Easy to Make Fun

Sure, it's easy to make fun of Carl Sagan, who I mentioned here yesterday. I bet even a six-year-old in Madagascar could do a take-off of the way he said "Billions!" in his effort to make us look up now and then from our antlike preoccupations.But look at this video below, which somebody made, setting and compressing his utterances into a kind of song. There's even brief footage of Stephen Hawking in it. How many have viewed it? You'll see when you pass the ad and click through: over 8 million of us, one of whom has written in the comments section that watching this video is what turned him/her away from a degree in Computer Science and toward a degree in Astrophysics .In case this doesn't appear for you, Click here to see the original video and then here to see the "Symphony" this person created. "Who knew Carl could beat-box?" might be your first thought; but your'e made of stone if you don't feel a catch in your throat when he speaks of not a sunrise but a galaxyrise.[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSgiXGELjbc]

Speed the Supplies

Thursday night I found myself watching Good Fellas with the detestable Joe Pesci playing the character he always plays in these movies, all the times hooting people in the face and all.  Good Fellas, which may not be as bad Casino where he puts someone‘s head in a vise but still! I only turned to it because suddenly I couldn’t look at one more image out of Haiti where CNN's Ivan Watson was covering the half-buried 11-year old in her little reading glasses when what he called ‘part’ of a body was pulled from the rubble beside him. He looked for a second like he might throw up.As of that night the supplies still weren't reaching the people. Forty-eight hours and more after the quake they still weren't reaching them! It makes you realize: we think we live in a world of bright commerce, should I have the Boston Creme or the Honey Glazed  but the truth is we will all die, and some rather soon.The above is a penciled ‘study’ from an oil done by the 17^th century Spanish painter Bartolomé Esteban Murillo.  As a study, it is simpler than the original but all the more powerful for that simplicity: all you see is St. Francis and the Christ figure and at first you think St. Francis is reaching up to embrace and comfort Him, but wait! It's the other way around isn't it? Isn’t the Christ figure beckoning for Francisco to join him on the cross, thus illustrating the famous prayer attributed to this sweetest of all saints? "Grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console,” it goes, "not so much to be understood, as to understand; not so much to be loved, as to love.” The rest of it is the reward:  “For it is in giving that we receive, in pardoning that we are pardoned, and in dying that we are born to Eternal Life.” Ah, may it prove to be so! But in the meantime, God, if you can hear us God: speed those supplies to your children, suffering so now on that lovely and devastated island.