Lightning and I go way back. I’m not exactly a lightning rod, but I’ve seen it up close more times than I ought to have. I was struck late in high school and somehow emerged unhurt, without even a burn or scar or anything to show for it. It knocked me flat and damaged the area around me. I was standing in the entrance to a small wooden-framed tent, and the bolt hit me, the tent, and a power pole nearby. Several times I’ve been in buildings that were hit, including one time when I was younger and home alone when a three-pronged bolt hit our house, the electric transformer (killing the power), and a tree (which fell across the phone lines). One summer at college, a freak storm blew in out of the north-east (the opposite direction from usual). As I was running to the student union building, a bolt struck a few yards from me, just around the corner from the building as I reached the door. It wasn’t until later that I found out it struck and killed a man running for the same doors I was. Oddly enough, his wife was at the university doing lightning research.

A lightning storm came by this morning. One bolt struck a tree directly outside my window. I’m told it is (was) “one of the largest American Elms in Georgia”. The power’s been on and off all day, and thus my net connection has been mostly off. By the time the Linux boxes booted up and got everything mounted and running, the power would drop again. I’ve still not got email, and I hear that the servers are going down again, on purpose this time. I’ll try to make up for a lack of writing later.

Mmmm…. Fresh Hog Jowels! There’s Ren & Stimpy on the tape too. I should do this more often.

Another Saturday night at home alone (nobody’s fault but mine) had me feeling blue. So I thought it’d be fun to see what was on all those unlabeled VHS tapes I have. The very first program on the very first tape was my favorite Simpsons episode -- The Last Exit to Springfield. It’s the one where the power plant union (Local 643 of the International Brotherhood of Jazz Dancers, Pastry Chefs, and Nuclear Technicians) goes on strike. They haven’t made them any better than that. After 30 minutes of laughing, I feel much, much better.

Or maybe it was from the martinis I mixed up.

On a crashing airplane
all the drinks are free
there’s time enough to drink them
that’s time enough for me

Hmmm… I was going to post some now, but the strongest storm I’ve seen here has just hit. I’ll post later…

Despite the objectives of people worried it would bring about the end of the universe, the Brookhaven National Laboratory’s new particle accelerator has been running since earlier this month. Just as predicted, the universe hasn’t ended. Or has it? There’s a bunch of writing and pictures on this page, and I didn’t understand a word of it. Maybe I’m just too educated.

A few miles west of the small town of Los Lunas, New Mexico (south of Albuquerque, north of Socorro), there is a boulder on a mountainside that may be carved with the world’s oldest surviving inscription of the Ten Commandments. Known as the Los Lunas Decalogue, it’s been dated using various methods to 600 B.C.E. I haven’t found any sites giving a skeptical view, and the evidience itself is fairly convincing. Given the technology of late Phonecian-era ships and the weather/geology of the time, it’s not out of the question for a single ship to find its way to central New Mexico. Of course the rock doesn’t show that there was a mass movement of people or regular back & forth travel. When I lived in the area, there was a “wacko” newpaper out of Hatch (the chile capital of the world) titled The Courier that documented ancient Ogam writing all around the Rio Grande valley and beyond. When I went looking for on-line issues the other day, I discovered that The Courier has folded. That’s too bad, because despite its wackiness, it was a good paper.

Life was hard before electricity. The BBC/PBS show 1900 House seems to be showing that fairly well. The Michael Lesy book Wisconsin Death Trip, published in 1973, shows us the same thing in a novel way. His book documents life in a small Wisconsin town from 1885 to 1899 using photographs from the state historical society paired with unrelated news stories culled from the pages of the local newspaper. The photos are eerie, but the stories are eerier still. You can find excerpts from the book at this Geocities site. BBC/Cinemax are presenting a movie version narrated by Ian Holmes. It’s currently mking the film festival circuit and will premier on Cinemax on July 4th. If you can believe the promotional materials, this will be a must-see movie.

“Lower ye the landing gear!” “The landing gear be lowered.” In The Ancient of Days: Deity or Manna Machine?, George Sassoon postulizes that the Israelite’s Exodus manna from heaven really came from a machine powered by a small thermonuclear device. He uses biblical passages and an ancient Aramaic Jewish text (the Kabbalah) to reach his conclusion. Suprisingly, this is an interesting and entertaining read.

If you’re into this sort of thing, you can read the wedding ceremony I wrote for my sister. It’s a bit longer than the last one, much more eclectic. My sister Lauryl is remarkably similar to me, and that comes across in the text, I think. After the wedding, my Grandmother asked how I, a never-married single man, came to know so much about marriage. The answer’s simple: the internet. The internet can make you sound like an expert on almost anything.