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12-Baph

Meteorological

How much energy could be harvested from this string of lightning strikes?

On March 27th, 2021, a series of severe thunderstorms crossed middle Tennessee, causing widespread flooding and putting on an impressive lightning show.

While most of the lightning stayed up in the clouds, the occasional bolt went to ground, and “cloud crawlers” put on a spectacular display every so often, too.

Which famous son* of a famous father preferred to spend the night of his old man’s celebrations brawling in a bar five hundred yards from the party, rather than hobnobbing with his family?

Our spies tell us a punch was thrown, and his faithful assistant was unable to Hold It Back. A father-son competition for publicity? Dad definitely won this round.

*As Hold It Back was the name of one of Jonny Rokeby‘s albums, nobody could really be in much doubt which father and son were in question.

Troubled Blood by Robert Galbraith

From cover of THOMAS MANN – DOCTOR FAUSTUS
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11-Pulp

Oceanography

Out of the Deeps by John Wyndham
(1st published 1953 England as The Kraken Wakes)

In this novel forty-one million Englishmen die, but it is only suggested through the hardships of one couple.”

Richard H. Tyre – emphasising that effective writing involves understatement.

Men will gain infinitely more knowledge, insight, and eventually more products, from mastering the depths of the sea than from spending billions more trying to achieve conquest of sterile space.”

Jacques Yves Cousteau [all wet]

Haunting the seas from Norway through Iceland and all the way to Greenland, the Kraken would attack vessels with its strong arms, and having a taste for human flesh would devour the ship’s entire crew at once.

Release The Kraken!

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05-Ount

Witchcraft

Coastland & Curtner by Joe

Halloween Will Be Here Soon

EDGAR 

Come on, sir. Here’s the place. Stand still. 

How fearful and dizzy ’tis to cast one’s eyes so low!

The crows and choughs that wing the midway air show scarce so gross as beetles.

GLOUCESTER 

Set me where you stand.

King Lear (Act 4, scene 6, by Shakespeare)
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03-Cast

What does it mean?

Found this diagram in some library book.

Re: “termite castle” culture – Swarms of termites build castle-like structures without supervision or a centralized plan. Working independently without communication or a leader, they proceed using environmental cues.

Map -16.47, 144.89

Back in 2012, as we drove south on the Mulligan Hwy in Australia and got down on the valley floor, we must have passed thousands of little termite castles.

Unfortunately, my environmental cues were not strong enough to make me stop the car and take a picture of any of those many interesting insect homes. Not one closeup photo; sad.

Mulligan Highway
Everlasting Impressions of Australia
16 photos · 11 views

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01-Hoof

Winding

Then came the Autumne all in yellow clad …

Russian Ridge Trail (No Sign of Putin)

Then came October full of merry glee …

The Faerie Queene (1590) by Edmund Spenser

Suffer no exceptions to the program, and maintain momentum. It’s critical to know what motivates, how to push that extra mile.

Stick to a regimen. To stay engaged, new challenges are needed. Repetition or comfort means it’s time to find a new target for one’s energy.

Garry Kasparov
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30-Loat

Perspective

This art was also found in K’s backyard. (Who is the artist?)

Cross your eyes to overlap images and see 3-D.

Humanhood stands somewhat aghast before #soul; stands awe-inspired in fear and reverence, while it communicates with #conscience as being very near. It understands conscience who is soul’s agent or moral representative.

The Word by Beardsley

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29-Spin

Circularity

Dial from Vintage Radio Police Scanner (found in K’s backyard)
Work of Art by M

Not darkness, for that implies an understanding of light. Not silence, for that suggests a familiarity with sound. Not loneliness, for that requires knowledge of others. But still, faintly, so tenuous that if it were any less it wouldn’t exist at all: awareness.

WWW:WAKE by Robert Sawyer
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28-Punt

Percolation

Community Center, Campbell
Half-mile South – Along the Los Gatos Creek Trail

Walk a fine line between flexibility & consistency. A strategist must have faith in his strategy and the courage to follow it through and still be open-minded enough to realize when a change of course is required.

