “Does anyone in the media read the Bible anymore?” He was shocked to read The New York Times attribute “Be not inhospitable to strangers, lest they be angels in disguise,” to the poet Yeats.