Mother’s Got A Dot Com

Is Mo building up to a Manic Christmas?

I thought this dawn picture could be an illustration of how morning strikes a match to light our candle for the day…

I haven’t gone Manic for a Month, and that’s just bad form. I apologize, and carry on with my personal take on Harvest:

Under a harvest moon, what do we find around here… I have to reminisc, as harvest season is more like August in these parts. By November, everything is dead and more or less frozen.

A trip into the forest in September may yield these beauties though!

These are gherkins and beans from our garden in August…

And here are some physalis or chinese lanterns - September, and strawberries - July:

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The circle of life… can’t wait for that time to come around again!

Manic Bite, Oh, Mo, there’s no way I can do this without Mr. Munch…

“Vampyr II” 1893-94 - by Edvard Munch (1863 - 1944)

This version of Vampyr was sold last November for 11,8 million Norwegian Kroner (about 2 million $).

Another version was stolen from the Munch Museum in Oslo in 1988 - it was taken out through an open window (!). Luckily, it was recovered after a short time.

This brings me to a story about a friend of mine, who became victim to a prank by his friends after his stag party. “Vampyr” was still missing and all over the news, and after getting him drunk, they put him on a train from Oslo to Gothenburg, Sweden, with no money, no credit cards, and a rolled-up canvas copy of “Vampyr” sticking out of his backpack.
He got back eventually, I think he had to bite the bullet and call his bride to be, so she could drive down there and pick him up. He also got married, and I don’t think anyone noticed the canvas or what was on it. He noticed though, and spent some time biting his nails, trying to remember what had happened the night before…

Manic Monday on the Moon…

Jyly 20th, 1969. I remember it well. I was 5, and Man was about to land on the Moon. Trouble was, it was happening way past my bedtime, and there was no way I could convince anyone that I should be allowed to watch this momentous event - kids should be in bed. And I was put to bed, regardless of my pleading.

Those were the days when news on TV were reported in radio form unless they had a camera on the scene as things were happening - everything was live, and the world as we saw it through the TV screen was black and white.

I did see it. The television had a prime location in our living room, which meant that it was also in full view from the staircase just outside.
At the appointed hour, I snuck down, and watched the whole thing from the staircase. The picture was blurred, and I couldn’t understand a word that was said, but I saw it, and it was awesome. No one stirred from their seats in front of the TV, so I was able to sneak back into bed unnoticed when it was all over.

Maybe it was a hoax to fool the Soviet Union, maybe it never happened, I don’t know. As I was looking for a picture to post here, I came across loads of “proof” that it wasn’t real, and some of it is quite convincing.
Fabricating footage of a moonwalk would have been much easier than actually doing it, I guess. I can’t help thinking that NASA would have made a much better job of it though (both the footage and the destruction of the evidence), if it were fake. After all, with the cold war and space race going on, both world peace and US credibility were at stake.

Funnily enough, I don’t really care. At the time, it was a marvelous thing to watch, and something that fueled my imagination for many years afterwards.
I hope for their sakes that they were actually there. For me, who saw them, huddled on a staircase - live from the Moon - it was an experience I’ll never forget.

Mo’s back, and is all about formula today.

I’ve never been good at Maths. I kept my medium grades all through High School, and no amount of work on the matter could change those. I begrudgingly kept up the work, though, while thinking “why am I doing this - I’ll never have any use for it!”

Well, that’s where I was wrong.

For one, I had plenty use for maths when I designed this place. How many square meters of roof tiles do you need, and how do you work that out when you don’t know the width of the roof? Out of its hiding place, deep in the meanders of my brain, came Pythagoras’ formula (a²+b²=c²), a,b and c being the sides of a triangle. Work out, if you will, the amount of insulation needed (in cubic metres), if the outer walls and floors are 25 cms thick and the inner walls 15 cms. While you’re at it, find out the number of tiles you need for the floor, and the amount of wood paneling too. I used my share of formulas, I can tell you…

Now, I’ve got 4 teens, all with the same non-relationship with maths that I had. What surprises me is that it’s been 27 years, but I still remember how to do equations with a couple of unknowns, the workings of + and - inside and out of a paranthesis and the mysteries of fractions. Formulas for surfaces and volumes are there; percentage, exponential growth, you name it - I can actually help them, and who would have thought that back in 1981…

Now, physics is another matter. The formula I’ve used as an illustration above is just that - an illustration. I guess I could tell you what the letters mean, if pushed. I’m not sure, though, what comes out of it. An old man with big white hair, perhaps?

Mo is on holiday (hope you’re having a smashing time, Mo!), and in his absense, Janna’s hosting her very first Carnival!

Head on over there, there may still be time to join in, and there’s certainly time to visit some of the wonderful MM posts that people have submitted. My favourite Manic post on this blog has to be this one, on 1000, and that’s the one I’ve submitted to the Carnival on The Jannaverse!

Mo’s simmering today… here’s my Boil post:

A BIG theme from Mo this week…

bigbigbig… OK - a big fallout on Technorati - I was on 660 last week, and now I’m way down in the 500s… At the same time, a big increase in readers - I’ve crept over 30 before, but today I’m on 50 subscribers! This coincides with the big goggle crawl. This blog was feeling quite big and full of itself, sporting a big‘ol PR2, when it suddenly was awarded a big fat zero.
If that’s what make the subscribers subscribe, keep the zeros coming - the bigger the better!
What else is big? Oh, yes, I borrowed a big book yesterday - “The other Boleyn girl” by Philippa Gregory. I’ve read a few pages, and it looks promising. My big girl, # 5 Brat, is becoming a school girl in 2 weeks time, and I’ll have a big challenge on my hands. Miracle Boy is getting busy in a big way, and I’ll have my hands full with him while his big sister is at school.
I wasn’t going to do a big post on big - I guess this’ll have to do…

Manic Mo has chosen “Bug” as today’s theme - which just happens to be the Monday theme of Doodle Week, Second Edition…

Anyway, here’s my Bug, a local mosquito, caught in the act, in an approximate 1:1 scale: