The depths of winter

Climate Change Meets New Age Mysticism

Every year Saint Petersburg has a maze with lights around it for kids to walk through. This year they decided to give it a theme:

The labyrinth is The Pier Aquarium's free outdoor activity in South Straub Park for St. Petersburg's family-oriented New Year's Eve Celebration. Traditionally a labyrinth is used as a walking meditation or spiritual practice and we have adapted ours, built in the Classic 7 Circuit Pattern dating back some 4,000 years, to include an interactive educational science component on Climate Change. The walkers strolling the labyrinth will pass by (and hopefully read!) luminary bags decorated with environmental messages and the posted Climate Change information signs.

Critics of climate change theories have questioned the theories based on their apparent lack scientific rigor. Some critics think the people who tout climate change due so out of a belief system that deifies nature. So, imagine my shock to see climate change tied to an ancient religious ritual that deified nature.

Beyond the fact that this isn't a very inclusive event (I saw parents dragging their children away from it!) are signs on paper lanterns the proper format to have a vigorous debate? And don't think that's a facetious question, because one of the first signs literally asked "Does climate change exist?". This display pretended to debate the question. For five-year-olds.

Mangroves at low tide

Three faces of dawn

Best movies of 2010

Winter's Bone

A film noir about hicks in the backwoods that treats its subjects (and its audience) as sophisticates rather than bumpkins.

Poverty is the main character of this movie. We don't like seeing him anymore in American movies, but he almost always is an excellent actor. Damn, he did a good job here.



Heartbeats

A high-concept art house film that's secretly a buddy movie.

Beautiful cinematography, dialog, and soundtrack. The movie is gorgeous and everything you imagine a French movie could be. Two friends fight over a man. A very simple concept, but how the characters in this movie choose to fight!

Watching it with my friends, I found the movie could be viewed as a tragedy or a farce. I say it's a farce, perhaps because I can see myself getting into the same situations the characters do, so I was able to laugh at them.



Black Swan

Psychological torture porn.

I think this movie is Natalie Portman's All About Eve. Portman, like the character she plays, is aging in a industry full of fresh faces and has a squeaky clean image she needs to get rid of if she wants to stay around.

The cinematography sometimes overreaches in an attempt to look artistic, but the movie was unlike anything I had seen before.

You may feel somewhat like a monster when you've finish watching it.

Merry Christmas!

Tell it to the birds: 1860

Lovers have a rage for talking of their martyrdom. Rather than be silent, they would tell it to the birds that fly, or the cloud which passes.

--From Catherine--

According to Google Books, the phrase made its way into the English language via a translation of a French novel. It seems to have taken awhile for it to gain the tone of sarcasm with which we associate it today.

Tell it to the birds

Winter colors:

Four views of the Saint Petersburg Christmas Tree

Just an old fashioned love song: circa 1450