target="onepic">
style="float: left; margin: 5px" height="60" width="80" alt=""/>

target="onepic">
style="float: right; margin: 5px" height="60" width="80" alt=""/>

A quick day trip to the beach.
I hadn’t walked on the beach in a long time so
I suggested just driving over there and doing
just that.
We went to
Cannon Beach
where the much photographed
Haystack Rock is located.

Men of War jelly fish had washed up on the beach
so the high water line was covered with the
little blue jelly fish.
It was also low tide so the area around Haystack Rock
was exposed showing off mussels, barnicles,
anenomies, starfish and crabs.

Pictures
are available.

2004-05-31 8:01am:

As was pointed out by
pril,
what I was taught when I was a kid was wrong — the small blue
jelly fish are not “Man o’ War”, but are really
“By-the-wind Sailor” or “Velella velella”
(Phylum Cnidaria/Class Hydrozoa/Order Anthomedusae/Family Velellidae).
They are similar to the
Portuguese Man-of-War.
Live and learn.

This is what marriage will look like if
the U.S. Constitution is amended to fully
embrace the original “Biblical principles”
based on the reading of the Holy Bible:

1. Marriage in the United States shall
   consist of a union between one man
   and one or more women.
   (
   Genesis 29:17-28;
   II Samual 3:2-5
   )
2. Marriage shall not impede a man’s right
   to take concubines in addition to his
   wife or wives.
   (
   II Samual 5:13;
   I Kings 11:3;
   II Cronicles 11:21
   )
3. A marriage shall be considered valid
   only if the wife is a virgin.
   If the wife is not a virgin, she shall be executed.
   (
   Deuteronomy 22:13-21
   )
4. Marriage of a believer and a non-believer shall
   be forbidden.
   (
   Genisis 24:3;
   Numbers 25:1-9;
   Ezra 9:12;
   Nehemiah 10:30
   )
5. Since marriage is for life, no federal or state Constitution
   nor law shall be construed to permit divorce.
   (
   Deuteronomy 22:19;
   Mark 10:9
   )
6. IF a married man dies without children, his brother shall marry
   the widow. If he refuses to marry his brother’s widow or
   deliberately does not give her children, he shall pay
   a fine of one shoe.
   (
   Genisis 38:6-10;
   Deuteronomy 25:5-10
   )

(Source:

Planet Proctor

)

It rained last night.
I’ve been hitting it lucky because I set some fence posts yesterday when it was dry — before it rained.
On Thursday, I mowed the lawn and it then it rained Thursday night.
(”Yes!!!” pumping arm).
I don’t know why I’m being lucky.
If Murphy isn’t here, where is he?

In the Portland airport, I came across a book by
Michael Savage.
I have listened to one or two of his radio programs and was disappointed by his vindictive and mean attitude.
He seems to be one of the recent crop of entertainers who’s schick is right wing vindictive.
I hate that the level of national discourse has been lowered to the level of these shows –
I guess it’s a little like people disliking violence on TV because of it’s general effect on society.

Anyway, his book continues his attack on the “liberals” who are “destroying our country” by “tearing down the traditions and culture that have made America great”.
One passage quoted Benjamin Franklin admonishing the early American Congress that they acted under God’s laws and they should begin each session with a prayer – a tradition that continues today..
This was to support the argument of the basic Judeo-Christian foundation of our nation that should not be tampered with.

This made me realize another reason I am unhappy with the current “Right Renaissance” – it is backward looking and not forward looking.
If it’s good for our grandfathers, it’s good enough for us.

The policies are inward looking — fulfilling inner passions and not striving.
They will use the term “making America great” but we are not the leader – the space program is a joke which makes us not the nation leading to the next frontier.
The business policies are designed to support established businesses rather than opening markets and ideas to change.
Our unilateralism is dividing the world rather that uniting it behind our leadership.
Lapses in the execution of our military actions show real problems with the depth of our moral past.

We need to be causing people to look up.
To change.
To grow.
To become better.
We need to be humble, be the best and lead by example.
To use our past as a foundation to grow from.
Not an anchor.

Finally home from England.
It will be good to spend a night in my own bed.
I put the rest of my
pictures
up and tomorrow I’ll annotate and organize a bit.
But, for the moment, I have to go to bed — I’ve been travelling
for near 20 hours straight with no sleep.

I was walking across campus with someone who used to school here and we passed a field of 22 men dressed in white. Cricket! “Ok,” I said, “I can make some sense of the soccer scores in the paper but I have a lot of problems with the cricket scores. What’s going on here?” So I got my first education in cricket. A bowler is trying to knock the bale off the wicket. The batter has two jobs: protecting the wicket and hitting the ball for runs. There are fast bowlers and slow (spin) bowlers. They have to throw the ball to bounce once and then strike the wicket. The batter uses the flat bat the redirect the ball and/or hit the ball out into the field. One surprise to an American is that the batter does not have to run after hitting the ball – if he stays in his box (I forget the term) he’s safe. Actually, there are two batters – one at each wicket. Once the ball is hit away, they run, exchanging ends, and each exchange is one run. A pitcher gets 6 pitches which makes up an ‘over’.

