Having never lived where I could see a wide expanse of sky from my bedroom window, the path of the moon as always mystified me.   It seems to appear unpredictably in one spot in the sky or another.   I still get a childlike thrill when a come across one of those enormous moons when moon hangs low over a line of houses low on the horizon.

So I began this project to understand where is the moon in the sky at any given hour of night and day of the year.  Where is the moon in the sky now? What is the path of the moon?  This page is devoted to exploring this question.   Unlike most blog posts, I’ll update it as I go along.  I’ve taken this up because it isn’t simple, even with the wonder of the internet, to find understandable answers.  As  I discover that I can figure out, I am trying here to put it into ordinary english, instead.

Having never lived where I could see a wide expanse of sky from my bedroom window, the path of the moon as always mystified me.   It seems to appear unpredictably in one spot in the sky or another.   No one can forget when there’s one of those enormous moons when it hangs low over a line of houses on the horizon.

So I decided I should understand how the moon moves.

Okay.   I’ve been getting a few things clear in my head:

The moon appears to move across the sky as the sun does, from east to west.   I say “appears” because what is actually happening, of course, is that the earth is spinning around one half of a revolution, more or less.   With the sun, it’s so dominant it’s almost impossible to think of it being the earth’s turning, not the sun’s moving that’s happening.   We know it as a scientifically proven theory, but the psychological reality is still that the sun moves from east to west, not that the earth is spinning from west to east.

But the moon is different from the sun in the sense that it doesn’t dominate the sky in the same way.   So it is somewhat easier to become conscious that the moon is just staying where it was and it’s we who are turning.

This is perhaps part of why it sometimes seems like the sun and the moon are moving in opposite directions, like some kind of cosmic seesaw.   But this is false.  The moon and the sun cross the earth’s sky in the same direction, because it is really the earth’s turning that accounts for the apparent movement of both.

Okay.   That’s Part I.   But there’s a whole lot more going on.  Just to enumerate:  the season (the tilt of the earth),  the hour of the day or night, where we are in the moon’s monthly orbit around the earth,  and where on the globe we are at the moment we’re looking at the moon.

Part II:  The role of the seasons; the “tilt” of the earth.

The fact that the earth is spinning through space on a tilt is what gives us seasons.  The earth holds this tilt as it goes around the sun.  So the Northern hemisphere is heated by many more of the sun’s rays in July and August than it is in.   It actually works as an image to think of a standard globe of the earth on a stand going around a light bulb while keeping the angle of the tilt of  globe steady while going around the light bulb.

This same tilt, I read, affects where we’ll see the moon.   I found this chart useful:

But it must be realized that this is most precisely true of the beginning date of each season.  On the first day of fall (tomorrow relative to when I am writing this) the moon takes a path from East to West.

This is only part of the answer however:  It tells us where the moon will be at sunrise and sunset, but not where it will be in between these two times.   Nor does it really explain to me exactly why this is so.

To be continued…

I rarely comment here like this, but I must speak out on this one.

Obama is calling for military action against Syria.   This would be catastrophic.   So far, Obama is following the constitutional requirement that only Congress of declaring war = committing acts of war.    But he is advocating precisely the wrong course of action.

Obama has shown evidence of horrific crimes against humanity, but he has NOT produced evidence of genocide.   It may seem awful to have to make this distinction, but it does matter.   The former requires punishment without adding more innocent victims; the latter requires action despite the cost in innocent lives.

Have we not proven to ourselves, beyond any doubt, that we cannot control the mideast militarily?   Syria is Iraq times ten times ten.

This is not a matter of being a pacifist or not, a Republican or a Democrat, tea party or socialist:   It is a matter of survival of the planet that every act of violence not be justification of unleashing untold violence.

People of good will, no matter what their “political affiliation,” need to raise our voices before it is too late.

Entergy, citing economic reasons (not its long battle with the State of Vermont nor the intense and persistent protests demanding its closure), announced that it will close Vermont Yankee by the fourth quarter of next year (2014).

I heartily congratulate all those who have fought the long, hard battle to shut down Vermont Yankee.

I also appreciate how some people feel, how they work for the plant or have friends or relatives who depend directly on it.  I feel very bad for them.  I mean that in all sincerity.  And I appreciate how some feel it will “hurt our already weak economy.”  It may, indeed.

