Or at least of those things, jaded and happy on the 22nd December, that we could remember…
A is for avaaz – giving the good people, the millions of ordinary people, a real voice. A great thing. www.avaaz.org
B is for Barry the Barber – a Geordie in Spitalfields via New York, great haircuts & beard trimming, good chat, good vibes. www.barrythebarber.com
C is for Christmas, still wonderful, longed for, magic, restful and festive in the right measure…
James Attlee invites us to savour the long nights of winter – their rare darkness and the too-easily-forgotten light of the moon.
For those of us who live in northern latitudes, one of the first signals of the changing of the season makes itself noticed at the end of August. Before we have reconciled ourselves to letting go of the summer, which may well give the impression of only just having arrived, the evenings begin to grow shorter. As September advances, even as we enjoy what may be some of the warmest weather of the year, darkness encroaches further, a forewarning of the long nights of winter waiting just offstage. What could there possibly be to celebrate in this shortening of daylight? Our hearts militate against rising for work in darkness, only to be greeted by darkness again as we leave to make our way home. After all, we feel like saying, we are human beings, not moles! We deserve a little more daylight than this…
One of our daily internet rituals (one that accompanies our regular checks of facebook, news sites, twitter, google reader… the list goes on) is a visit to NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day. One of the simplest websites we’ve ever come across, it presents a single new picture of the universe and brief explanation of the picture each day. It has no home page and does not have a particularly handsome design. Yet, unusually for the world wide web, it manages to create a moment of space and perspective each day. A chance to sit and wonder at, to learn about the world (and beyond) without leaving your desk…
Home-made Spacecraft from Luke Geissbuhler on Vimeo.
A home-made journey into space. Courtesy of Brooklynite father, Luke Geissbuhler, and his seven-year-old son, Max. The rest is best left to them…
…at least in what is left of it, we hope to: Wonder at Gaugin’s use of colour at Tate Modern…
Watch out tonight for the first super harvest moon in 20 years, a phenomenon that occurs when the autumn equinox (when day and night are of equal length and summer moves into winter) coincides with a full moon in the northern hemisphere. NASA tells us to expect the result to be a kind of 360 degree twilight glow as the sun sinks in the west and the moon rises in the east…
