Category Archives: Uncategorized

NewScientist (19 May 2018) reports on a potential key upgrade in the process of the creation of fertilizer:

FEEDING billions of people around the globe takes a lot of energy, and much of it goes into making ammonia, the key ingredient in many fertilisers. To do this, we rely on the Haber-Bosch process, invented a century ago by German chemists Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch. No one has yet come up with anything that can compete with it on a large scale – until now.

Xiaofeng Feng and his colleagues at the University of Central Florida in Orlando have created a process that uses water, nitrogen from the air, electricity and a catalyst to help turn the ingredients into ammonia. It works at room temperature and regular pressure.

The current technology used for this step involves temperatures of 500°C and high pressures, which in turn implies consumption of large amounts of energy. If this discovery can be scaled up, it’ll certainly make it easier to support increases in population.

Alex Jordan enjoyed his lamps, and so did we.

Unfortunately, these are mostly slightly out of focus, and during the tour there’s really not much time to check the quality of the pics and reshoot.

Is doing well, as it usually does in the spring. It’ll burn out in late July.

The Pope’s favorite scene at his personal screening of Deadpool 2.

We speak of “breaking the fourth wall” when a theatrical production acknowledges the audience. Deadpool 2 (2018) gleefully shatters it and dances on its remains. This sequel of Deadpool (2016) follows the continuing life of the eponymous anti-hero, a former criminal subjected to genetic enhancement who now has greatly enhanced healing capabilities and reduced reaction times.

For the storyteller, Deadpool presents a challenge because his enhanced physiology puts him beyond the reach of just about any opponent, and, unlike Superman, his alienated position with respect to greater society leaves him more or less invulnerable to leverage. However, he has a girlfriend, and, as might be expected, she makes an early exit in this movie at the hands of assassins.

This leads to Deadpool’s violent disarticulation of himself while conversing with the audience concerning the vicissitudes of his life. Let it not be said that removing limbs from body from head puts a stop to the monologue, but merely lends it a bit of color not often achieved in other stories.

But this is to emphasize the problems the storytellers face, and so, in response, they introduce two elements to heighten the tension. First, the “authorities” can repress mutant capabilities through a simple collar secured around the neck. Once Deadpool, knocked unconscious, is so secured, he becomes nothing more than a man with Stage 4 cancer. And, once in this condition, the redemption of his life appears in the form of another assassin, a man who breaks into the prison containing Deadpool – and attacks a fourteen year old mutant instead of Deadpool.

With weapons from the future.

I will leave my reader to work out how an assassin is a redemption, or to attend a showing of Deadpool 2. As with the first in this series, the sensitive member of the audience may be offended, even rendered insensible, at some of the crudities issuing forth from the mouth of our protagonist. Or at the suggestion that regrowing limbs has, well, perhaps I shan’t go there.

But, in all the fun and games, there is a certain hollowness. Rescuing one’s girlfriend may seem a heroic and logical maneuver, yet it actually removes any gravitas attendant upon the story to realize that a real loss is not a loss, that the story is infinitely malleable in order to render a happy ending – and that breaks the implicit logic of the story.

In the end, it’s a bit of highly entertaining fluff.

Alex loved the diorama, depicting the idealistic real life scene, and we took pics of those as well.

Clerisy:

[usually treated as plural] Learned or literary people regarded as a social group or class.
‘the clerisy are those who read for pleasure’

[treated as singular] ‘he makes Coleridge’s ambitions for a clerisy exclusively conservative’ [Oxford English Dictionaries]

Noted in “Progressophobia: Why Things Are Better Than You Think They Are,” Steven Pinker, Skeptical Inquirer (May / June 2018, print only):

Epithets aside, the idea that the world is better than it was and can get better still fell out of fashion among the clerisy long ago.

Old friend Kevin McLeod discusses current trends and what they portend (full post follows from FB):

I’m starting to see more news sources enforcing paywalls. There are efforts like Texture that offer a subscription deal with all you can eat access to their sources, and they have many. Access to The Washington Post, owned by Jeff Bezos, could conceivably become a feature of Amazon Prime membership. I’m fine with paying for access to quality news sources – we did that daily in the print news era.

But paying fails to solve another problem; paywalls break sharing. I can’t share paywalled news sources in social media because it automatically cuts off people who don’t subscribe to that source. I’m afraid we’re entering an era where only those who can afford it will have current events literacy, and those who can’t will be saturated with trash sources like Fox.

