Who trusted God was love indeed
And love Creation’s final law–
Tho’ Nature, red in tooth and claw
With ravine, shriek’d against his creed–
- - Alfred, Lord Tennyson - In Memoriam
You'll be taking off from Thule Air Base,but don't worry you'll be back. Dress warm.....
Oregon farmer wins Half Moon Bay pumpkin contest
Danika Starr, 9, sits with her father's winning pumpkin at the Half Moon Bay Pumpkin Festival Weigh-off contest in Half Moon Bay, Calif., Monday, Oct. 8, 2012. The pumpkin weighed 1,775 pounds, making it a new California record. Starr wins six dollars for each pound, which equals $10,650.
It's a horror. A horror. The only good thing to be said is that it has been chopped off its feeding tube and can no longer consume small house pets. I know about this. I know it well from the time when I too raised, ignorant of the horror, my own giant pumpkin back in another time in a world well lost.....
The Pumpkin that Ate My Backyard
It began as a $1.49 seedling at Home Depot which I bought for my step-son to plant.
He planted it, as heedless 9-year-old boys will, in an obscure corner of a sandy bed under some ice-plants. It seemed to me at the time that the pumpkin was going to have a short and shady life.
But then, after about a month, it seemed to suddely clamber across my terrace. Then it strangled the corn plants. That gave it HUNGER and it ate the chair. When it approached the deck it lunged, fell back and sprouted this "fruit" of the vine.
Now the pumpkin is trying to invade my neighbor`s yard. Last night I heard them outside calling plaintively for their new puppy to come back in, "Sloopy! Little Sloopy! Sloopy, come!"
But answer came there none.
On May 18th, 1980, thirty years ago today, at 8:32 a.m., the ground shook beneath Mount St. Helens in Washington state as a magnitude 5.1 earthquake struck, setting off one of the largest landslides in recorded history - the entire north slope of the volcano slid away. As the land moved, it exposed the superheated core of the volcano setting off gigantic explosions and eruptions of steam, ash and rock debris. The blast was heard hundreds of miles away, the pressure wave flattened entire forests, the heat melted glaciers and set off destructive mudflows, and 57 people lost their lives. The erupting ash column shot up 80,000 feet into the atmosphere for over 10 hours, depositing ash across Eastern Washington and 10 other states. Collected here are photos of the volcano and its fateful 1980 eruption. -- The Big Picture
The finest, clearest days in Seattle are those when the inhabitants remark, "The Mountain is out." The Mountain is Mount Rainier, a peak so looming and solitary on the edge of the Puget Sound basin that it makes its own weather. Here's a peek at the mountain I took last week from I-5 inside Seattle city limits.
Continued...I heard they exploded,
The underground blast,
What they say's gonna happen,
Gonna happen at last,
That's the way it appears.
They tell me the fault line
Runs right through here.
-- John Hartford
PERHAPS GEOGRAPHY IS DESTINY AFTER ALL, as the subtext for this otherwise bland caption for a startling image indicates:
The Sinai Peninsula, located between Africa and Asia, is a result of those two continents pulling apart from each other. Earth's crust is cracking, stretching, and lowering along the two northern branches of the Red Sea, namely the Gulf of Suez, seen here on the west (left), and the Gulf of Aqaba, seen to the east (right).-- From NASA's Shuttle Radar Topography Mission
Eadweard Muybridge
American (1830--1904)
The Domes from Merced River, Yosemite Valley, c. 1874
albumen print
George Eastman House
Carleton E. Watkins
American (1829-1916)
Cape Horn, Columbia River, Oregon, 1867
albumen print
George Eastman House
Unnamed Lake
"The refuge is so remote and untamed that many peaks, valleys, and lakes are still without names and shall remain that way. Marsh fleabane cluster along the lakeshore, while Nichenthraw Mountain and spruce trees are reflected on the calm water of early morning."
From: Pressing Forward: Arctic Refuge Photographs by Subhanker Banerjee at Orion.
(Scroll down. It's a Big Tree)
Mom's Cafe in Salina, Utah.
Best Chicken Fried Steak on Planet Earth
From the terse but always interesting Muxway "Very Big Machine"
Fair warning: the image is about 1.6 megs in size and, broadband or not, will eat your browser.
The blackout as seen from mid-heaven.
Click for larger image.
Via Junkyard Blog
Geology of the Conterminous United States at 1:2,500,000 Scale
The present Geologic Map of the United States follows the same format as the preceding Geologic Map of the United States of 1932. Ideally, both have been designed to represent the geological features that the user could find if he should visit any locality within its limits, that is, the bedrock formations that lie at the surface at that locality. In many parts of the country, especially in the arid regions of the Southwest, this is literally true. In other parts of the country there are lesser or greater departures from this ideal, owing mainly to concealment of the bedrock by surficial material.
James M. Clash's Forbes article Namibian Giant, is not about some future draftee for the Celtics. It's a fascinating item about taking on a pile of sand so vast it can hardly be imagined.
Wait 30 million years and you get Big Daddy, one of the oldest sand dunes on the planet and thought to be the biggest. A ziggurat of red sand, Big Daddy rises 1,200 feet from the parched African earth of the Namib Desert. Above is the deepest of blue desert skies; at its base is a sea of golden, talc-like clay. The sharp contrast of the three colors reminds one of a giant Rothko painting.Climbing Big Daddy, however, is not like climbing a Rothko, which would be a great deal easier. First you've got to get yourself to Namibia, in southwest Africa, sandwiched between Angola and South Africa. We flew 15 hours nonstop from New York to Johannesburg, connecting there to a two-hour flight to Windhoek, Namibia's capital. From Windhoek it's still another hour in a small charter plane to Sossusvlei, but the ride, with the sea of dunes undulating below, is supernaturally beautiful.