Saffron's Special Day

The weather forecast says only a 20% chance of rain tonight and it should be cool and windy. Perfect Halloween weather! (You know you're from Michigan if you've ever gone trick-or-treating in the snow, wearing your winter coat over your costume.)

Best of all, today is Saffron's special day. We found her 12 years ago today and, despite her liver disease, she's still with us and doing OK. We are so happy she's here to celebrate her special day with us! Here's a recent photo of us together (don't you hate it when you're sleeping and someone starts taking your picture?):




















And here are a couple of Halloween pics from last year. (She no longer climbs onto the table with the village.)








































Happy Halloween birthday, sweet girl!

Happy Halloween!

It's the second most wonderful time of the year: Happy Halloween! I stitched this for my friend Nathan (click to enlarge):

Beautiful October

After killing frosts on Oct. 9 and 10, temps have stayed in the 50s F (some days going up to 60!). Apparently these conditions, coupled with our cooler than usual summer, have led to a long, beautiful autumn. Even at the end of October, we still have leaves on the trees.

For my fellow Tolkien geeks: it's like spring in Lothlorien! For everyone else, here's the quote:

"There are no trees like the trees of that land. For in the autumn their leaves fall not, but turn to gold. Not till the spring comes and the new green opens do they fall, and then the boughs are laden with yellow flowers; and the floor of the wood is golden, and golden is the roof, and its pillars are of silver, for the bark of the trees is smooth and grey. So still our songs in Mirkwood say. My heart would be glad if I were beneath the eaves of that wood, and it were springtime!" (Legolas, The Fellowship of the Ring).

I took this photo in Davison Regional Park, Fall 2005. It looks about like this now, too!

RIP, Milvina

A memorial service was held Saturday for Millvina Dean, the last Titanic survivor. She was 97. The BBC story includes a short video with highlights from the service and her partner Bruno Nordmanis scattering her ashes "from a small launch on the water of berth 43/44 at Southampton Docks, the terminal from which the ship set sail."

God bless you, dear lady. I pray you are with your parents now and this time you all complete your voyage together. Rest in Peace.

Scream Theatre

I had a blast at the show tonight! The should cell CDs so we can enjoy the Halloween radio show again and again. If you're in the Flint area and not busy tomorrow, catch the show at 8pm at The Good Beans Cafe (810-237-4663). Tickets are only $7 for 1.5 hours of fun Halloween entertainment.

October, at Last

It's Friday, it's October, AND I have a new Ray Bradbury book to read. Life is good.

Woo Hoo! Frost Advisory!

There is a frost advisory most of Michigan's lower peninsula tonight. Woo hoo! Come on, frost. Kill the evil ragweed and solve my summer allergy problem!

Bradbury at 89

After I found the interview with Ray Bradbury from July, I decided to put him in my Google Alerts so I don't miss any more news. I just learned that Ray celebrated his 89th birthday at Clifton's Cafe in downtown LA, where the Science Fiction Society met in the 1930s.

Next month he'll be signing his books at Every Picture Tells a Story in Santa Monica on Oct. 24. Oh, how I wish I could be there!

UPDATE: Ray will also be speaking Oct. 3 at the Duarte Festival of Authors (Southern California) and signing his new book We'll Always Have Paris. I'm so glad I added Ray to my Google Alerts! I just wish I could get to CA to meet him.

Ray Bradbury on the 50th Anniversary of Apollo 11

I just found this wonderful interview of Ray Bradbury on the July 19, 2009 podcast called 365 Days of Astronomy. This was recorded about a month before Ray's 89th birthday. He sounds good! Older, a little tired, but still mentally sharp and as optimistic as ever. Follow the link to read the transcript or listen to the podcast.

I've also pasted the transcript here.

---

Podcaster: Mat Kaplan of The Planetary Society

Links: Planetary Radio

Ray Bradbury.com

Description: A very recent conversation with the beloved author, poet, dramatist and visionary, Ray Bradbury. In these excerpts, Mat asks Ray to look back forty years to the Apollo 11 landing on the moon. Ray expressed his exhilaration and hopes to Walter Cronkite and walked out on talk show host David Frost! The Los Angeles-based writer shares other memories and looks to our future on Mars and beyond.

