Quite beautiful and thrilling. A dance of lightning strikes three buildings at once on the Chicago skyline and then fractures and crackles the sky in amazing ways. A reminder that though humans think we rule the Earth, Gaia is still in charge. We are just lodgers in her house.

Lightning strikes three of the tallest buildings in Chicago at the same time! from Craig Shimala on Vimeo.

Here is an impressive time-lapse video (there’s a very brief ad in front of it and after that no sound until the shuttle launches). It depicts the work that leads up to the launch of a NASA space shuttle on April 5, 2010, arming it with fuel tanks and rolling it out of the massive Orbiter Processing Facility warehouse at the Kennedy Space Center to the launchpad. It was crafted from thousands of individual frames by photographers Scott Andrews, Stan Jirman and Philip Scott Andrews, who condense six weeks of launch preparation into three minutes, 52 seconds. (Here is how they did it.)  As the article at the link describes:

The photographers positioned multiple cameras—up to nine at any one time—inside the cavernous assembly building to click away while the orbiter, fuel tank, and twin solid rocket boosters were “stacked” for launch.

Scott Andrews figures the finished video represents tens of thousands of individual frames and at least 100 hours of shooting, using the highest-resolution digital single-lens-reflex cameras on the market. Jirman did the color correction, which took a week alone.

When it was done, [shuttle astronaut] Poindexter had what he’d wanted—a unique visual record of an intricate workflow that’s been going on at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center for nearly 30 years—and, with the shuttle’s impending retirement, is about to come to an end.

Photo from this page.

Horses I have met along the way in the hills and hollers of West Virginia. (Click photo bigger)

'Nelson, Out Standing in His Field' | May 2010 | douglas imbrogno

I generally distrust video links e-mailed to me from friends and acquaintances that includes a Web address and message like: “From me to you; have a wonderful day!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!” The multiple exclamation points are the usual give-away that some well-meaning soul, moved to the ends of their toes by a slideshow of rainbow photos and quotes about angels, thinks you will be, too. When I got just such a message above and a link this morning, I was about to delete it. But the sender had a good track record of entertaining e-mail linkage via my in-box, so I took the bait and clicked. Of course, maybe I am doing the same thing to you? You, being the hard-bitten cynic of human society that you are, may think this video my own rainbow-and-angels gush. So be it! This one got to me, though, by the end. Also, I was seduced by the Italian location. You had me at “abbracci“:

I will be shooting video at the upcoming PGA Greenbrier Classic for the Charleston Gazette, my first visit to the Greenbrier v2.0 since Jim Justice, bless his millionaire Mountain State soul, rescued the place from insolvency. I must admit to having no special feelings for golf perhaps because I have only ever successfully thwacked a golf ball a half-dozen times so that it went any appreciable distance. (‘Thwacked,’ by the way is perhaps the most splendid onomatopoeiac golf adjective ever).

I don’t believe natural selection or God, should she exist, ever intended for the human animal to take a rigid, thin reed and attempt to bat an object the size of a walnut vast distances into a hole you can’t even see. Makes no sense. It’s no wonder Tiger Woods carried such stress around with him that he needed a cavalcade of bimbos just to cope.

But my feelings re: golf are nothing in comparison to this ravishing raking of golf from a bog post titled “Why Does the World Contain Golf?” by Glen Newey, which is a good question:

Why does the world contain golf? The question is strictly analogous to asking why it contains evil. Like chess or darts, golf is clearly not a real sport, which I define as an activity that you can only be any good at with a BMI of less than 35. At school, golf was offered to us as a ‘games’ option in the sixth form. Then, as now, I had no interest in bashing a dimpled pill towards a tiny and distant hole. But it looked less nasty than waddling through sludge in frozen mist after a leather ball, or getting the club-end of a hockey stick in the nuts. I was beguiled by the golfing scenes, in TV soaps as much as sportscasts, where the players were conveyed between strokes in electric buggies, alighting only to swoosh a lazy approach shot to the green. Reality bit when I found that I had to lug the bag of clubs myself, blasted by wind and rain, for a nominal five miles – a purely theoretical figure, bloated by the constant need to divagate onto the beach or into tussocks of marram to track down my wayward ball. It was with relief that I switched the year after to another non-sport, snooker, where you could at least stay in the warm and get a drink.

Some people have too much free time on their hands. But this is fun.

UPDATE. ~ OK, I have learned a little more about the provenance of this video, concocted by Improv Everywhere.

'Red Heel' | w.va. | may 2010 | douglas imbrogno

UNDRUNK

Is how
I prefer
you.

I’m just
saying.
Nothing

more than
that,
my dear.

This is
no judgment.
Nor, god

knows, an
argument.
We, too, after

all,
were
intoxicated

with our
usual
emendation.

It’s the
sloppy talk
that makes me

want to slouch
outside in
streetlamp calm.

Fixing on
the crescent moon.
Its mouth agape

transfixed by Venus,
a pale fire flickering
the darkling heaven.

from “What I Meant to Say,” by Cardinal Crowe (The WestVirginiaVille Press)

mechanics' helpers | huntington w.va. | douglas imbrogno

“800 MILES: Rounding Third”

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | PART 6

NOTE: Getting here late? Read the whole piece in a single blogpost here.

—–

There comes a point driving 800 miles in one day hauling a dead Honda homeward when your consciousness begins to resemble that of  a certain person. A person who has gone without sleep for several days on cocaine while the Columbian drug lords who’ve taken you hostage march you mercilessly through the jungle, lashed by whips to keep you stumbling down the narrow mountain path despite your feeble-minded exhaustion. And if you stumble, you tumble into the 800-foot gorge below and are never heard from again.

I hit this point about mile 697, somewhere in the late-night darkness of Interstate 64 after the turn-off from I-75 at Lexington, Ky. Problem was if I stumbled or fell asleep or strayed into the next lane, I would not disappear. I’d end up in in the local news: “U-Haul truck hauling Honda crashes into Dominican Mission bus, all perish. Film at 11!” So it was only through an act of will, intense concentration and yogic eyeball exercises that made me look like Rodney Dangerfield behind the wheel of a Ford truck that kept me focused on the white center lines dashing by through the night.

Also, there comes a point in the consumption of massive injections of caffeine when the caffeine seems to shift into reverse. It starts to make you tired as your body says, ‘Whoa, Charlie, that’s a wee bit too much, now. We are hereby refusing further stimulation. All systems on overload. Shutting down. Yo, Self, your endocrine system is taking a siesta …”

More stressful yet, I was in a race against time. My mechanic had promised to stay up until I got back to his small Cabell County shop, to help me offload the car from the dolly. I was not at all sure I could do it alone as the engine was dead and I had to do a gravity roll off the dolly into his lot, located up an alley on the edge of town. But it was now 12:05 a.m. and he said he could wait only “a little longer” as we communicated via phone. Then, in the wilds of eastern Kentucky, somewhere between the towns of Mt. Sterling and East Jesus (just across from West Jesus, Ky.), the signal dropped out on my iPhone back to town. I was alone with my addled thoughts while still more than an hour from the end of this infernal haul. Right then, I glanced up at my rear view mirror. Who was tailgating me! There was a car RIGHT on my bumper, out here in the middle of nowhere. Damn it, WTF?!! (more…)