Easter is not a time for groping through dusty, musty tomes or tombs to disprove spontaneous generation or even to prove life eternal. It is a day to fan the ashes of dead hope, a day to banish doubts and seek the slopes where the sun is rising, to revel in the faith which transports us out of ourselves and the dead past into the vast and inviting unknown.

~Author unknown, as quoted in the Lewiston Tribune

He is Risen!

Stacked eggs....and lots of them!

Good Friday ushers in Easter observances
Friday, April 6, 2007
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By TOM HOWELL JR.

SPARTA — Hopatcong resident Neil Anderson is usually clean-shaven with a flat-top haircut, but come Thanksgiving, he lets his locks and beard grow.

Why? Because for one Thursday night in spring, he has to look like Jesus.

"I really dive in," he said.

For the last four years, Anderson, 44, has portrayed the son of God in a Last Supper reenactment at the Shepherd of the Hills Lutheran Church. On Thursday night, he and the 12 "apostles" sat at a long table-clothed table straight out of the Roman era.

A captive, standing-room audience took in the seventh annual performance and followed the actors into the sanctuary, or, for Thursday's purposes, the Garden of Gethsemane.

Marty Nielson, 72, of Sparta, used to play Jesus, but he "betrayed himself" and now portrays Judas Iscariot.

"Anderson makes a better-looking Jesus than I do," he quipped.

Nielson likes to joke he went "from the top to the bottom," but he has an important role to play.

"You have to kind of put yourself in a deal of being ostracized by the rest of the Apostles," he said.

In a new feature this year, the actors froze in the exact pose of Leonardo Da Vinci's
famous painting, while Jesus quietly told Judas the betrayer to "Do what you have to do."

At night's end, the apostles took items from the altar and left Jesus alone in the "garden," with only his prayers to the Father.

"All the accoutrements are getting stripped away, and it gets down to the bare fact that he is about to die," Anderson said of the scene's impact.

As the holiest week of the Christian calendar advances toward its culmination, churches throughout Sussex County today will observe the solemn sacrifice of Good Friday before the rebirth contained in Easter Sunday.

Performances such as the one at Shepherd of the Hills bring the Easter story alive, especially for children. The audience Thursday could take in Biblical details, including the Challah bread made by Anderson, and that Apostle Matthew, played by Joe Krieg, of Andover Township, was a tax collector by profession.

via the New Jersey Herald

10 Most Magnificent Trees in the World.

This Aspen grove is actually 1 tree!
All these are actually branches of the same tree.

See all of them at neatorama

Cassini Images Bizarre Hexagon on Saturn

March 27, 2007

Pasadena, Calif. -- An odd, six-sided, honeycomb-shaped feature circling the entire north pole of Saturn has captured the interest of scientists with NASA's Cassini mission.

NASA's Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft imaged the feature over two decades ago. The fact that it has appeared in Cassini images indicates that it is a long-lived feature. A second hexagon, significantly darker than the brighter historical feature, is also visible in the Cassini pictures. The spacecraft's visual and infrared mapping spectrometer is the first instrument to capture the entire hexagon feature in one image.

"This is a very strange feature, lying in a precise geometric fashion with six nearly equally straight sides," said Kevin Baines, atmospheric expert and member of Cassini's visual and infrared mapping spectrometer team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. "We've never seen anything like this on any other planet. Indeed, Saturn's thick atmosphere where circularly-shaped waves and convective cells dominate is perhaps the last place you'd expect to see such a six-sided geometric figure, yet there it is."

my day begins.

It's National Velociraptor Awareness Month!

Velociraptor attack is the 3rd leading cause of death for men age 27-29. However, everyone must think about the implications of velociraptors: young and old, men, women and transgendered persons.

The American Society for Velociraptor Attack Prevention is a bi-partisan group of professionals, dedicated to the diffusion of knowledge concerning velociraptor attack prevention.


Velociraptor compared in size to a human.
Courtesy: Wikipedia

Do you know if your neighbors are raptors? Take the quiz and find out.

The American Society for Velociraptor Attack Prevention

My day looked a lot like this today.

Here's my Mothers Irish tree.

This is a cloud view of my poetry written over the last 5 years. (at least the ones I posted)
The larger the word the more times I used it.

able abuse afraid alone anger angry away bad badly becomes being body bonnie boy chaos church colored control cracked dark dear deep died done egg everything evil faith fear feel felt fully god going gone grief guess happened happy hope house ian john journey kids knowing lemonade life light looking lost love maybe mind miss moment myself night nothing once order pain parade parents path people please posting rain reason saying seed seems shell sitting sleep somehow something sometimes soul step stop sun taught teacher tears things think thoughts tired today union victim virus whites wishing world wrote years yet

created at TagCrowd.com

my friend Mike was visiting us from Istanbul,
He brought me the accouterments for making Turkish coffee,
And some great Turkish coffee.

He then taught me how to make it.

He said that it is very hard to master and that a perfectly poured coffee has a thin layer of foam covering the top of the coffee completely.

Well, I did it!
Here it is, the perfectly poured Turkish coffee.

This is Music and dance that nears perfection!

Glenn Miller, Dorothy Dandritch and the Nicholas brothers.
Doing the Chatanooga choo-choo

Giant blue herons nesting in Chatham

Sunrise in Mendham.

It's beautiful,
It's cold!
It's 6:30 in the morning!

How many countries can you name?

You get 10 minutes and you have to know how to spell them!

I got 69 out of 245, can you do better?
Let me know how many you got.

Click here to test your skill.