Bulb Nature Quotes

[Talking about Monte Rissell] ...and like Ed Kemper he was able to convince the psychiatrist he was making excellent progress while he was actually killing human beings. This is kind of a sick version of the old joke about how many psychiatrists it takes to change a light bulb. The answer being, just one, but only if the light bulb wants to change.

The earth is not our home. We came from nothing, and to that condition our nostalgia should turn. Why would anyone care about this dim bulb in the blackness of space? The earth produced us, or at least subsidized our evolution. Is it really entitled to receive a pardon, let alone the sacrifice of human lives, for this original sin—a capital crime in reverse (very much in the same way that reproduction makes one an accessory before the fact to an individual’s death)? Someone once said that nature abhors a vacuum. This is precisely why nature should be abhorred. Instead, the nonhuman environment is simultaneously extolled and ravaged by a company of poor players who can no longer act naturally. It is one thing for the flora and fauna to feed and fight and breed in an unthinking continuance of their existence. It is quite another for us to do so in defiance of our own minds, which over and again pose the same question: “What are we still doing in this horrible place?

Each spring for a period of weeks the imperial gardens were filled with prize tulips (Turkish, Dutch, Iranian), all of them shown to their best advantage. Tulips whose petals had flexed wide were held shut with fine threads hand-tied. Most of the bulbs had been grown in place, but these were supplemented by thousands of cut stems held in glass bottles; the scale of the display was further compounded by mirrors placed strategically around the garden. Each variety was marked with a label made from silver filigree. In place of every fourth flower a candle, its wick trimmed to tulip height, was set into the ground. Songbirds in gilded cages supplied the music, and hundreds of giant tortoises carrying candles on their backs lumbered through the gardens, further illuminating the display. All the guests were required to dress in colors that flattered those of the tulips. At the appointed moment a cannon sounded, the doors to the harem were flung open, and the sultan's mistresses stepped into the garden led by eunuchs bearing torches. The whole scene was repeated every night for as long as the tulips were in bloom, for as long as Sultan Ahmed managed to cling to his throne.

1 ounce dried comfrey leaf 1 ounce yarrow blossoms 1 ounce dried sage leaf 1 ounce dried rosemary leaf 1 large fresh bulb of garlic ½ cup of sea salt

The invention of the light bulb has greatly reduced the number of times we look at, and therefore the number of times we think about, the moon and the stars.

The Moon is not an Electric light bulb!

The availability of cheap effective lighting alone, following Thomas Edison’s invention of the incandescent bulb in 1879, greatly extended the range of waking human consciousness, effectively adding more hours onto the day—for work, for entertainment, for study, for discovery, for consumption. Subsequently, one development led to another, and to yet another, fueled by a corporate economy in developed nations, and then later by the arms race, and then the space race, as human ambition literally outgrew the planet. It seemed that there was no limit on what humanity could achieve. But there was a flaw at the heart of that expansive optimism—namely, that humanity cannot exist as a thing apart from nature; it has no destiny but annihilation apart from the land that gave it birth.

THOSE BORN UNDER Pacific Northwest skies are like daffodils: they can achieve beauty only after a long, cold sulk in the rain. Henry, our mother, and I were Pacific Northwest babies. At the first patter of raindrops on the roof, a comfortable melancholy settled over the house. The three of us spent dark, wet days wrapped in old quilts, sitting and sighing at the watery sky. Viviane, with her acute gift for smell, could close her eyes and know the season just by the smell of the rain. Summer rain smelled like newly clipped grass, like mouths stained red with berry juice — blueberries, raspberries, blackberries. It smelled like late nights spent pointing constellations out from their starry guises, freshly washed laundry drying outside on the line, like barbecues and stolen kisses in a 1932 Ford Coupe. The first of the many autumn rains smelled smoky, like a doused campsite fire, as if the ground itself had been aflame during those hot summer months. It smelled like burnt piles of collected leaves, the cough of a newly revived chimney, roasted chestnuts, the scent of a man’s hands after hours spent in a woodshop. Fall rain was not Viviane’s favorite. Rain in the winter smelled simply like ice, the cold air burning the tips of ears, cheeks, and eyelashes. Winter rain was for hiding in quilts and blankets, for tying woolen scarves around noses and mouths — the moisture of rasping breaths stinging chapped lips. The first bout of warm spring rain caused normally respectable women to pull off their stockings and run through muddy puddles alongside their children. Viviane was convinced it was due to the way the rain smelled: like the earth, tulip bulbs, and dahlia roots. It smelled like the mud along a riverbed, like if she opened her mouth wide enough, she could taste the minerals in the air. Viviane could feel the heat of the rain against her fingers when she pressed her hand to the ground after a storm. But in 1959, the year Henry and I turned fifteen, those warm spring rains never arrived. March came and went without a single drop falling from the sky. The air that month smelled dry and flat. Viviane would wake up in the morning unsure of where she was or what she should be doing. Did the wash need to be hung on the line? Was there firewood to be brought in from the woodshed and stacked on the back porch? Even nature seemed confused. When the rains didn’t appear, the daffodil bulbs dried to dust in their beds of mulch and soil. The trees remained leafless, and the squirrels, without acorns to feed on and with nests to build, ran in confused circles below the bare limbs. The only person who seemed unfazed by the disappearance of the rain was my grandmother. Emilienne was not a Pacific Northwest baby nor a daffodil. Emilienne was more like a petunia. She needed the water but could do without the puddles and wet feet. She didn’t have any desire to ponder the gray skies. She found all the rain to be a bit of an inconvenience, to be honest.

