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  • Here I Am Lord

    Here I am Lord,
    It is I Lord.
    I have heard you calling in the night.

    I will go Lord,
    Where you need me.
    I will hold your people in my heart.

  • The Need To Explain Life

    The Socrates_Cafe asks this week why humans seem to have an almost universal need to explain life?  That's an interesting question; one I really haven't given much thought to, but I'd like to speculate a little about it.

    I think that humans need to explain life because it is natural for us to do so, i.e., we are rational beings with an inherent, genetic need to understand our environment.  This understanding allows us to control our environment to a certain extent, while giving meaning and purpose to our existance. 

    It allows us to live an ordered life, rather that one dominated by random chance.  We bring order to things by examining them and explaining them to our satisfaction.  And it provides a mechanism by which knowledge can be passed on to generations that follow us, knowledge that will hopefully assist in our survival and theirs.

  • Cartoon Craze

    Featured_Grownups wants to know what my favorite cartoon characters were when I was growing up.

    When I was a child, television was still something new, and every family on the block didn't have a T.V.  When my folks finally did get a T.V., I remember watching Elmer Fudd along with Tom and Jerry.  Elmer Fudd quickly fell by the wayside, leaving only Tom and Jerry.  Then The Road Runner started airing and that became my cartoon of choice, probably because there seemed to be a certain sophistication to it that Tom and Jerry lacked, and partly because it first introduced me to the desert scenery and landscapes of the American Southwest.  I became facinated by it and have be drawn to it ever since.

    But the principal draw, of course, was the fun watching to see what contraption the Acme Corporation was going to deliver to Wile E. Coyote  each week and just how he was going to use it get himself in trouble again.

  • The "End-Date" Of Ancient Calendars

    The Socrates_Cafe asks what significance, if any, the "end date" given in ancient American calendars is and what significance do they have for either the life of mankind or to geologic time? The ending of last cycle in these calendars is usually placed somewhere in December of 2012. Is the world going to end on that date?

    All calendars, regardless of origin, are used by mankind to regulate his daily life.  Ancient man counted the days to know when to plant his seeds and when to harvest his crops.  He counted the days of the week and the months of the year so that he would know when one annual cycle ended and another was to start.  This use of the calendar has always been of the utmost practical use, most especially because our ability to produce crops to sustain and nourish ourselves depended upon it.

    Today Farmers still depend upon knowing the calendar, but we also count the days until the weekend, when we can leave our work and take a little time for ourselves and our families.  And then we count the days in the weekend so we know how much time we have before we must return to our labors.  We also count the number of days before an expected event such as a solar or lunar eclipse or to the next holiday when we can get together for a family reunion, and we use the calendar to schedule our next vacation.  But of all the calendar watching we do, perhaps the most fascinating to the people in the west is the date on which the calendar ends.

    We in the Western part of the world seem to like to attach great significance to these end dates, and when these dates fall in our future, we seem to like to speculate about why the calendar was ended on a particular date.  Usually such speculation focuses on the end of life or the end of the world, because we can think of no other reason that a society would create a calendar that extends into the future and then simply abandon it.  Perhaps it is because the world's three monotheistic religions all agree that some significant event involving their deity will eventually occur in their immediate future.

    It never occurs to us that maybe the calendar doesn't extend further into the future because its creators simply grew tired of it, or because they were all killed in a surprise raid by a neighboring tribe, or because they wanted to leave something for their ancestors to do.  Maybe they simply didn't see any need to create a calendar that extended more than a few hundred years beyond their own life times, and the actual end date is based only on the principal premise upon which it was created in the first place, namely the end of one cycle of the time period being measured. 

    Of far more interest to me than all this speculation is the fact that the most frequently used end date for the ancient calendars is December 21, 2012 AD, the date when conjunction of the sun with the center of the visible Milky Way galaxy occurs, an event that occurs only once ever 26,000 years.  It is of interest because it shows that our distant ancestors had a knowledge of mathematics and astronomy equal to our own, at least in some respects.  This gives the lie, as it were, to the idea that they were primitive, with little in the way of scientific knowledge.  How they were able to come by this knowledge without the aid of the modern equipment and devices we have available today also lends itself to wild speculation.

