Tip of the hat to the late Martin Gardner, polymath and numbers man who wrote the “Mathematical Games” column for Scientific American for many years. This page is really about Luck, and posits that there is no such thing, good or bad. There’s just good and bad and in between, in shifting emulsification. –Maybe. What the Hell do I know?
Yesterday at 5:11 AM Mountain Standard time my mother, Jane Bowers Stoneman, declared victory over suffering and dementia by shuffling off this mortal coil; or, as Shakespeare also put it, [Dies.]. I had started grieving for her some days before she stopped breathing, because the quality of her life had been declining, and the rate of decline was accelerating. It is heartbreaking that the end so often takes that shape. I will miss her terribly the rest of my life, and honor her memory, but I am glad she is shed of all her pain, frustration and sorrow.
I’d been working on this page and was about 2/3 finished when Mom died. I know my mother’s mind to the extent that she’d want me to plug away, finish this piece, and begin the next one, and so I’ve struggled all day to do what should have taken a couple of hours at most. It STILL could use some work, but there’s a significant chance that anything else I do at this point will make it worse rather than better.
This one’s for you, Mom, flawed as it is. Your loving son continues his journey. Please keep up the cheerleading as always.
On the proper maintenance of one’s Sunny side.
Two Unreals dance in a canyon.
Friends, it’s November 17, 2020, and Phoenix, Arizona has recorded a temperature of at least 90 degrees Fahrenheit. In all Arizona’s recorded history, there has never been a day this hot this late in the year.
The lady of indeterminate age and race in the image below advises us that some truth may be had for those who do a search on “radiative forcing equation.” It is scary. Many more of us need to be scared now, or we are headed for an Inferno.
Summer’s over, Friends…
This is a sincere prayer thrown out to the Self-Aware Universe that a machine designed only to injure or kill or threaten be made obsolete. My mother said many times “It never hurts to ask.”
Fear and Confidence grapple…
This sketch was mostly done during the U.S. Vice-Presidential Debate between Kamala Harris and Mike Pence. The working title was “Concerned Citizens.”
I live in the city of Phoenix, Arizona, in the United States of America. It is the fourth year of the Trump administration, and Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has just died. Our nation’s Flag is at half mast, a sign of respect, yet Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s dying wish, that her replacement not be chosen until after the 2021 inauguration, is being disrespected by the leaders of the Republican-majority Senate, even though honoring her request would also be honoring the word of these selfsame Republicans, who said back in 2016 that a new Justice ought not be chosen until it reflected “the will of the people,” i.e. the election.
It is a sign of the times in my country that Honesty and Decency have been discarded by those in power for the sake of retaining power, “will of the people” notwithstanding. We are in danger of becoming a dictatorship.
A dose of Truth–REAL Truth–and acceptance of Truth, however contrary to what people WISH were the Truth, would do a lot to put my beleaguered country back on track. But too many of us think we can vote for Truth the same way we vote for our candidates. And that, Friends, is insane.
One with Clay, Image and Text 