Inconceivable

This post will also be found in Tehachapi's The Loop Newspaper.  

Too often when people don't understand something they turn to something magical as an explanation. “Proof” by personal incredulity is pretty common. Those missing socks... Lawn gnomes hiding in my closet are stealing them. Some think that the pyramids in Egypt were too much for such “primitive” people to create. Therefore ancient astronauts.

snowplant

snowplant a photo by mathnerd on Flickr.

over the moon
reflecting off granite walls
snowplant pushing up
vampire red
sucking the life's blood
of the pine roots
at the mercy
of Spring

Magic in the Gaps

 This post will also be found in Tehachapi's The Loop Newspaper. 

I recently saw a magic show. Some of the illusions and tricks were very good. (Congratulations Michael.) Now it is a quirk of our minds to find “magic” in things we don't understand. And we often grab on to whatever explanation comes first. Especially with lucky “charms”.

Chalcedony

On a recent trip out to the desert near Boron, a group of us went out collecting rocks.

The area we were at was know for its chalcedony (which is pronounced something like kal-sed-a-nee). This is actually the name of a large family of rocks and minerals including agates and jasper. But the form that is generally just called chalcedony is a bluish-grey quartzy rock.

The crystals in chalcedony are typically very small. The composition is mainly silica (silicon dioxide), while the colors come from other chemicals in the stone.

How's the (Space) Weather?

 This post will also be found in Tehachapi's The Loop Newspaper.

After a long period where the Sun was fairly inactive, the number of sunspots is up to 63. With one, called 1158 of huge size. (Check out http://spaceweather.com/ to keep up-to-date on what's going on out in space.) This one sunspot is about 62,000 miles across. And the earth is about 8,000 miles across at the Equator. So we could line up about 8 Earths across this sunspot.

Cassiopeia & Cepheus

A couple other constellations are Cassiopeia and Cepheus. The Queen and the King.  I can find Cassiopeia since it looks like a "W" and is found on the other side of Polaris from the Big Dipper. Cepheus is then to the right of Cassiopeia.



Since these are fairly near Polaris, they are in the North and due to the light pollution at my house being worst in that direction, I can't always see these constellations.

Making Faces

This post will also be found in Tehachapi's The Loop newspaper.

I recall being told as a child that if I kept making that face, my face would freeze that way. Well, I've now seen it happen.

In the current Tehachapi Community Theatre (TCT) production of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, there was a need to have bust made of one of the cast, Monica Nadon as Domina. After a little research on the Internet, what can't you learn there (of course it's sometimes wrong), I found a method to do lifecasting. Which is making a mold from a living subject to turn into a sculpture.