No one seems to be noticing that 50 years ago this month, Roger Maris was closing in on one of Major League Baseball's most revered records.9/12/2011
The Golden Anniversary of Maris's Remarkable Season is Being Forgotten
No one seems to be noticing that 50 years ago this month, Roger Maris was closing in on one of Major League Baseball's most revered records.4/12/2011
Active 2011 Atlantic hurricane season predicted by CSU forecasters
Forecasters at Colorado State University are predicting that the summer of 2011 will bring another active hurricane season to the Atlantic Basin. 4/06/2011
Alabama Family Will Donate Historic House for Renovation as African-American History Museum
12/16/2010
Bob Feller, 1918-2010

12/07/2010
December 7, 1860: A Nation on the Verge of Exploding

12/02/2010
Study Shows Gulf Coast Hurricanes Weaken Before Landfall

11/22/2010
Spirit of '10?
We're in a war against some dangerous people who are willing to use any means they can come up with to kill as many people as possible. But it seems that we're thrusting our heads deeper and deeper into the sand to avoid confronting this reality.It's easy to understand the annoyance of passengers who have to undergo these new search procedures. It is unsettling and humiliating to have your privates groped or displayed on a screen. But there is this war going on, and we are continually reminded of how fiercely our enemies hate us and how intensely they want to kill us, preferably in large, spectacular numbers. They would love nothing better than to explode a passenger airplane crammed with Americans over a large city so that chunks of flaming wreckage and body parts rained down on horrified witnesses who would then blame the government for not preventing this tragedy.
So it's hard for me to understand the mentality of those who are the loudest in protesting the increased scrutiny. And it's also baffling to me that the complaints of such a small group could explode into the broiling scandal that has erupted in the past few days.
I've long been fascinated by the history of World War II. As I've gotten older, I've realized how propaganda was used to shape public opinion and persuade people to get with the program. And propaganda always makes me uneasy because it's used to emphasize one point of view and diminish or conceal other points of view. So when I see a poster like the one above that I've altered for this post, I also realize that the same techniques were being used by the Allies and their enemies.
I can't help but compare that era to today. However misleading the propaganda images from that time may have been, it's clear that people were willing to put up with much more danger and inconvenience than we are now. For example, beginning in September 1940 and continuing for months, Nazi Germany bombed London and other British cities every night. By May 1941, about 43,000 civillians had been killed in the attacks that came to be known as the Blitz. That means that far more people were killed every month during the Blitz than were killed in the attacks on New York on September 11, 2001.
10/10/2010
Recalling an Infamous Home Run
I've been down with the flu for several days and it's disrupted all the normal routines. It's a pretty nasty bug. I'm at the stage now where it's a low-grade fever and general aching malaise interrupted by occasional fits of violent and rather painful coughing. And there are powerful sneezes as well.9/30/2010
Jane Returns with Irish Whiskey
So Jane got back a few hours ago from her trip with her mom to Ireland, and she brought many presents -- including a bottle of Irish whiskey that supposedly isn't available in the U.S.
So we sat on the front porch and listened to the stack of Irish folk music CDs she brought, and I sipped Irish and Jane drank wine and we watched the rain that's been falling all week. I read that we've had more rain in the past two days than we had during the infamous Hurricane Floyd in 1999, which put most of the area around Plymouth under eight or 10 feet of water. But since the wetlands around the Roanoke River here haven't been developed, we stayed dry.
Anyway, Jane brought me a bottle of Green Spot Irish whiskey. I've been drinking scotch for years. The Irish whiskey is sweeter than scotch, but not as sweet as bourbon, which I've never cared for.
She also brought me a mini-bottle of Irish potcheen, or moonshine, as it's known in these parts. Note that the label says it's "Now Legal" in Ireland. Haven't opened that yet.
And, oh yeah, while in Ireland she went to some restaurants and visited an old castle, and some writer's thing in Dublin.
9/20/2010
OK, OK, I'm Finally on Facebook . . .
