Category: photog’s Corner

Here you will find the stuff that shouldn’t be mixed in the other categories but interest me. caveat emptor.

31JUL2024 – The Curse Has Come upon Me.  Well Pretty Soon Anyway.

photog Current Events, Life in Dunwich, photog's Corner , ,
The First Selectman Taking a Stroll

A terrible fate is creeping up on me.  Periodically, First Selectman Cthulhu has to have his external parasites burned off by soaking in a lake-sized vat of boiling sulfuric acid.  It’s uneventful but a very long process that requires someone to supervise.  From next Monday until the Wednesday of the following week I will be in a form of purgatory.  Isolated from the site and forced to endure almost unimaginable tedium I shall not be able to write my posts under my normal conditions.  Whatever output I produce will be stilted, uninspired and generated in a state of exhaustion and mental duress.  Come to think of it, you may not notice the difference at all.  But undoubtedly, the word count will go way down.  I should be able to load up the Pictures of the Day and the Quotes of the Day this weekend.  But beyond that everything will be hit and miss.

Like some kind of latter-day Prometheus bound with cruel spikes driven through my immortal flesh into the adamantine stone beneath and with a cruel eagle constantly devouring my ever-regenerating liver, I will endure all this uncomplainingly knowing that I do it for the good of all mankind, or at least for the good of the MAGA Republicans.  Maybe Trump can visit me on my mountain crag and speak words of encouragement and snide insults at the eagle.  If he has the time.

If any of you have any content that you want posted feel free to e-mail it to me and I’ll make sure to publish it as a way to keep the readers happy.  When the time of my internment is through, I shall return renewed and rededicated to the proposition that all internet links are created unequal.  That they are endowed by their content creators with varying quality based on the qualities of these creators themselves and on how hard they are willing to work to make the content entertaining.

As the hours slowly pass during my captivity I’ll try to imagine what it will be like when President Kamala Harris is the commander in chief of this formerly great nation.  I imagine how she will take the rostrum in the House of Representatives and give the State of the Union address and we’ll all applaud as she describes the glories of her electric yellow school bus bill.  This bill will require the confiscation of all private, gasoline powered automobiles and mandate the use of buses for all travel.  With a $40 trillion dollar price tag it will be the boldest and most expensive bill ever passed and it will certainly convert us into a banana republic in the image of Venezuela.

I was just listening to Trump at one of his rallies riffing on what a loser Kamala Harris is.  It was funny.  I guess I’ve missed his rally patter.  It really is quite hilarious the way he describes her failure as “border czar” and her statements on defunding the police during the Summer of Floyd.  And his equally harsh mockery of Biden is quite amusing.  I think Trump is wise to highlight the fact that Kamala kept Joe Biden’s condition as a secret from the country.  That is indeed a damning accusation against someone trying to gain the trust of the country while running for the office of president.

Today is the last day of July and I consider it the end of New England Summer.  I’ve read that measurable snowfall has been recorded in every month of the year except for July in southern New England.  If that is so then August is early winter.  I have already begun preparing for it.  I’ll begin prepping the snowblower and break out the snow shovels.  I may wait a few weeks before wearing thermal underwear but it’s almost time.  Turkey deep fried on the barbecue for Labor Day?  We’ll see.

What Makes a Good Story?

photog Current Events, Literature, My Fiction, OCF, photog's Corner

An eight-hundred-page book tells the story of a forty-inch-tall man traveling across a semi-mythical world to throw a ring into a volcano.  A famous play is the story of an overly proud king disowning his only loving child for not flattering him and then paying the price for it.  A three-thousand-year-old poem tells the story of a proud warrior being dishonored by a foolish king and the havoc that ensues in a famous war that includes gods and goddesses acting decidedly human.  A boy saves a princess with the help of a space pirate and a mystical monk long, long ago in a galaxy far, far away.  Two almost god-like races, one devoted to peace and truth and the other consumed by war and evil fight a war of extermination in the Milky Way galaxy over the course of billions of years.  A movie tells the story of seven samurai or seven cowboys agreeing to save a town from bandits with glory as the only reward.  A hen-pecked New Jersey grocery store owner sells everything he owns and travels 3,000 miles to California to buy an orange ranch that doesn’t have any oranges on it.  A man drags his wife and young son two thousand miles to an isolated hotel in the Rocky Mountains where they will all be the playthings of ghosts who want to add them to the spectral residents.