Bio: Mat Kaplan hosts and produces Planetary Radio, the weekly public radio and podcast series from the Planetary Society. Planetary Radio is heard on 150 stations across North American and beyond, as well as on Sirius XM satellite radio. The podcast can be found in the iTunes Store. Founded by Lou Friedman, Bruce Murray and Carl Sagan, the Planetary Society inspires and involves the world's public in space exploration through advocacy, projects, and education.

Today's sponsor: This episode of The 365 Days of Astronomy Podcast is sponsored by Clockwork Active Media Systems. Clockwork invents, designs, develops and maintains web applications that market, sell, streamline, automate and communicate. Visit Clockwork.net net or email inquiries@clockwork.net to get started on your web project.

Transcript:

OPENING REMARKS: Hello, pod people. I’m Mat Kaplan of the Planetary Society, where I host and produce our weekly series about space exploration called Planetary Radio. We’re very proud to join you on this, the eve of the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing. And we’ve brought along someone many of you know and love. I visited Ray Bradbury at his West Los Angeles home just a few days ago. Ray will soon turn 89. I was cautioned that his hearing is not what it was, so I should speak up. Also that he was likely to tire long before he was ready to stop telling stories. That’s just what happened. We talked about many things, but we kept coming back to the shining significance of July 20, 1969. Here are a few excerpts from our conversation. You’re hearing them ahead of our regular radio and podcast audience.

MAT: I wonder if you feel as fortunate as I do in the whole history of humanity to have been alive not just to have left our planet, but to have set foot on other worlds?

RAY: Well, when I was a young boy, I thought, “I’ll be an old man when we land on the moon.” But I wasn’t old, I was 49 years old. I was very young. And I was in London that night, and I went over to the TV show. Instead of introducing me, he introduced Engelbert Humperdinck. I walked off the show. The producer came running out after me and said ‘What are you doing?’ I said, “That idiot doesn’t know this is the most important night in the history of mankind. I will not be on the show with that idiot! He’s stupid! Get me out of here! Get me a cab!” So I went across London and I met with Walter Cronkite. I did a broadcast on Telstar at midnight telling all the reasons why space travel was important and why it was important that we were on the moon because we were on our way to Mars. And someday we would settle Mars, and then we would go to Alpha Centauri, and we’d live forever. So this is the first step toward living forever. Mankind has got to be…the sun going out, or the sun flaring up. So, we’re gonna survive because of this very first step tonight, and that idiot Snow should have had enough brains…

MAT: Now, wait. I’ve gotta stop you because you said “Snow.” It’s “Frost,” right? David Frost.

RAY: Pardon me!

MAT: That’s quite alright. I just didn’t want to confuse the audience!

RAY: Frost, yeah. I don’t know why I used Snow. When I left that broadcast at the BBC in London I walked across London laughing and crying all the way. It took me six hours to walk back to my hotel. It took me six hours to walk back to my hotel. I didn’t take a taxicab! I wanted to be in London alone with myself and my joy. When I got back to the hotel, out in front there was a tabloid with the headline that said, “Neil Armstrong Walks on the Moon, Bradbury Walks at Midnight!” They reported I walked off the David Frost show. I hated him so much. But it’s good to have that headline! Me and Neil Armstrong in a single newspaper the morning after we landed on the moon.

MAT: It didn’t start then, of course. I think of your old friend, Arthur C. Clarke. It was in his story that he had a proto-human looking up at the moon and reaching for it, and thinking, well, if I could just get to a high enough spot I could reach it.

RAY: Well, we’re all similar people. We have the same dream, and landing the moon really did it for us.

MAT: You were talking though, before we started to record about, yes, I guess it’s okay to be excited about the moon, but your heart is still farther out on that red planet.

RAY: Well, see, we’ve been building flimsy things in space. Space stations, but they’re not strong enough. But it’s gotta be the moon. And sometime in the next few years we’ve gotta re-establish ourselves on the moon.

MAT: So you do see a role for the moon? You’re happy to see that we’re on the path to returning humans there?

RAY: We should never have left. We’ve circled the Earth with our rockets and photographed it. That’s good information, but it doesn’t help us get to Mars. The moon has gotta be a solid underground for us to build factories to go to Mars, and it’s going to take thirty or forty years to establish a base on the moon. And then we’ll go to Mars and we’ll establish a civilization which will last for thousands of years. And then we’ll move from Mars to Alpha Centauri or a planet near there.

