Edgar Allen Poe

"I do believe God gave me a spark of genius, but He quenched it in misery."

-- Edgar Allen Poe

brush pick-up

For much of the year, when it comes to the fallen branches in the back yard, I enjoy the luxury of just flinging them onto a pile, but now it is time for our brush pick-up, and now I have to put in the work of moving all those branches to the front. After my walk, I took care of that instead of doing my few repetitions of sit-ups and push-ups.

Obama Wins Four More Years (303 - 206)

NEW YORK -- President Barack Obama did not just win reelection tonight. His victory signaled the irreversible triumph of a new, 21st-century America: multiracial, multi-ethnic, global in outlook and moving beyond centuries of racial, sexual, marital and religious tradition.

[...]

The Republican Party, by contrast, has been reduced to a rump parliament of Caucasian traditionalism: white, married, church-going -- to oversimplify only slightly. "It's a catastrophe," said GOP strategist Steve Schmidt. "This is, this will have to be, the last time that the Republican Party tries to win this way."

-- Howard Fineman

I went to bed early last night. What happened?

The quote above is obviously the buoyant take on events, but let's ride on that high. I am afraid, though, that the Republicans are not going to take Steve Schmidt's lesson from their debacle, but will only rail against the supposedly liberal media all the harder, as well as fulminate against the bottom 47%. I believe they have seen the light, and it is a strange admixture of Jesus and Ayn Rand and white supremacy, and they probably were not converted by the trauma of losing so big even as they thought they had won it, with some, including even-temepered George Will, believing that Romney was going to win in a landslide.

I feel good about Obama's victory, but I do not expect the future to be easier going than the past has been. I am pretty sure that we are still a country divided, and that the right-wing Red Staters are only more angry and disturbed. I hope they upgrade Obama's security.

Pics

( Read more... )

Hitchcock's "Psycho"

Janet Leigh and Alfred Hitchcock on the set of ‘Psycho’, 1960.

Psycho is a 1960 American suspense/horror film directed by Alfred Hitchcock and starring Anthony Perkins, Vera Miles, John Gavin, and Janet Leigh. The screenplay by Joseph Stefano is based on the 1959 novel of the same name by Robert Bloch. The novel was loosely inspired by the crimes of Wisconsin murderer and grave robber Ed Gein, who lived just 40 miles from Bloch. [...] Both Gein and Psycho's protagonist, Norman Bates, were solitary murderers in isolated rural locations. Both had deceased domineering mothers, and had sealed off one room of their house as a shrine to their mother, and both dressed in women's clothing. However, there are many differences between Bates and Ed Gein. Among others, Gein would not be strictly considered a serial killer, having officially killed only two people.

-- Wikipedia

The Aging Universe

Most of the stars that will ever exist have already been born, according to the most comprehensive survey of the age of the night sky.

An international team of astronomers used three telescopes — the UK Infrared Telescope and the Subaru Telescope, both in Hawaii, and Chile’s Very Large Telescope — to study trends in star formation, from the earliest days of the universe. Extrapolating their findings has revealed that half of all the stars that have ever existed were created between 9 and 11 billion years ago, with the other half created in the years since. That means that rate at which new stars are born has dropped off massively, to the extent that (if this trend continues) 95 percent of all the stars that this universe will ever see have already been born.

[...]

Unfortunately, then, it looks like our universe is running out of steam — in only a few more billion years, the study predicts, we may well be seeing the very last star that will ever be born. That’s if humans manage to survive that long, of course.

-- Ian Steadman, Wired UK

Don't fret, don't cry! We still have time to frolic and make love and go mad a thousand times and more, as much as our hearts can stand.

Bond, James Bond

As I was cleaning up after dinner last night, I saw a commercial for "Skyfall", and I knew that I was going to have to give up on Neil Gaiman's "American Gods" and go for Fleming's "Casino Royale". As much as I have been intrigued by the James Bond character in the movies, it is about time that I read the original novels, you know, while I still have all of my teeth and much of my vision.

( Some Extra Bond Goodness )