Morning Glory Clouds Over Australia

Morning Glory Clouds Over Australia

What causes these long, strange clouds? No one is sure. A rare type of cloud known as a Morning Glory cloud can stretch 1,000 kilometers long and occur at altitudes up to two kilometers high. Although similar roll clouds have been seen at specific places across the world, the ones over Burketown, Queensland Australia occur predictably every spring. Long, horizontal, circulating tubes of air might form when flowing, moist, cooling air encounters an inversion layer, an atmospheric layer where air temperature atypically increases with height. These tubes and surrounding air could cause dangerous turbulence for airplanes when clear. Morning Glory clouds can reportedly achieve an airspeed of 60 kilometers per hour over a surface with little discernible wind. Pictured above, photographer Mick Petroff photographed

some Morning Glory clouds from his airplane near the Gulf of Carpentaria, Australia. ~ NASA



Credit & Licence: Mick Petroff; Tip Thanks: James Holmes (Cairns)

Learn more about weather at the Wilkinson Public Library.

~ Faith

Barack's Book Bag ~ What Obama's summer reading list says about him

All vacations have their rituals: slapping sunscreen on wriggling kids, eating ice cream after dinner, and hiding the holes in the rental-house drywall. Presidential vacations have rituals, too: peekaboo with the press corps, highly managed casual social engagements, and golf. Always there must be the golf.

Even the news media have their vacation rituals. One of them is overinterpreting the presidential summer reading list. Monday the White House obliged, offering the list of five books president Obama has packed for his trip:

• The Way Home by George Pelecanos, a crime thriller based in Washington, D.C.;
• Lush Life by Richard Price, a story of race and class set in New York's Lower East Side;
• Tom Friedman's book Hot, Flat, and Crowded, on the benefits to America of an environmental revolution;
• John Adams by David McCullough;
• Plainsong by Kent Haruf, a drama about the life of eight different characters living in a Colorado prairie community.

What does this list of American authors tell us about the president? Well, it's not as fun as the year Bush decided to read Camus' The Stranger. George Bush reading a French Existentialist is like Obama reading a Cabela's catalog. Plus, it was a story about a one-time layabout turned unrepentant Arab killer, which, if you wanted to overinterpret things, gave you enough material to get you through a few packs of Gauloises.

The Obama selection is not overtly controversial. In 2006, Bush's list included The Great Influenza, about the 1918 flu. If Obama were reading that today while his White House was issuing a new report about the H1N1 virus, he'd start a national panic. But his list is also clearly not poll-tested. Women played a key role in Obama's victory in 2008. They're swing voters. And yet all of Obama's authors are white men. The subject of the longest book, John Adams, is a dead white male. Obama couldn't get away with that in an election year, and, given his aides' penchant for cleaning up little things like this, we'll soon see the president with a copy of Kate Walbert's A Short History of Women.

The Price and Pelecanos books are very similar—urban, East Coast crime stories by two authors who have also written for the HBO series The Wire. Only the Haruf provides geographical and literary diversity. The McCullough book seems like the kind of thing presidents get with the job. When presidents read presidential biographies, it must be like a user's manual for the office. Sure, Adams occupied it 200 years ago, but just as Obama read Team of Rivals when picking his Cabinet and Jonathan Alter's The Defining Moment on FDR's 100 days when forming his initial agenda, he'll probably now start dropping Adams references in the coming months.

I bet Obama doesn't finish the Friedman. There's no book on his list more like his evening briefing books. And he's going to have to sacrifice something. The books total nearly 2,400 pages. At an average speed of one page per minute, the president needs to spend at least four hours a day reading. Plus, he's still got briefings and work reading he's got to do, and Sen. Baucus might be calling on Line 2. The president can't do all that and spend time with his daughters, play golf and tennis as he did Monday, and enjoy a few of those three-hour dinners with his wife. And if he can do all of that, why hasn't he passed health care reform twice by now? (Of course, the marathon reading could be training for the 1,000-page health care bill he might be lucky enough to read one day.)

That said, the Obama list is nowhere near as ambitious as the stack Bill Clinton used to take with him to the Vineyard. The 42nd president usually took at least a dozen books, ranging from history to biography to mysteries. When Clinton visited Edgartown Books on the island a few years ago to sign copies of his autobiography, he walked the aisles pointing to books, saying, "Read that, read that, read that," according to Susan Mercier, the manager.