MAT: You don’t sound like you’ve lost any confidence in the human potential in the universe.

RAY: We didn’t think we could do it, and we did it! It was quite amazing. And I went down and met with all the astronauts in 1967. I went to Houston. Life magazine sent me down to interview all the astronauts that were coming up. None of them had any names yet. But Life magazine had a meeting where there were seventy astronauts. And the editor of Life said, “Young men, I think you’d like to know that in the back of the room today is Ray Bradbury.” Everybody jumped to their feet and seventy astronauts ran back and clustered around me because they’d all read The Martian Chronicles. Isn’t that wonderful? I’m part of the lunar exploration. It’s so wonderful to be loved by these young men who treated me as a equal.

MAT: I think you’re part of much more than the lunar exploration. I think of the scientists and engineers who were also inspired to do what they’ve done, who are STILL inspired, who are still leading the missions that are taking us off of this pale blue dot.

RAY: Well, that’s wonderful. The night the Viking lander landed on Mars I was out at JPL. I was watching the photographs come in on the TV. I noticed a man behind me and I turned. It was Werner von Braun. I didn’t want to speak to him. I had mixed feelings. But I realized he was a mixed creature. He was half black, half white. He was half good, he was half evil. He invented the V2 rocket that destroyed England, and then he invented the rocket that took us to the moon. So I shook his hand, and he wrote an autograph on a piece of paper for me: “You saw it all ahead of us…to the moon. You inspired us.” And so Werner von Braun gave me credit for inspiring him to be a rocket engineer. Isn’t that beautiful?

MAT: There’s much history left to be made. In something like ten years humans will walk on the moon again. If we’re lucky, in something like twenty or thirty years they’ll walk on Mars for the first time. If you had a message for these future explorers, does anything come to mind that you might want them to hear from the past…

RAY: No, I want everybody listening to me to think of Mars, only Mars, again and again and again. And think of going back to the moon and make sure the government hears this from you. These are bad times today. If you read the Wall Street Journal, forget it! You know? If you buy stocks sell ‘em! Get rid of ‘em! But listen to me and say, “Back to the Moon!” The moon is everything and Mars is beyond, waiting for us. I want to be buried on Mars. I don’t want to be the first live person to arrive there. It’ll be too late. But I want to be the first dead person that gets there. I want to arrive in a Campbell’s soup can. Bury me on Mars in thing called the Bradbury Abyss. They gotta name a place on Mars for me, and I will welcome that.

MAT: I would love to see that happen. From your mouth to NASA’s ears! Thank you, Ray, and thank you for all of those stories.

RAY: Heh, heh, heh.

CLOSE: Author, poet, dramatist, visionary and blessed optimist, Ray Bradbury. We’ll include more of our recent conversation in the coming week’s episode of Planetary Radio, the public radio and podcast series from the Planetary Society. And we’ll put nearly my entire half-hour conversation with Ray on the Society’s website, planetary.org. Thanks very much for joining us. Ad astra!

---

For any newcomer to this blog: Ray Bradbury is one of my all-time favorite authors. I've blogged about him several times and recently sent him a geeky fan letter enclosed in a Halloween card (which I hope reaches him in time for his favorite holiday). I'd write more but I'm busy downloading the podcast so I can listen to the complete half-hour interview. Thanks, Planetary Radio!

Never Forget

Waiting for Frost

Last night the upper peninsula and the northern part of the lower peninsula had a frost warning. I can hardly wait for the frost. Here's why:





































In case you can't read the maps, those are the ragweed and mold levels (the things I'm most allergic to). Pollen is not killed by having a lovely, cool summer (that I can't even enjoy!), it's only killed a killing frost. I think that's 28F for several hours. Since the summer has been so cool, I'm really hoping for an early frost this year!

RIP Sister Carol Anne

I just learned that one of my favorite authors, Sister Carol Anne O'Marie who wrote the Sister Mary Helen mysteries, died in May from Parkinson's disease. After seeing a death date on her Stop You're Killing Me page, I found her obituary and a nice article in the online Catholic Voice about her homeless shelter: "Nuns continue ministry to homeless women in Oakland."

I found this picture and a nice remembrance of her on Stephen Danko's web site. There's another nice tribute on Janet Randolph's blog.