Good journalism costs money. I don’t want to see reliable sources dry up and blow away. But I also don’t want to see society become further polarized and segregated than it already is. If income determines quality of access to information it will lock in existing inequalities.

Maybe it’s time we considered the BBC’s funding model. Add a very small tax to bandwidth, something comparable to the universal service fee applied to phone bills, and use that to fund a public corporation that supports news reporting. Subcontract specialty reporting on complex topics – finance, education, global conflicts. Create a strong firewall against oligarchic and political interference in coverage. Get back to reporting metrics on the economy using plain language, realistic figures and formulas.

Are there better ideas? Main thing is, let’s not limit ourselves to doing things as they’re done now. Maybe there are fair and effective solutions that don’t require funnelling money to a handful of people running news conglomerates.

While I recognize the problem, I should like to point out that this is not truly a new problem. Prior to the advent of cable television, quality news came in two forms: print and broadcast, where the latter consisted of radio and television. The former category generally charged for their service, although the charge was not onerous for folks.

When cable came around, now one needed both a television and a cable subscription, which generally transformed it into a third category, because the charge covered all the channels. The broadcast category paid for itself through ads. While ads were also an important part of the print category, they also charged readers for the right to read their papers.

The supposed charms of cable were two-fold:

1. No commercials. That’s right, that was one of the come-ons I vividly recall, as I was growing up when cable first became available. One of my dislikes of cable these days? commercials.
2. Far more choices. Of course, more choices sounds like a consumer’s dream, but there’s a hidden implication here concerning the competitors in broadcast. Those competitor face a physical limitation more severe than the cable competition because the electro-magnetic spectrum can only support so many channels. Oh, we can be clever about it, and have been, but there are physical limitations. This has resulted in the government stepping in, over the years, to regulate who can use what where, as well as the content of those channels. For example, the Fairness Doctrine, since rescinded, required broadcasters of political (or controversial) content to also broadcast opposing content. (This may explain why I once ran across Lyndon LaRouche giving a political speech on broadcast TV. Just listening to him made my stomach churn. An early purveyor of national division, I suspect.)

I think Kevin’s worry, while admirable, is perhaps a little off the mark. There are sources of inexpensive, even free news. The real question is whether they are quality sources. Fox News may make itself easily available, but as long time readers know, their coverage of critical issues is flawed – as measured by conservative critics of the current radical GOP.

And I do have to wonder if government funding of news gathering is a wise thought. Granted, the BBC seems to do a fine job, but I’ve never really studied them, nor read relevant studies (which, if I’m honest, is a far more likely activity I would undertake). And how does the BBC funding differ from that of NPR or PBS? (Yes, I send money to our local public news organization, Minnesota Public Radio, since I listen to them on the radio.) Frankly, a little competition is a good thing, if the proper goals are recognized and guide the development of the news organizations. That is, profit, while necessary in most cases, is not the measurement of greatness that most corporate managers would like to think. The goal must be consistent excellence in the news gathering and communication efforts, with aggressive neutrality and fact-checking – we needn’t give credence to Flat-Earthers, amusing as they can be, just as Creationists should also be ignored, no matter how outraged they might be at relegation to the fringe areas of society.

So I think it’s not the access, but the quality of the organization, which is at question here.

Theodicy:

Voltaire was satirizing not the Enlightenment hope for progress but its opposite, the religiouos rationalization for suffering called theodicy, according to which God had no choice but to allow epidemics and massacres because a world without them is metaphysically impossible. [ “Progressophobia: Why Things Are Better Than You Think They Are,” Steven Pinker, Skeptical Inquirer (May / June 2018, print only)]

This is George after driving in Chicago traffic.
Or maybe it was me. I’ll have to ask my wife.

Rampage (2018) is a monster movie mixed with another monster, actor Dwayne Johnson, aka The Rock of professional wrestling fame. Johnson plays Davis Okoye, former Special Forces military member turned primatologist. His favorite subject? George, an albino gorilla he rescued from poachers after the poachers killed George’s mother. George now leads his troop and communicates with Davis in sign language. And tells dirty jokes.

In orbit, a research experiment in genetics has gone awry, and as the space station explodes, the essential genetic material exits and returns to Earth in re-entry capable capsules. Three of them. One of them lands near George, who – unfortunately – ingests part of it.

Very quickly we have mutated critters wandering about, and – much like those monsters in Pacific Rim (2013) – the humans are quite underwhelming in their response to the challenge. Adding to the fun are some ridiculous bad guys, a few plot twists, and Okoye’s fantastic run of luck, not to mention his turn of phrase:

Of course the wolf flies.

