The map... ~ July 22, 2006

1.5 billion seconds ~ July 19, 2006

Back yard ~ July 17, 2006

Weird (peculiar) quotes... ~ July 15, 2006

"Who dares? Who dares to crack a whip with me? My mammy was a gator and my pappy was a bull! I can whup my weight in wildcats and drink my belly full. Who dares?"
The Kentuckian.

"How was I to know she was a lady? She was with you, wasn't she? "
The Virginian

Pa, how far is Brazil?
That's a long way away, Stevie - clear across the world.
Is it as far as Amarillo?
Yeah, farther!
Why are our bulls going to Brazil?
Because we sold 'em to a rancher down there.
The Americano

Imagine... ~ July 14, 2006

Decades of history, centuries of legend, millenia of myth... all reduced to assorted gangs fighting over tracks of dirt. Alas, now that the shooting has started, it will take years for cooler heads to prevail. Not that there's really been any break in hostilities for ten thousand years. There have been (and will continue to be) wars... this one's on the news and just one of many (many of which never make the news) and everybody figures they've got something in the fight.

I hope and pray we humans could use our God-given free will.

I'd rather be known as someone who tried peace to avoid war and failed... then someone who started a war to ensure peace... and failed.

A Founding Father said... ~ July 11, 2006

The poor people, it is true, have been much less successful than the great. They have seldom found either leisure or opportunity to form a union and exert their strength; ignorant as they were of arts and letters, they have seldom been able to frame and support a regular opposition. This, however, has been known by the great to be the temper of mankind; and they have accordingly labored, in all ages, to wrest from the populace, as they are contemptuously called, the knowledge of their rights and wrongs, and the power to assert the former or redress the latter. I say RIGHTS, for such they have, undoubtedly, antecedent to all earthly government, — Rights, that cannot be repealed or restrained by human laws — Rights, derived from the great Legislator of the universe.
...
From the time of the Reformation to the first settlement of America, knowledge gradually spread in Europe, but especially in England; and in proportion as that increased and spread among the people, ecclesiastical and civil tyranny, which I use as synonymous expressions for the canon and feudal laws, seem to have lost their strength and weight. The people grew more and more sensible of the wrong that was done them by these systems, more and more impatient under it, and determined at all hazards to rid themselves of it; till at last, under the execrable race of the Stuarts, the struggle between the people and the confederacy aforesaid of temporal and spiritual tyranny, became formidable, violent, and bloody.

It was this great struggle that peopled America. It was not religion alone, as is commonly supposed; but it was a love of universal liberty, and a hatred, a dread, a horror, of the infernal confederacy before described, that projected, conducted, and accomplished the settlement of America.

~ John Adams, writing three-hundred, forty-one years ago.