Halloween Party









A few random photos from the weekend...
Now this is just about as cool as can be. Star Trek Continues is a fan-supported effort to finish off the last two years of the original five-year mission. They've got a full episode out, and it's pretty darn good.
Southern Man notes that the "Global Warming" crowd has dropped that verbiage and instead adopted "Climate Change" as though the two terms meant the same thing, to the point that (for example) The LA Times will no longer print letters from "climate change deniers." This is, rather transparently, a straw man argument: take someone who has legitimate doubts about the science of global warming (disclaimer: Southern Man would be one of those, for good solid scientific reasons) and accuse them of something entirely different. So today there will be a brief lecture on climate change.
And Day Three was the Drive Back Home. Which for some reason always seems to take less time than the drive up, even though we were in no hurry and made several stops to snack and geocache and generally goof around. Teen Daughter was delivered to her mother at four-ish and Southern Man was back at The Land by nine, having stopped in town to shop for Southern Son's upcoming birthday. As in, tomorrow. Southern Man got him all six Star Wars movies on Blu-Ray; hope he likes them.
For our one full day in Branson we kicked things off with a visit to Ripley's Believe It Or Not.
Day One was Travel Day - pick up Teen Daughter at her mother's house and then head on in to Branson.
Normally Southern Man posts these holiday "Day Zero" posts 'cause he gets off early enough to get a jump on vacations but alas his current schedule has him working until late evening tonight. But nonetheless Fall Break is about to begin. The plan is to drive a few hours to pick up Teen Daughter from her mother, head in to Branson, MO, for a couple of days of eating and attractions (she's already indicated that she wants to hit the Ripley's Believe-It-Or-Not Museum) and sleeping and geocaching, drop her back off on Saturday, and spend Sunday catching up on laundry and chores as well as church and relaxing with friends. A brief break, but it ought to be a good one. Stay tuned...
In fourteen-hundred and ninety-two...and then went back to Europe and held press conferences, thus establishing his everlasting fame as "discoverer" of the New World.
Columbus sailed the ocean blue...
Columbus was not a scholarly man. Yet he studied these books, made hundreds of marginal notations in them and came out with ideas about the world that were characteristically simple and strong and sometimes wrong, the kind of ideas that the self-educated person gains from independent reading and clings to in defiance of what anyone else tries to tell him.Columbus was convinced that he could reach the Orient by sailing to the west for three reasons, all incorrect and all at odds with the scholarly concensus of the day: his low estimate for the size of the Earth (which had been known to be spherical since the time of Aristotle and accurately measured as long ago as Eratosthenes), his high estimate of the east-west extent of the European land mass (Columbus was swayed by Marinus of Tyre, who put the Eurasian landmass as spanning 225o rather than the better-accepted 180o proposed by Plolemy), and his conviction that Japan lay far to the east of China. These notions, coupled with his misuse of the Italian mile and his likely misreading of Alfraganus (which had led him to view the Earth as considerably smaller than the prevailing view) and rumors of land reported by sailers who had sailed far into the western Atlantic to take advantage of the trade winds, convinced Columbus that the voyage was possible. His proposal was rejected by many possible sponsors who believed his estimate of the length of the voyage was unrealistically short. However, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, a politically-astute couple whose marriage had united several smaller principalities into what would eventually become the modern nation of Spain, eventually agreed to finance about half of the expenses with the remainder coming from Italian investors. The rest, as they say, is history.
At the end of 1492 most men in Western Europe felt exceedingly gloomy about the future. Christian civilization appeared to be shrinking in area and dividing into hostile units as its sphere contracted. For over a century there had been no important advance in natural science and registration in the universities dwindled as the instruction they offered became increasingly jejune and lifeless. Institutions were decaying, well-meaning people were growing cynical or desperate, and many intelligent men, for want of something better to do, were endeavoring to escape the present through studying the pagan past. . . .Southern Man salutes Columbus, a courageous man who risked death for what he believed in and who in no small way created the world in which we live. Happy Columbus Day!
Yet, even as the chroniclers of Nuremberg were correcting their proofs from Koberger’s press, a Spanish caravel named Niña scudded before a winter gale into Lisbon with news of a discovery that was to give old Europe another chance. In a few years we find the mental picture completely changed. Strong monarchs are stamping out privy conspiracy and rebellion; the Church, purged and chastened by the Protestant Reformation, puts her house in order; new ideas flare up throughout Italy, France, Germany and the northern nations; faith in God revives and the human spirit is renewed. The change is complete and startling: “A new envisagement of the world has begun, and men are no longer sighing after the imaginary golden age that lay in the distant past, but speculating as to the golden age that might possibly lie in the oncoming future.”
Christopher Columbus belonged to an age that was past, yet he became the sign and symbol of this new age of hope, glory and accomplishment. His medieval faith impelled him to a modern solution: Expansion.
A few cell phone snaps from an evening out with The Gang for Fright Fest at the local amusement park...
With all the stories about the government shutdown it was pretty easy to miss the rollout of the much-delayed and much-anticipated HealthCare.gov, the health insurance marketplace where everyone could get "affordable" health care.
"The President has already granted businesses a one-year extention on implementing the Affordable Care Act. All we want is the same one-year extension for individuals. What is it about this that you don't like?"
From the Congressional Record, 3/16/2006...
Civil disobedience is the active, professed refusal to obey certain laws, demands, and commands of a government. Henry David Thoreau's essay of the same title is required reading. It's readily available; Southern Man's e-copy was free at the Kindle Store. And we are - happily - seeing more and more civil disobedience as citizens push back against a tyrannical government who confuses a cessation of non-essential services to barry-cading open-air parks and monuments and even shutting down privately-funded facilities that just happen to lease their lots from the Feds. And the shutdown continues: the House passes spending bills, often unanimously, and the Senate turns them down on party-line votes. The president has openly said that he refueses to negotiate and (much to the chagrin of unions everywhere) likens his opponents to workers walking off the job.
Apparently if the Federal Government is your landlord they can ignore the terms of the lease: Couple evicted from home that they own because it sits on Federal land. Ditto for an inn which has been operating on Federal Land (and paying rent) since 1919. There was an attempt to shut down Mount Vernon, which is privately owned; all they managed was a privately-owned parking lot. But "Federal Land" doesn't even begin to cover it: in Florida, the Feds attempted to shut down the ocean itself, citing the shutdown.
As part of the government shutdown the Park Service put up barricades in the Washington DC mall - an open-air park that is normally accessible 24/7/365. A bunch of WWII veterans on an "Honor Flight" to DC responded appropriately.