Author: whoisfenton

Someday you will find yourself standing on a sun washed field, a freshening breeze in your face, wishing you had a boomerang in hand just to see if the rumors are true.

Engineers call the boomerang an unbalanced airfoil, with one side flat and one side curved like an airplane wing.  Thrown into the wind the spinning boomerang will arc out and gradually curve.  As it slows it will head back toward you, and if you are lucky will slow to a stop above you and drop into your waiting hand.

Thrown improperly the boomerang will arc up and up until it reaches a great height, where upon it will come accelerating back toward you causing you and your friends to scatter to safety, lest this whirling harbinger of doom hunt you down and deliver a mighty blow.  I got whacked once or twice back in the day, much to the merriment of my brothers.           

Such a simple little machine that lets us ride the winds of physics, all the way home.       

Every once in a while I decide to try some new thing — scuba diving for example.  Thus, around age 40 I decided to see if I could learn to juggle.  After all I reasoned, if all those folks I saw on the teevee could do it, how hard could it be?

Pretty dad-gummed hard as it turned out.  Not as hard as say, solving Maxwell’s equations, but right up there with playing Snookers well or baking a perfect souffle’. 

The best kind of juggling balls are these squarish little bean-bags filled with sand.  I acquired a set from a toy store in Singapore, and they came with a helpful guide oddly called: How To Juggle.  I was on my way!

These little dudes have the right size and weight AND when you drop them they don’t go rolling away to the far corners of the room.  And drop them you will, several hundred times until you finally get the pattern of catch and release.  I eventually got to the point of being able to juggle three balls for a few minutes, much to the delight and amazement of my kids who gazed upon me as a kind of superhero.  “Mission accomplished”, thought ‘The Juggler’ as he melted into the shadows, beanbags at the ready, senses laser-focused on the rise of villainy.

I ultimately climbed all the way to the level of rank amateur.  I would watch experts juggling 4, 5, 6 or 7 things at once.  One guy could do one-handed juggling whilst eating an apple with his free hand.  Folks would juggle knives or flaming torches and some performers could do synchronized juggling, flipping bowling pins back and forth between them, never missing a beat.  

For my next trick, watch me juggle these perfect souffle’s with one hand whilst playing expert snookers with the other, and still having the time to glare menacingly at Maxwell and his pesky equations.

Finally, it would be cool to juggle a certain purple vegetable, and then tell folks that you never missed a BEET!   Bada bing bada boom. 

The physics are clear
Gravity and torque
Bring delight to all
You see it in the faces
Of children young and old.

At least two must play
Singularities insufficient
You await a partner
To begin the game
That lasts as long
As patience asks;
Even forever
If you like.

For simple machines,
We are the seeds,
The universe gives
Forces in balance
Giving and taking
The yin, the yang,
The you, the I.

Now and then I write about the walks my daughter and I share in the woods at Eno River State Park, 4200 acres of protected habitat nestled between Durham and Hillsborough.  These rambles have become a tradition, as we speak in hushed tones in a forest more familiar and vast than an ancient abbey or soaring cathedral.  Here the markings of man upon the earth do not jar the senses; rather, they blend with nature and appear as primal and common as a beaver dam or eagle’s nest.

We see the ruins of an old house back in the woods off the trail and move to investigate.

In its prime we imagine this house full of life, of crops to harvest and children to teach and fences to mend.  Seated high above the Eno River the sound of rushing water echoes as a symphony among the trees.  In the gloaming the creatures of the night must appear, taking their place upon the land while others dream of sunrise. 

We walk in the shadow of years and stand where the front porch used to be, sensing the lives that came before and sharing memories past and dreams to come.  The old house stands as a reminder of the fleeting nature of things and paradoxically, their permanence.  The forest reclaims its own, implacable and kind.  Renewal offers a timeless glimpse of ourselves, alive in all things, then and now.

Yesterday we experienced another one of those events designed to make us feel small, stuck as we are on this beautiful globe as it whirls through the cold vacuum of space.  Yikes, lighten up Mr Spaceman.  Every once in a while the earth, moon and sun line up in such a way as to cast shadows upon one another.  In this most recent Total Lunar Eclipse, the earth cast its shadow upon the moon, and due to our atmosphere refracting the sun’s light, it produced this “sunset” effect on the moon.

