As a child, astronomer Jill Tarter would walk along the beaches of western Florida with her father and look up at the stars.
“I assumed, at that time, that along some beach on some planet, there would be a small creature walking with its dad and they would see our sun in their sky, and they might wonder whether anyone was there,” she tells Fresh Air’s Dave Davies. “But I never thought about it professionally until graduate school.”
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Some 1,600 years ago, the Temple of the Night Sun was a blood-red beacon visible for miles and adorned with giant masks of the Maya sun god as a shark, blood drinker, and jaguar.
Long since lost to the Guatemalan jungle, the temple is finally showing its faces to archaeologists, and revealing new clues about the rivalrous kingdoms of the Maya.
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As I told my friend Meghan, it would do my heart some good if all the cowboys out there would shut the fuck up. The self-congratulatory, faux-messiah, would-be hero bullshit is truly insulting to real human beings who were really there and who are really fucking suffering. Your Wyatt Earp nonsense diminishes legitimate grief and pain.
AND ONE MORE FUCKING THING, and I promise I’ll shut the hell up.
As Kate put it: ‘It doesn’t matter why the kids were at the movies in CO. Stop. Blaming. Victims.’
So fucking what if some parents took their kids to a midnight movie? Somehow it makes it /their/ fault that a lunatic gunman went berserk and shot at them? I reckon a movie theatre ranks pretty high up there in the list of Reasonably Safe Places to Take Your Children No Matter What Time It Is. Stop blaming victims.
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So, I keep seeing people go on and on about how if other people in the theatre had been packing, the tragedy in Colorado could be averted.
People of the Someone Should Have Shot Back mindset, are you saying that in a darkened theatre filled with smoke and an unidentifiable gas, hundreds of screaming, scrambling, panicking people, and gunfire, under the duress of unimaginable terror, adrenaline, and fight or flight, you would have had the presence of mind to pull out a gun, release the safety, take aim, and headshot a kevlar-armored moving target without injuring or (heaven forbid) killing a fair number of bystanders in the process? Are you confident that other law-abiding gun-toters in the theatre would be possessed of this same mystical composure?
It’s good to know that there are so many SWAT and Navy Seal-trained laymen out there ready to protect us at the drop of a hat.
What happened at the Batman premiere is horrible beyond comprehension. My heart goes out to everyone that is suffering because of that madman.
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I’m thinking about magazines because I’m sorting through a perilously tall stack of New Yorkers, Economists, Mother Joneses, and Yoga Journals that are threatening to envelop my coffee table.
I like magazines. Once in a while, I like to read news and opinion pieces that aren’t in binary format. I like the format of magazines, I like the feel of them, I like the relaxed, casual feeling that sitting on the couch with a goddamn magazine invokes.
I do not like the subscription forms that cascade out of them.
What periodicals you read regularly? Discuss.
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Today, Peter Beagle taught me a bit about Lilith and lullabies.
Damn fine Monday.