But I must say that no amount of money, no amount of “good jobs,” no amount of “business stimulation” could make me wish that plant to stay open a minute longer.

Yes, this does make our already difficult economy of southern Vermont in yet more in need of help to get it moving out of the doldrums.   But we should also keep in mind that many of those who come to this area do so because it offers a cleaner, safer, healthier environment.   And again:  What economic stimulation is worth the price of endangering all living things for generations to come?

Sometimes we have to take a step back and take an honest look at what we are doing.   Nuclear power plants create toxins more powerful to humans than anything that has ever existed on the face of the earth.   This is not an environmental activist’s nightmare; it is a simple, horrifying fact.  Nothing we can construct can ultimately “contain” such forces.  How much more proof than Fukushima do we need?   We are fallible creatures and we know it, right?

Nuclear plants are neither the solution to our need for electricity nor are they a solution for our economy.  We’ve already created enough radioactive waste to threaten humans a hundreds of generations ahead of us.  We can at least turn off the dangerous engine and stop creating more unimaginably radioactive poisons.  We must.

Have you noticed the changes in Google?   Google made it’s name, literally, by being clean, and reasonably unobtrusive in it’s advertisement itself as well as advertising third parties.   The equation has changed in the past few months.

First consider the demise of iGoogle.   If you’ve never seen it, iGoogle is simply a nicely designed step up from a icon strewn desktop, that had absolutely no advertising, not even teasers from Google.    Google encouraged a bunch of developers, some in Google and some out, to come up with what are called “widgets,”  little things that do stuff, like a nice clock or weather in cities around the world.   It had a Google search box as where your cursor went initially, which was perfect.

But the beauty of the iGoogle was of course its downfall:  The fact that it had no advertising, that it’s whole appeal was in not having advertising, meant that it wasn’t generating profit, perhaps even competing with Google products that Google could put advertising on.

And a  fundamental illogical aspect of capitalism strikes again:   Thou shalt profit by thy endeavors.   Thou must.   Thou cannot leave a penny on the sidewalk.   Thou cannot give away what you could otherwise sell.

So have you noticed that Google’s search page now pops up with enticements to check out other Google products?     Have you how much more of the page of an average search is cluttered with “Ads related to…” at the top?

We are being eaten alive by advertisements.

Since the internet is now a primary source of our information, we increasingly are having to pay for that information by having advertisements thrust before our eyes.    We are passive victims, innocent bystanders, in the paroxysms of an insane mechanism: the market.

Yes, I realize Marx only had it half-right:  He understood the oppression and insanity and cruelty of capitalism.   He understood, too, that were systems of human organization far worse than capitalism.    But he did not understand — and really, who it’s a lot to ask — how we could get beyond where we are now.  He had ideas; he had hope. We have seen that it is a rocky road to say the least.

To say the least Marx was far too optimistic.    I wonder if he foresaw that people would do many heinous things in his name.   But things haven’t worked out so well.  Capitalism’s crumbling seems continuous, yet it’s still the only show in town, the only circus on earth.

Still there’s gotta be a better way.

.

Such a situ

community: particularly in terms of human intimacy…

preparing for the fact that we are likely to see a Republican president and a Republican congress in 2016…

everybody’s got their own share of angst, though certainly some people get more than their share…

the beauty part:  finding quiet sounds;  Bach’s solo cello suites; starting on the third, fifth, or seventh of a chord…

We’re fond of saying that we live in a world in which everything is instant, but it’s not really true.   The world of computers and cell phones is a stop and start world.   We’re constantly pushing a button and waiting for a response and then pushing another button and waiting for a response.  Constantly.  It’s not so much instant as sporadic.  The internet, in its 2013 incarnation, is not a world of instantaneity.  It is a world of clicks and waits, and click again.  It demands our attention in a hurky-jurkey way, pulling us from pillar to post, from trivial to profound in a click and back again to trivial in another.

At the same time that it’s amazingly fast, the internet and mobile devices slice time like a broken second hand of a wristwatch.

Is it a wonder we’re all either hyperactive or depressed, or both at once?

For all it’s terrible aspects, there’s some stuff that’s fantastic about social media.   And for all that’s fantastic about it, there are some terrible aspects.   One way or another, we’re stuck with it, it’s “here to stay”…at least until the Next Big Thing comes along.

