A Rolling Out of Maps

Democracy in America

From the National Review Online.  A reader of NRO points out the Rockwellesque nature of the scene.

Stylish Bond Garbage

From TheGarbageMusic at YouTube

Poem

Incantation

Human reason is beautiful and invincible.

No bars, no barbed wire, no pulping of books,

No sentence of banishment can prevail against it.

It establishes the universal ideas in language,

And guides our hand so we write Truth and Justice

With capital letters, lie and oppression with small.

It puts what should be above things as they are,

Is an enemy of despair and a friend of hope.

It does not know Jew from Greek or slave from master,

Giving us the estate of the world to manage.

It saves austere and transparent phrases

From the filthy discord of tortured words.

It says that everything is new under the sun,

Opens the congealed fist of the past.

Beautiful and very young are Philo-Sophia

And poetry, her ally in the service of the good.

As late as yesterday Nature celebrated their birth,

The news was brought to the mountains by a unicorn and an echo.

Their friendship will be glorious, their time has no limit.

Their enemies have delivered themselves to their destruction.

Czeslaw Milosz, 1968

from New and Collected Poems: 1931-2001

Moonwalk

Neil Armstrong stepping onto the lunar surface, July 20, 1969.  Photo courtesy of Evelyn Claunch.  Taken with a Rolleiflex box camera from the screen of a black-and-white television set in a darkened room.

Spaceflight

All videos courtesy of NASA. These videos document the American STS-128 mission to service the International Space Station, August 28 through September 11, 2009.

Home

 

An artist's conception of our Milky Way Galaxy based on the latest data from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope.

Image from NASA/JPL-Caltech

Transit

The International Space Station and the docked space shuttle Endeavour transit the sun for a talented photographer and, through him, the rest of us.

Photo by Thierry Legault, July 28, 2009.

Man at Work

I'm putting Rolling through its traditional annual relaunch, with continuing thanks to my benfactors at Planting Pennies.  Please have a cup o' joe, enjoy an older post revived for the duration, and visit again in a couple of weeks.

"Love Beauty Joy and Worship"

A frieze on the quadrangle side of Lovett Hall, Rice University, Houston.  I took this picture in the late 1980's the old-fashioned way, with film and a telephoto lens (the frieze is between the first and second floors, rather high on the wall).