That is a picture I took of our moon, standing out on the tarmac just past the witching hour freezing my buns off.  The fact that this image looks like it might be *anything*, like a marble or a slice of pepperoni, is a result of my not being able to force the iPhone camera to take a picture of the night sky.  Could be user error, just sayin’. 

The actual image laid down on my analog visual system was spectacular and you’ll just have to trust me on that — or — you can search the internet and find actual pictures taken by real photographers that look like this;

This is called a blood moon by Captain Obvious and a super blood moon by Herman, God of Heavenly Bodies.  The ‘super’ comes from the fact that the moon was at its closest proximity to earth — its perigee — and thus appeared slightly larger than normal, like the T-rex in your side mirror.  Oh wait, that’s CLOSER.  Dadgum optics <grumble>.

NASA estimates there will be 85 total lunar eclipses this century so there will another sooner or later.  Sky watchers who missed this week’s show will have to wait quite some time before the next total lunar eclipse; on May 26, 2021.  Mark your calendars!

We all understand that time is linear, yet our lunar nature insists on clocks and calendars, even naming the months and days after the gods.  These cyclical notions have become so ingrained in our collective psyche that if we try to consider linear time our circadian brains curl into a fetal position and must be coaxed back to normalcy with cookies and milk.

Back when I first learned computer programming, in between woolly mammoth hunts, I would devise these complex code fragments to figure out how many days elapsed between two dates, or if you started on date A and added 1075 days, what would the new date be?  In other words I was doing crude “calendar math”.  Internally computers store our MM/DD/YYYY style date in a form called the Julian Date, which is a measure of linear time. Day zero starts on January 1, 4713 BC,   Jan 2, 4713 BC is day one, Jan 3 is day two and so on.  Once our normal dates are converted to Julian Dates, then regular math can be used to do calendar arithmetic.  Two routines are needed:

1) Convert our normal date to the corresponding Julian Date

2) Convert a Julian Date back to our normal date

3) Walla! 

For example, today is Jan 1, 2019, or the Julian date of 2458484, as shown below.  Because the Julian date is just a number, the fractional part of days can be represented as a decimal fraction to the right of the decimal point.

Which brings me back cyclically (see what I did there?) to Wednesday.  Odin of Norse Mythology was king of the gods.  In the Anglo-Saxon version of the myth he was also known as Woden, and the mid-week day became known in Old English Wōdnesdæg or Woden’s-day.  Woden’s son was Thor from the Marvel Comic Universe and sure enough Thorsday follows Woden’s-day.

Today, Wednesday is sometimes called “hump-day” (old english: Hmupdae) because it represents the peak of the work-week followed by a blissful slide into the weekend, also known as Sæterdæġ, after Saturn.

And round and round we go…

I decided a while ago to make a series of bucket-list trips to places where I have a connection or history.  The first of these was the long and winding road through the Northeastern states of my youth.  I was accompanied on that journey by my son, my daughter and the great navigator Google who appears when called upon to dispense witty repartee like, “I’m sorry Dave, your estimated arrival time is 3:37 pm”.

Last summer the bucket list took me and the kids to the great city of Baltimore, home of the Inner Harbor, Johns Hopkins Medical Center, the Ravens, the Orioles and the second best crab cakes in the Milky Way galaxy.  The winner of best cakes can be found in the Crab Nebula, a supernova remnant in the constellation of Taurus, because duh.

But this trip was less about crab cakes and all about baseball; in particular my beloved Yankees who were in town to play a four game stint against the mighty Orioles at Camden Yards.  Perhaps a better phrase would be “the once mighty Orioles” because the “O’s” were in the throes of a historically bad season, brought on by an aging roster and swollen payroll.  My daughter and I thought to disguise our loyalties by donning Oriole caps to blend in with the crowd, only to discover that hordes of Yankee fans had driven down from New York, and these hordes made no attempt to adapt to the local colors of the Maryland state bird.

We were there for the weekend and saw a couple of games, two wins by the Yankees as part of a four game sweep.  It is to the Orioles and their fans credit that thirty thousand of the faithful came out to see their team every night.  Win or lose, Baltimore loves her Orioles.

The night is clear and warm and Camden Yards is bright and alive under the high intensity stadium lighting.  The players warm up with the sound of baseball slapping into leather gloves, the hickory crack of bat on ball, the sensory rituals that are so much a part of this game I love.

