Portland.BloggersPub

David Ford- “Go to Hell”. One take, one shot… looping, no pre-recording.

Author and professor Paul Collins introduced me to EurekAlert! This is an excellent resource for science writers or simply the science curious. It posts press releases from a wide variety of fields—from Agriculture to Technology & Engineering.

Just looking at it now, I love the press release “Galaxies gone wild!” It’s a great example of using a clever, catchy title to draw in the reader.

Also, I was surprised by an older release, “Is anybody out there?” This release promotes a paper by Andrew J. Watson—a paper that I copy edited for Astrobiology. It is just amazing. I work and work on these papers; they become commonplace. Then I find something like this. I’m impressed and humbled by how far something that I have edited goes, how long it lasts. Editing is an amazing profession.

Returning to my original point, EurekAlert! gives us an understanding of how vast and active scientific research is, and—frankly—how curious and intelligent we all are! I highly recommend exploring this site.

Image credits: NASA, ESA, the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)-ESA/Hubble Collaboration and A. Evans (University of Virginia, Charlottesville/NRAO/Stony Brook University), K. Noll (STScI), and J. Westphal (Caltech)

1st Cor 3:1-9…

Thanks to nonprofitgirl for turning me on to a troubling security issue - apparently a bunch of Spam links got into the end of my last post. I went back to the post editor and sure enough, there in the HTML is huge list of Spam links. IN THE CODE. I have no idea how […]

Amy, Jack, Jane and I are down at the Oregon coast right now, speaking to a group of Quaker Pastors called the Northwest Yearly Meeting. Fun to be with a different tribe, hear a bit of language that’s very different…

This is one of the ballsyest things ever accomplished in literature. Taking one of Shakespeare’s greatest classics and writing a sequel from where it left off…four hundred years later! It’s written in blank Shakespearean verse and is supposed to be as true to the original as possible. I think that takes guts to write a sequel to such an old story with such a devout group of followers. What’s next, The Bible, Part 2‽ Don’t get me wrong, I’m curious, and if done well this could lead to a whole new string of adaptations of public domain material. After all, that’s what classic storytelling came about, repeating stories by word of mouth, adding interesting bits to them, subtracting the parts that didn’t receive a great reaction. Shakespeare’s tales were his takes on stories he had heard countless times before. I say bring a sequel on. The problem is that with rare exception (like the excellent movies Godfather 2 or Wrath of Khan), sequels can rarely live up to the original; when the original has had four hundred years of fame, those are some large shoes to fill!

“If someone were to ask you, ‘What is the one thing in life that is certain?’ you would have to answer ‘The love of Christ.’ Not parents, not family, not friends. Not art or science or philosophy or any of…

Bad Church. Bad Pastor! Someone needs a time out…

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