When Clinton vacationed at the Vineyard during his presidency, bookstores sent baskets of books in a public competition for his affections. This year, Edgartown Books sent President Obama a small collection: That Old Cape Magic by Richard Russo for the president, Linda Fairstein's Lethal Legacy for the first lady, and A Child's Guide to Martha's Vineyard for the girls. The books were delivered through a Clinton acquaintance (there are a lot of those on the Vineyard these days), but there's no word on whether the president has seen the delivery.

Over at Bunch of Grapes, a bookstore in Vineyard Haven, the new owner is playing it coy. A clerk acknowledged that they had sent books, but when asked which ones, she sounded as if she were on the press office payroll. "Nothing [we] can share with anyone," she said. Another store employee says there are rumors Obama might visit, which means management is probably wise to be so fussy with information. Barnes & Noble, meanwhile, certain not to get a visit, has already tried to capitalize on the Obama reading list.

We can blame John Kennedy for this obsession with presidential reading. Asked at a press conference what he read for relaxation, he named Ian Fleming's James Bond novels. Kennedy was the first glamour president of the television age. His celebrity status escalated the process of overinterpreting presidential behavior, but those books also seemed to say something about the man who read them. It was just too fitting that Kennedy was reading about a debonair Cold War rake who made his own rules. Presidential reading lists have been squeezed for meaning ever since. Which means that in the heat of this year's health care debate, the president doesn't dare read anything by anyone who once wrote a book called Dr. No. - Slate

Check out the Library Catalog at the Wilkinson Public Library for your next read.

~ Faith

Wikipedia to Limit Changes to Articles on People

Wikipedia, one of the 10 most popular sites on the Web, was founded about eight years ago as a long-shot experiment to create a free encyclopedia from the contributions of volunteers, all with the power to edit, and presumably improve, the content.

Now, as the English-language version of Wikipedia has just surpassed three million articles, that freewheeling ethos is about to be curbed.

Officials at the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit in San Francisco that governs Wikipedia, say that within weeks, the English-language Wikipedia will begin imposing a layer of editorial review on articles about living people.

The new feature, called “flagged revisions,” will require that an experienced volunteer editor for Wikipedia sign off on any change made by the public before it can go live. Until the change is approved — or in Wikispeak, flagged — it will sit invisibly on Wikipedia’s servers, and visitors will be directed to the earlier version.

The change is part of a growing realization on the part of Wikipedia’s leaders that as the site grows more influential, they must transform its embrace-the-chaos culture into something more mature and dependable. ~ NY Times

~ Faith

The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

"Where are the people?" resumed the little prince at last. "It's a little lonely in the desert..."

"It is lonely when you're among people, too," said the snake.


J'aime bien les couchers de soleil. Allons voir un coucher de soleil...

I am very fond of sunsets. Come, let us go look at a sunset... - Wikiquote

Request from Wilkinson Public Library.

~ Faith

Telluride Promise ~ Based on a True Story

A little man in a small mining town did the right thing for people who trusted him with their money and went to jail for it. A banker, Charles C. Wain, "Buck," foresaw the depression. Six weeks before the crash, C.C. set in motion his plan to protect his depositors, by arranging for a "loan" from New York banks. Pursued by the ambitious and the rich and powerful, brought to trial on charges that were not actually for the crime he committed, he pled guilty partly to protect his family and friends from further harassment, mostly because it didn't seem right just to beat the system. "I took that money. That was the only way I could get it to pay out my depositors." Six years later, three months before FDR signed the National Banking Act, making his crime the law of the land, he was quietly released from prison. He tells his own story from the vantage point of his last days as an obscure Fuller Brush man of 83. - Amazon

Request from Wilkinson Public Library.

~ Faith

House of God ~ A Book Doctors Can’t Close

It was a raunchy, troubling and hilarious novel that turned into a cult phenomenon devoured by a legion of medical students, interns, residents and doctors. It introduced characters like “Fat Man” — the all-knowing but crude senior resident — and medical slang like Gomer, for Get Out of My Emergency Room.

Called “The House of God,” the book was drawn from real life, and 30 years after its initial publication, it is still part of the medical conversation.

Written by a psychiatrist, Stephen Bergman, under the pseudonym Samuel Shem, M.D., the novel is based on his grueling, often dehumanizing experiences as an intern at Harvard Medical School’s Beth Israel Hospital in 1974. More than two million copies have been sold, and the book has been continuously in print since its 1978 publication. ~ NY Times

Request from Wilkinson Public Library.

~ Faith

William Shatner's "The Transformed Man"

So bad it's good. No, great!

~Ty

Check it out at your library.

ZEITOUN: A new book by Dave Eggers

A great review by Timothy Egan in the New York Times Book Review. Check out Zeitoun today!

