Southern One

WISE telescope brings us the ‘Wreath Nebula’

gwfrink3 — Sat, 24 Dec 2011 16:44:01 +0000

Yes it looks like a wreath, but actually, it’s called Barnard 3 or IRAS Ring G159.6-18.5. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Wide Field Infrared Explorer staff explains: The green ring (evergreen) is made of tiny particles of warm dust whose composition is very similar to smog found here on Earth. The red cloud (bow) [...]

No, Virginia … (it’s wrong to lie to children)

gwfrink3 — Sat, 24 Dec 2011 14:55:21 +0000

There is more to regret than the “Reindeer Food” falsehood. Leading my sons George and Jack to believe in Santa Claus when their skepticism dawned and they asked, “Daddy, is there really a Santa Claus?” was wrong. As Greta Christina suggests in her rewrite of Francis Church’s answer to eight-year-old Virginia O’Hanlon, I owed them [...]

Reindeer feeding ritual revisited

gwfrink3 — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 02:10:03 +0000

I not only helped inflict the myth of Santa Claus on my sons George and Jack, I made feeding his eight tiny reindeer a Christmas Eve ritual. My Aunt Betsy Frink Adams gave us spiced “Reindeer Food” one Christmas (Or was it a gift from my first cousin, Betsy Holden?). The boys and I put [...]

Religious wars

gwfrink3 — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 14:17:21 +0000

Robert S. Becker’s agnostic view: Jesus’ birthday was strafed by a failed suicide bomber along with predictable fatalities in Afghanistan. Reading Sarah Vowell on our Puritan forefathers only confirmed our own beginnings, depicting how the first Europeans, as if freed from Old World decadence, embraced two menacing fantasies. The first asserted instant American exceptionalism and [...]

Rick Warren’s ‘magic number’

gwfrink3 — Sat, 12 Dec 2009 14:20:55 +0000

Religious Connections’ gently oblique approach to pastor Rick Warren’s tweeted attempt to create an evangelistic urban legend, demonstrates the falsehood of Warren’s every word. Without ever slapping the goateed Baptist across the face. So polite, don’t you think? First, Religious Connections refutes Warren’s fundamentally vacant claim that Christians were put to death for their faith [...]

Tea Party Confederate flag-waving

gwfrink3 — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 20:15:48 +0000

Tea Party Confederate flags aren’t emblems of small government and freedom. Historically, they’re the opposite. From John Majewski’s book Modernizing a Slave Economy: The Economic Vision of the Confederate Nation: Although southerners rebelled against growing centralization of the federal government, they had no qualms about establishing a strong national state of their own. Scholars have [...]

Exit laughing? O’Reilly pardons Huckabee

gwfrink3 — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 11:51:37 +0000

Don’t laugh, yet. Bill O’Reilly has had an epiphany and pardoned former Arkansas governor and fellow Fox commentator Mike Huckabee, absolving the Huckster of all blame regarding Maurice Clemmons. Clemmons, who was granted clemency from what amounted to a life sentence by then Arkansas Gov. Huckabee in 2000, was fatally shot by Seattle police while [...]

Happy holidays, unless you’re depressed

gwfrink3 — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 22:23:26 +0000

"Happy Thanksgiving," soon to be "Joy to the world,", unless you have the holiday blues — a sometimes debilitating and dangerous if commonplace disease. Holiday depression is so commonplace and so hard to recognize that the Mayo Clinic has a Web page devoted to it, and depression support Web sites have whole archives devoted to [...]

technorati

gwfrink3 — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 17:32:22 +0000

JN3PSAGFFJ29 Posted in Uncategorized

Lisa’s farewell

gwfrink3 — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 14:09:08 +0000

One need not believe in visions to have them.

I don't, and yet ever so rarely, I do.

This one was a red-blonde girl in her teens. She looked through my kitchen door as I drifted up from sleep on the living room couch. She was similing. Her smile was full of unaffected love and her expression was certain everything was and would be somehow alright for both of us.