About.com: Mercury Retrograde Dates for 2011

March 30th to April 23rd: Mercury in cardinal Aries. Refresh old ideas in time for Spring. A time to be brave, and confront others, if this is a loose end. Universe creates serendipity, via opportunities to speak courageously. Here we face the fear of expressing what might rouse others to anger.

It's a break from agreeing, or saying everything is fine, when its not. It's risking being authentic, when you know it's provocative. It's feeling lit up with passion, and allowing that to be a force that works on others. It's dealing with blowback from being forceful about your opinion. It's daring to face those who have been in positions of authority. It's being excited about new ideas, some that might have been threads of inspiration for you all along.

Rx periods can cause delays, frustrations, mix-ups. Watch out for hair-trigger tempers, raging and ranting, blowing a fuse. Deep breathing and physical activity helps blow off pent up intensity.

It's only one day in, and this Mercury retrograde is already living down to its reputation.

First, LiveJournal was misbehaving. True, it had a perfectly good explanation--LJ was the subject of a DDos attack--but so did the disruption of transatlantic flights last year because of an eruption in Iceland. That also happened during a Mercury retrograde.

Second, I got lost twice today. The first time was when I was trying to get to my car to retrieve some papers. I ended up at the opposite corner of the parking structure and had to figure out where I really was. I ended up being late to introduce the speaker. As for the papers I pulled out, one of them was for the wrong time, which means I didn't pull it out at the right time, either. That's two miscommunications in addition to being lost and late. The second happened when I took the speaker back to his hotel. Because of a misunderstanding of directions, I ended up taking the wrong offramp and going around in circles before I delivered him to his destination.

Then, I couldn't call home. My home phone would ring, but when my wife picked it up, she would get a dial tone instead of hearing me. We had to reset the modem and wait an hour for phone service to come back.

On top of all this, I'm having trouble getting access to a Google document.

Yeah, I'm a scientist and I know that's entirely likely that it's all a coincidence or self-fulfilling prophesy, or I was just having a bad day, but it is weird. On the other hand, Mercury retrograde makes for a convenient excuse. As I tell my students, my official position is that astrology is bunk, but it's fun bunk and generally harmless besides.

Late Night Motie News Linkspam

Tonight, news about food, energy, and politics, along with two stories I tell my students, one about the future of the human population and the other about shopping for a car. I'm sure you can guess which one is more entertaining.

Also, in case I don't get around to posting another entry today, the word for this entry is news.

As any of you who have reading my journal for any length of time have probably figured out, I have deeply ambivalent feelings about drum and bugle corps. On the one hand, I loved it dearly and was a great fan of it. On the other hand, it ended up treating me badly, and I had to walk away from it because I realized that it was bad for me. The same could be said about the women I dated who marched in drum corps, particularly the last one, who I was with for 10 years, but that's another story.

In any event, I am still nostalgic for the activity (admiring it from afar isn't as hazardous to my mental health as actually being involved) and regularly follow goldsmith1210's series about the top 50 drum and bugle corps of the past 40 years on YouTube. His most recent video included one of my favorite performances, the 2000 Boston Crusaders, which reminded me that it was in one of my playlists. It also reminded me that I had written one of my favorite reviews of that performance as well.

With that, I present Boston Crusaders' 2000 show "The Color Red" along with my reviews.



( An amalgam of two reviews behind the cut. )

Yes, folks, these are new logos for Coffee Party USA.

The top one is the logo for our Survivor: Trickle-Down Economics video project, which is part of our Coffee Break Campaign to Save America. It's also the current logo on Coffee Party USA's Facebook page. The bottom one was the previous logo on the Facebook page.

Don't worry about the old logo. It's still being used on the website.

Above will be crossposted to the Coffee Party USA communities on Dreamwidth and Livejournal.

Those of you who know that I used to be a huge Survivor fan might think that I had something to do with that first logo. I only helped to suggest the theme. Lots of other people ran with the idea and did the hard work.

Now the badges for this post--Word for the monthly theme and Art for the logo designs.

Australian Broadcasting Corporation via Discovery News: Biggest Full Moon in Decades to Appear This Weekend
Moon gazers are in for a treat this weekend when the full moon will appear 14 percent bigger.
Fri Mar 18, 2011 08:47 AM ET
Content provided by Carl Holm

Romantics, werewolves and other moon gazers are in for a treat this weekend as they witness the biggest full moon seen in nearly 20 years.

But experts are discounting predictions of earthquakes associated with the event.

The moon's orbit is elliptical, and as it follows its path, one side of the ellipse, known as perigee, passes about 50,000 kilometers (31,000 miles) closer than the on the other side -- apogee.

A perigee full moon appear around 14 percent bigger and 30 percent brighter than an apogee full moon.

Discovery News: No Link Between 'Super Moon' and Earthquakes
The 'maximal perigee' tonight has only a minimal effect on seismic activity and cannot be linked with last week's earthquakes in Japan.
Fri Mar 18, 2011 10:50 PM ET
Content provided by Rachel Rice

Despite opinions being dispersed over the Internet that the 'super moon' will lead to natural disasters such as earthquakes, floods and volcanic eruptions, geologist Bill Burton with the US Geological Survey says that this is unlikely.

"There are just too many factors that go into seismic activity to make that statement," Burton told Discovery News. "I think you'd be hard pressed to see a difference in tectonic activity during different lunar phases."

Severe natural disasters such as the earthquake off the coast of Japan last week can raise questions about all of the factors involved. Research geophysicist Malcom Johnston with the USGS says that blaming such events on the moon's orbit is not a new idea.

"This idea of blaming natural disasters on the phases of the moon goes way back to the Greeks. It has been around for hundreds and hundreds of years," Johnston said.

Above part of Overnight News Digest: Science Saturday (Supermoon edition) on Daily Kos.

Yet another night the post wrote itself.




UCLA squeaks by MSU 78-76. My undergraduate alma mater defeats my favorite grad school alma mater's cross-state rival to stay alive in the NCAA tournament. This is a good day for me during March Madness.

Continuing with selecting news posts with a common theme out of last week's Overnight News Digest: Science Saturday, I am posting three news items about Food. I'm planning on passing them out to my Global Politics of Food class tomorrow as current events and research to discuss. Why not get double duty out of them? After all, I was able to convince my department chair that compiling these articles was a form of professional development. :-)

( Articles from Michigan State University and Purdue University about Food Deserts, the causes of the rising prices of food, and the effects of overfertilizing corn grown for ethanol behind the cut. )

I have at most a week on my free paid user trial on LJ. I'd better load up that "all your bouillabaise are belong to us" icon that I'm using here on Dreamwidth there before it runs out. I could use a food icon, there, too.