The movie is based on the story of the creation of Facebook by Mark Zuckerberg, a socially clumsy young man at Harvard who, in a sense, executed the uber-geek's ultimate ironic twist. He channeled his frustrations, social ineptitude and exceptional intelligence into creating what the Times calls "the largest engine of social interaction in the history of mankind."
And he made a gigantic amount of money in the process.
Here's how the Times described both the movie and the phenomenon of Facebook: "Social media -- with the technology that allows people instantly to inform dozens or hundreds of thousands of people about where they've been and what they've done, in pictures and in words -- become a kind of self-replicating organism in the film, feeding and consuming all who mouse over it."
So Facebook ranks up there with the invention of the printing press and the telephone in terms of ideas that have altered our world. Many innovations have claimed to make the world smaller, but Facebook has used the Internet and the proliferation of personal computers to reduce the world to the size of a telephone booth, if anybody still remembers how small a telephone booth is.
And, like a cranky hermit living in a cave high in the mountains, I've deliberately avoided Facebook until it seems like I'm the last person in the civilized world to join the fun. Even people whom I thought had jumped off the grid long ago have Facebook pages. The New York Times says there are 500 million people with Facebook accounts. So, clearly, the rest of the world doesn't have the reservations about Facebook that I have.
Why have I avoided it? Partly just simple orneriness. The older I get, the less comfortable I am with cutting-edge technology. And there's also the fact that I'm lazy, and maintaining a Facebook page is a form of work.
But mostly, I've avoided Facebook because I'm afraid of it. I read George Orwell's novel, 1984, a long time ago, and it affected me. 1984 describes a world in which an oppressive, authoritarian government knows everything about you and can observe your every move.
Facebook is a massive central data base into which one deposits detailed acounts of one's likes and dislikes, comings and goings, political and religious beliefs, sexual preferences, favorite colors and football teams, and recent purchases. That's an awful lot of info for someone somewhere -- or anyone, anywhere -- to have access to at the click of a mouse button. It's like Big Brother with a smile, to borrow a phrase I picked up somewhere, probably while browsing the Web. And I worry about what some people might do with that info.
Still, it's fascinating and absorbing to be able to tell the world about your favorite movies, your favorite books and quotes, and post favorite pictures of your cats or your friends in unguarded moments. And I'm enjoying it.
And if you're wondering why I finally decided to jump into Facebook, you'll have to go to my page to find the answer. I'm going there now to add 1984 to my list of favorite books and add a personal news update that I've posted a new entry on "Drye Goods."
9/17/2010
Hurricane Karl Floods Mexico

Hurricane Karl made landfall earlier today near Veracruz, Mexico. Here's a link to a story I did today about Hurricane Karl for National Geographic News.
Meanwhile, a weakening Hurricane Igor is expected to diminish to a Category 2 storm (winds of 96 mph to 110 mph) as it passes just east of Bermuda late Saturday. If Igor follows the forecast, Bermuda will be on the weak side of the storm.
9/13/2010
Monster Igor Won't Bother Us

NOTE: The photo illustration at the top of this post is a composite of a graphic from the website Weather Underground and Marty Feldman as "Igor" in the movie "Young Frankenstein."
9/08/2010
Igor is Out There

Only in 1997 was the season not active enough to produce the nine storms needed to reach that year's "I" name. And three times in the past seven years, the "I" storm became a memorable monster hurricane.
In 2003, Hurricane Isabel formed from a tropical wave on September 6. Isabel reached its peak intensity as a Category 5 hurricane with winds of 165 mph. Thankfully, the storm weakened before it made landfall at Cape Lookout, North Carolina. But it still did massive damage and blasted us back into the 19th century for a couple of weeks when its eye passed over us here in Plymouth.
Hurricane Ivan, which formed September 2, 2004, became one of the worst hurricanes on record when it devastated the Caymen Islands as a Category 5 storm (see
After smashing the Caymens, Ivan entered the Gulf of Mexico and struck Pensacola, Florida as a Category 3 hurricane with winds exceeding 120 mph.
Hurricane Ike formed September 1, 2008 and peaked as a Category 4 storm with 145 mph winds. Ike lost most of its fury as it crossed the length of Cuba, but still caused major damage when it struck Galveston, Texas a few days later.