What do all of these stories have in common?  Well, almost nothing.  Each of them is a fairly popular work of fiction.  But otherwise, they’re all over the map in terms of plot, characters, genre and the societies they represent.  But what makes them successful stories is their ability to draw the reader (or viewer) into their worlds and spark human empathy.  It’s as simple as that.

We recognize Frodo’s humanity and cheer him on as he pits his tiny strength against titanic forces of evil.  We shake our heads at the pig-headed antics of Achilles and Agamemnon but we nod our heads at the recognition that war will take good men like Hector and make his wife a widow and his son an orphan.  We thrill to the heroics of a small band of warriors pitting their strength and skill against a small army of bandits, knowing full well that most of them will die in the battle.  We laugh at and at the same time see ourselves in a man constantly belittled and frustrated by everyone around him including his overbearing wife and annoying children who then stubbornly heads down the road to ruin only to be saved by fortune and his own indestructible sense that eventually it will have to be his turn.

So, what is the most important aspect?  Plot or character?  I used to think plot.  After all, we all like the quest and the action scenes and all the other hooks that draw us into the story.  But as I get older, I realize that if the characters are mere ciphers, then the hold thing devolves into a video game.  And it can be fun and exciting but on reflection it feels sort of meaningless.  Does it really matter how many monsters he fights if you don’t believe the hero is real?

So that’s the trick for the author.  Somehow you have to invest your heroes and villains with enough humanity to make your reader (or viewer) care.  Breathing life into a stream of words takes a bit of doing.  Usually, you have to take something from your own experience to make it seem real.  But when it’s done right it’s the rewarding part of writing.  Self-satisfaction.

Father’s Day – 2024 – Crashing Plaster and Pancakes

photog Current Events, Humor, Life in Dunwich, OCF, photog's Corner, Reclaiming the Family , ,

And the rolling year has once again brought us back to that most equivocal of fake holidays, “Father’s Day.”  When I say fake, I mean that it’s a manufactured occasion that has no long history of celebration.  Its equivocal nature is owed to the mixed feelings that everyone in a family feels about dear old Dad.  Well, at least that’s my own point of view.

And this is based on my own father and the way he raised his six sons.  Basically, it was like some kind of anthropological experiment that was started out with the best of intentions but then went horribly off the rails and eventually completely overwhelmed the investigators and had to be recast as a cautionary tale for all involved.

A more beleaguered man has never walked the face of the Earth.  He was always outnumbered, outgunned, behind the times, short of resources and out of patience.  I don’t remember him getting through a single day in that house without screaming and hollering at several or all of us.  We were terrible kids.

We broke everything he owned.  We lost every tool he possessed and we caused at least one disaster a week.  His house was perpetually on the edge of crumbling into something resembling the debris piles seen in old footage of London after the Blitz.  When leaks would develop in the house’s flat roof his solution was to use a hand drill on the ceiling to direct the leak and put a bucket under it.  His idea was that by tapping the leak it would prevent it from soaking the whole plaster ceiling and have it collapse onto us while we were sleeping.

He had a steam heat system which perpetually leaked at all of the radiators.  And he battled this problem by attempting to use string and grease to seal the threads of the pipe joints.  But the threads were so stripped that this never accomplished much of anything.  But he soldiered on with the hope that one day he’d catch up with his expenses and have a plumber come in and replace it all.  Finally, the ceiling in the living room underneath the leakiest radiator on the second floor collapsed.  All the plaster crashed down on the living room floor and exposed the wooden laths in the ceiling.  One of my younger brothers was overjoyed and he said aloud, “This will finally force him to fix the ceiling once and for all.”  Well, no.  That ceiling remained in that condition until after my father’s death a number of years later.

