“For those who believe in God, most of the big questions are answered. But for those of us who can’t readily accept the God formula, the big answers don’t remain stone-written. We adjust to new conditions and discoveries. We are pliable. Love need not be a command nor faith a dictum. I am my own god. We are here to unlearn the teachings of the church, state, and our educational system. We are here to drink beer. We are here to kill war. We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us.”Charles Bukowski
The above image is of the Tarantula Nebula or also know as 30 Doradus. It was created using the Hubble Space Telescope. Nebula are luminescent regions in space that are made up of gas and dust. They are often star forming regions.It is located about 161,000 light-years away from Earth and is part of the large Magellanic Cloud. This Nebula is the brightest star forming region in our galactic neighborhood. The James Webb telescope has also looked at this region and has seen thousands of never-before-seen young stars. If you would like to learn more please see these links: https://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/goddard/2023/hubbles-new-view-of-the-tarantula-nebula and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarantula_Nebula
Image credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, C. Murray, E. Sabbi; Acknowledgment: Y. -H. Chu
“We’re all going to die, all of us, what a circus! That alone should make us love each other but it doesn’t. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities, we are eaten up by nothing.”Charles Bukowski
The above image is of the barred spiral galaxy NGC 6872. It was created in 2013 using several different telescopes, (European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope, NASA’s Galaxy Evolution Explorer, and infrared data from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope.) This galaxy is located 212 million light-years from earth. And is also known as the Condor Galaxy. The constellation it is found in is Pavo (Southern Sky) which is Latin for peacock. The smaller shaped galaxy above it, is known as IC 4970 and is a lenticular galaxy. The two galaxies are interacting. NGC 6872 is also the largest known spiral galaxy found so far. If you would like to learn more please see these links: https://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/spiral-galaxy-spans-space and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NGC_6872 and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pavo_(constellation)
Image Credit: NASA/ESO/JPL-Caltech/DSS
“It was true that I didn’t have much ambition, but there ought to be a place for people without ambition, I mean a better place than the one usually reserved. How in the hell could a man enjoy being awakened at 6:30 a.m. by an alarm clock, leap out of bed, dress, force-feed, shit, piss, brush teeth and hair, and fight traffic to get to a place where essentially you made lots of money for somebody else and were asked to be grateful for the opportunity to do so?” Charles Bukowski
This is an image from the JWST (James Webb Space Telescope) of the Spiral galaxy LEDA 2046648. It is the large one at the bottom of the picture. And it is about 1 billion light years from earth. It is located in the constellation Hercules. This was one of the reasons for the JWST infrared vision Camera (NIRCam). It allows astronomers to peer much further back in time to these incredible distant galaxies and stars. By comparing these much older ones to younger galaxies the hope is that we will have a better understanding of galaxy formation, evolution and composition. If you would like to learn more, please see these links: https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/Webb and https://www.popsci.com/science/james-webb-space-telescope-spiral-galaxies/ and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hercules_(constellation)
Image Credit: ESA/Webb, NASA & CSA, A. Martel
“There’s nothing to mourn about death any more than there is to mourn about the growing of a flower. What is terrible is not death but the lives people live or don’t live up until their death. They don’t honor their own lives, they piss on their lives. They shit them away. Dumb fuckers. They concentrate too much on fucking, movies, money, family, fucking. Their minds are full of cotton. They swallow God without thinking, they swallow country without thinking. Soon they forget how to think, they let others think for them. Their brains are stuffed with cotton. They look ugly, they talk ugly, they walk ugly. Play them the great music of the centuries and they can’t hear it. Most people’s deaths are a sham. There’s nothing left to die.” Charles Bukowski
Image Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, A. Pagan (STScI) & R. Jansen (ASU); CC BY 4.0
“Yet nevertheless – it can’t be helped – contaminated by the sickness of my time, I entrust my bones again and again to flying contraptions to circle the globe. I can’t help belonging to this generation of the restless, the globetrotters, the astronauts, obsessed with seeking, pursuing salvation elsewhere, as if the black-eyed Susans in Provence were more black-eyed than the ones in my backyard. As if being young and American on Main Street were any different from being young in the Grand Rue of a Belgian town. As if to grow old in Kyoto were so different from growing old in Verona or Prague! Old ones, unenlightened but sane as they are, are often wise enough to sit on benches in parks practicing the Zen precept: “When you sit, sit; when you walk, walk. Just don’t wobble.” Frederick Franck
This is an image of Pluto taken by the NASA New Horizons spacecraft in 2015. According to NASA the picture was created by using the Long Ranger Reconnaissance Imager and the Ralph/Multispectral Visible Imaging Camera. They say it is approximate in true color. And it is believed the haze is created by the action of sunlight on methane and other gases in the planet’s atmosphere. Pluto was discovered February 18th, 1930 at the Lowell Observatory by the American astronomer Clyde William Tombaugh. It is considered a dwarf planet and is located in the Kuiper belt ( a ring of bodies beyond the orbit of Neptune). Pluto is made up of mostly ice and rock and is much smaller than the other planets in our solar system. The surface is mostly composed of nitrogen ice with traces of methane and carbon monoxide. The orbital period is about 248 earth years. The image below was also taken by New Horizons spacecraft and has enhanced color to bring out the difference in surface composition. If you would like to learn more please see these links: https://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/a-blue-farewell and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluto and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clyde_Tombaugh
Image credit: Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute
“Instead of wondering when your next vacation is, maybe you should set up a life you don’t need to escape from.” Seth Godin
HEY!! I AM LOOKING AT YOU!! THAT’S WHO!!