There's no way of knowing for certain what this storm will do, but given the severity of its infamous "I" predecessors, it's a little unpleasant to contemplate a Hurricane Igor -- especially with a name that is straight out of Hollywood monster movies.
9/06/2010
Maybe It's Time for Butch Davis to Go
In that 2007 post, I wondered whether Davis -- who had a 71-38 record and three Big East championships at the University of Miami -- could steer clear of NCAA violations and build a national powerhouse football team at a university that takes academic standards seriously. Among the possible violations being investigated by the NCAA is an allegation that an academic tutor may have improperly helped some football players write term papers.
9/02/2010
Blogging Hurricane Earl

Monday, September 6: Here's a link to my National Geographic News story explaining why Hurricane Earl weakened as it approached the Outer Banks.
Also, got an email today from Arlene Vadum in Worchester, Massachusetts that included a brief comment on Hurricane Earl's visit to New England a couple days ago. Worcester is well inland from Cape Cod, where Earl was expected to pass near or over Saturday afternoon as a Category 1 hurricane. But Earl weakened to a tropical storm and was pushed a little farther out to sea by that Canadian front, and so the blow to the Cape and the Northeast was much less than had been feared.
Arlene writes: "We got the rain, pretty hard for a time, and virtually no wind. People didn't do anything special in Worcester because we were told that Earl wouldn't affect us. I saw on the news that people were not going to the Cape and the islands because of Earl, but in the end the news seemed to say that there was 'much ado about nothing,'"
Thing is, you can't decide what to do during the next hurricane warning based on what you did during the previous storm because the next hurricane might make a last-minute turn in your direction and be far worse than expected. But anyone who's lived on Cape Cod any length of time knows that.
9:15 a.m. Friday: We're getting light but steady rain here in Plymouth as Hurricane Earl moves away from us. The storm made its closest approach toward us a few hours ago. I stood on our side porch a few minutes ago and took a quick look around the neighborhood, and I didn't see anything that looked like damage. Didn't even see any limbs in my back yard from the huge pecan trees that usually drop limbs even during a light breeze.
We sat around last night with our neighbors, Jennifer and Ben, and watched some of the local coverage of Hurricane Earl. Almost felt sorry for some of the local TV news reporters. They had been prepared to do the Jim Cantore-style standup-in-the-storm spots, and nothing was happening -- no driving horizontal rain, no fiercely gusting winds to shove them around, no loud crashing waves or wind-driven debris in the background.
I don't mean to make fun of Hurricane Earl's visit, however. We were lucky. The storm weakened some and turned slightly away from the Outer Banks, and so things were not nearly as bad as they could have been.
But we may not be so lucky for the rest of the month. Tropical waves are rolling off the west coast of Africa, and conditions are still ripe for hurricane formation. And this is the time of year when the so-called Cape Verde hurricanes form. These are storms that begin as tropical waves and quickly become tropical storms as they pass the Cape Verde islands. These are the breeding grounds for monster hurricanes such as Hurricane Ivan of 2004.
There's a tropical wave that recently rolled into the Atlantic that's likely to become Hurricane Hermine. There probably also will be a storm that gets the "I" name that the monster Ivan got six years ago. The name for that storm this year is Igor. If a hurricane does get the "I" name, it could become a very bad storm. And contemplating the possibility of a monster storm named Hurricane Igor makes me a little uneasy.
11:30 p.m.: Light steady rain started about an hour and 15 minutes ago and you can tell the streets are wet when cars pass because they make that "skish" noise that tires make on wet pavement. My barometer has dropped in the past few hours, but the winds are light and essentially it's a damp, breezy and very muggy evening. Reminds me of Key West this time of year.
As of 11 p.m. Earl had weakened to a Category 2, which means that its peak winds are 96 mph to 110 mph. Judging from the radar images, the storm is no longer moving westward and is starting a turn to the north well before it approaches Cape Hatteras, which means that it's probably not going to come as close to the Outer Banks as was predicted earlier.
