delicate and strange

sand water sky

# 21
two miles from being my life-long ambition
a beach bum

mangelwurzel

try yodeling that

"impressive rutabaga" is the subject line of a several days ongoing e-mail with my realtor, about ongoing problems as I am preparing to move into my 20th home. Moving is stressful anyway; just ask, I oughta know.

Today, the subject line of the e-mail struck me as hilarious. Hmm, ah dunno, maybe it's a case of hysteria.

Did you know:

- Frank Zappa performed a slow yodel of the word rutabaga in his 1967 song "Call Any Vegetable".

which logically led to the facts of mangelwurzel

- it has a history in England of being used for sport (mangold hurling), animal fodder, and the brewing of a potent alcoholic beverage.

- in the book Middle Earth, it is a staple diet of the trolls.

- ok, I'm a voracious reader, and one of the few books I've deemed worthy to read more than once is Animal Farm. But I did not remember reading the word mangelwurzel, how could one not remember that? It appears in the fourth stanza of the ballad "Beasts of England."

see what will turnip, can't beet that

mangelwurzelmangelwurzelmangelwurzelyodelaaayeeeehoooooo

please don't litter

Authorities thought that they had found pieces from the recent deadly Air France flight 447 crash - what they found was a floating island of trash - mostly plastic. I've heard it's bigger than a continent. There is not a way to measure accurately, as pieces and masses are found floating in the Pacific from the US to China. Fish and birds stomachs have been found full of plastic bits, it's in our food chain. Plastic does not biodegrade; plastic is proven to contain toxins.

http://mnn.com/earth-matters/translating-uncle-sam/stories/what-is-the-great-pacific-ocean-garbage-patch





Reduce. Reuse. Recycle. Brought to you as a public service announcement, by someone who cares, and thinks that she should do more to honor her mother, Earth.

sandpipers

pale blue dot

We succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space], and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.

The earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light.

Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity -- in all this vastness -- there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us. It's been said that astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, a character-building experience. To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.

Carl Sagan - Excerpted from a commencement address delivered May 11, 1996.