Alcohol and hordes can be an incendiary combination, and we watched as an overly festive lady was led away by security.  We could hear her arguing unsuccessfully that she is a good person and that everyone likes her, everyone that is except for the Yankees fan and family she had been ‘conversing’ with.  Another fellow arrived late and was surprised to find that his seat was insufficiently wide to, um,  accommodate him.  The usher led him away to, well I’m not sure to where exactly, but hopefully it all worked out in the end.  Bada bing bada boom.

Both my older brothers were avid Orioles fans and we spent decades in good-humored ribbing as our team’s fortunes rose and fell, like the tide.  I lost them both last year within six weeks of one another and truth be told this is why I wanted to come to these games, to be an Orioles fan for a time under a Maryland sky filled with stars.  They would have wanted to be part of the game and times we shared, to still be part of all this. 

And I believe they are.

The Big Island of Hawai’i has two dominant geologic features; the twin volcanic peaks of Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa.   Mauna Loa rises over 6 miles from the ocean floor, making it the tallest mountain on Earth as measured from base to peak.  Yes, even taller than Everest.  I have been to the Big Island many times, and standing on the slopes of Mauna Loa makes you feel inconsequential yet paradoxically vast, because while the mountain itself dwarfs us, our minds can encompass it and understand its history, its story and its song.

But the solar system in which we reside is rife with wonders, some of which we are just beginning to discover.  On Mars there is the great shield volcano Olympus Mons towering 13.7 miles over the martian plains of Tharsis Montes.  Olympus Mons is not the tallest mountain in the solar system (we will get there next), but it is easily the most massive, with a diameter roughly equal to the state of Arizona.  The slope incline of Olympus Mons is so gradual that an observer on the surface of Mars would not be able to see the summit because it is beyond the visible horizon.

Further out from Mars in the Asteroid Belt we find the asteroid Vesta, a chunk of rock orbiting the the minor planet Ceres.  Millions of years ago Vesta suffered an impact which created a crater nearly half the size of Vesta itself,   The rim of the resultant crater is called Rheasilvia Mons, and it holds the current record as the tallest mountain in the solar system at 14.2 miles.  Rheasilvia Mons is not a shield volcano but still, 14.2 MILES.

The universe discloses its wonders to questioning minds.  Imagine what other mountains are out there in our search for understanding the universe and our place in it.

It may not have been an accident that I was born one year after Earl Tupper patented the storage design that would later be known as Tupperware[tm].   I say this because Mr Tupper’s infernal invention has been my personal plasticized Iago, a sinister presence ever-ready to question my amateurish handling of leftovers.  By the way, am I the only person who wishes that Earl Tupper was actually called The Earl of Tupper, a position formally held by the Duke of Styrofoam and a loyal subject to the Baroness of PVC?  Yet another opportunity wasted.

Anyway, I believe I own all the Tupperware that currently exists on the planet.  I say this because all of the horizontal surfaces in our house have at least one piece of Tupperware on them, and in many cases contain multiple instances of bowls cleverly concealed INSIDE ONE ANOTHER, like some hellish mockery of those Russian nesting dolls. 

Now, I know some of you feel that you yourself have Tupperware in your home or place of work, but this is clearly the result of a clerical error at the vast and secretive Tupperware complex located deep in the Carpathian Mountains.  Regardless, the Tupperware is mine.

At this time, I would like to suggest a major revision to the concept of the Tupperware Party and its ill-fated companion, the Tupperware Jubilee.  I am thinking of naming it The Great Tupperware Recall Event, where participants bring their (my) Tupperware and assemble it into an enormous shimmering mountain visible from space.  I haven’t worked out the next steps but it will be epic.

The forest can be a dark place, blocking out the sun, capturing the light high in the canopy where only flying things bear witness.  It is easy to let our imaginations run wild and create any number of horrifying fictions of what entities rest down there on the forest floor, ready to sense our fear and lurch forward with the heavy rasp of cartilage on stone. 

It is into this grim appointment that we come across a stand of birch trees, white and stately and gleaming with an otherworldly glow.   

Of all the trees in the spreading wood I find the birch to be one the most beautiful, an oasis of light exposing our fears as fantasy.   The birch stands out like a visitor to the forest, something artificial placed there by forces outside our understanding.

Long ago, after we emerged from the sea, we lived our lives on the grasslands and in the trees of the forest.  I wonder if those memories have followed us, unwitting companions whispering into the quiet air the story of our long and curious journey.