Both the wonder and the problem with social media are that it enables nearly intimate personal exchanges, access to an amazing array of factual information, and virtually instantaneous relay of up-to-the-minute communication among a vast number of people.   None of these were conceivable pre-internet.

The trick is in the “nearly” and the “virtually.”  Ah, there’s the rub.   Intimacy is, by definition, not something you share with whoever and whomever you should stumble upon in the course of your life.   The “up-to-minute communication” may be wrong or wrong-headed, can be shut off in a moment by a controlling government or monitored down to the dirt under one’s fingernails.   And the amazing array of factual information may also be wrong, distorted, or, in the best case, simply thin, raw, unanalyzed — a vast tangle of disconnect factoids with no discernible integrity, no basis to form inferences by which one could reach valid conclusions of significance.

Social media is simultaneously a lonely world full of people, disconnected facts, and innumerable cute cat videos and a way of sharing truly precious moments with people one cares about.

If we’re lucky enough to be on this side of the digital divide, we can rejoice about what it brings to our doorstep , but we should not mistake it for the hug of a loving friend or the honesty of a good long candid conversation.

Still, I love to see pictures of my kids and grandchildren…and some of those cat videos really are funny.

I had a conversation with one of my son’s one day about advertising.  He asserted that the escalation of advertising we are witnessing will one day be seen as a “bubble,” not unlike the housing bubble.   It would continue to expand for a few more years, and then would burst.   We would look back on that collapse much as we do the housing bubble now.

I do know what he means, but I can’t say I accept it with equal equanimity.

If there is key tenet of our modern religion, capitalism, it is that advertising is what makes everything tick.

I am old enough to remember Burma Shave signs along the highway, little red signs, that went by pretty fast and were sometimes funny.   Now, in the glorious twenty-first century, we’re watching one show and an ad blips up demanding our attention to an ad for another show.   I’ve even seen where it’s advertising the very show I’m watching.    And the show itself is more of a series of advertisements than a show.  Surely my son is right.  Surely this is a form of heat death, of entropy, as advertising turns in on itself.

I bet against him though. Advertising is too close to the heart of the “free market economy,” to be left by the wayside.  It only flows in one direction:  Always more.

Capitalism is running a fever.  It’s death has been “greatly exaggerated” many times, but it is surely running a fever.

Though a psychology prof for many years, I don’t have a high opinion of psychology experiments.   All the famous experiments of the twentieth century social psychologists, Milgram, Zimbardo, and Asch, show things, that if you ask me, are pretty darn obvious to the naked eye.   And B.F.Skinner’s rats-clicking-for-cheese and half-starved pigeons pecking away was a chilling vision of human existence, a science fiction nightmare.

Now, so far as the culture as a whole seems aware of it, psychology is reduced to neurochemistry.   We are the ghost in the machine once again.  We are pictured brains in pretty colors on a cat scan or some other imagining technique, we are sequences of the four elements that are our DNA. Meanwhile, they can’t really “fix” anything, anyway.  The can have you take a pill that dries your mouth out and you feel like there’s cotton in your head, but that’s about it. And all their “science” doesn’t tell us much of anything of when we love or hate, care about each other or treat each other cruelly.

Novels tell us.  Plays tell us.  Music, too.   They can talk to us about the human condition in ways that matter, ways we can understand.

I got into listening to Dickens in my car.  I drive from place to place quite a bit, so it was a marvelous way for me to “read” books that I had long ago thought I’d never read.  Dostojevski, too.  What an amazing understanding of the human condition, of all its generalities and uniqueness.

But I do hold dear one article that I read about in a newspaper once.  They’d studied a whole bunch of factors so see what contributed to longevity.  They took into account all sorts of factors into account, like exercise and diet.  The thing they found that really correlated with long life was whether you were happy.   I never read anything else on the subject.   I didn’t want to see that somebody else found out that wasn’t true.  Or maybe was only true if you ate your oatmeal or granola every morning.    I realized:  Even it weren’t true, even if happier people didn’t live longer lives, it was certainly better to live a short happy life than a long miserable one.

Just trying to be still for a moment…

yellow bird found the feeder

they fly in couples, he and she, these yellow birds; the bright yellow male and the browner female…

but the zen of it is that of course you can’t try not to try, of course.

Oh well, that’s life.

So I guess I’m not “doing nothing.”  I am writing this.

My yellow birds have flown away.

