Weather: "Warmed up" to about 5 degrees Fahrenheit -- snowing styrofoam, and there's a visitor from Helena, Montana on the way! Normally, it takes 3 1/2 hours to get here from there -- good luck, Rick! (He arrived OK, after 4 1/2 hours.)

Wildlife: The hole in the ice didn't close in the sub-zero cold! Damn near, but not quite. I think I'll get a bag of sunflower seeds this afternoon. Lots of Flickers and Doves lately.

Charity Alert: The Rainforest Site: Help Save Our Rainforests!

Media Watch: I don't think I have mentioned this before now, but I'm a regular listener to National Public Radio. Their news programs accompany me back and forth to work, plus their music and specialty programs keep me informed and entertained in the intellectual wilderness of 21st Century Amerika.
On television, I watched the NASA panel speak about their "Spirit" Mars lander on CSPAN, and skipped over "Duh Guvernator's" lying, self-serving rant from California. Nice pictures from space -- I hope that the science they undertake is as good as their imagery -- go slow, guys. Science means investigation, after all.


Personal: The old debate about the "place of space" in our society goes on, including manned vs. unmanned exploration.
I know that I've directly benefitted from many spinoffs of space exploration during my working life, but I can't dispute that we continue to outpace our ethics with technologies that allow us to act before we think.
H.G. Wells pointed that out almost a hundred years ago.
If we wait for Ethics to "catch up" with Science, we'll have no Science at all.

Lately I regret that our society's public ethics and political structures are reverting into disfunctional, discredited modes of corrupt "Gilded Age" behavior, predating Wells' era, and worse.
The goal of the administration-in-power seems to be a country resembling a Christian Fundamentalist version of Saudi Arabia, governed according to a narrow lip-service-only ideology (maybe even a Merchantilist Soviet Union). Like the Soviets and the Saudis, they are thieves, and spokespersons for thieves.
Western Wahabbi's, like Pat Robertson, seem to be on a mission to make science illegal -- they certainly battle teaching it in the schools -- and barely tolerate it's existance at all, except for convenient technology, of course.

Back to work! I spared everybody a Monday rant'n'rave -- Happy New Year 2004!

Weather: Sub-Zero -- snow like styrofoam -- and still falling, or blowing around.

Wildlife: The suet feeders are depleting faster with the cold. I'm putting out more seeds and some cracked corn for the Doves, and other ground-feeding birds. Our little trio of deer poke around daily, and they're welcome to some of what's left.

Charity Alert: The Child Health Site : Help a Child in Need Lead a Healthy, Active Life

Media: Yeah, I'm enjoying the shape of the NFL playoffs -- the Green Bay Packers are one of the best injury-riddled teams I've ever seen, and they've earned their good luck. The better, even slightly-better, teams all won during Wildcard Weekend. Pregame Sillies -- The Mad TV impersonator has been very funny, Jillian Barberie's outfits have been good, but her comedy's been indifferent -- she should work at scoring at least ONE one-liner per show.
Got notes for my mini-project about influential books (see below), but I'm reading Lord Of The Rings now -- my wife bought me a copy because my Tolkien collection is in storage. We saw Return of the King together over the holidays, and she made an important point -- Peter Jackson turned it into a war movie with special effects as it's focus.
The best parts of the book are NOT the battle scenes. In my opinion, they tend to weaken the spell that Tolkien's fantasy world weaves over the reader, because the "bad guys" are too strong, and too many miracles are required for the "good guys" to prevail.
In the movies, I think the battle sequences are both interminable, and laughable, in the way they over-strain their credibility. From the start, those big, fast black riders should have caught those slow, stupid little guys very easily.
In the book, the riders had vague, but real, limitations on their powers that permitted Frodo and his companions to evade and escape them. As their enemies became more and more formidable, my "willing suspension of disbelief" suffered as well, so I favored the beginning chapters over the ending chapters.
HOWEVER there's passages of fantastic beauty throughout the book that bring me back again and again as a reader.
I'm putting it on my list of influential books for the 2nd half of the 20th Century -- it's popular success envigorated a whole sub-genre within the world of SF.