Nancy Messer

I was just on the phone with a lady from Cincinnati Business Courier about last week's edition.  It IS possible to buy just one edition of the paper without getting a subscription.  It cost $5 ($3 for the edition and $2 shipping).  If it's going outside the country the shipping is higher.  I told her that once I let all of you know about the availability of one issue, she may be receiving more requests.  Her name is Nicole Elder.  Her email address is nelder@bizjournals.com.  Her phone number is 513-337-9427.

Henry Cohen

That North Avondale group has legitimate acclaim, but I don't think anyone from there can take credit for teaching Ray Rice his left hook! Now there's something to be proud of.......not!

David Buchholz

Congratulations to Phil Spiess who has been chosen to deliver the keynote speeches at both the upcoming Democratic and Republican National Conventions!  Thankfully, they won't overlap.  No wonder you need a vacation, Phil!

More pixels from around the world...leaving the Fox Glacier in New Zealand for Thimpu, Bhutan.  We were among the first Western tourists in.  We sat at dinner and overheard the king's son, the only Bhutanese with a Porsche 911.  That was the good news.  The bad news is that the roads are so bad that the only place he could get it out of first gear was on the Paro runway.  

Imagine the descent into Paro.  Before descending the plane is flying between the mountain peaks, not over them.  And that's at 29,000' feet!  The descent itself twists and turns all the way down.

I noticed that our flight attendant was the same one photographed on the airline's brochure.  Then I discovered that they only owned two planes.  A 50-50 chance.  

When Prince Charles came to visit he had to fly on one of these two planes, as his personal plane was too large for the runways.

You've got to love a country where the schoolgirls are this cute and their Gross National Product is measured in happiness.

Philip Spiess

Ah, Dave, you let the news (crap?) out of the bag!  I have chosen for the keynote address(es) the key of G as my note -- in fact, that is the address:  "Gee!"  So now you've heard it, and you won't have to watch either convention.  This is probably best for your digestion, anyway, since dyspepsia at our age isn't pretty!  (To say nothing of high blood pressure.  Nothing so emboldens a man to have a heartattack or apoplexy as watching a national political convention at full throttle.)  And now it's dinner time:  Ciao!

Jerry Ochs

Phil,

Gaudi was a Catalan, some of whom claim to be 100% Phoenicians.  The Basque have no relatives in terms of DNA or language.   Both groups seek independence.  Regarding the paint job on that building, anybody could have done it, even a graduate of North Avondale Elementary School.

Stephen (Steve) Dixon

Wrong, Spiess. Basque country is not in Spain. It is an area of southern France. Here is a photo of one of the women in traditional garb:

Philip Spiess

And she's obviously Basquing in the glow of something!  And look at them Pair o' Knees!  (They're in the south of France, too, aren't they, or at least forming the border with Spain?)  It's enough to make one thigh with regret!  And I can tell from the black garb and the soulful expression on her face that she's a nun -- and having nun of it!

Jerry:  The Catalans may be right:  the ancient Phoenicians (capital at Tyre) migrated westward to the north shore of Africa, where they founded Carthage (means "new capital" in Phoenician), and eventually came to be known as the Carthaginians, the ones who fought Rome.  At the time of Hannibal, his father, Hamilcar Barca (I've always thought this would be a good name for a small, imported automobile), was the Carthaginian governor-general of the province of Spain, focused on the Mediterranean coast -- i.e., what's now Catalonia.

Jerry Ochs

I have a deep and lasting fondness for abstract art.  Ed's Mandelbrot patterns (what program on what type of computer?) fit right in.  Here's a natural abstraction.  Can you guess what it is?

David R. Schneider

With Chuck and Nancy's posts 1051 and 1052, what was great about North Avondale as well as other neighborhoods, each area had its own "downtown" area. Whether it was North Avondale, South Avondale,

Evanston, Mt. Washington, Bond Hill, Clifton or Roselawn, just to name a few, you could go to a place like Glueck's and then go down the street to the park.  When I moved to NW Indiana in 1971, I missed the type of Cincinnati neighborhoods. It is not uniquely Cincinnati.