I'm so sorry to hear of her death and to learn that she suffered from Parkinson's disease. Apparently she didn't let it slow down her writing or her ministry! God bless you, Sister. I wish I could have met you in person but am glad to know you indirectly through your books. Rest in peace.

My Favorite Paperback Book Gadget

When I developed chronic tennis elbow one of the things that hurt my arm most was holding a book. As an avid reader, not reading was NOT an option so I like to try different book gadgets. One of my favorites is the Gimble.

When you buy a Gimble (just $8 at Schuler Books, where I found mine, or Barnes and Noble), you get two sizes: mass-market paperback and trade paperback. Not only is the Gimble inexpensive, it actually WORKS! It's great for reading anywhere but especially handy for those who like to read while eating or read in the bathtub.

The Gimble is made in the UK and I found it in the gift section at Schuler Books. It was a serendipitous find since I haven't seen them in any other store. I've now purchased several as gifts and recommend them to anyone who loves to read.

My Interview on Mystery Matters

Today I'm the guest on Mystery Matters, an internet radio show hosted by author Fran Stewart. You can listen live at the web site at 10 a.m. or listen later via the site’s archive or podcast at Mystery Matters.

How I Spent My Summer Vacation

Yesterday we visited the Star Trek Exhibit at the Detroit Science Center. It featured lots of costumes and props but the coolest part was the recreated bridge of the original series:





















That's my husband in the Captain's chair and I'm at Sulu's station.

A volunteer told us the set was one-third scale, except for the chairs. The captain's chair is one of three actual props. Yup, I sat in it, I just didn't get my photo taken there. That's right: my butt sat where William Shatner's butt once sat! At least I wasn't geeky enough to wear a uniform to the exhibit. :)

Julia's Kitchen is Complete Again

I haven't seen Julie and Julia yet, but just read that Julia's copper pots are now in the Smithsonian with the rest of her kitchen. When we saw the exhibit a few years ago, that wall was glass. Now it's an actual wall with her copper pots. I want to go see her reunited kitchen!

Read more on the NPR and Smithsonian web sites.

We miss you, Julia. May the new movie lead new readers/viewers to discover your books, DVDs, and your love of life and food!

Saffron on YouTube!

The other night we gave Saffron a Cornish Hen. Yup, a whole chicken that was just her size! She loved it. Watch the excitement in her first YouTube video:



Before you ask: yes, we spoil her terribly. (Hey, she deserves it and we are just so glad she's still with us after being diagnosed with liver disease two years ago!) And, yes, we are easily amused. Who needs TV when you have cats?

P.S. If the video takes too long to load watch it on YouTube.

The hibiscus bloomed for the first time since we moved last summer. Whew! I was afraid that between moving and repotting we had killed it.

We're having a cooler summer than usual (it hasn't reached 90 yet!). I love it but wonder if that's part of the reason this tropical plant, which usually grows and blooms like crazy in July and August, isn't blooming much.

At least it had one bloom!

Reindeer Cherrries?

Sometimes being hard of hearing is almost (but not quite) amusing. The other day Mom gave me some Ranier cherries, but I thought she said "reindeer cherries." What the hell are reindeer cherries, I wondered.

They are beautiful cherries that look like this:





















Not like this:






















They were delicious and didn't taste anything like venison.

Back to Work!

Hoo-ray, the physical therapist says I can work again as long as I take frequent breaks and don't overdo it! Starting today, I am slowly working on updating my Fall classes. I figure it will take about a week.

Sadly, my Detective Fiction class, which I was really looking forward to, has been cancelled for low enrollment. Oh well, maybe things will work out the next time it's offered. In the meantime, that means I have only one class to prepare for Fall. Teaching four sections of freshman composition will be a LOT of grading, but it does cut down on the prep time.

I'm really annoyed with our Regents. They have changed our academic calendar and for the first time in years we'll start Fall classes AFTER Labor Day. That means exams will last pretty much until Christmas. Look at our schedule:

Sept. 8 -- Classes Begin
Dec. 14 -- Classes End
Dec. 15 -- Study Day
Dec. 16-22 -- Exams
Dec. 24 -- Grades Due

Yes, you read that correctly: grades are due on Christmas Eve. Christmas Eve! Apparently our Regents don't actually teach and never have. Bah! Humbug! It's going to be a LONG fall semester and a very short Christmas break...