You Want To Hurt Me?

Snow in Malone

This is how to tackle a snowy Saturday.

Bleak House

"The one great principle of the English law is, to make business for itself. There is no other principle distinctly, certainly, and consistently maintained through all its narrow turnings." Charles Dickens, from Bleak House. Kathleen and I watched "Bleak House", a fifteen part serialization of Dicken's classic. In our house, we are Dickens Addicts and thank goodness that we are not alone. I think that Masterpiece Theatre and Hollywood have such reverence for Dickens that it is hard to think of a bad adaptation of any of his works. A lot of that has to do, of course, with the fact that there is no such thing as a bad Dickens' story. But Kathleen and I came upon a 2005 version, done for Masterpiece Theatre, of Bleak House. It was one of the best adaptations of any novel that I have ever seen. Here's a taste of it. Spoiler Alert: If you haven't read the book or seen the movie, this gives some important endings away.
The cast was just great. We watched it on Netflix.

No Ordinary Explosion

The filamenthad been seen hovering over the Sun's surface for over a week before it erupted earlier this month. The movie was by the Earth-orbiting Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) in one color of ultraviolet helium, and another color of X-ray light specifically emitted by iron. The explosion created Coronal Mass Ejections which dispersed high energy plasma into the Solar System. This plasma cloud, though, missed the Earth and so did not cause auroras. The above eruption and an unusually expansive eruption that occurred in August are showing how widely separated areas of the Sun can sometimes act in unison. Explosions like this will likely become more common over the next few years as our Sun moves toward Solar Maximum activity.

A Priest We All May Know At One Time Or Another

I like this guy. Nothing like tradition...

-Joe

“Life is like a piano... what you get out of it depends on how you play it.”

The Pope's brother Msgr. Georg Ratzinger — for thirty years choirmaster of Regensburg Cathedral — recently gave an interview to the Swiss Catholic press agency KIPA, in which he divulged that Benedict XVI's favourite musical pieces are the Clarinet Quintet and the Clarinet Concerto. Inside the Vatican reported that Benedict was playing Mozart on his piano on the Sunday afternoon following his installation as Pope, when he returned to his old apartment to see his brother. And papal biographer George Weigel said in Newsweek after Benedict's election that "here is another surprise for cartoonists of the dour Ratzinger: he's a Mozart man, which I take to be an infallible sign of someone who is, at heart, a joyful person."

But let's hear Pope Benedict himself on the subject. In the extended interview that was published ten years ago as Salt of the Earth we read: "You are a great lover of Mozart." " Yes! Although we moved around a very great deal in my childhood, the family basically always remained in the area between the Inn and the Salzach. And the largest and most important and best parts of my youth I spent in Traunstein, which very much reflects the influence of Salzburg. You might say that there Mozart thoroughly penetrated our souls, and his music still touches me very deeply, because it is so luminous and yet at the same time so deep. His music is by no means just entertainment; it contains the whole tragedy of human existence."

Quicksand

Forget about the monsters, giant bugs and ghosts. When I was a lad, the biggest and wierdest danger to any hero or hapless wanderer in the movies was QUICKSAND!



Quicksand offered filmmakers a simple recipe for excitement: A pool of water, thickened with oatmeal, sprinkled over the top with wine corks. It was, in its purest form: "My gosh, we're sinking! Will we escape this life-threatening situation before time runs out?" Those who weren't rescued simply vanished from the script: "It's too late—he's gone." The alternative was no less random: Surviving quicksand has always required more good fortune than skill. Is that a lasso over there? A tendril from a banyan tree, perhaps. It is brought to mind as the children and I saw the Socerer's Apprentice -- the newest and coolest version of quicksand and ther serendipitous escape.


Speaking of quicksand, Maureen is married.