So, my example of fatherhood was definitely idiosyncratic.  And as for Father’s Day, if my father could have had his wish on that day, it would have been to lock us all out of the house for the whole day and leave him alone to watch baseball, horse racing and boxing on his tiny, pathetic, black and white, constantly drifting television set.  But that was an impossibility.  We were an omnipresent reminder of his status as Dad.

So, on Father’s Day he often fell back on his only real domestic skill.  He could make pancakes and French toast by the imperial ton.  And in that house, he had to.  He bought the cheapest pancake mix and syrup he could find in bulk containers.  I always imagined that he got it from war surplus.  And when pancake day arrived, he’d cover all the burners on the stove with griddles and he would cook and we would eat stacks of pancakes until we couldn’t move.  It was probably the high point of our lives together.  For that brief time, we were all happy simultaneously and we were all well fed which rarely otherwise occurred.

So maybe Father’s Day should be like that.  A day when Dad should find something he knows he can do that makes the whole family admit that he’s good for something other than paying the bills.  Anyway, it’s a thought.

Camera Girl Grows Up

photog Current Events, Life in Dunwich, OCF, photog's Corner , ,

Camera Girl is acknowledged across the multi-verse as the worst dog trainer of all time.  Whereas children and grandchildren respond to and obey her enlightened methods of child rearing, her dogs on the other hand are completely wild.  This happens because she thinks dogs are perpetually infants.  And so, she coddles them and allows them to walk all over her and run amok.  Many years ago, we had our first German Shorthaired Pointer, Max.  He was a magnificent specimen of a very large GSP and I thought he was fairly well-behaved.  But one weekend I come home to find my youngest daughter standing on the couch because the dog had taken her socks while she was putting them on and was growling whenever someone came near them.

So, I went to get the socks from Max and he bit me.  I was shocked.  I asked Camera Girl, “When did this start?”  She looked sheepish and said since he’d started to mature, he had been getting aggressive.  I guess I’d been busy over the last six months and hadn’t spent any time training Max.  But now we were in a bad situation.  I didn’t want to lose the dog but I couldn’t have a large strong dog that might bite my kids.  So being a lunatic I put on a pair of cowhide gloves and winter coat and attacked Max.  I went for the socks and he went for me.  I grabbed him around the neck and threw him to the floor and pinned him.  Then I growled like a lunatic and bit him on the throat.  And I never had another bit of trouble from that dog again.  From that point on he worked for me.

Over the years Camera Girl has improved slightly.  But depending on the temperament of the dogs, she’s done anywhere from fairly well to really poor at training them.  Our latest pup is a female basset hound and she is feisty.  And she likes to chew on things, including me.  So, I started to follow Camera Girl when she was “training” Penny.  And of course, the dog was running the show.  She had this short legged chunky hound running around causing chaos and the only attempt at training was baby talk admonishments. So, I demanded that we get her straightened out.  Now luckily there have been great strides taken in dog training since my days of biting Max on the throat.

One training aid is a shock collar.  Well, actually it’s a combination buzzer/shocker.  Camera Girl is way too tender-hearted to shock the dogs.  But I’ve finally demanded that she start using the buzzer and use it consistently to get Penny to stop biting and jumping up.  This is actually also for her own good.  Basset hounds are very prone to hurting their backs and jumping up is a good way for them to do that.

And what do you know?  After about two weeks of consistent training the absurd puppy is finally, finally beginning to behave.  She hasn’t even tried to chew on my face once today.  And I’m overjoyed.  I think Camera Girl is finally beginning to grow up.  Any day now I’ll be comfortable enough to finally throw that ratty coat and gloves away once and for all.  And it’s a good thing.  I think next time the dog would win.