Unfortunately, this movie fails to explore any new thematic territory. The bad guys are motivated completely by financial gain, with no consideration that those to whom they would sell their discovery might use the information to destroy the bad guys. It’s all about a simple-minded quest for cash, which, as you might guess, ends badly – if creatively – for them.

And that’s the heart of the problem with this movie. If the bad guys had some depth to them, this could have been far more interesting and fun. But instead of exploring a rich vein of new, intriguing conundrums, we’re stuck with a played out vein of monsters rampaging – excuse me – across the landscape, and Duane Johnson once again demonstrating he’s more than just a monster from the ring.

But we knew that already, and as fun as that talent can be, it just can’t carry this movie. The acting is fine, the special effects are competent, the science sucks, and the thing that comes from Florida must have been moving faster than a tsunami. It’s a bad sign when the audience is enumerating the science and reality faults of a story. A good story will make you not notice them, but we were noticing them.

It might be a good head-cold movie, or post-fencing tournament movie, when you’re too tired to examine it closely. Then just sit back and enjoy the mayhem.

Perhaps only second to the Carousel, the Maritime exhibit was the most awesome House On The Rock exhibit. Featuring a life-sized diorama of a whale in combat with a gigantic octopus (unfortunately, none of those pics seem to have come out – it was quite dark and unfriendly to my little smartphone camera), that particular exhibit was under construction when Alex Jordan passed away; it was completed by his staff.

But there was much more to the exhibit than just a couple of plaster critters, and those pictures, of model ships and various associated materials, did come out.

I thought this Chinese ship was fabulous.

A bit of scrimshaw, I believe.

Another Chinese junk.

Some mundane sailing ships behind glass. Loved the scrimshaw.

An attention-getting Titanic model.

More beautiful scrimshaw work.

Not exactly sure.

And finishing up with some lovely models of sidewheel paddleboats.

I’ve been hearing for weeks now how Trump and his associates have been comparing various conspiracy theories to the Watergate scandal of the 1970s. For instance, here’s Talking Points Memo:

President Donald Trump’s reelection campaign used his recent “demand” that the Justice Department investigate special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe in a fundraising email Monday.

“WORSE than Watergate,” the email’s subject line read.

“I hereby DEMAND that the Department of Justice investigate whether Obama’s FBI and DOJ infiltrated or surveilled our campaign for political purposes,” the email, signed by Trump, reads.

“THIS COULD BE THE GREATEST POLITICAL SCANDAL IN AMERICAN HISTORY.”

“I need you to sign your name right this second to join me in demanding this abuse of power gets investigated.”

And a few days ago, Steve Benen has compiled a list of them:

According to the current president, Uranium One, for example, is Watergate. So is the non-existent wiretapping of Trump Tower. Benghazi, Trump has assured us, is “bigger than Watergate.” What’s more, Joe Arpaio’s investigation into Barack Obama’s birth certificate, Trump wrote in 2012, “could dwarf Watergate.”

In March, the president said the Justice Department’s investigation into his campaign is “bigger than Watergate,” and yesterday, worked up by something he saw in conservative media, Trump added that the FBI had an “informant” in his political operation, which he said is – you guessed it – “bigger than Watergate!”

I have one question: President Trump does understand that Watergate involved an American President conspiring in a disgraceful action that resulted in his forced resignation, right? Every time he uses that comparison, it serves to remind Americans of a certain age of the abuses of another Republican President.

It may all be some literary foreshadowing.

This pic was taken at a friend’s place, and that unusual coloration – whatever it’s name – are actually flower petals from the tree.

Michael Le Page in the pages of NewScientist (5 May 2018, paywall) reveals how best intentions are the paving stones down that merry old path:

Half of all the palm oil imported by Europe is turned into biodiesel and blended into conventional fuel to power cars and trucks. This misguided attempt to “green” fuels is actually tripling carbon emissions, not reducing them. What’s more, the practice is subsidised by the European Union. In other words, taxpayers are paying to destroy rainforests and accelerate climate change.

“People don’t know that they have palm oil in their fuel tanks,” says Laura Buffet of Transport & Environment in Brussels, Belgium, which campaigns for cleaner transport in Europe.

And yet, while palm oil has acquired a reputation as a villain, the plant itself, called oil palm, is something of a hero. It is up to nine times as productive per hectare as other sources of vegetable oils such as rapeseed (canola) and soybeans, meaning it requires less land (see Graph [omitted]).