If you are reading this then you have continued to survive Covid 19 so far and so have I!! Yea again for both of us!!
As I started writing this in the second week of February the number of cases continues to drop each day to about the 30 thousand range and the number of deaths per day had dropped to about 400! That is some good news for now and hopefully things will continue to move in that direction. Of course this is the official counts that are reported and you have to assume due to home testing, the number of cases is higher and the number of deaths related to Covid are higher. Some states are not reporting accurately. It looks bad for business.
As of right now ( all of February) the variant of concern was XBB.1.5 and for now, that still seems to be the variant of concern. Nothing seems to have been generated out of China as of yet. And unofficial estimates of deaths in China and Russia have put the numbers between 1 million and 1.5 million for each country. Of course the numbers could be a lot higher but we will probably not know for sure until relations between the US, China and Russia get better. With the way things are working out in Ukraine it will probably be a while.
Here in the United States the Covid deaths continue to be about 3000 to 4000 per week during the month of February. And the above picture according to official data has not changed much but I am guessing the data is skewed. Again, this is because a lot of states have just stopped reporting or they are reporting deaths due to something else.
The best way to understand what I am talking about is with an analogy. Try to imagine that your body is a house in a forest. Any pre-existing conditions you have are the conditions in the forest, the type of trees present, whether you house has a metal roof or not, the amount of moisture in the forest soil (drought or not), the siding on the house (fire resistant),etc… Now, here comes a forest fire that was started by a match. The match is Covid. Unfortunately you have a wooden roof (heart disease) and the forest fire burns down your house (you die). The question is whether Covid (the match) played any part in the forest fire that consumed the house (your body). The answer is yes. While the match ( Covid) did not kill you directly, indirectly it allowed your pre-existing conditions to get worse(that’s the forest fire) and you died. Without the match you would still be alive. I did not come up with this analogy but I feel that it is one of the best ones I have heard so far. And I hope that it helps. What some states and countries have been doing is leaving out the match part (Covid) of the death report.
The total death count at the end of February was 1,145,000 individuals. That is a jump from the previous month by 13,000 official deaths due to Covid, but again you have to assume the count is higher due to under reporting or skewed reporting.
February was another good month for getting out doors. The wind patterns still held as in January so the air quality was pretty good. There were some of the usual high pollution days but not as many as some years in the past. We came out of the deep freeze when February rolled around and this led to significant thawing/melting of the left over snow and ice from January. Unfortunately this led to some significant muddy conditions in the afternoon for dirt trails in the foothills behind Fort Collins, so most of my running and walking were confined to the bike paths. If you were an early riser( I am not) then this would not have mattered as much. Temps still got pretty cold at night and the muddy trails were frozen over by morning and thawed by the afternoon.
The best part of the month were the late afternoon sunsets. Almost everyday (unless it was over cast) you could plan on a beautiful sunset. I have included some of the best ones below.
This picture was taken on February 2nd, 2023 at about 5:45pm in the afternoon.
This picture was taken on February 5th, 2023 at about 5:30pm in the afternoon.
This picture was taken on February 9th, 2023 at about 6pm in the afternoon.
This picture was taken on February 11th, 2023 at about 5:30pm in the afternoon.
