Motus Mentis

The new Moon of December 31st will be the second one this month; the first having been on December 1st. When two full Moons occur in the same calendar month, it’s called a “Blue Moon”, but till now there has been no name for this inverse phenomenon. The folks at Spaceweather.com asked for suggestions for their readers, and the winner was “Ebony Moon”. Like Blue Moons, Ebony Moons happen about once every two-and-a-half years. The next one will be in August of 2008.

One of my favorite left-clicks in all of cyberspace is WikiPedia’s Random Article link. Here’s a typical sequence:

Hagop Hagopian
1636 in literature
Mutawintji National Park
Pindall, Arkansas
United States Chess Federation
Anita King
Historicity of Jesus

You never know what you’re going to get.

As I write, Gotham is on the edge of its seat. We are waiting to see if the transit workers, whose contract expired twenty-eight minutes ago, are going to walk out. If they do, it will be disruptive, to say the least. Estimates of the cost to the city’s economy start, I believe, at around four hundred million dollars a day. It also couldn’t come at a worse time for the city’s merchants, some of whom make their entire annual profit during the Yuletide purchasing spasm.

I am not working on any recording projects at the moment, so there are no studios for me to get to, and in my capacity as a software developer for PubSub I won’t be adversely affected – it is as easy for me to spawn bugs at home as it is in our Financial District command center, thanks to the miracle of Open VPN. But many will be deprived of their livelihood, and our colossal engine of commerce, the very heartbeat of capitalism itself, will certainly sputter, if not stall.

I wonder about something, though. There are seven hundred twenty-two miles of subway in the city, and God knows how many miles of bus routes; at any given moment the trains and buses can be at any point on their respective lines. Presumably the operators and conductors themselves get to work by train or bus; if the strike is called, and the wheels must stop rolling, where do they leave the vehicles, and how do they get home? It’s awfully nasty out tonight.

My friend Duncan Werner has sent me a link to a brief but outstandingly informative article that I would like to share with you all. It offers a great deal of helpful, practical advice about what to do should you find yourself unexpectedly free-falling from the stratosphere. Not only is the essay chock-full of encouraging tips and pointers, it’s a nice bit of writing, too. Here is how the author, one David Carkeet, sets up the situation:

What, indeed? You or I would probably be pretty glum at this point, but this is nothing we can’t handle, the author reassures us:

I recommend that all of you drop what you’re doing and read this item at once. (Unless, of course, you were about to spend some more time poking around in here. Do that first.) If you don’t read it now, you’re sure to forget, and sometime later, plummeting through the azure void, with your laptop hibernating happily back in the overhead compartment, you’re really going to kick yourself. Just remember:

What’s that breeze? Oh. John Kerry is at it again. The lugubrious, thatch-crowned Ent, whom readers may recall bloviating on all sides of every issue during last year’s depressing presidential campaign, was on “Face the Nation” yesterday, accusing US soldiers of “terrorizing” ordinary Iraqis, and “breaking sort of the customs of the–of–the historical customs, religious customs.”

Mr. Kerry has been roundly lambasted in the blogosphere already, so I won’t pile on. I shall instead refer the reader to James Taranto’s mention of it in today’s Best of the Web.

I am really neither conservative nor liberal politically, but am, instead, all over the map on an issue-by-issue basis. Nevertheless I always enjoy, and highly recommend, James Taranto’s daily newsletter. Mr. Taranto takes a strongly conservative stance, but has a light touch and, above all, a sense of humor, which is a nice afternoon break from the Left’s ceaseless cataract of sanctimony and “outrage”. I can’t link directly to the subscription form, but you can go the the Best of the Web homepage and find it from there.

I have a new toy:

My parents, who are, shall we say, “getting on”, and who are less capable physically than they once were, have moved to smaller quarters, and needed to get rid of some of their stuff. Some was sold, some thrown out, and some redistributed to friends and family. My father, not needing it anymore, entrusted to me his microscope.

Now this isn’t just any old microscope. It’s a Wild M20, made in Switzerland, and considered by many to be the finest optical microscope ever made. My father bought it in London, his hometown, in the 1950s, when he was just beginning his career as a medical researcher. Though it is not particularly large, it is surprisingly heavy, and its dense metal body is finished in deep, lustrous black. Its interlocking parts, even after fifty years, move with exquisite precision, and without the slightest play. The optics are incomparable. Though it is a purely functional object, I find it almost hypnotically beautiful.

I know little about the practical techniques of microscopy, but I intend to learn. What a gift! I think of the legions of the curious throughout the ages who would have given their eyeteeth for such an instrument, and feel that I owe it to them to learn to use this fantastic tool, and to use it reverently and well.

You can read about the Wild M20 here, and here.

Thanks, Dad.

I’ve just read, on my wife Nina’s recommendation, the book A Million Little Pieces by James Frey. Here is the first paragraph:

I wake to the drone of an airplane engine and the feeling of something warm dripping down my chin. I lift my hand to feel my face. My front four teeth are gone, I have a hole in my cheek, my nose is broken and my eyes are swollen nearly shut. I open them and I look around and I’m in the back of a plane and there’s no one near me. I look at my clothes and my clothes are covered with a colorful mixture of spit, snot, urine, vomit and blood.

The book is the story of Frey’s six weeks, at age 23, at an elite detoxification clinic in Minneapolis. It is a horrifying tale. I have known an awful lot of drug addicts and alcoholics in my day, and have peered over the edge of that abyss at times myself, but Mr. Frey, I have to say, raises the bar. He has, by the beginning of this story, been a dedicated alcoholic for ten years, and an obsessive crackhead for three. He has spent every day for years pumping booze and drugs into himself until he blacks out. He has destroyed every relationship he has ever had with anyone, is wanted in three states for various antisocial acts, and has brought himself to the uttermost brink of death.

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