The problem is that we are cutting down some of the most species-rich rainforests in the world to plant ever more oil palms. Growing demand is driving massive deforestation in Malaysia and Indonesia, which produce 90 per cent of palm oil.

To halt this destruction, demand must be curbed. The obvious solution is to ditch palm oil from foods, but this approach is likely to fail.

Ever get the feeling that we’re going to see more of this sort of problem in the future? It may be a tragic thing to say, it may offend some people who believe life is somehow sacred, it may even enrage clever libertarians who think they see the hole in the reasoning, but, to me, the problem is just too much human life.

“Palm oil has a worse greenhouse-gas footprint than any other vegetable oil and causes habitat loss of endangered species,” says Stephanie Searle of the International Council on Clean Transportation in Washington DC. “It’s better to expand 5 hectares of rapeseed production onto abandoned cropland in Europe than to destroy 1 hectare of peat swamp forest in Indonesia.”

It feels like we’re on the poopdeck of the Titanic, frantically rearranging the lounge chairs while the ship’s cat goes sliding down the tilting deck.

But I must soldier on, I fear, because I may be wrong.

Jordan collected or created weapons, including a few outré specimens.

From The Onion, five years ago:

My friends, everybody has their down days, and during these long winter months it is especially easy to succumb to the doldrums and find yourself in a bit of a funk. But not to fear! I have a simple tip that’s guaranteed to pick you up and get you back in good spirits in no time, and here it is: Whenever you’re feeling low, just remember that I, Donald Trump, will be dead in roughly 15 to 20 years.

That’s right. In the not-very-distant future I will die and then be gone from the world for all eternity. You may even get to watch me in a casket on national television being lowered into the ground, never to be seen again. I bet you’re smiling just thinking about that.

And then the backlash, which The Onion had neglected, from the Donald’s lawyer:

In a free press, journalists must expose the truth even if it upsets those in power. Our work often leads to significant backlash, and we at The Onion are no strangers to receiving threats of legal action. While we generally dismiss them as the baseless accusations they are, we recently found an old cease-and-desist letter from the president’s personal attorney that has caused us to reexamine this policy.

Our editorial board would like to formally announce that we have finally read Michael Cohen’s 2013 email regarding his client Donald Trump and would like to discuss the matter further at his convenience.

Delicious clairvoyance.

Now the North Korean summit is off, according to NBC News:

President Donald Trump on Thursday canceled the planned summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, which was set to take place June 12 in Singapore, and said the American military is prepared to act if there’s any fallout.

But the fallout may have nothing to do with the Korean peninsula, in view of this bit of buffoonery reported by the AP:

A group of House Republicans is seeking the Nobel Peace Prize for President Donald Trump because of his work to ease nuclear tensions with North Korea.

Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un are working out the details of a historic summit that could take place by the end of May or early June. Yet an agreement by which the North would give up its nuclear weapons and allow for the world to confirm it still seems far off.

That’s from a few days ago, before the Trump Administration realized they weren’t prepared for a meeting with North Korea.

My prediction? Norway had better duck if Trump doesn’t get that Nobel Prize. The GOP will suggest the Nobel committee is rigged, hates Trump, and is incompetent. If the GOP spokesman works hard, he might even be able to say it in one breath without crying.

Looks like Trump’ll be coming up short. Again.

The garden, that is.

Apparently, a bit of weeding is in order.

Jordan apparently had quite an affection for statues, from realistic to abstract to cartoonish. Here’s a sampling from my hurried photographs.

Continuing in the vein of Are you kidding? is Conrad Black on National Review, who happily wants to believe that, since he doesn’t see any signs of collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russians in the past, there won’t be any evidence found in the future as well:

It is now clear that Russian attempts at interference in the 2016 election, though somewhat outrageous, were ineffectual, unconnected with any particular party, a small effort given what a country of Russia’s resources and taste for political skullduggery and chicanery is capable of, and minor compared with the influence many countries, including the United States, have sometimes exercised in the elections of other countries. No serious person could find anything in the conduct of the president that could be construed as obstruction of justice, the all-purpose catch-all of American prosecutors, who can conjure that charge from the most mundane acts.

