Big sunspot 798 exploded twice yesterday, August 22nd, and hurled a pair of coronal mass ejections apparently toward Earth. Geomagnetic storms are possible when the clouds arrive. Sky watchers should be alert for auroras during the nights of August 23rd and 24th. High latitudes are favored: e.g., Canada, Alaska and northern-tier US states from Washington to Maine.

Visit SpaceWeather.com for more information and updates and--a bonus--a rare photograph of a green flash from the Moon.
11:40:04 AM    comment []  

In his column in today's Chicago Sun-Times, Lewis Lazare writes,

The fallout surrounding the New Yorker's shocking Aug. 22 issue featuring Target as the single advertiser spread Monday to the American Society of Magazine Editors, an organization of leading magazine editors among whose responsibilities, we've been told, is keeping a watchful eye on the so-called sacred (but it would appear fast becoming less so) wall between advertising and editorial in the magazine industry.

Based on our experience the past several days, we would respectfully suggest that ASME, which also hands out the esteemed National Magazine Awards (which the New Yorker, by the way, has won bundles of in recent years), has all but abandoned its watchdog role.

Last week, we had attempted to have a conversation with Marlene Kahan, ASME's executive director. Kahan kept seeming to dodge our calls, saying in an e-mail as recently as last Thursday afternoon that she hadn't even seen the New Yorker's history-making Aug. 22 issue and was not in a position to comment.

Kahan did, however, forward a link to ASME's guidelines for member magazines on the handling of single advertiser issues. Depending on how strictly one interprets those guidelines, the New Yorker could be said to have breached at least one, and as many as three of them. But, without question, the New Yorker blatantly flouted guideline No. 2, which states: "If an entire issue is underwritten by a single advertiser, this should be disclosed to readers in a publisher's or editor's letter, explaining that the advertiser had no influence over the editorial content."

Nowhere in the New Yorker's Aug. 22 issue is there such a note from Publisher David Carey or Editor David Remnick.

Appalling. Click here to read the entire column.
10:35:57 AM    comment []  

I've had several cups of tea and accomplished two hours of book work--nothing literary, just posting books for sale online. And now pausing before breakfast I dress and then sit on my bed with my Tarot deck and my Rhodia notebook and drowse. The window curtain drifts inward and back, and so a band of yellow light broadens and narrows at intervals across the page and warms my writing hand.

From time to time I hear a bird cry from somewhere in the willows. Otherwise all is silent. Pets are outdoors sleeping in the sun. Brother in a room at the far side of the house fills his notebook with large 4s and 5s.

For a long minute I can't remember whether I am 52 years old or 13. A menopausal woman in a remote cold desert, I feel precisely as I did as an adolescent girl in the center of a large city. Incorrigibly truant, sitting day after night after day in a locked furnished apartment, sleeping, waiting, waiting, sometimes unsure whether the overcast twilight was evening's or morning's, apprehensive, feeling life coming toward me from a long way off and uncertain I would be around when it finally arrived.

I cut up magazines for scrapbooks and taped movie stars' faces on a wall. I painted and drew and wrote in a journal and read library books. Girl in Buckskin was about a teenaged pioneer whose parents died--was it Indians?--and with her older brother she had to make her way across a vast wilderness to a settlement before winter came. The brother, who in the beginning cared for her, died early on. Winter came. I think she lived for a while with kind Indians, and acquired survival skills, and then was banished and on her own again, day after day in the cold snow and the gnawing hunger. And finally it was spring, and she found the settlement, and I recall that as I read the last page it was the middle of the night, and I began to cry, and I cried and cried, and I was someone who couldn't cry, I thought, but there it was.

***

My left shin aches, and when I shift position to stand, my left knee protests sharply. Oh yes, I'm 52, then.

The letter 'G' is visible in fading black ink on the back of my left hand. This reminds me to pay my car insurance today ("Geico").
9:44:20 AM    comment []