An Easter Bouquet

So...I go away for a week, and when I return, all the azalea and jasmine and dogwood blooms are gone. Alas. In their places, though, a whole 'nother group has magically appeared in my backyard:

Japanese Maple

Pond-age

Fringe Tree - YAYY!!

Roses (non-Hybrid Teas)

Lorapetalum—brown phase

Rhododendrum

Down by the river

Of course, with it being Spring, Easter-time comes. One of my favorite things about Easter—besides my wooly backyard—is getting to hear the Ch.M. Widor Toccata from his Fifth Symphony (for organ) (1879).

Sacred music, no matter your views on religion, is one of the signal contributions of the West to the arts and world culture. I've heard this piece any number of places, significantly in Riverside Church in NYC where the bass pedal absolutely shook its granite foundations. To give you some clue: it took until this guy's great invention (R.I.P.) to approach the sort of soul rocking thunder that great pipe organ music provided to people for hundreds of years before the birth of rock 'n' roll and the advent of the Marshall stack. Jim Marshall may, indeed, be the 'father of loud' (see here), but for generations before him, there was nothing like the pipe organ of his ancestors. Here is one of them, Widor himself, recorded at the age of 88, at the St. Sulpice organ in Paris on which and for which this masterpiece was created:

Here's a faster, more 'modern' version. None of these, however, can capture the power of hearing it live. And LOUD!

[Catch the 'wait for it' at 3:28—That, my friends, is being THUNDERSTRUCK!—what they call pulling out all the stops.]

I get shivers.

Resurrection: Hippitus Hoppitus

Baseline Forest Carbon Map of the U.S. for the Year 2000

Easter is a Christian holiday celebrating the resurrection of its nominal founder from death by Italian crucifiction. Resurrection means, of course, the resurgence or revitalization or revival of something. It's a Spring thing here in the good old Northern Hemisphere. There's a lot dour pessimism about the state of our world—with good reason; to wit: we're running out of energy to fuel our civilization, and what fuel we're using is destroying our climate and our environment. But there're also signs of hope. Resurrection of humanity.

Don't mess with Texas: it's on fire. The worst in recorded history. And it's running out of water. Don't most of the global warming deniers come from Texas, anyway?

A hole in the Antarctic ozone has desiccated Australia.

The more I learn about natural gas, the costlier it seem to get.

As if we didn't know it already, the era of cheap energy is over. Conventional sources, that is.

Though it seems even the trusty old spark plugs may soon go the route of the buggy whip or dinosaur (that's 'Jesus pony' to you fundamentalists) thanks to "lasers".

There are alternatives, though. And they seem to be proliferating. Algae, for instance. And all that wind kicking up those fires in Texas? Not a problem, a solution.

Some suggest that there may be a Moore's law governing the efficiency of solar cells. And that soon we might be using solar cells as conventional windows.

Nuclear fission reactors, one hopes after Fukushima Daiichi, are toast. It's way too soon to rule out fusion, however. Creative problem solving, no? Archaeology of knowledge: wasn't that a title by Foucault?

[Anticipating a Randal Gravesian response to the foregoing, I humbly proffer the following:

]

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In case you were wondering, Easter eggs are the devil's testicles. And here's the story of how the Easter Bunny and painted eggs play in to the overall scheme of Christ's resurrection from the dead: the Hare Club for men. Not here or here.

"Let the War on Easter Begin!"

Anybody seen Harvey?

Ever wonder how the Christian feast day of the Resurrection turned into Easter? How the scriptural story of one man's being raised from the dead came to be celebrated with bunnies bringing colored eggs and candy in grassy baskets? [When I was a kid, we also received live baby chicks on Easter.] On its face it makes absolutely no sense. So, what gives?

A little research turned up the following: Plain and simple—the bunny, the basket, the eggs, and the chicks are all pagan symbols that have precisely nothing to do with Jesus and the resurrection. Fertility mostly. Wikipedia's got the lowdown. Others, here and here.

Btw: If you haven't seen it, the Southpark episode "Fantastic Easter Special" is a killer.

Easter. Thought.

Today is Easter Sunday in the Western Christian tradition, celebrated on the first Sunday after the first full moon after the vernal equinox. It is a celebration of the physical resurrection from the dead of the crucified Christ, Jesus of Nazareth. It sets into motion a period of celebration, forty days until the Feast of the Ascension and fifty until Pentecost (a/k/a Whitsunday). At the Ascension, Jesus ascended bodily to Heaven. At Pentecost, the Holy Spirit descended upon the Apostles.

This entry concerns the Ascension. Christian theology asserts that Jesus ascended bodily into Heaven. Now, he is not the only one. According to Catholic theology (from Vatican II in 1950), Mary, Jesus's mother, also ascended bodily into Heaven (a/k/a the Assumption). In the Jewish scriptures (a/k/a the Old Testament), two others purportedly ascended to Heaven: Enoch and Elijah. Enoch apparently just disappeared, whereas Elijah was witnessed ascending in a chariot of fire: "As they were walking along and talking together, suddenly a chariot of fire and horses of fire appeared and separated the two of them, and Elijah went up to heaven in a whirlwind." II KINGS 2:11.

Now, the key word here is 'bodily'. It is essential to Biblical and Christian faith. Sine qua non.

Now the thought: We denizens of the 20th and 21st centuries have learned several important physical laws they weren't aware of when the scriptures were written, one of them being that matter can not travel faster than the speed of light—and certainly not a human body. So, on a generous reading of Holy Scripture and physical law assuming Jesus's and Mary's bodies to be traveling at the speed of light, they are currently some "2,000 light years from home" (apologies to Mick and the boys). Elijah and Enoch are, presumably, somewhat further out.

Thus endeth the lesson.