Philip Spiess

Okay, it seems logical that we will leave Jerry Ochs's photographic entry as this week's "Sursum as Summum" Challenge.  But nobody responded to the last one, which was about "the rabbit in the moon."  The celebration of the Christian Easter, which is always calculated to be the first Sunday, after the first full moon, after the Spring equinox, begs the question, "Why"?  (By the way, the incredible 1826-1828 mechanical clock in the Cathedral of Strasburg, France, has master mechanical calculators incorporated into it to calculate Easter, and equinoxes, and eclipses of the sun and moon, and -- there are some astronomical things the clock is built to calculate -- if it's maintained -- that won't happen for some 1,000 years.  The clock also, at noon, has the Apostles parade and pass and bow to Christ; every fifteen mintues a little angel turns a sand clock in its hands to count the quarter hours; Death strikes the hours of the night on a bell with a bone; etc., etc.  If you're ever in Strasburg, the capital of Alsace -- note Nelson Abanto, who's now in Alsace for his son's wedding -- be sure and visit this clock in the Cathedral at either noon or 6:00 o'clock; it's an adventure.  But I digress.)

"Why?"  My 6th Grade students asked me one year why a rabbit ("the Easter Bunny") was associated with Easter, and, aside from telling them not to eat the "little chocolate eggs" that rabbits leave in the lawn, I had to tell them I didn't know, which I did tell them if they asked questions I was not prepared to answer.  But, as I also told them, I would find out the answer.  And the answer was extraordinary:  Easter is named after Oestra, an ancient Eastern fertility goddess, as well as goddess of the moon (see the moon's cycles, the monthly "estrous cycle," and the moon's pull on tides), whose symbol was the rabbit -- for obvious reasons.  [I once wrote a little couplet called "The Multiplication Table":  "The reason that there are rabbits / Is they all have certain habits."]  But why, exactly, a rabbit in the moon?  As I was pondering this, coming home from work on a night where I had worked late, driving on the main road near my house which runs east to west -- I was driving east -- suddenly a low-risen full moon appeared really big in front of me in the sky and -- son of a bitch! -- there was the rabbit!  We are so ingrained to see the man in the moon that we don't see a rabbit.  If you look at the full moon, the rabbit faces left, with its ears streaming to the right over the top of the moon's sphere.  Check it out!

Larry Klein

Phil, I can barely get in gear for Halloween next month, and you're giving us the history of Easter!  But you're right, I've driven into the full moon several times in my life and never recognized the 'rabbit'.  However, if you sit near the 50 yd line at Marx Stadium (that's Walnut's football field) on a certain Friday night in October, you will see the full moon slowly roll across the horizon directly in front of you, and it's BIG too.  And almost orange!  I witnessed the phenomenon two years ago.  Maybe that mechanical clock can calculate the next occurrence of that on a Friday night?

David Buchholz

This morning we recorded .50" of rain in our rain guage, the first measurable rain since last spring.  Now SF is only 22" below normal...praying for a wet winter and an end to the draught.  A hopeful taste of the fall and the rains to come...taken in my yard 2009

Nelson Abanto

Hi Folks,

We just got back from my son's wedding in France.  I went out fishing this morning and we had some luck:

It is not a great photo but it was a great fish.

Ed Seykota

Jerry Ochs: The patterns emerge by coloring each pixel according to its position.  The "according to" part may take a day or two per page - even on a high speed desktop machine - with software I write in C# and run in Windows.

Per a guess on #1060, I see brush strokes, heavy layers of paint - and colors and textures that remind me of homes in Latin America.   

Nancy Messer: Fractal designs have a property of self-similarity to their own details - perhaps like owning a dozen cats, each of which owns a dozen smaller cats, that each own a dozen tiny cats ... and so on, forever.

David Buchholz:  I still wonder what your "translator" might do with a fractal image under your make-it-look-like-an-oil-painting rules.

If you were to take a close look at Mandelbrot's pimples, you might see each one sprouting lots of tiny pimplettes, each of which has its own case of acne ....

Philip Spiess - Congratulations on your address and on your new address - and for Spiessing up the column with the occasional 2/3 pun.

Jerry Ochs

Ed,

Here is a colored pencil translation of your latest set.

Ed Seykota

Jerry: Thank you for the demo.  I like it.  It seems to take some of the edge off it and make it easier to view.  I have a one-day-maybe plan to compile a bunch of them into a glossy 12"x12" coffee-table book.  Maybe get to it after I learn Spanish and lose another 15 pounds - so that ought to put it off for a while at least.