10:15 P.M.: We had brief intermittant showers here about an hour ago, but for the most part it's been a pleasant evening to sit on our neighbors' porch and drink beer and enjoy the breeze. I'll update later.
7:31 p.m.: Hurricanes are just fiendishly unpredictable, even in this era of weather satellites and sophisticated computer software designed to make them more predictable.
The latest update for Hurricane Earl has it weakening considerably before it blows past North Carolina. Earl is now a Category 3 storm with peak winds of about 115 mph, and it's expected to diminish to Category 2 before it approaches Cape Hatteras. That means its peak winds will be no more than 110 mph.
Earlier forecasts had it maintaining at least Category 3 strength as it passed the Cape. Had it stayed that strong, its peak winds could be approaching 130 mph.
This is why being a hurricane forecast specialist is such a difficult job. When you put out a warning that a hurricane is approaching, you have to convey to the people on the coast that they're in a dangerous area. You don't want to overstate the danger, but the consequences of understating the danger are so dire that you can't afford to be responsible for giving thousands of people an excuse to stay put instead of getting out of harm's way. There's always a good chance that the hurricane will be worse than expected, and those people who got complacent because of your understated warning suddenly are facing a deadly situation.
There are some subtle signs of Earl's approach here in Plymouth. Jane and I sat on our enclosed front porch for about 90 minutes and had drinks and watched the weather. The very tall trees on our neighbors' lots across the street are swaying the way they do only when a major storm is approaching. So Earl's approach is subtle but noticeable.
Stay tuned.
5:45 p.m. My story about Hurricane Earl has been posted at National Geographic News. See this link:
5 p.m. Barometer down slightly, from 1013 mb at 2 p.m. to 1011 mb at 5 p.m. I did a story about Hurricane Earl for National Geographic News that will be posted shortly. I'll post a link here when it's up.
The satellite image shows Earl as of 5 p.m. EDT. More of eastern North Carolina is now covered by the edges.
2:53 p.m: As of 2 p.m., Hurricane Earl is offshore from Charleston and has weakened a little since the 5 a.m. update. But Earl's strongest winds are still around 125 mph, and it's expected to strengthen a little and have winds exceeding 130 mph as it aproaches the North Carolina coast tonight. Earl is expected to make its closest approach around 2 a.m. Friday, when it'll be offshore from Cape Hatteras.
As you can see from the above satellite image, we're starting to see the edges of Hurricane Earl here in Plymouth, which is about 100 miles south of Norfolk and about 80 miles west of Cape Hatteras. If the storm maintains its projected path, we're not likely to see any fierce winds tonight. But hurricanes are unpredictable, and I spent part of the morning clearing small objects out of our yard, fueling up my pickup truck, and making sure the gas-powered generator was working.
My barometers are slowing starting to fall, an indication that there's a bad storm out there somewhere.
I'll have another update around 4:30 p.m.
Powerful Hurricane Earl Headed Our Way

Hurricane Earl is expected to be an intense Category 4 hurricane when it makes its closest approach to the North Carolina coast early tomorrow morning. The current forecast predicts that Earl's strongest winds will exceed 140 mph around 2 a.m. Friday when the storm's eye is about 40 miles east-southeast of Buxton, a village at Cape Hatteras. At that point, Hurricane Earl will be about 115 miles east-southeast of Plymouth, North Carolina, where Jane and I live.
If Earl maintains this intensity, it'll be among the strongest hurricanes north of the 35th parallel, which falls roughly halfway between Cape Lookout and Cape Hatteras. Hurricanes draw their strength from warm ocean waters, and the water temperatures usually aren't warm enough to sustain the storms this far north. But ocean temperatures off the coast of the Southeast are well above normal this year, and there's plenty of fuel to keep Earl stoked as it moves northward.
As I'm writing this, I just got an email alert saying that a hurricane watch has been issued for portions of the Massachusetts coast. A hurricane watch means that hurricane-force winds -- that is, winds of at least 74 mph -- are possible within the watch area.