Haven’t posted much, though I have been constantly writing.   The same themes run through my mind:

What does it mean to be an amateur, who’s an enthusiastic but not necessarily “talented” amateur?

Why are we humans, as a race at this point in our history as a race, so painfully unable to make peace with each other?   Why does it feel so acutely that the clock is ticking against human civilization?

What is community about?   I used to consider myself a “proponent” of community.   But what does that mean?   “Communities” of people can do awful things as well as wonderful ones.   Yet working together as a community seems to me the only way to function as a group or for the society as a whole.   “Socialism” is so tinged with meanings and historical references (anyone can claim to be a Socialist) that it seems we can’t talk even sensibly talk about it.  Certainly not via Twitter, this year’s solution to global communication.

And, for fun and amusement, I write about what’s it’s like being an actor and in community theater.  But community theater is more than a venue.   It is also a “community” in every sense of the word.   So I continue to try to put into words

And then there’s life and death and God and, yes, “being in the moment.”

A lot of different themes that weave together.

Though there’s more to come, a lot of what I have to say is already here.   Take a look around.

Unabashed socialist

Well, I’m guilty about a lot of things, but not about calling myself as socialist, in believing that we humans better goddamn well learn to live together better or none of us or our descendants are going to enjoy life very much, in believing that the only way this can happen is if greed and its partner, mean-spiritedness, cease to be the driving forces of our society.

Is it possible for our (U.S.) society to change?

Well, it’s not like a socialist order, a “from each according to their ability; to each according to their work,” has ever really had a really decent try.  The battle has always been fought on the terms of those who hold the power, so even the bravest socialist attempts, if they weren’t either crushed or co-opted, ultimately became equally vicious, paranoid, self-serving, and, oftentimes, murderous as the systems they were supposed to supersede.

Is it possible to change?  Well, is the current world situation “possible”?  Can it be tolerated, accepted?  The chasms of inequality between peoples, are growing, not diminishing.The constant threat of violence, horrible violence is ever present. A science fiction nightmare of “the state” “knowing” everything about everybody in order to fight “the terrorists” — their polar opposites and their perfect partners — is our reality.

So something else is surely worth continuing to struggle for.

No, Karl Marx didn’t have it all laid out and outlined and all one had to do was read the directions and follow the map.   And Lenin and everyone else who raised the banner of socialism haven’t shown the way to create a more humane social order.   But that doesn’t mean that the goal isn’t right.

We have to learn to live together.   We have to share the Earth’s resources.  We have to learn how to build a society together in a way that makes sense for everyone, not just an extraordinarily privileged few.

We have to try.

The world is changing.   The world is the same.

We hear so frequently that “everything is different”…”since 9/11”…”since the internet”…”since social media.”

Sometimes it does feel like very fundamental changes have taken place — and are taking place — on a global scale.  It is undeniable that dramatic shifts have taken place in some areas:   the ability to communicate across geographic distance and the speed of access to information and the breadth of transmission of information exceed all but the most prescient expectations.

At the same time, there are gaping holes even in the areas that have, apparently, changed the most.   Access to the means of communication is, despite the internet, despite social media, primarily mediated by enormous corporate interests and by state control.   Texting and cell phones may have fueled social change, particularly in some middle eastern dictatorships, yet repression still is far more the order of the day.  Enlightened social policy founded on human rights and freedom from oppression remains the exception, not the rule, even in the most technologically advanced countries.

The abyss between wealth and poverty has not been bridged.  What is perhaps “new” is the degree to which this abyss appears more and more unbridgeable, permanent.   Terrorism has replaced communism as the most fearsome image.   But the nuclear time-bombs in the hands of nation-states, including the United States, are still ticking.   If anything, we are closer now than ever to apocalypse with barely a wisp of hope for progressive change, for change towards a more just, equal, humane social order.

From the first few minutes of the play, Deathtrap by Ira Levin, to the end, we do not know what to expect.

Deathtrap feels like a classic of a genre, but it’s more a genre-buster than an exemplar. Despite it calling itself a” comedy thriller,”  it fits neither genre entirely.   I toys with the thriller genre too much to be a true thriller and opens some interesting questions, despite its comedy.

It is a cascade of mirrors.

As a child, if I stood in a particular place in my father’s bathroom and positioned the mirrored cabinet doors just right, I could see my reflection endlessly repeated.   Deathtrap is like that.  No wonder I like it .