Barbara Kahn (Tepper)

Fabulous fish Nelson!  You must know how to cook them - this is something I struggle with....fine with all sorts of things but not fish.  Any tips?

I think you were in my 7th grade class.  ;)

Nancy Messer

Ed - I like your version better - brighter and more colorful.  I'd be interested in a coffee table book of these but taking into account where that stands on your priority list, I'll check this website in 30 years to see where you are with it!

Henry Cohen

Don't know if this is really true or not but the real reason Larry went back to Walnut Hills and took the coaches job was so he could gain access to his transcript and in true F. Buehler fashion become the top ten scholar he always wanted to be.

Philip Spiess

Larry:  A number of years ago, my son and I were being inducted into the Boy Scouts of America's Order of the Arrow, a camping honorary.  It was a mid-October night; we were at one of the many camps that exist west of Washington near the Shenandoah Valley and the Skyline Drive, and each inductee had to sleep outdoors, with no tent, over night.  The night was an odd one weatherwise:  the night sky, though dark, had a curious purple glow and many shifting clouds, and the full moon, which came up early, spent the night going around the horizon, rather than over the sky's arch above our heads (as might have been expected).  I've never figured it out, but the whole scene, as I slept and woke and slept, then woke again, was very much out of a classical 18th-19th Century Japanese print (Jerry, Ochs, take note).  It was bizarre, eerie, and wonderful, all at the same time.

And now, friends, farewell.

Nelson Abanto

Hey Phil,

I had a similar night camping on Mauna Loa on the Big Island of Hawaii.  The altitude was about 13,800 and one never sleps very well at that altitude.  It was a clear, beautiful night and at times I felt I was actually looking down at the stars.  Surreal.

Jerry Ochs

Nancy, Ed, et al.,

I prefer Ed's original too.  He mentioned David's translating it and I figured David couldn't make it much brighter or clearer, so I went in the opposite direction.  I am myopic, so I live in a softer and fuzzier world (see Thurber's "The Admiral on the Wheel").  Here are some steps down to a river.

Jonathan Marks

Don't know if anybody's posted it previously, but here's a follow-up video about the North Avondale '64 article in the business mag:

 http://www.bizjournals.com/cincinnati/blog/2014/09/cincinnati-neighborhood-of-high-achievers-is.html?ana=e_du_wknd&s=article_du&ed=2014-09-27&u=jyWD49rteI3DqY8rKUQHYoaYrHh&t=1411821798 

Chuck Cole

Following up on Phil's information about the date for Easter:  Easter was originally very very closely tied to Passover (Most believe that The Last Supper features a Passover seder meal) but eventually they decided it had to be on a Sunday.  So Passover begins on the 15th day of Nissan, the 7th month.  Months in the Hebrew calendar begin on new moons, and Passover then falls on the day of the full moon, but it must occur after the vernal equinox.  If it wouldn't, because the Jewish year is shorter than the solar year, an extra month is added, so periodically, Passover leaps from being very early (soon after the equinox) to being a month later. For reasons that have never been completely clear to me, there are years where a full moon occurs after the equinox but Passover is celebrated at the foloowing full moon, because an extra month had been inserted.  I asked around as to why this was the case, and was told that there is actually a list of what years will receive the extra month.  It was set very long ago and even though it creates this inconsistency with the connection between Passover and the first full moon after the equinox, the current system cannot be changed.  I am told that the reason for this is that a change could only be made by the coming together of a special rabinical court or assembly.  And the problem is, I am told, that this meeting cannot be convened until the Temple is rebuilt in Jerusalem.  This seems very unlikely. I think the sun might turn into a red giant and scorch all life on earth (which will happen in a couple of billion years) before the Temple is rebuilt.  

Nancy Messer

Jon - thanks for the follow-up video.  It was fun to watch and I have it bookmarked forever!

Chuck - thanks for that explanation of the timing of Passover/Easter.  I had been told the Last Supper was a sedar supper and went with that until many years ago they were a month apart.  I didn't know why and asked a Catholic friend who is usually up on this kind of stuff why this happened.  I don't remember his answer but it didn't make sense to me.  Yours does!  Thanks for the info.