By contrast, a hurricane warning has been issued for the North Carolina coast. A hurricane warning means that hurricane-force winds are expected within the warning area.
I'm going to try an experiment in live-blogging as Hurricane Earl approaches North Carolina. The storm is expected to be offshore and due east of Savannah, Georgia around 2 p.m. today. I'll start a new post then and make updates as Earl gets closer. Please check back.
NOTE: The graphic at the top of this post is from the website Weather Underground.
7/21/2010
The Cat Days of Summer
It's so hot, I'm recalling the heat jokes I heard years ago when I lived in Macon, Georgia. How hot is it in Macon? So hot that they keep the charcoal in the refrigerator. So hot that in the summer, Satan rents out hell and lives in Macon.
We're deep into the so-called "dog days of summer," which run approximately from early July through mid-August. The dog days got their name from the ancient Romans, who attributed the heat at this time of year to Sirius, the dog star.
The heat affects every living thing. In his 1815 book, Clavis Calendaria, Or A Compendious Analysis Of The Calendar, John Brady noted that this is the time of year "when the seas boiled, wine turned sour, dogs grew mad, and all creatures became languid, causing to man burning fevers, hysterics and phrensies."
Cats personify the "languid" effect of the heat. Felines are more prone to sleep on their backs during extremely hot weather. I'm assuming it's somehow cooler.
7/11/2010
So We're Back . . .
Jane and I got back a few days ago from our July 4th trip to Baltimore, where (1) We watched our nephew, John Morrow, play in a lacrosse tournament; (2) We had lots of crab cakes and beer; (3) Visited the house where Edgar Allan Poe lived from 1832 to 1835, and (4) I was sick in bed in the hotel for a day with some kind of flu-like illness (and no, it wasn't related to the crab cakes and beer).
So it's been hot and I'm lazy. I'm working on a few ideas for new postings. In the meantime, here's what the view looked like earlier today when Jane, Beaucat and I went out to the front porch for Sundowners. And by the way, I usually drink my vodka martinis with a slice of Vidalia onion, but we were out. So I was forced to substitute an olive.
Anyway, more to come soon . . .
6/19/2010
Very Busy, Please Stand By
6/08/2010
How I Slid Into an Appreciation of Chinese Culture
Some people think the whole thing is another in a series of sinister plots to undermine our sacred American values. They think it poses a serious threat to our very way of life. What better way to overthrow the government of a country and instill communism, they reason, than to brainwash the children who will one day take the reins of that government?
In their view, anyone who studies anything about China is a potential traitor. So I guess it's time for me to confess something -- a long time ago, in that bastion of undisciplined and dangerous free-thinking that is Chapel Hill, I studied ancient Chinese culture. And God help me, I enjoyed it and haven't been the same since.
But the Chinese government had nothing to do with coercing me into taking this subversive course, nor was I bent on fomenting revolution. I swear that the only reason I took it was because I was desperate to get a decent grade in summer school. I signed up for the course -- known at the time as Chinese 50 in the University of North Carolina curriculum catalog -- because it was famous for being, in the student slang of that era, a "slide."
A slide was a class in which you could get a decent grade by doing little more than filling a seat in the lecture hall for a semester. The names of such courses are circulated among the mediocre students on the campuses of colleges such as UNC, where you always seem to find yourself in classes with students who are a whole lot smarter than you and ruin the grading curve for everyone else.
So during that summer session I took a seat in one of the largest auditoriums on campus, joining academically sluggish football players, party-hearty frat boys and other less-than-focused semi-scholars who knew their college careers depended on a QPA-boosting grade in this course.
I wish I could remember the name of the professor who taught Chinese 50, but that's long gone from my memory. But I do clearly remember his appearance and mannerisms. He was a small, wispy, slightly nervous American Caucasian, probably late 30s-early 40s, with a scraggly beard and graying hair. In those days you could still smoke in UNC classrooms, and he chain-smoked throughout his lectures.
In short, he was not a very imposing figure. But he was deeply in love with the culture and history of China, and he intensely wanted to communicate that love to his students -- even though he knew his class was a sort of summer purgatory for those who'd discovered that academics was probably the least-interesting of all the things you could do in Chapel Hill.