The Trump-impeachers, shuffling grimly forward into the desert like Old Testament slaves to the chant of the ineffable millionaire congresswoman Maxine Waters: “Impeach 45!” will perish in the sand. The vultures will pick their bones in an Ozymandian setting. No president has ever been impeached and removed successfully (though Andrew Johnson, who was not guilty of anything, escaped removal by only one vote in 1868). The required “high crimes and misdemeanors” the Constitution stipulates, have never been clearly defined, but apparently did not include President Clinton’s likely untruthfulness to a grand jury. After two years of exhaustive legal investigation accompanied by intense media innuendos about everything President Trump and his family have done more ambitious than putting on their shoes in the morning (unlike the Clinton case and much closer to the relentless media badgering and defaming of Richard Nixon in the Watergate affair), there is nothing to impeach with, or about.

Note the spurious inclusion of the claim that we do it, too, as if this has any relationship to, as if it excuses, the Russian attempts to influence the 2016 American Presidential campaign. An American patriot would be outraged at Russian interference in our election. Mr. Black? He can’t be bothered, because the elixir of power he holds to his lips through his proxy, Mr. Trump, is simply too delicious to let him consider clinging to his principles.

Or would Mr. Black have us believe he’d be equally insouciant if Mrs. Clinton had won the 2016 election?

But Mr. Black isn’t writing this merely to express his belief there was no collusion, but to prepare the way for open warfare against the American intelligence community which threatens his favored candidate’s exalted position:

It also seems to be clear that Comey, and former National Intelligence and Central Intelligence directors James Clapper and John Brennan, were involved in improper leaks of confidential information and in coordinating their activities to mislead the president-elect. All three also appear to have misled congressional committees while under oath. The inspector general of the Department of Justice, Michael Horowitz, is apparently only a week away from a release to the Congress (i.e., the world) of his report on the official handling of the Clinton emails affair. His report is reportedly 400 pages, and there has never in recent history been a 400-page nothingburger. It would be astounding if there were not further criminal referrals for some of Trump’s prominent tormenters, presumably starting with Comey, as there were for former FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe from the inspector general’s first report. This will be a spectacular wind-up to Comey’s author’s tour, as he entrusts his defense to another of America’s most egregious rules-free prosecutors, Patrick Fitzgerald.

This is part and parcel with the Trump strategy of discrediting anyone who can damage him. Indeed, he admitted as much to Lesley Stahl, as reported today by CNBC:

President Donald Trump told the veteran journalist Lesley Stahl of the CBS program “60 Minutes” that he bashes the press to “demean” and “discredit” reporters so that the public will not believe “negative stories” about him, Stahl said.

And why does he feel that’s necessary? The easy answer is that he believes the press will be biased against him. The hard answer?

Here’s the question that no Trump supporter dares address, to even acknowledge: If Trump is innocent of collusion, then why the circus, the frantic attempts to avoid the questions, the open worries about a fallacious perjury trap? If your man is innocent, then a thorough investigation should reveal little more than the usual minor tripping over confusing campaign finance laws. So let him be investigated, let him come out shining like an angel!

That’s certain to shove a pine tree up the liberals’ collective ass, now wouldn’t it?

The behavior of the President, his family, and his lawyers is mere circumstantial evidence, and yet it is absolutely telling. Mr. Black may come to eat his words.

Recently there’s been talk about the indictment of the President and whether this is permissible or not. The New York Times has a good article on the subject by former Solicitor General Neal K. Katyal, who lays out the various assertions, interpretations, and results of the controversy.

Begin with the basics. An indictment — a formal accusation that someone has committed a crime — can be brought only by a prosecutor working either in the federal or state system. Mr. Mueller is one such prosecutor. But even if Mr. Mueller has the goods on Mr. Trump, two barriers remain before he may indict him. First, some constitutional scholars believe a sitting president cannot be indicted. And second, two Department of Justice opinions, dating back to the Nixon and Clinton administrations, side with this view. From that vantage point, it looks as if Mr. Giuliani’s report about what Mr. Mueller said appears plausible.

But there are deep problems here. For one thing, the scholars who believe that a sitting president cannot be indicted always couple that belief with the insistence that the remedy for a president who commits a crime is to impeach him first (so he is no longer “sitting” and could then be indicted). Otherwise, a president would be above the law; he could, say, shoot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue and face no legal process whatsoever. For that reason, the “can’t indict a sitting president” view is necessarily dependent on Congress having all of the information necessary to conduct thorough impeachment proceedings.

This is quite tricky ground, empirically speaking. To suggest that the President is immune to criminal prosecution leaves the state with a situation in which the most powerful individual in government is theoretically without restraint, at least until the end of their term. This is not a stable situation.