Garry Kasparov
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25-Lift

Gathering

Hoist it to Our Host
Simon Said What?

Live on, survive, for the earth gives forth wonders. It may swallow your heart, but the wonders keep on coming. You stand before them bareheaded, shriven. What is expected of you is attention.

Salman Rushdie
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24-Tune

Astronomy

(Thanks Barb!)

On this night in 1846,following the marvellous calculations of Le Verrier of Paris and Adams of Cambridge concerning the celestial phenomenon known as the perturbations of Uranus, Herr Gaulle of Berlin discovered the existence of a new planet, one of the greatest triumps of theoretical astronomy. The planet was named Neptune

Book of Days by Elizabeth & Gerald Donaldson
Front Cover of Book of Days
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23-Nuts

Seasonal

September Paw Paw, the largest edible fruit indigenous to the United States.
and Bolts

Spend some time in your mind. Sit down, close eyes, palms upward on knees. What an empty cavern! Fill it with the realization that without your mind, you would be just another sack of shit. Then think of something else.

2 + 2 = 5 always gets me

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21-Gamp

Conversation

Heartbeat Cafe – Cambrian Park

Affirmation mode requires saying something positive, whereas an affirmation format produces a positive affirmation no matter what you put in the blanks.

Fill in the blanks with a negative expression:

I love everything about ______________________.

e.g., I love everything about “waiting for answers”.

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17-Post

Reconnoiter

Along the Guadalupe River
Mural at Campbell Community Center by M. Luna & Alber De Matteis

Time of great explorers has passed but there are still precious territories to discover. We can explore the boundaries of our own lives. But before we go exploring we’ll need a map telling which areas of mind are still uncharted.

Garry Kasparov
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16-Land

Routine

Not A Park
37.28,-121.88

Banana Public

Explorers:

  • Plan the route
  • Marshal resources, discarding any excess
  • Maintain a sharp tactical eye, never back away unless certain
  • Remain alert for dangers, aware of changes in environment
  • Energize with new confidence and inspiration
How Life Imitates Chess by Garry Kasparov
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15-Leap

Exploration

Apollo Space Capsule

Jojo was a man
who thought he was a loner
But he knew it couldn’t last.
Jojo left his home in Tucson, Arizona
For some California grass.

Get back, get back,
Get back to where you once belonged.
Get back, get back,
Get back to where you once belonged.
Get back, Jojo.

“Is Tucson in Arizona?” John checks with Paul as The Beatles write “Get Back” – New Yorker cultural-comment

What’s at LunarData.com?

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13-Look

Transportation

Three Creeks Trail & Bike Path at Willow & Bird
K stopped under Light Rail Crossing Gate on Dupont St
Paved Path between Caltrain and 87

Two of us riding nowhere
Spending someone’s
hard-earned pay
You and me, Sunday driving
Not arriving, on our way back home

We’re on our way home
We’re going home”

Two of Us by The Beatles, Let It Be (1970)
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12-Dirt

Archaeology

You and I have memories
Longer than the road
That stretches out ahead”

Two of Us by The Beatles, Let It Be (1970)

385 million years from now the world will be vastly different again as well, while the universe, during the same time period, will have changed insignificantly (in comparison to its totality, of course).

The point is: you don’t have to move all that far from where you are now to experience expanded consciousness. Merely step outside. Go to the beach if possible.

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04-Down

Rooftop

Part way into the third DVD you can sense how intensely the Beatles have their feet to the fire. But, Paul pulls it together, so diplomatically:

The movie’s director, Michael Lindsay-Hogg, says, “Tomorrow, with the nine cameras, if we do tomorrow, there is a kind of, ‘Something will happen’.”

Paul replies, “No, it’s the best bit of us, always has been and always will be, is when we’ve got — when we’re backs against the wall and we’ve been rehearsing, rehearsing, rehearsing.”

Paul then glances over at John, “And he knows it’s a take on the dub. And he does it great.”