The Safety Dance – Part 1

photog My Fiction, photog's Corner ,

The man stood alone on the subway platform at ten thirty in the morning and considered where his life was going.  He had just been laid off at the office and now was trying to work out how he was going to break the news to his wife.  She was home with their three small children and the dog and had been hoping that the Christmas bonus he had been expecting today would pay for them to move to an apartment in a nicer town where the schools were decent.

Now all of that was in the wind and he’d have to start looking for a job in a not-so-great economy with a not-so-great resume to sell.  Suddenly getting home seemed like a really bad idea.  He looked behind him at the cardboard box sitting on the bench.  There were some books, a coffee mug, some desk toys and a few papers that his boss had watched him take and which were considered “non-proprietary.”  No company secrets sneaking out the door, not even a Swingline stapler.  Suddenly looking at this pathetic flotsam representing five years of his life, he picked up the box and dumped it in the nearest trash barrel.  The coffee mug made a satisfying tinkling sound as it smashed against the metal barrel.

And just like that he felt considerably better.  He opened up his brief case and started lightening the load.  He got rid of anything he didn’t think would ever be of any use in the afterlife of corporate separation.  Most satisfying, he ripped apart his safety lanyard with its annoying multi-colored slogan about reducing risk to zero.  That seemed the most pathetic part of the corporate culture that he had had to endure at work.  How exactly had the never-ending safety dance protected him from the danger of losing his job.  He had to admit that the culture had saved him from earthquakes, lightning and tornadoes but it had been useless against unemployment.  He stopped for a second when he found the free roast beef card from the company cafeteria.  He had nine out of the ten spots stamped.  He was a week away from the free sandwich.  He had to admit that one burned.  But he chucked it away too.  There was nothing left in the brief case so for good measure he chucked that too.  Now he felt giddy.

He walked up out of the subway station into the cold, bright light of a December morning in Manhattan and thought, “Okay, Odysseus, now what?  Instinctively, he started walking uptown.  By noon he realized he wanted a cup of coffee and a snack so he stopped at a coffee shop and bought a very overpriced coffee and doughnut and sat near the front window and looked out at the city.  He was in the middle of a block that was mostly expensive five story walk-ups.  Remarkably there weren’t any homeless tents on the sidewalk so the illusion of pre-COVID, pre-George Floyd New York was almost perfect.  As he drank his coffee and ate his doughnut a feeling of happiness washed over him.  But when the snack was finished, he realized that it was time to decide how this day would end on a better note.  He needed a path forward.

He took out his phone and looking in his contacts he saw the name of a guy he worked with at the job before this one.  They had been friendly but the somewhat odd personality of this guy had always kept things a little off.  But he had been pretty well connected.  They both were inside-sales guys for large industrial equipment manufacturers and he had heard the guy was doing alright.  So, he called him up and heard, “Jim!  Wow, I haven’t thought about you in a million years.  What’s up?”

“Dave, my boss gave me the boot today.  I’m looking for any leads for something right away.”  The speaker went silent for a few seconds and then, “You know, it’s a damn funny thing.  I know you’re a local boy and never set foot outside the northeast but there’s a very nice opening I just heard of in Missouri that is probably right up your alley.”

Now it was Jim’s turn to go quiet.  Missouri, how the hell was he supposed to move there?  He didn’t know anything about living outside of New York and he didn’t want to try.  But he decided not to shoot it down right away, “Well, I guess I’d like to hear a little more about it.”

Now Dave’s voice sounded a little annoyed, “You know this is a pretty sweet deal.  I wouldn’t wait too long before coming in.  Can you meet for lunch tomorrow?  I’ll bring along the hiring manager and you can impress him with your sparkling wit.”  Deciding quickly, Jim said, “I’ll be there.  Where should we meet?”