On the first day of class, he laid his cards on the table. If you show up for all the classes and do all of the assigned work, you'll get a 'C,' he told us. If you do a little more than the assigned work, you'll get a 'B,' and if you do still more work you'll get an 'A,' he said.
But I'm not doing this so you can kick your mind into neutral and coast through summer school, he said. I'm doing this because I think the ancient Chinese built one of the greatest civilizations in world history, and I'm hoping you'll pick up just a little bit of that from this class.
And then he proceeded, during those muggy North Carolina summer mornings, to tell us a fascinating story of a long-ago people who were sublimely civilized. Like any group of humans, there were scoundrels, wastrels and thieves among them, but their culture was focused on moderation and self-discipline.
The ancient Chinese recognized the deep flaws of human nature, and took that into account in making their laws. They recognized that no human is as powerful as the forces of nature, and structured their lives to be in harmony with their surroundings. They recognized the ceaseless interplay between simplicity and complexity in all aspects of human existence, and wrote poetry and essays to express that.
They even devised a written language that was not intended to be spoken, but was designed to communicate an idea or a passion by creating a series of images in the minds of readers. It was a language that existed only in the mind, sort of like telepathy.
I also learned about Lao Tzu, the ancient philosopher who supposedly scolded Confucius for his pride and vanity and wrote the Tao Te Ching before disappearing forever.
I got a B+ for the course, but more importantly I came away from that class with a lingering fascination for a civilization and a system of thought that was based on reasoning and intellect instead of emotion and acquisitiveness.
It's been decades since I took Chinese 50, but a week hasn't gone by that I haven't thought of that class in some context. And now the story emerges about the frightened people in Hacienda Heights who have freaked out because kids there are learning something about China.
So the adults are upset because the children may become wiser than their elders. I think Lao Tzu might find that amusing.
NOTE: The symbols at the top of this post are Chinese for "change."
6/03/2010
Baseball's "Human Element" Throws Monkey Wrench Into the Game

Umpire Jim Joyce admitted that he'd missed the call on a play at first base that would have ended the game and preserved Galarraga's pitching gem. He even apologized to Galarraga after the game. But MLB commissioner Bud Selig refused to overturn Joyce's blown call and declare that Galarraga had indeed pitched a perfect game, sparking outrage among many fans.
Baseball purists such as I love to talk about the "human element" of baseball. Invoking the human element means that even though baseball has rules that theoretically prevent any sort of advantage for either team, we purists recognize that human frailties often decide the outcomes of games. And we supposedly accept that as part of the game, just as we have to accept that a pebble in the infield can suddenly change the path of a ground ball and alter the game.
Calling it the human element sounds more noble than saying that an umpire blew a call. And there's a long history of Major League baseball games that have been affected by that particular human element -- including several perfect and near-perfect games.
New York Yankees' pitcher Don Larsen pitched the most famous perfect game in Game 5 of the 1956 World Series. But Larsen probably had a little help from plate umpire Babe Pinelli. With two outs in the ninth inning, Pinelli called Brooklyn Dodger pinch-hitter Dale Mitchell out on a third strike that many witnesses thought was well out of the strike zone. Pinelli, the human element in this game, apparently decided that Larsen deserved the perfect game and ended it before Mitchell could spoil the masterpiece.
In May 1959, Pittsburgh Pirates' pitcher Harvey Haddix pitched above and beyond the boundaries of normal perfection when he didn't allow a runner to reach base for 12 innings. Facing one of the toughest lineups in baseball at the time, Haddix retired 36 consecutive Milwaukee Braves batters.
It was an unprecedented performance, and I doubt that anyone will ever accomplish it again. But Haddix and the Pirates lost the game in the 13th inning. Since he'd pitched nine perfect innings before losing, he was credited with a perfect game -- until MLB changed the scoring rules in 1991 and wiped Haddix's perfect game from the record books.