The game is defensive in design and take hours and hours to play. A single days game would run from 11 to 1 when there’s a break for lunch, then play from 2 to 4 followed by a break for tea and then play from 5 to 6 after which you’d all have a dinner together.
A great excuse to spend a day in the park with friends. Thoroughly civilized.

target="onepic"
style="float: left; margin: 5px" height="80" width="60" alt=""/>

During the week, Cambridge is a collage town filled with students zipping about on bicycles and over heard conversations in the pub are about philosophy or physics.
On the weekends though, the streets become packed with tourists and shoppers.
Double-decker busses roar through the narrow streets (the one’s they are allowed on).
The center of the city is closed to vehicles and it becomes wall-to-wall people.
I was given a tour of Queens College by an alumnus and was told that one of the disadvantages of living in a college is that they attract tourists – one morning you’ll open the curtains and find a person with a camera on the other side.

Those who weren’t shopping were filling the parks or punting on the river.
All the parks I walked through were filled with picnickers or volleyball games or people kicking around soccer balls.
Young boys would be batting around a ball with cricket bats and couples snuggled on blankets.
A very pleasant spring day in Cambridge.

Some observations:

• For an American, this place is VERY expensive – the exchange rate of 1.75 dollars US to one pound makes everything from postcards to pints rather dear;
• Light switches are pushed on the top to turn off and pushed on the bottom to turn on;
• I had a dinner named “Bangers and mash”. Other fun foods are available;
• The “first floor” is the second floor of a building — the one at street level is called the ground floor and the one above that is called the first floor;
• The light switches and power outlets are not in bathrooms — building codes don’t allow it;
• The pubs are the place to hang out. Always full and very lively.

I also have some
pictures
up.
More to come.

My
hotel
is right in the middle of the college district.
The view out my window is of the zoology library and, while
getting ready for bed, my view out the window is of racks
and racks of books throught the windows across the street
with a few diligent students studying.

This morning, I started in Bristol and rode the train
to Paddington Station in London.
Then a trip on the
Underground
to
Kings Cross Station.
I boarded the train to Cambridge on platform 9b
(not 9 3/4 for all you Potter fans).

The smooth hour trip from London to Cambridge and a
taxi ride to the hotel and soon I was out exploring
the streets.
I walked around the colleges and took pictures
of the churches
and people punting on the river.
I had dinner and a pint in The Eagle pub.
Then I ran into come colleges and
we had to go out for another pint and a another
pub.

Once I get some real network connectivity, I’ll
get some pictures up.

Found in the
Independent
…

Riots suppreessed city’s sex drive
Italy: Riots at the G8 summit in Genoa in 2001 supressed the
sex drive of its residents and lead to a decline in births,
a study released yesterday shows.
Nine months after the riots, birth rates dropped by 29 per cent.
Even 11 months after the clashes, birth rates were 20
per cent lower than average.

target="onepic">
style="float: left; margin: 5px" height="60" width="80" alt=""/>

A day of meetings was capped off my a walk around the city of Bristol, a dinner at a wharf-side restaurant and a few pints at a local brew pub (you do know that the British prefer their beer warmer and flatter than us Americans).
Pictures are accumulating on my
picture page.

I arrived in England without a hitch. Well, except for the long line to get through immigration – there was a 30 minute queue for us “other passport” people. I took the Heathrow Express from the airport to Paddington station. I arrived Monday morning during rush hour so the place had this rhythm of trains pulling in and masses of men and women in business attire pored out of the trains, cell phone to ear as they flowed out into the surrounding streets. A quick train from Paddington to Bristol and I was at my first destination.

I am sitting in the Dulles airport on my way to England. I have a week long business trip that will take me to Bristol and Cambridge. Sadly I won’t have much time to sight see with most of the whole days taken up with either traveling from old place to another or in meetings. I plan to take pictures of what I find and send them over. Stay tuned.

target="onepic">
style="float: left; margin: 5px" height="60" width="80" alt=""/>

target="onepic">
style="float: right; margin: 5px" height="60" width="80" alt=""/>

Last night I spent the evening playing Bingo.
Not something I’d normally do, but my wife and my daughter
asked me to go with them on an evening of dabbing and
munching.
In a large room
(a glass wall separating the smokers from the
non-smokers and there were more smokers than
non-smokers) we sat at fold up tables with our large sheets
of numbers with our little dabbers.
Yes, you buy these ink dabbers that make a circle of ink
on the page. These come in many colors with sparkles, pastels
and people have nicely crafted bags for carrying them around.

We bought our pads of the regular games, the specials and
the bonus games.
Then numbers were called and numbers were dabbed.
I actually did pretty well by winning one bingo early in one
of the games.
That was $44 for me!!

I thought the most interesting feature was that this
bingo parlor was not a private business but is run by the state.
Oregon is a state the runs lotteries and bingo palors.
This means that it’s main business is running the lottery and not
squeezing that extra $10 or $20 dollars from every customer.
Thus is wasn’t like going to a movie theatre —
the food at the snack bar was reasonable,
the cokes in the coke machine were only 50 cents
and people brought their own food in.