…………

Mowing Your Problems Away

photog Current Events, Life in Dunwich, OCF, photog's Corner ,

A few weeks ago I was introduced to the term “no mow May.”  Apparently by not mowing the lawn in May there is a theory that we allow all of the pollinating insects to do their thing and Gaia will be happier and not allow volcanoes and asteroids to kill us all.

Now everyone on this site knows of my undying allegiance to the Green Revolution.  I’ve had the “global warming hockey stick graph tattooed on my eyeballs so that I’m constantly thinking about how much danger the planet is in.  So of course, I sacrificed all other considerations and refrained from mowing the lawn.

Well, lawn would be a misnomer.  My neighbors despise me for the sheer tonnage of dandelions in my fields.  They accuse me of robbing them of the perfect lawns they lust for.  I am, in a word, a heretic against the religion of lawn care.  But be that as it may I held out all May.  And as they drove by my property and the grass and weeds got taller and taller I could feel their hate growing and the dark side of the force becoming stronger and stronger.  But I would walk about unconcerned, at play in the fields of the Lord, luxuriating in the waist high sea of grass and weeds, taking macro shots of bugs and the grass itself and whatever else struck my fancy in my fantasy of a post-Leftist Earth.

But yesterday was May 31st and Camera Girl confronted me and reminded me of that fact.  And she had that wifely look on that I could tell meant that she would brook no nonsense.  And noticing it I said, “Oh, June already, how time flies!  Well, thank goodness it’s stopped raining.  I’ve been worried I’d never be able to get out there!”

So yesterday I hooked up the ride-on mower to a battery charger and got out my new ear protection and safety glasses and gloves and gathered up the various debris that was scattered all over the property and checked under the exceptionally long grass around places where there could be rabbits, foxes and other varmints hiding and collected all the large rocks, tennis balls and dog toys that Camera Girl hurls around the yard for the canine crew.

And this morning bright and early at 11 am I went outside and began the ordeal.  Yikes!  No mow May is a tricky calculation.  Sure, it bought me a couple of weeks of sloth but what a wreck.  I ended up recutting about a third of it and the cleanup was considerable.

Remarkably, Camera Girl was so impressed by the improvement that she seemed to forget that I was the cause of it looking so awful in the first place and I was treated as the conquering hero.  At late snack there was a slice of some kind of pastry, sort of like a Danish but less doughy, that I didn’t even know was in the house.  It was served with a mug of coffee just the way I like it and all was sweetness and light.  Women are extremely unpredictable creatures.  They get stirred up about things that we don’t even notice.  And we almost never know whether it will be in our favor or not.  But as has been observed by greater minds than mine, they are the only source for producing more human beings that we have so far discovered.  So, there we are.

There’s a lot to be said for cutting the grass.  A man can lose himself for a few hours and he can find his mind wandering in and around a lot of problems that are somewhere in the back of his mind.  Alternatively, he can also sometimes forget his problems for a little while.  Today was one of those day.  I turned off the 2024 election and all the rest of the madness for a few hours and damned if I don’t feel a lot better.

Bridging the Gap

photog Current Events, Life in Dunwich, photog's Corner ,

The summer doldrums have officially begun.  Until Labor Day the only interesting news will consist of Donald Trump being prosecuted, persecuted or whatever the Left wants to call their absurd gestapo action in multiple jurisdictions.  So, we’ll have to interest ourselves in “other things” until then.

And that is what I’m scratching my head over.  Book reviews, movies, television, plays.  Science, music, religion.  I’ll have to widen my net to capture things that normal humans interest themselves in.  And that’s all to the good.

This weekend we will be hosting some of the Minions.  Their parents will pull up to the top of the driveway, toss them out of the vehicle in duffel bags, hit the horn and speed away into the night hoping for the best.  Camera Girl has cooked mass quantities of pasta sauce, meatballs and sausage and thereafter imperial tons of spaghetti will be cooked and consumed.