In May 1972, Chicago Cubs pitcher Milt Pappas retired 26 straight San Diego Padres' batters. Then, one out and one strike away from perfection, Pappas threw two pitches that were close enough to be called third strikes. But plate umpire Bruce Froemming -- that ornery human element -- apparently didn't have the same respect for perfection that Babe Pinelli had in 1956. Froemming called both pitches balls, and Pappas's perfection was lost to human imperfection.
I had mixed feelings when I heard that Bud Selig was going to consider whether to reverse Joyce's call and declare that Galarraga had pitched a perfect game. That umpire-as-human-element thing came to mind, and I thought that maybe Joyce's blown call should not be reversed.
Then Selig made his ruling, and I was angry, and I know why. I just don't like Selig. He could say publicly that his mother loves him, and my instinctive reaction would be to snort and call him a liar. My old friend Chaz Misenheimer has a description of Selig that sums up the opinion of many fans, including me. Chaz says Selig is "a smiling, spineless, gutless jellyfish of a bureaucrat who couldn't pick up Barney Fife's whistle."
Milt Pappas -- still sore that he lost his bid for perfection 38 years ago because of the human element -- was more succinct in his description of Selig's decision. He called the commissioner "Mr. No-Guts."
At the same time Selig announced that he is going to convene a committee, confer with the players unions, yada yada yada, and figure out some way to prevent this from happening again.
I'll admit that I'd probably have complained regardless of what Selig decided. But his wimpy, bureaucratic effort to please everyone and avoid controversy reminded me of why I dislike him. He's breaking his back to avoid having to make a tough decision himself.
NOTE: The screen-grab photo at the top clearly shows that pitcher Armando Galarraga's foot is touching first base ahead of Cleveland Indians' runner Jason Donald. The play should have been the final out of Galarraga's perfect game.
6/02/2010
CSU forecasters predict "very active" hurricane season
There seems little doubt that we're in for a stormy summer. Earlier today, Colorado State University forecasters Phil Klotzbach and William Gray released a statement predicting that the 2010 Atlantic Basin hurricane season -- which started yesterday -- will be "very active." The CSU meteorologists think that 18 named tropical storms will form before the end of the season on November 30. They think 10 of those storms will strengthen into hurricanes with winds of at least 74 mph. Five of those hurricanes could develop into major hurricanes with winds exceeding 110 mph.
Last week, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration predicted that 14 to 23 named storms could form in the Atlantic, with 8 to 14 of those storms becoming hurricanes. NOAA also said that three to seven major hurricanes could form.
The news from the CSU forecasters is even worse for the Caribbean Sea. Klotzbach and Gray think this year could be similar to the awful summers of 2004 and 2005, two of the most active seasons on record. Monster hurricanes such as Ivan, Katrina, Rita and Wilma formed in the Caribbean during those summers, and 2005 became the most active single season on record with 28 named storms.
Several factors are expected to contribute to this year's exceptional hurricane activity.
The El Nino weather phenomenon that kept the lid on last summer's hurricane activity is dissipating. El Nino events occur sporadically and are caused by an unusual warming of waters in the Pacific Ocean off the northwest coast of South America. When an El Nino occurs, it creates strong upper-level winds over the Atlantic, and these winds disrupt hurricane formation.
Largely because of last summer's El Nino, only nine name storms formed in the Atlantic Basin, which includes the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea.
Waters in the tropical Atlantic also are unusually warm this year. Hurricanes draw their energy from warm ocean water, so this could provide plenty of fuel for the storms.
Klotzbach said that an active hurricane season could affect efforts to contain and clean up the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. "If the storm tracks to the west of the oil, there is the potential that the counter-clockwise circulation of the hurricane could drive some of the oil further towards the U.S. Gulf Coast," he said. "We do not expect that the oil slick will have much of an impact on any tropical storm or hurricane that passes over the area."
NOTE: I shot the photo at the top of this post here in Plymouth during the eye of Hurricane Isabel, which struck North Carolina in September 2003.
5/31/2010
"I lament that there are those who can learn no lesson of humanity ..."