This picture was taken on February 16th, 2023 at about 6pm in the afternoon.
This picture was taken on February 20th, 2023 at about 6:15pm in the evening.
This picture was taken on February 24th, 2023 at about 5pm in the afternoon.
This picture was taken on February 25th, 2023 at about 6pm in the evening.
Marvin and I (and occasionally Janet) get out every afternoon and walk or run. And I could have included a picture for everyday but I won’t do that to you! Lol. Truly February was a month for sunsets as you can see. Here’s to hoping that March will bring a similar sky and air quality!
You might notice that I pay a lot of attention to the air quality in and around Fort Collins. We all know that air pollution is bad for us but how bad can it be? Unfortunately, it is one of those things that is very hard to quantify, unless the pollution is visible and so bad you can’t breath the air. There are many kinds of air pollution but for now I will keep it to what is known as “particulates.” A study that came out this past November from Columbia University helped to finally shed some light on this subject. The researchers were examining lymph nodes found in lung tissue from deceased organ donors. The crazy part, they were not looking at the time for air pollution’s influence on the immune system. But what they noticed was as people aged the lung lymph nodes darkened in color and when examined were found to be clogged with particles from airborne pollutants. See the picture below. The donners were all nonsmokers and the numbers are their ages. These pictures reminds me of the lung pictures from the antismoking movement when I was a teenager.
Lung lymph nodes from six non-smokers between the ages of 20 and 62. Particles of air pollution darken the lymph nodes and impair immune cells within the nodes. Credit: Donna Farber / Columbia University Irving Medical Center. Here is a link to the full article: https://medicalxpress.com/news/2022-11-decades-air-pollution-undermine-immune.html
If your athletic like me, or even if your not, the next time you decide to get outdoors and go for a run or a walk in the park, check the air quality. A good way to do this is with a product called “purple air.” They are sensors that you can buy for indoor or outdoor use to check the air quality in your area – in real time, not delayed. The cool part is that if you don’t have the money to do this, you can still check out the their map showing where all the monitors are and what the air quality is in real time. Here is a link to there web site and map: https://www2.purpleair.com/
(To be clear, I do not receive any financial compensation for endorsing their product.)
I am an ultra runner and I am always amazed in recent years when fellow runners and “health conscious individuals” will still make the decision to run the race with a forest fire nearby that is creating terrible air quality. When asked why run in this mess, I get the response that it is no big deal and they are not worried about it. The above picture and research says otherwise. It is direct proof of what particulate emissions can do.
It was another good month for reading and I would like to share a few book recommendations.
The first book I would like to review and recommend is called “The Creative Act: A Way of Being” by Rick Rubin. I first heard about the book from a 60 minutes interview with Rubin. I had no idea that he had been so productive in the music industry.
To be honest, I had heard of him before but did not really know who he was and how “looked up to” and “sought out for” his insights were into how to make music better. I had no idea the number of famous musicians that have used him as a guru so to speak. I know, I know, I live under a rock when it comes to knowing much about who’s who in the music world. Lol. So after a little bit of research, I thought I would give his book a try.
Let me say first, Wow! This book is about how to be more creative. And it does not matter what you medium is, whether it is music, drawing, painting, sculpture, or someone that does not do any of those things but wants a fuller and more meaningful creative life. This book is about how to foster and encourage your creativity, but it is also a book on how to live a more meaningful life by encouraging and nourishing that creativity. After all when you think about it, we are all creative, it is in your genes. If you go back far enough, someone, somewhere in your family tree made things. There were no Walmart’s, Targets, Home Depots, TV videos, museums, etc.… at one time everyone made things.
The book, I got it as an audiobook, is divided up into short segments that touch on different parts of creativity with a secular Buddhist mindset or that is what it feels like. The cool part about this is that you can start from any part of the book. You don’t have to read it or listen to it from front to back. Each small segment is a stand-alone section. Rubin does not give you the answers but he points you in the direction to find them.
Some of you might get turned off by the Buddhist flavor, don’t, it’s secular and you’re doing yourself a disservice by not reading it if the eastern philosophy gets in your way. This is a great book. I have already listened to it twice. The book will work in any format and can probably be found at your local bookstore or on Amazon. Here is the Amazon link: https://a.co/d/7rl2vW4
Then next book I would like to review is called “The Maffetone Method: The Holistic, Low-Stress, No-Pain Way to Exceptional Fitness by Dr. Philip Maffetone.” I first heard about the Maffetone method and Dr. Philip Maffetone from the Podcast called the Extramilest by Floris Gierman. Here is a link to the website if you’re interested: https://extramilest.com/mystory/ Lots of great advice on running and well worth your time.