She has procured from various local libraries DVD’s featuring questionable cartoon characters from a selection of eras ranging all the way back to the 1970s.  I have begged for a boycott on any further screenings of Scooby Doo and his associates.  The answer I received was noncommittal.

The pool will be “opened” this weekend but I expect that for the first week or two the water will be suboptimal.  Specifically, it will be opaque and green.  I tried to sell Camera Girl on a trip to the regional zoo.  She shot this idea down claiming kids don’t like zoos.  Hmmm.  Maybe she’s right.  Maybe we’ll go the reptile zoo instead.  I know kids like reptiles.

We’ll probably have a baseball catch one of the days but I’m hoping we can get in some time at the pool table.  I think a good sense of geometry and dynamics is useful for any growing boy.  Plus, it’s been pretty warm for the last few days and the basement tends to be cooler.

It’s time to find out if the Minions are already slaves to their electronic devices.  As far as I know these younger descendants aren’t yet tethered to smartphone entertainment devices.  But I’d also like to cut back on the television time too.  I’ll make it the long weekend objective to try and bridge the multigenerational gap using non-electronic media.  I might even introduce them to the concept of human speech as a means of communication and entertainment.  I might even (shudder!) bring down a book from the shelf and read aloud.  Hopefully it won’t have the local constabulary at my doorstep demanding equal time for whatever woke PBS kid’s series is currently topical; Gender Fluid Jenny or Fern Affirmed or whoever.

I think I’ll start the weekend with a seminar on geographic and demographic topics in Middle Earth.  I’ll skip Beleriand at this time.  The Silmarillion is too depressing for the young ones. I’ll highlight various topics with video presentations from Peter Jackson’s motion pictures.  I’ll start with the Numenorean kingdoms of Arnor and Gondor and use this as a jumping off point on the branches of the royal family.  Of course, there could be extra points for anyone who can specifically identify how many generations separate Elrond and his multi-great nephew Aragorn.

Well, let’s see if I can freehand a map of Middle Earth.  As me old gaffer always said, “You’re nowt but a ninnyhammer, photog!”

The Dunwich Budget

photog Current Events, Life in Dunwich, photog's Corner , ,
Farmer Cthulhu in His Fields

Here in Dunwich we had our town budget meeting and the Finance Committee asked for a 10 percent increase and there was an uproar.  The Bishops and the Whateleys demanded that First Selectman Cthulhu go into closed session with them and provide an itemized list of all the increases in expenditures.  At the end of the session the First Selectman exited the chamber.  When asked by the committee if all demands had been satisfied, he belched out a dark viscous cloud and declared, “Sure, at least until dinner anyway.  I’m always hungry an hour after Whateley.”

During the next session a group of concerned Dunwichians demanded that alternative revenue raising methods be provided.  Cthulhu suggested a 0.001% head tax be levied.  This low rate excited many of the concerned group and they asked what details would still have to be worked out if this tax was provisionally approved.  The First Selectman confided, “Well we’ll have to figure out how to decide which heads to harvest.  I favor going blind fold and just biting off whatever heads come within my grasp until I’ve reached the agreed upon total.  That seems fairest.”  It was unanimously decided to shelve that proposal indefinitely in favor of the 10% tax increase.

Democracy in action in Dunwich is a frightening but somehow clarifying process.  As opposed to other less mythic New England towns Dunwich cuts through the pretense of egalitarianism and nakedly reveals the precise power dynamic between Great Old Ones and anyone small enough to be engulfed, chewed and swallowed by their cephalopodic maws.

But to be fair, it’s not as if Americans aren’t equally at the mercy of their government.  Paying taxes and not receiving services like police protection, safe drugs, secure borders and honest representation in Washington are standard operating procedure since at least the Obama administration.