Pinhead Talk ~ Sprites, Elves, & Blue Jets: Strange lights in the sky

Pinhead Town Talk

"Sprites, Elves, & Blue Jets: Strange lights in the sky" Earle Williams, Research Scientists, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
August 11
6:00 – 7:15 pm

Telluride Conference Center in Mountain Village
Free admission, cash bar Watch Live Here

~ Faith

The Lost People of Mountain Village

The Lost People of Mountain Village is NOT funny.

"I've seen it from a distance but I won't go up there....noboby around here will..."

Preview this movie or check it out from the Wilkinson Public Library.

~ Faith

The boy can play

The boy can play

Tom White returns to Telluride for a night of classical piano
By Katie Klingsporn
Associate Editor
Published: Thursday, July 30, 2009 11:45 PM CDT

Tom White opens up a heavy book of music. Its yellowed pages are covered with dense patterns of notes and symbols that stretch and cluster, rise and dip in the most complicated ways. For someone who can only read basic notes, this is about as legible as hieroglyphics.

It’s the Waldstein Piano Sonata by Ludwig Van Beethoven. It’s about 30 pages long, an epic piece that travels the emotional landscape like a cross-country train, that unfolds like a day. Its parts are bright and ebullient, quiet and gorgeous, as new and cathartic as daybreak.

It’s one of White’s favorites.

“It’s an amazing piece. It’s epic. It’s one of those pieces that just haunts you forever, I guess,” he said.
He flipped to a page and began to play, filling the empty pews and spacious sanctuary of Christ Church (where he was practicing) with music so lovely and lush it could only belong to another plane.

White, who has been playing the piano since he was 12, has had this sonata on his wish list for a long time. Last fall, he finally cracked it open and started picking his way through it, figuring out the intricate parts, stringing the movements together, and slowly, over days, weeks and months, memorizing it.

On Saturday, White will play the Waldstein Sonata as part of a classical piano performance he is putting on at the Michael D. Palm Theatre. The performance is at 7:30 p.m. Tickets are $10 at the door, kids get in free.

White, who gets to perform on the Palm’s gorgeous 9-foot Steinway concert grand, will also be performing Suite Bergamasque by Claude Debussy, which he describes as a loose collection of early dance songs inspired by the famous poem Clair De Lune. Rounding out the performance, White will perform Sebastian Bach’s English Suite #2, a difficult piece that was written for dances from the late Renaissance and early Baroque periods, dances whose steps are mostly forgotten, White says.

“It’s one of those cultural things that’s been lost over the centuries,” he said.

By playing them side by side, White hopes to juxtapose a more modern dance suite with its roots.

This performance comes a little more than a year after White performed a similar concert at the Palm with friends. Only, last year’s was a bit of a farewell show, as White, then 31, was on the verge of moving to Greeley to attend grad school for piano performance.

Before he left, White lived here for six years, and his voice may be familiar to many as the co-host of KOTO’s Sunday Evening Classical, which injects some Brahams and Schubert into the usual stream of rock and roll, bluegrass and reggae that KOTO pumps into our speakers. He also performed a couple of concerts at the Sheridan Opera House, and led the occasional music lecture and taught lessons.

When he landed in Greeley from Telluride last fall to start school, he admitted that it was an aesthetic shock. But gradually, he found himself very much at home in the world of academia and musicology, he said. At school, he gets to practice four to six hours a day, live in a world of music and soak in the knowledge of incredible instructors. He plays on his instuctor’s awesome Steinway, learns about the history of music and plays in the symphonic band.

“It’s been so much fun and I’ve learned so much,” White said. “I found that being in an academic environment really suits me … it’s the one place where I really fit in in life.”

Plus, he had vast quantities of time to practice pieces like the ones he will perform this weekend — hours spent memorizing thousands of notes and hundreds of sequences, the allegros and staccatos and fortissimos, the complicated rise of sound and melody of piano pieces.

It appears that all of the saturation has paid off, too. White said it’s hard to tell if he’s improved much, but he seems to be more natural and graceful behind the piano, his hands dancing like spiders over the black and white keys, crossing over one another, simultaneously playing different parts that each appear horribly difficult.

He still has one year of study, and then White — who has loved classical music since he was an adolescent — hopes to get his doctorate, and go on to teach in a college setting.

It seems to suit him.

For this performance, White received support the Telluride Council of Arts and Humanities — which gave him a grant, the Chamber Music Festival — which helped him with insurance, and the Palm Theatre.

~ Faith