They had discovered the reason no elements beyond uranium exist naturally in the world: the two forces working against each other in the nucleus eventually cancel each other out. They pictured the uranium nucleus as a liquid drop gone wobbly with the looseness of its confinement and imagined it hit by even a barely energetic slow neutron. The neutron would add its energy to the whole. The nucleus would oscillate. In one of its many random modes of oscillation it might elongate. Since the strong force operates only over extremely short distances, the electric force repelling the two bulbs of an elongated drop would gain advantage. The two bulbs would push farther

Squiggly light bulbs and Priuses, whatever value they have, come out of the industrial mind. Ecological agriculture has the disciplines of ecology and evolutionary biology to call on, based on millions of years of emerging efficiencies such as those seen in nature’s prairie ecosystems. The industrial sector has no such organizing discipline to call on.

Zoroaster was the prophet of the Persians, the people who restored the Jews to Jerusalem, the same Persians who later gave rise to the Chaldeans. The basic idea in Zoroaster’s teaching is that there are two Gods, one good, the other evil. The good God is a God of Light, of Justice, of Wisdom, who created a perfectly good world. His name is Ahura Mazda, “First Father of the Righteous Order, who gave to the sun and stars their paths.” The Mazda bulbs were named after this God of Light. Against him stands a God of Evil, Angra Mainyu, “the Deceiver,” who is the god of lies, darkness, hypocrisy, violence, and malice. He it was who threw evil into this good and well-made world. Thus the world in which we live is a mixture of light and darkness, of good and evil. This worldview is the mythology of the Fall. In its biblical transformation, it is the Fall. There is then a nature world that is not good and one does not put oneself in accord with it. It is evil and one pulls out or away in order to correct it. From this view arises a mythology with this sequence: Creation, a Fall, followed by Zoroaster (or Zarathustra), who teaches the way of virtue that will bring a gradual restoration of goodness. On the last day, after a terrific battle known as Armageddon, or the Reckoning of Spirits, Zoroaster will appear, in a second incarnation, the evil power will be wiped out, and all will be peace, light, and virtue forever. This mythology is surely familiar to all.

His eyes, or rather the places where his eyes had been, were beheld. As strange misgrown masses gather in the knotholes of the noblest oaks when prostrate, so from the points which the whale's eyes had once occupied, now protruded blind bulbs, horribly pitiable to see. But pity there was none. For all his old age, and his one arm, and his blind eyes, he must die the death and be murdered, in order to light the gay bridals and other merry makings of men, and also to illuminate the solemn churches that preach unconditional inoffensiveness by all to all.

Everything is arranged," John Robertson told me. Thank God." I forgot to mention that we appear to have one small problem," he said. Okay..." Evidently it seems Winston Holder has already left this morning to the border and Gbarnga. He took a journalist in." A journalist? Who?" I don't know who. They thought it must be you." But it wasn't me. I'm me," I said, though from the first hour in this country I'd begun to doubt it. I have Lincoln Smythe's address. He'll put us right. Everything will be arranged promptly, and we'll work out your itinerary." I thought everything was arranged," I said. By the bare bulb hung above our straw beds I saw, far back in John Robertson's eyes, the eternal West African question: What is this guy going on about? Naturally," he said, "but we just have to work out your itinerary." Everything is arranged doesn't mean you should expect to get anywhere or accomplish anything. In fact, for sanity's sake, those two ideas have to be banished: the idea of getting somewhere and the idea of accomplishing something. Everything is arranged means that all is complete, the great plan of the universe is unfolding before our eyes. So eat, drink, sleep. Everything is arranged.

