Lo! The Eastern magi rise

Lo! The Eastern magi rise
  at a signal in the skies
Brighter than the brightest gem
  shines the Star of Bethlehem
Brighter than the brightest gem
  shines the Star of Bethlehem

Now the holy wise men meet
  at the royal infant's feet
Off'rings rich are made by them
  to the Star of Bethlehem
Off'rings rich are made by them
  to the Star of Bethlehem

Night's terrific shades give way
  Open dawns the promis'd day
And on us as well as them
  Shines the Star of Bethlehem
And on us as well as them
  Shines the Star of Bethlehem

A magnificent track from the Smithsonian Folkways album English Village Carols: Traditional Christmas Carolling from the Southern Pennines, which is an album that is available through many sources. Highly recommended if you like Christmas music that is sung (rather than instrumental) and is not from the standard selections. Personally, I love it. The liner notes are good too (although they don't include lyrics! I had to get these from the track itself).

Cheers!

Quick test

Just a quick test of the new flock browser/blogger tool.

Something New to think about

I'm writing this in the new Flock browser (www.flock.com). It's a mozilla-derived "social" browser with built in support for blogs, delic.io.us tags, and other stuff I don't know about yet. RSS, natch. Email, yes.

Does it make life easier? I doubt it. One of the reasons that my blog here is so, er, sparse is that I don't make much time for writing in it. The blog software itself is not that big a deal. Perhaps having support built into the browser will help me feel more like taking the time to write. We'll see!

technorati tags: flock browser

Wiki thoughts

I'm fond of wikipedia. Inspired by Wikipedia's example and by my own interest in forteana, I started up FortWiki, to which everybody is invited to contribute.

Forteana is the study of "weird stuff" generally, and especially the items that were of interest to Charles Fort, a journalist of the early part of the twentieth century. What Fort found interesting at that time were a broad variety of subjects that were not really explained by the sciences of his day, or else were truly bizarre by his own standards but admittedly outside the purview of science.

Examples include falls of fish, anomalies in the orbit of Mercury, "sea serpents," lake monsters, humans flying without the aid of machinerey, ghosts, ghouls, werewolves, alternative archaeology, and many other curious topices.

In this day and age, some of the topics have been satisfactorily explained (for the most part, anomalies in Mercury's orbit have been explained by General Relativity, but see for example William R. Corliss' excellent Catalog of Anomalies for exceptions to the relativity explanation. This is still a live discussion!)

Other anomalies and weirdnesses are still collected and published, in some excellent periodicals. Of note in this regard is the Fortean Times, a most excellent and amusing magazine.

So what has all of this to do with wikis? Simple. Fortean topics are constantly evolving and shifting. The wiki format is wonderful for accumulating knowledge (see wikipedia for a good example of how cumulative knowledge can be) and for collaboratively refining communal knowledge (fancy talk for hammering out a consensus). In the fortean world, consensus would be nice, but not really necessary - multiple viewpoints and ambiguity must be tolerable, or the whole enterprise is worthless.

Strawberries

My SO was kind enough to pick me up a little box of strawberries in a hanging planter down at Wal-Mart last night. Cool! I love strawberries, and this variety is supposed to be everbearing. Summer is on its way!

This weekend was very wet here. Heavy, heavy rain with wind, pretty much non-stop. March weather is often stormy, but this was beyond stormy and into the heavy winter rains that we expect in December and January. And all of this after several weeks of unusually dry weather. Hmm. I wonder what the rest of the year holds.

The Kentucky mint continues lush. I think its grown a bit since we brought it home. This is a good thing, because of things like mojitos. Tasty!

What I'm Thinking About Right Now: Margaritaville

I love Internet radio. This rainy cold morning, I'm listening to the sweet sounds of Jimmy Buffet's Radio Margaritaville. Good stuff.

Internet radio has a selectivity and ubiquity that AM/FM can't touch. The way things are right now, AM/FM is a better choice for card radio (I've never played with Sirius or the other satellite radios, so I don't know what those are like). But, two years down the road when WiMax gets going, Internet radio in your car is a real possibility.

There are Internet radio devices out there, but I don't know how customizable they are - can I choose my own favorite radio stations, or can I only use the presets? And what formats are supported? MP3, Real, WMV, Ogg Vorbis (and Theora, for those that might also be Internet TV devices someday)? Others?

I think I prefer a laptop overall - much more open and configurable. And when I say open, I do mean Linux (although I like MacOS X just fine, thanks).

Other plants I'd like to get

So, in my earlier post I reference "Kentucky" mint and raspberry.

I'd also like to make a grape arbor, with enough grapes on it to make a batch of wine each year. I think I can build a large enough arbor to make this possible, and in the meantime, I'm researching grape varieties.

Complication number 1: Oregon (where I live) allows the import (from other states or internationally) of grape vines under certain very limited circumstances. Grapes grown in Oregon are routinely checked for phylloxera, a nasty grape disease. See http://berrygrape.oregonstate.edu/fruitgrowing/grapes/phynursy.htm for information about this. That site is the gathering place for information regarding growing fruit crops in Oregon.

Complication number 2: Grapes are grown here on the south coast (where I live), but only certain varieties are suitable. What varieties? I dunno yet. More research to do.

Churned the Compost Bucket

Went out again this morning and did the same churn with the compost bucket.


I think we're getting off to a slow start because it's been rainy and cold recently, which means the bucket isn't getting enough sunshine and warmth to speed things up much.

Also, I noticed that when the bucket is in its hole, it sits up a bit off of the bottom of the hold - enough to let air and such in. The bricks are doing a good job of keeping the larger pests out, too.

Yesterday, I went and bought a couple of little mint plants. Kentucky mint, it's called, but it smells completely like spearmint to me. These I think I'll wind up planting near the raspberries, so they can all get watered together. It is a nice sunny area, until the late afternoon when trees uphill of us block the sun somewhat.

And, in further news of yesterday, Territorial Seed's 2005 catalog arrived in the mail. Yum!

Turned the compost bucket over

Well, I went out this morning and turned the compost bucket. Emptied the bucket, plied my shovel to chop and otherwise munge the stuff, threw it back into the bucket (it's still pretty damp, so I didn't add water this time) and turned the bucket over again.

The compost was looking like it was beginning to break down. There's not much decay evident, but bits of it here and there. The eggshells are beginning to break up nicely, and the veggie bits are being worn down.

Gardening stuff

Ok, this is really meant to be more of a diary for myself than a public bloggy thing. It's just that the format is great for diary stuff as well.

Today, I've just started my first compost setup. It's a five-gallon bucket turned upside down in a shallow hole in the ground, filled about a third of the way (so far) with kitchen scraps, dirt, a handful of grass and some old leaves.

The plan is to pull the bucket off once a day, refill it with the contents after mixing them up thoroughly, and then re-plant the bucket upside down in its hole. I'm using some bricks around the base of the contraption to help keep the animals out.

One lack I see in this setup is airholes to promote oxygen flow, and therefore aerobic decomposition. We'll see if mixing it up once a day makes a difference.