    I see the 2012 date not as the end of the world, but as the end of one cycle and the beginning of the next, or the end of one age and beginning of another.  And barring accident or dieaese, I expect to awaken on the morning of December 22nd 2012 to another day that will be little different from the preceding day.

  • Global Warming Debate Still Goes On

    Even in the face of the fact that global temperatures have shown a steady decline in each of the last 11 years,  Al Gore is still making enough noise to get his name in the paper.  While Greenpeace activists were sitting on the roof top of Westminster and demanding zero carbon emissions by 2030, Al Gore, according to the Wisconsin State Journal, was in Madison attending the annual conference of the Society of Environmental Journalists. 

    After sharing his optimism over how he expects politicians to be coming around to his way of thinking, he did something he has not done since the debut of his documentary film, "An Inconvenient Truth" in 2006 -- he opened up the floor to some questions -- only to learn that there are still plenty of people who still do not share his view of imminent diaster if the world does not embrace his view of global warming.

    Phelim McAleer, an Irish filmmaker, asked Gore to "address nine errors in his film identified by a British court in 2007."  Instead of doing so, Mr. Gore "responded that the court ruling supported the showing of his film in British schools."  At that point, Mr. McAleer's microphone was cut off.  What a strange response.  I guess Al won't be taking any questions for another 3 years.

    In the mean time, southwest Idaho is experiencing record low temperatures that are threatening to destroy at least a portion of this season's crop of seed potatoes.  As Larry Van Dyke, who owns Van Dyke Farms in Townsend, told the Bozeman Chronicle, when it's this cold for too long, the frost penetrates and the taters are toast.

    Parts of Colorado are experiencing the earliest snowfalls in decades, and Montana has issued early frigid weather warnings and advised parents to keep children in to avoid frostbite.  The unexpected zero degree temperatures in early October forced the University of Montana's homecoming parade to be canceled, and blowing winds are creating wind chills of -20 degrees in some areas.  Temperatures in some parts of the State have broken 30 and 40 year old records.

    Even in the face of predictions that oceanic and solar influences will continue to cool the earth until at least 2030, Al Gore keeps insisting that half of the years between now and 2015 will be hotter than the previous hottest year of 1998.  I'm tempted to say something like "Poor Al," but I know he's laughing all the way to the bank over all of this.  In fact, I saw an article the other day that said some analysts were expecting Al Gore to become the world's first billionaire based solely on climate control issues.

  • Do You Periodically Beat Yourself Up

    Do You Periodically Beat Yourself Up?  I do.  It seems that no matter what I do, I just can't do it well enough to suit myself.  I could have this.  I should have done that.  Whatever I say, I could/should have said something else?  And then my failure consumes me.  I torment myself with my failures, -- sometimes for only a few days or a week, but then again, it could be for months.  Often, I'll recall an event years later, and my mind reels under the memory of some inadequacy or another.  Torture!  Pure mental torture over not being a perfect being.  That's what it is.

    What is your favorite form of self flagellation?

  • Links To War Related Posts

    Below are Links To War Related Posts that I have made.

  • Links To Tongue-In_Cheek Posts

    Below are some links to posts of a more humorous nature.  They may be jokes or absurd situations that are not to be taken seriously.

  • Links To Blog Posts About The Reluctant Singer

    Below are links to various posts of a more personal nature that related to me as an individual or to my personal life.

  • Links To Hotel Related Blog Posts

    For three years, I had a part time job driving a shuttle van for one on the hotels in my area.  Below are some links to blog posts I made regarding my activities around the hotel, the guests, and my fellow workers.  Unlike my other groupings of related posts, these links are presented in the order inwhich the posts were made.