A couple of days late, but I have been pointed at this lovely time-lapse photo of the sun’s track across the sky during the Winter Solstice in Fairbanks, Alaska. The photo came from ScienceBlogs, and there are several other beautiful time-lapse pictures in the post. Thanks to my pal Otto for alerting me to it.
You can see why people might have been worried about the sun not coming back.
For those of us in the Northern Hemisphere, the days are now getting longer again. 🙂
Photo by gorbulas sandybanks from Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.
There’s an interesting new Just Plain Sense podcast gone up today. In it Christine Burns talks to a Catholic priest with an apparent passion for post-modernism. It is nice to find a priest with a belief in the need for deconstructing texts. There’s also a fair amount of “what was he thinking???” comment on the subject of Pope Ratty and his recent pronouncements about saving the world from teh trannies. I realize now, however, that I should have suggested that Christine ask a question or two about paganism.
Oh, and if anyone who knows Peter Murphy is reading this, please do let him know that there is an actual Catholic priest in Liverpool called John Devine.
I ought to write something inspiring, but Liz Hand has done it so much better than I could.
There’s a very interesting article on the Nebula Awards web site about Aztec mythology. (Well, it is interesting if you like that sort of thing, I guess, but I do.)
Today’s Independent has an article about pagans and Goths getting involved in Morris Dancing. My initial reaction to this was that it was going to be a hatchet job much like their treatment of Eastercon, and I have to admit that regardless of any other qualities of the article, I find it hard to take it seriously when it contains cheap shot lines like this:
“Look at it coming up,” says a female voice, and she’s not talking about her partner’s big stick: the sun is beginning to burn orange through heavy grey clouds on the horizon.
Having said that, the rest of it doesn’t look too bad, and I’m pleased to see that there appear to be Morris groups that are actually engaging with what they do and trying to make something modern and vibrant out of it rather than simply looking back on ancient traditions. (This is the neo-pagan in me coming out, can you tell?) I particularly like this comment:
There are radical politics at work too: he sees the dance, and “neo-pagan carnivals” such as the Rochester Sweeps, as a way of resisting the “complacent nostalgia” of Englishness “founded on the detritus of imperialism, Christianity, racism and xenophobia”. His England has more primitive, inclusive roots, and for him the morris is a way of expressing that.
The “he” in this case being Philip Kane, founder of the Wolfshead and Vixen Morris side. His is a sort of Englishness that I think I can get along with (though goodness only knows what some of my American friends will make of those blacked faces).