talix18:
I’m in a “Sit still and WAIT” period. Either I’m suppressing whatever I might have to say or I’m deliberately not looking too closely at each passing day - the unexamined time will pass more quickly? When in reality the opposite is true - the busier I am, the more engaged, the faster time will fly. How and to what shall I turn my attention when the only thing it wants to stick to says “wait”?
In The Snow Leopard there is a passage where the author comes to a high point in the trail at a low point in the expedition. Delays due to bad weather and the complicated sociopolitics of the lowland Nepalis have delayed them to the point where they fear the monsoonal snows will block their passage across the Himalaya. At this point, on a muddy, drizzly track, something compels the author to stop at a clearing, wait, and look north. After a considerable wait a gap in the clouds comes and reveals the whole crest of the Dhaulagiri range, 20,000 feet high, glowing like diamonds in the low sun. If he’d not heeded the call to wait, he would have been back in the trees and missed the whole thing.
So, um, look north. Metaphorically, of course.
… saying “Gesundheit!” when someone informs me that Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn has died.
(homage á xkcd)
I thought to myself, “… how many Hasselblads are left behind on the lunar surface?” … to Google! Which led me straight to the source (in Sweden), then the answer (12), and a gallery of cameras that had made the trip. Including this one, which flew on Apollo 8, Christmas 1968 (and returned):
You know what camera that is? Yes. That is the camera that took THIS PICTURE:
“And God said, Let the waters under the heavens be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so.
And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas: and God saw that it was good.”
(http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/image/apollo8_xmas.mov)