Surely, no one is surprised anymore that no balanced budget is ever negotiated, approved and administered.  Since Obama’s time continuing expenditure resolutions and multi-trillion-dollar omnibus boondoggles are the new normal.  I wonder if it is even possible to get a balanced budget enacted.  Would the administrative state just shrug it off and print more money and chalk it up to the need for “clandestine intelligence programs” above the public’s pay grade to know or even question?  I have to confess I’m curious what in the world Trump will do if he gets back into the White House.  It’s rather like being one of the fifth century Westen Roman emperors.  You have to go through the motions of giving orders to the generals but outside your window you can see the Goths and the Vandals carrying off the last of the treasury.

This beyond reckless deficit spending will eventually lead to collapse.  It has to.  Really the only question I have is whether there is a plan to handle the collapse or will the rats just desert the sinking ship for greener pastures.  Will the Obamas flee Martha’s Vineyard for New Zealand or Singapore?

Well, at least locally, the budget process is carefully controlled and all due respect is provided to the voters.  First Selectman Cthulhu is also the ballot clerk at the budget vote.  Every registered voter receives one ballot and casts it proudly.  And we’re proud of our innovations in local government.  By pre-printing the yes oval already filled in we have saved hundreds of dollars over the last few years in the cost of pens and markers.  And that way Cthulhu doesn’t have to eat any “no” voters.  That’s progress!

Turtles All the Way Down

photog Current Events, photog's Corner, Religion, Science , ,

Over the last few months, I have been reading and listening to a bunch of physics.  Particle physics and cosmology.  The micro and the macro of the attempt to understand the universe.  Limitless vistas of space with super clusters of galaxies and more exotic objects that stretch back to the alleged Big Bang.  And inside the proton are the ephemeral quarks and gluons flashing in and out of existence in (I kid you not) a yoctosecond.

And all of this hyperactivity of nothingness just to make it possible for me to push on the keys of my laptop to write this post.  All of those electrons and quarks following all these conflicting forces at various distances; the strong force, weak force, electro-magnetic force and gravity just so that reality can be felt and tasted.  All of these incredibly complex concepts and the mathematics that tries to describe it.  And the weirdness of quantum mechanics and its inherent and explicit ruling out of determinism.  All of this and how far we’ve come from Galileo and Newton.  And all we’ve achieved in technology.

And yet…

What are quarks made of?  What are gluons made of?  What happened five minutes before the Big Bang?  What happens five minutes after the End of the Universe?

There is no bottom.  There is no top.  There is no start.  There is no finish.

The human mind cannot encompass the infinite.  If we find something beneath quarks, I am sure there will be something under that.  And when the successor to the James Webb Space Telescope is put into service in twenty years at a cost of $100 billion or so I’m sure it will show us even further wonders that defy our ability to explain.  And so will the telescope after that.

And as the man said, “Not that there’s anything wrong with that.”  But that’s the part you have to wrap your head around.  Thinking that scientists have the ultimate truth is a misnomer.  All they have is the latest and greatest explanation as to how things work.

But they’ll never be able to tell you why you’re here or why you should care.  Each of us has to do that all by ourselves.

It’s remarkable.  Five hundred years after the Renaissance put us on the trajectory of man is the measure of all things and God is dead, we come right back to the same place.  The universe isn’t a big windup toy that means nothing and will return to nothing.  And after science tried to convince us that Earth is nowhere and humans are less than nothing it turns out that life is really the only thing with inherent value.  And human life is the miracle that we started out with before we killed God.

The more we study life the more in awe we are of its complexity and miraculous properties.  The more we study humans the more we discover about their potential.

I do not mean to disparage science.  Wresting the secrets of the universe from Nature is a noble endeavor.  And done with proper humility it is one of the finest works that can be achieved by the human mind.  But surely by now all the best minds in the world must be aware that an infinite universe cannot be defined by finite beings.  God built this nursery for us and it’s built to hold us while we grow up.  I can’t imagine we’ll find the door to the nursery unlocked.  At least not on this side of reality.