It's Memorial Day 2010, and we're entangled in a couple of wars that seem to have no end. But as Harper's Weekly noted in its issue of August 17, 1861, war is pretty much the perpetual state of the human race."War is among the oldest historical facts," Harper's editors wrote. "The world has always been fighting more or less. It is the final appeal when ignorant men quarrel or when grave men differ. It is not necessary to hate your enemy, but it may be necessary to kill him. If a man sincerely thinks that he ought to cut your throat, he can not complain if you think with equal sincerity that he ought not."
Harper's published those words less than a month after the First Battle of Bull Run, the first major battle of the Civil War which had been an unmitigated disaster for Union forces.
For 234 years, young men and women have been sent to fight in America's name. Sometimes they've been put in harm's way for reasons that were questionable at best. Other times, they unquestionably preserved our way of life.
But regardless of the reasons, young lives were cut short. So here are some photos of the Americans who have gone off to fight since the Civil War.
The photo above, from the Library of Congress, shows unidentified Confederate soldiers who were captured during the Battle of Gettysburg, which was fought from July 1 to July 3, 1863. More than 600,000 Union and Confederate soldiers died in the Civil War, which provided a horrifying example of the carnage of war in the Industrial Age.
The photo at right, from the website FamilyOldPhotos.com, shows Davis Wilson Wolfcale, a corporal in the Indiana National Guard. Wolfcale was around 21 years old when this photo was made during his service in the Spanish-American War of 1898. That war was touched off by the mysterious explosion of the battleship USS Maine in Havana, Cuba in February 1898. It was the golden age of Yellow Journalism, and Americans' passions were inflamed by sensationalistic and wildly inaccurate stories published by William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer, who were locked in a fierce battle for newspaper circulation in New York.
Wolfcale survived that war and died in Michigan on October 13, 1941, about six weeks before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor plunged the United States into World War II.
The United States was reluctant to enter World War I, which broke out in Europe in August 1914. Americans were enraged when a German submarine sank the passenger liner Lusitania in 1915. Still, American troops didn't join the Allies fighting Germany until 1917. The fresh American troops turned the tide of the war, and Germany surrendered in 1918.
The above photo, from the website WorldWar1Gallery.com, shows unidentified American soldiers during World War I, which was called the Great War because no one imagined there could be another conflict of the scale of that war. They were wrong, of course.
The United States was still a segregated society when it entered World War II in 1941, but black soldiers and sailors played a vital role in that conflict. This photo shows an African-American soldier working on a truck engine at Fort Knox, Kentucky in June 1942. The photo is from the National Archives and was made by Alfred T. Palmer.The war that erupted on the Korean peninsula in June 1950 wasn't even given the designation of "war" at first. It was officially referred to as a "police action." But the fighting against Korean and Chinese communist forces was as bloody and deadly as any war the United States was ever involved in. And it was a war of uncertain purpose. When a cease-fire was finally signed in July 1953, Communist forces still occupied North Korea and controlled the North Korean government.
This photo shows an American soldier of the 19th Infantry defending a position in Korea during the grim fighting of July 1950. It's from the website The Korean War, produced by B.L. Kortegaard.The Viet Nam War was another well-intentioned but confusing effort to stop the spread of communism in Asia. The war provoked a determined anti-war movement in the United States and opened cultural and social fissures that still haven't been closed 35 years after the war ended in 1975.
The above National Geographic photo shows a young American soldier warily relaxing in Viet Nam.The last photo shows Navy Chief Petty Officer Adam L. Brown of Hot
Springs, Arkansas. Brown, a decorated Navy SEAL, was killed a couple of weeks ago in Afghanistan. He left behind a wife and two children. The photo is from the website ArkansasOnline.com.I have no doubt that the enemy Brown was fighting in Afghanistan means to do us harm and has to be fought. But his death calls to mind another quote from that Harper's Weekly issue of August 17, 1861. The quote is from the 19th-century English poet Walter Savage Landor: "I lament that there are those who can learn no lesson of humanity, unless we write it broadly with the point of the sword."
NOTE: The photo at the top of this post shows the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at Arlington National Cemetery. It was shot by Myron Davis for Life magazine in 1942,