On the other hand, if the President is not immune, then an unscrupulous prosecutor could consume large amounts of a President’s valuable time, or at least so we’d like to believe, although the reports on our current President’s television viewing habits leads me to believe that, at least in some cases, the time is not so valuable.

On balance, on this issue along, empirically I’d prefer the President not to be immune, because the rogue prosecutor has important constraints imposed by the judicial system. While such a prosecutor may succeed in marching a sitting President off to jail, a judge must sit in on an immediate hearing concerning bail and that sort of thing, constituting a second opinion on the prosecutor’s case. If we give the President immunity, he may flout all laws and, for the objector waving the impeachment flag, I must answer that impeachment takes time, time in which great damage may be done to individuals by the vindictive person, and to the state by the traitorous or foolish.

Moving onwards, and as Katyal touches on, a core principle of the United States is that we are all equal before the law. The assertion that the President is immune, even if temporarily, is as galling as it is dangerous.

But there’s one more point which Mr. Katyal appears to have ignored, and that is the division of powers question. I’ve heard it mentioned that removal of the President is primarily a political matter, and thus should be left for Congress. Yet, violations of the law are matters for neither Congress, which merely prescribes punishment, nor the Executive, but the Judiciary and our various law enforcement agencies. If a President breaks a law, it should not and cannot be a matter for Congress to decide upon, because that would rob the Judiciary of its primary responsibility for adjudicating the law, and its punishments. While we may choose to suspend indictments for minor law-breaking such as speeding and that sort of thing, transferring the entire responsibility to Congress, and handing it a metaphorical nuclear device as its only official tool for punishment, would be a mistaken reading of the Constitution.

Those scholars who claim a sitting President cannot be indicted should hand in their diplomas. They have no idea of what they speak.

Kenneth Dekleva draws parallels with American diplomacy with nuclear armed China and former enemy Vietnam in a post on 38 North:

So now comes the hard part. Singapore’s late Prime Minister Lee Kwan Yew, were he still alive, would be hosting the crowning moment of his legendary career. I’d like to think that he, so prescient in his views of other leaders (he referred to China’s Xi Jinping as “in the Nelson Mandela’s class of persons [and] a person with enormous emotional stability who does not allow his personal misfortunes or sufferings affect his judgment—he is impressive”) would perceive Kim Jong Un as an aspirational leader, who has highlighted his desire to see North Korea move beyond nuclear weapons towards economic development, much like Vietnam’s Doi Moi policy in the 1980s. But the Kim-Trump summit will have its future challenges. Kim has, like the Chinese in the 1970s, started with grand gestures and communiqués, but now comes the long, patient and difficult work of diplomacy. One might recall that it took seven years from the 1972 Nixon-Mao summit until the establishment of US-China diplomatic relations in 1979. In the case of Vietnam, an even longer period of time elapsed before full US-Vietnamese diplomatic relations were established in 1995.

For Kim, a long period of diplomacy probably seems appropriate and doable. For Trump? I occasionally speak of being part of the ‘Instant Gratification Generation,’ and sometimes it seems like President Trump is as well. Will that doom the summit to failure? The United States to a humiliating agreement? Or we still have a long diplomatic period ahead of us, decorated with the bombast of Trump?

I’ve chosen to include poorly lit or out of focus pictures from our House On The Rock tour because much of HOTR was really poorly lit or, well, just a bit out of focus.. According to my Arts Editor, Jordan included many windows in his design, but their contact with his aesthetic sensibilities realities often, but not always, resulted in their being painted over. The result is an odd contrast between a murky indoors requiring concentrated peering, and a bright outdoors full of interesting landscapes.

Here we see a sleeping spot. I think. Note this is well-lit.

But this was just as dim as it looks.

This overhangs a valley with no apparent support.

The most prominent theme of House On The Rock, at least for me, was collections. Alex Jordan appeared to be ready and willing to collect anything. Display techniques varied, from dioramas to automatons to addition & augmentation by his staff. And, occasionally, Alex chose the traditional items under glass approach.

Paperweights:

Signs:

Butterflies:

Beer steins:

And, of course, festively painted wagon wheels:

Hecatomb:

It is believed to be the oldest evidence of mass animal sacrifice, known as a hecatomb,, ever discovered. [“A Sanctuary’s Final Farewell,” Jason Urbanus, Archaeology (May/June 2018, print only)]