Over the last few years I have been reading about how the “long steady distance with significantly reduced intensity” idea has been coming back into vogue so to speak. For a while, in the past, there seemed to be this maelstrom of advice telling people that the only way to get faster and stronger was to train faster and harder. The no pain, no gain sort of approach. And for me, almost half of all my training was in this category. That was until I got injured, again. During the recovery phase, which is still ongoing, I wanted to find a better way. This is probably my forth “significant” running injury in the last 10 years. And I wanted to be done with these sidelining injuries. This is now, my third book on this idea of running with a much lower intensity in order to get faster and stay injury free.
The book was published over 20 years ago but is still relevant in the places that count. But if you want a more updated version of what it is all about. I suggest that you Google the Maffetone Method and check out the website. Here is the link: https://philmaffetone.com/method/
The method is based on heart rate and now that heart monitors are pretty common and easy to use, I have found this is a great way to train. One of the best take-a-ways from the book is from this sentence: “I had learned an important lesson, one that would benefit not only me but also those I would work with for decades to come: I had made myself fit enough to run 26.2 miles, but fitness was different from health.” This was me to a T. Over the last 10 years I had made myself fit enough to do 50 mile ultras but was I healthy? And this is what the book is about. That health and fitness are not the same thing.
The website has updated information but I wanted the book to hold and read. So if you get the book, realize that it should not be your only source to go to for fitness and health, but a complement to other books on the subject. I got the book on Amazon but you can probably find it at your local book store. Here is the Amazon link: https://a.co/d/8c0j4KH
The last book I want to review and recommend is called “Zen Seeing, Zen Drawing: Meditation in Action by Frederick Franck.” I am an artist and I got this book initially as a way to improve my eye hand coordination. But in the process I found that it is so much more. I was hooked on the book as soon as I read this sentence:
“Proclaiming oneself to be an artist is all too pretentious. Art is neither a profession nor a hobby. Art is a Way of being.”
The book is about how to see, to really look and see what is there at the most mundane level. How many times do we just “look at” something, not really seeing what is there? Thinking that when we are looking at something, we are seeing it.
The author helps the reader realize this difference between seeing and looking by using drawing as the method. At the same time it is a way of slowing you down. You could even call it a form of meditation.
This book was published in 1993 but is a relevant today as when it was published. A timeless classic that should be a part of anyone’s library, whether you are an artist or not. I got the book on Amazon but you may be able to find it at a used book store. Be warned, I believe it is out of print and even the used paperback version can be in the 50 dollar range. Here is the Amazon link: https://a.co/d/ayPiz7t
No new “sellable” art work again for this month but I have been working on a new series that highlights Rooster faces. For now it has just been sketchbook drawings and one practice painting. This is a way for me to work out the details on a few things before staring the ones that I will put up for sale. I have included four drawings and one painting below. The drawings are done by free hand pencil sketching and then adding pen and ink. The painting was just done by looking and painting what I see from the photograph. These were all done in the month of February and I am hoping to start the “official” drawings and paintings some time in March.
This one was finished the first week of February.
This one was finished the second of February.
The painting was finished by the 14th of February but I started it about three weeks before. I am new to this type of painting and it takes me a little time. Lol
This one was finished by the third week of February.
This one was finished the last week of February.
I had fun doing these and I hope you enjoyed seeing them. Hopefully I will have at least one new piece done and ready for sale by the end of March or April.
In support of Prochoice and Separation of Church and State, I will donate 10% of any sales to Planned Parenthood or the Freedom From Religion Foundation, but only if you wish me too. If not, I will be more than happy to keep the money! Lol
Well I have come to the end of another blog post. Yea! I hope you have enjoyed reading it as much as I did writing it.
So take care my friends and if you have not gotten vaccinated or boosted, even if you have had Covid, then get it done. It would be stupid to say the least, if you were to lose your life or suffer significant disability with this virus when vaccines are readily available in this country. So until next time Adios!!
“It is far better to grasp the universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.” Carl Sagan
“Questions you cannot answer are usually far better for you than answers you cannot question.” Yuval Noah Harari
“May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous…, leading to the most amazing views.”Edward Abbey
