Jake & Eddie’s Excellent Adventure 😎🐶
Two pattern-seeking animals resonating with syncopation to the increasing entropy of the space-time continuum
After two hurricanes the beach has been torn up with a new underwater topography. One of the results has been vast ‘graveyards’ of shells at low tides. I have made some pretty amazing – and easy – discoveries over the past couple of weeks on our morning walks. I never recall seeing a starfish on Cocoa Beach…
Cocoa Beach has hosted an art show over Thanksgiving for as long as I can remember. I always look for unique woodworking like this Nautilius shell made from spalted maple. You can check out the artist’s other work at Rustling Palms Studio.
I have been trying to gain a better understanding of how we Americans have gotten to the point we are – as fucked up as it seems. I found an article that summarizes a view taken by the late historian David Potter:
The European settlers who first came to the country found forests stretching on forever, flocks of geese so large that they required 30 minutes to take off. All of this possibility drove the settlers sort of mad. They found themselves walking more in a day than they had ever imagined, dreaming dreams bigger than they had ever imagined. These immigrants, the ones who weren’t brought here in chains, turned entrepreneurial, disordered, antic, religiously zealous, morally charged, messianic, and perpetually restless. They measured their life by how much they had grown and how far they had climbed. They were propelled by a central contradiction: They had this intense spiritual drive to complete God’s plans for humanity on this continent—and they also had this fevered ambition to get really rich. They were propelled by a moral materialism that would never let them rest.
This follows several ideas that continually pop into my head: Manifest destiny and the fact that – indeed – America was founded as a Christian nation. I have, in the past, confused freedom of religion with freedom of belief.
Update January 2025
It’s official! Fearless Leader tRump mentioned Manifest Destiny when making some vague tRump-style commitment during his Inauguration Weave, ringing in America’s new Oligarchy.
It just fucking pains me to no end to have to agree with our Felon-In-Chief being a Liberal Coastal Elitist Sociopath. However, I grew up right smack dab in the middle of another President’s proclamation:
We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.
President John F Kennedy ~ from an address at Rice University on the nation’s space effort, is a September 12, 1962
I am not going to hold my breath, but I have to admit it would be fucking bitchen for humankind to make it to Mars in my lifetime.
Manifest Destiny, Indeed
After several tries, starting in August, NASA was finally able to launch SLS (Space Launch System) with the unmanned Orion capsule as part of the Artemis program (Artemis I). The capsule will orbit the moon and return in a shake-down run for sending astronauts there in the coming years.
I watched the last Saturn V rocket with Apollo 17 launch at night 50 years ago. My girlfriend’s father got us to Kennedy Space Center to view it. It was delayed but finally went up in the early morning hours. It lit up the sky and the roar was deafening. It was fantastic to see the successor launch all these years later.
I watched the splashdown and did some screenshots as it landed off the coast of California.
Interestingly, the splashdown occurred on the same date as the last lunar lander on Apollo 17 landed on the moon – 50 years later – during my senior year in high school 😵💫.
I was pretty shocked earlier this week to see an unheard-of November hurricane Nicole headed our way. It could have been worse but the beach is trashed 😔. That makes two this year after a couple of years off.
Highlights and video from the trip together with some fooling around in GarageBand for a soundtrack.
Logging 5200 miles over 35 days, we wove our way along the Appalachian mountains north, west, and south again to visit destinations on my bucket list.
We headed north out of Florida with overnights in Georgia and North Carolina. The first stop was in Virginia and Shenandoah National Park and a drive on Skyline Drive. From there we drove through the badlands of Pennsylvania visiting my old nemesis Three Mile Island Along the way. This took us through the land of legends to coastal Maine.
We visited Acadia National Park and spent some time along the coast. We traveled inland to stay one rainy day at a stunningly beautiful pond in Maine on a lot belonging to my friend Bill. We then drove across the top of New England with stops at Mount Washington, New Hampshire, and the Adirondack Mountains near Lake Placid and Whiteface Mountian. Fall colors greeted us along the way!
Driving south now we visited Watkins Glen and the famous raceway and state park there. Our new two stops were to explore my roots with stops in Pennsylvania at my father’s ancestral home in Snow Shoe and my mother’s hometown of Connellsville. Continuing south we drove through West Virginia and saw the New Gorge National Park along the way.
We ended up in Tennessee, near Knoxville, at the home of my friend Bill. We visited the Smokey Mountains and toured the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. From there I spent a day with my friend Laura in Georgia and then headed south to Panama City.
We finished up there with a great visit with my brother Dave and his family including my 10-month-old grand-nephew Theo! Back home to access the damage from Ian – fortunately not too bad.
Next trip – Excellent Adventure 2023 – The West Coast!
Last stop: Panama City Florida for a week with my brother Dave and his family. Dave’s son Carl, wife Kari, and baby Theo arrived towards the end of the week.
We enjoyed Lisa’s renowned cooking and spent time in the Butterfly haven she has created in the backyard of their stunning home on the bayou.
Another great set of family memories as the Tubridy family marches on!
Bill, Laura, and I visited some museums in Oak Ridge Tennessee. Oak Ridge is the home of the Clinton Engineer Works, now called Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
The uranium used in the ‘Little Boy” bomb dropped on Hiroshima was made here. The effort was herculean. The world’s largest building (at that time) was built and manned to hold the hundreds of machines used to enrich the Uranium. It’s known as the K-25 site.
There were other efforts using different enrichment techniques at other locations on the large laboratory site.
Today the Laboratory has very active programs. Especially for the production and use of neutrons for imaging and other high-tech application, as well as programs for our nuclear stockpile.
I stumbled upon a machine there which brought back some amazing experiences from my early professional work. My first job at Boeing was to test aircraft using a much more modern version of this hardware. Later I went to work for Hewlett-Packard which was making modern vibration test systems.
In the middle with the big dial is a Hewlett-Packard Oscillator. This was a version of the original product Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard made in the garage in Palo Alto in the late 1930s. One of the first customers was Disney which used them to make the soundtrack for the movie ‘Fantasia’ during the same time period. I actually did marketing work on the successor models many years later and was directly involved in obsoleting the product line.
We also visited the American Museum of Science and Energy which had very good exhibits on some of the newer efforts of the lab as well as its history and general information on nuclear energy.
Located in the Smokey Mountian area outside of Knoxville. We drove up one afternoon to check out some waterfalls and the fall color. Lots of retired guys driving their motorcycles and Corvettes on a fine sunny day!
