Happy National Pi Day.........................

Once in a lifetime:  3.14.15.............................................

3.141592653589793238462643383279502884197169399375105820974944592307816406286208998628034825342117067982148086513282306647093844609550582231725359408128481117450284102701938521105559644622948954930381964428810975665933446128475648233786783165271201909145648566923460348610454326648213393607260249141273724587006606315588174881520920962829254091715364367892590360011330530548820466521384146951941511609433057270365759591953092186117381932611793105118548074462379962749567351885752724891227938183011949129833673362440656643086021394946395224737190702179860943702770539217176293176752384674818467669405132000568127145263560827785771342757789609173637178721468440901224953430146549585371050792279689258923542019956112129021960864034418159813629774771309960518707211349999998372978049951059731732816096318595 and so on and so forth.

Leave the lights on....................................

Edward Bear.......................................................The Last Song

Turns......................................

Let go and you snare God.  But letting God go too
Is more than any but the rarest man can do.

Sin is no more than this;  that a man turns his head
away from God, and looks towards death instead.

Friend, you have read enough.  If you desire still more
Then be the poem yourself, and all that it stands for.

-Angelus Silesius, as translated and excerpted from The Cherubic Wanderer

What did you say.....................................?

For a minute there I thought you said the Vatican was calling for the use of force against ISIS.  Holy Sermon on the Mount, Batman.

Have I ever told you..............................

......................................that I'm a fan of Robert Downey Jr.?

more on Downey here

Fifty years ago........................................

Castaways..............................................................Liar Liar

Color me doubtful............................

The headline reads:   How Uber’s Autonomous Cars Will Destroy 10 Million Jobs And Reshape The Economy by 2025.   

Full post is here.  A few cherry-picked quotes here::

The effects of the autonomous car movement will be staggering. PricewaterhouseCoopers predicts that the number of vehicles on the road will be reduced by 99%, estimating that the fleet will fall from 245 million to just 2.4 million vehicles.17

Ancillary industries such as the $198 billion automobile insurance market,18 $98 billion automotive finance market,19 $100 billion parking industry,20 and the $300 billion automotive aftermarket21 will collapse as demand for their services evaporates. We will see the obsolescence of rental car companies, public transportation systems, and, good riddance, parking and speeding tickets. 

The environmental impact of autonomous cars has the potential to reverse the trend of global warming and drastically reduce our dependence on fossil fuels. Passenger cars, SUVs, pickup trucks, and minivans account for 17.6% of greenhouse gas emissions26 – a 90% reduction of vehicles in operation would reduce our overall emissions by 15.9%. As most autonomous cars are likely to be electric, we would virtually eliminate the 134 billion of gasoline used each year in the US alone.

Like I said, color me doubtful.

Within.....................................

All Heaven is within thee, Man,
And all of Hell within thy heart:
What thou dost choose and will to have,
That hast thou wheresoe'er thou art.

All thou wouldst have lies now within thee, every whit
'Tis thine—so long as thou dost never strive for it.

Heaven is within thee. Stay!  Why runn'st thou here and there? Thou seekest God in vain seekest thou Him elsewhere.

Travel within thyself! The Stone Philosophers with wisest arts Have vainly sought, cannot be found By travelling in foreign parts. Christian, dost thou demand to know Where God hath set His Throne? Even there within thyself, where He Gives birth to thee, His Son. -Angelus Silesius

Thought I ought to post this.....................

.............while it still could be construed as amusing:

Maybe some context would be useful for our younger readers.  The film clip below was produced by the Federal Government to teach kids to "duck and cover" in case of a nearby nuclear explosion.




It was a very different time.  I can remember doing this drill in the second grade:

original gif courtesy of Gerard

Opening paragraphs................................

      She was tall and lanky and wore an expensive white summer suit with a complementary cream-colored shoulder bag and jet-black wraparound fuck-you sunglasses.  Her ash blond hair touched her shoulders.
-John Sanford, The Fools Run

........I think it is when somebody is sick..............

Tom Clay...............................What The World Needs Now

Seem like we did this last month.............

What did Arkansas ever do to him...............?

Friend Bilbo posts the "Arkansas Engineering Exam."  With a great deal of confidence, I believe I could correctly answer only one of the ten questions.  Had fun pondering them though. Your results may vary.

Opening paragraphs................................

     For the most wild yet most homely narrative which I am about to pen, I neither expect nor solicit belief.  Mad indeed would I be to expect it, in a case where my very senses reject their own evidence.  Yet, mad am I not - and very surely I do not dream.  But to-morrow I die, and to-day I would unburden my soul.  My immediate purpose is to place before the world, plainly, succinctly, and without comment, a series of household events.  In their consequences, these events have terrified - have tortured - have destroyed me.  Yet I will not attempt to expound them.  To me, the have presented little but horror - to many they will seem less terrible than barroques.  Hereafter, perhaps, some intellect may be found which will reduce my phantasm to the commonplace - some intellect more calm, more logical, and far less excitable than my own, which will perceive, in the circumstances I detail with awe, nothing more than the ordinary succession of very natural causes and effects.
-Edgar Allan Poe,  The Black Cat

You might think this is a close-up snap-shot of.......

......................Kurt's grilling-ready charcoal, but actually it is a photo of the rarely-seen center of our very own Milky Way galaxy:

People, can you get your mind around the notion that, according to scientists' estimates, there are 100 billion galaxies in the observable universe - and,  "the Milky Way is a barred spiral galaxy some 100,000–120,000 light-years in diameter which contains 100–400 billion stars. It may contain at least as many planets as well."?  The mind reels.

larger photo and description is here

Fifty years ago......................................

Jackie DeShannon.........What The World Needs Now Is Love

Spring is in the air................................

..........................................My Sweetie is forcing the forsythia.

Uh-oh.........................................

" ... generally speaking, when you look at the 20th century, it’s the era of the masses, mass politics, mass economics. Every human being has value, has political, economic, and military value, simply because he or she is a human being, and this goes back to the structures of the military and of the economy, where every human being is valuable as a soldier in the trenches and as a worker in the factory.

"But in the 21st century, there is a good chance that most humans will lose, they are losing, their military and economic value. This is true for the military, it’s done, it’s over. The age of the masses is over."

-as excerpted from here.

Denouement........................................

as borrowed from the Journal of a Nobody

Since this is the second day in a row that the word denouement has appeared in this blog, thought this might be helpful:

via

Me neither..............................

via