The Beatles: Get Back (2021)

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26-Trak

Framework

Willow Glen Plaza
Odd August (6-day week!) <- click to get current month

I have of late, but wherefore I know not, lost all my mirth, forgone all custom of exercises, and, indeed, it goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame, the Earth, seems to me a sterile promontory; this most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o’erhanging firmament, this majestical roof, fretted with golden fire–why, it appeareth nothing to me but a foul and pestilent congregation of vapors.

What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express & admirable; in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god: the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals–and yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?

Hamlet by William Shakespeare

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22-Push

Underground

That yellow tubing is state-of-art material for natural gas pipeline.

Work is the way you occupy your mind and hand and eye and whole body when they’re informed by your imagination and wit, by your keenest perceptions, by your most profound reflections on everything you’ve read and seen and heard and been a part of.

You may or may not be paid to do your work. Work is a world apart from jobs. –Alice Koller, quoted in Sun Magazine

Work Is When You Put Off Playtime

twitter.com/ggarchar
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20-Rock

Takeoff

This Way to the Rocket Launch Live
Spinning the Engines up to Speed

Thousands of operations are performed before the rocket can leave the launch pad, and dozens of engineering cameras track these operations.

This is also a good preview of NASA’s super heavy-lift launch vehicle, the Space Launch System (SLS), mankind’s new vehicle for the next trip to the Moon.

The first flight of Artemis and the full Orion spacecraft is scheduled to launch on SEP 05.

Update: The launch date was actually Wednesday, November 16, 2022 at 6:47 AM (UTC).

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15-Yomi

Representative

Stephen Crowley/The New York Times (Jan 2017)

Judy Woodruff: There are a lot of Democrats who are changing their registration.

Tamara Keith: There are not enough Democrats in Wyoming to help her win. That said, she has the Cheney name and is unlikely to disappear from the political scene, certainly.

Amy Walter: And a lot of Democrats nationally are writing checks to her. She has a very big bank account right now. She’s not going to spend it all down even in this primary. You can’t spend that much money in Wyoming.

Voters are pissimistic about the economy and think that Biden and Democrats aren’t doing a good job and believe Republicans would do better. That’s what you make the campaign about.

The more the campaign is about Donald Trump, January 6, abortion, the better it is for Democrats. It becomes really a choice election, instead of a referendum.

And even if it is a referendum between Biden and Trump, that’s probably pretty good for Democrats, not very good for Republicans.

PBS Newshour

24-Risk

Often Focused

Drinking at least two cups of coffee a day could decrease the risk of death from cancer, cardiovascular disease, and diabetes.

Coffee is rich in polyphenols, a group of compounds with antioxidant and anti-inflammatory activity which can be divided according to their chemical structure into flavonoids and non-flavonoids.

National Library of Medicine

22-Seat

Reflection

AM-arqstudio, Braga, Portugal (2021)

If the space terms predominate in the expression for the interval between event-points, the interval is said to be space-like, since it is then possible to select a co-ordinate system–belonging to an observer with an admissible velocity, in which the events appear simultaneous, and therefore separated only spatially.

If, however, the interval is time-like the events cannot be simultaneous in any co-ordinate system, but there exists a co-ordinate system in which the space terms will vanish entirely, so that the separation between events will be purely temporal, id est, occurring at the same place, but at different times.

A Canticle For Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller, Jr. (1959)

20-Tool

Resolution

Channel fear into action (paradoxical intention); Energize Fear:

  • Fear of sickness.
  • Fear of damages.
  • Fear of regrets.
  • Fear of remorse.
  • Fear of guilt.
  • Fear of grief.
  • Fear of irrelevance.
  • Fear of death.

Let the channeling begin: ACTION!

16-Trug

Turbulence

Success is measured by the opposition you encounter, and the courage with which you maintain the struggle against overwhelming odds.

Marden

Eschew sidewalks and low hanging tree branches; walk in the middle of the street, and listen for the notes of traffic.

06-High

Fort Myers

Caloosahatchian Yearbook 1936 – Bud Baker

Forward – If, in this annual, the staff of ’36 can help to cast a backward glance over many pleasant, carefree hours spent in M.H.S. and cause us to live again those happy days of youth, we have reached our goal.

Fort Myers High School