They sat eating ham sandwiches and fresh strawberries and waxy oranges and Mr. Tridden told them how it had been twenty years ago, the band playing on that ornate stand at night, the men pumping air into their brass horns, the plump conductor flinging perspiration from his baton, the children and fireflies running in the deep grass, the ladies with long dresses and high pompadours treading the wooden xylophone walks with men in choking collars. There was the walk now, all softened into a fiber mush by the years. The lake was silent and blue and serene, and fish peacefully threaded the bright reeds, and the motorman murmured on and on, and the children felt it was some other year, with Mr. Tridden looking wonderfully young, his eyes lighted like small bulbs, blue and electric. It was a drifting, easy day, nobody rushing, and the forest all about, the sun held in one position, as Mr. Tridden's voice rose and fell, and a darning needle sewed along the air, stitching, restitching designs both golden and invisible. A bee settled into a flower, humming and humming. The trolley stood like an enchanted calliope, simmering where the sun fell on it. The trolley was on their hands, a brass smell, as they ate ripe cherries. The bright odor of the trolley blew from their clothes on the summer wind.

You pay homage when and where you can. I love the smell of the bulb as the earth opens and releases it in harvest, an aroma that only those who grow garlic and handle the bulb and the leaves still fresh from the earth can know.Anyone who gardens knows these indescribable presences--of not only fresh garlic, but onions, carrots and their tops, parsley's piercing signal, the fragrant exultations of a tomato plant in its prime, sweet explosions of basil. They can be known best and most purely on the spot, in the instant, in the garden, in the sun, in the rain. They cannot be carried away from their place in the earth. They are inimitable. And they have no shelf life at all.

The rain beat against the windows and against the tin roof of the hotel. It came down in hissing roars, then in whispers, then in loud shishes like sandpaper rubbed against wood. She drank the second glassful, climbed off the bed and began undressing, and then we were together, the cheap naked bulb still blazing down on the bed. Thinking back, I remember the stupidest things; the way there was a taut crease just above her hips, in the small of her back. The way she smelled like a baby's breath, a sweet barely there smell that retreated and retreated, so that no matter how close you got to it you weren't sure it was there. The brown speckles in the lavender-gray eyes, floating very close to the surface when I kissed her, the eyes wide open and aware. But not caring. The eyes of a gourmet offered a stale chunk of bread, using it of necessity but not tasting it any more than necessary. I remember getting up and coming back to her, and of throwing a shoe at the light bulb, later, when the whisky was gone. I remember the smell of rain-darkness in the room and her telling me I'd cut my feet on the light-bulb glass on the floor. And how she said I was no better than a tramp myself, that I made love to the cadence of the raingusts on the roof, and it was true I was doing just that, but it seemed the natural thing then. And I felt so marvelously clean and soaped and so in tune with the whole damned universe that I had the feeling I could have clouded up and rained and lightninged myself, and blown that cheese-colored room to smithereens.

There is a deep stillness in the Fakahatchee, but there is not a moment of physical peace. Something is always brushing against you or lapping at you or snagging at you or tangling in your legs, and the sun is always pummeling your skin, and the wetness in the air makes your hair coil like a phone cord. You never smell plain air in a swamp - you smell the tang of mud and the sourness of rotting leaves and the cool musk of new leaves and the perfumes of a million different flowers floating by, each distinct but transparent, like soap bubbles. The biggest number in the universe would not be big enough to count the things your eyes see. Every inch of land holds up a thatch of tall grass or a bush or a tree, and every bush or tree is girdled with another plant’s roots, and every root is topped with a flower or a fern or a swollen bulb, and every one of those flowers and ferns is the pivot around which a world of bees and gnats and spiders and dragonflies revolve. The sounds you hear are twigs cracking underfoot and branches whistling past you and leaves murmuring and leaves slopping over the trunks of old dead trees and every imaginable and unimaginable insect noise and every kind of bird peep and screech and tootle, and then all those unclaimed sounds of something moving in a hurry, something low to the ground and heavy, maybe the size of a horse in the shape of a lizard, or maybe the size, shape and essential character of a snake. In the swamp you feel as if someone had plugged all of your senses into a light socket. A swamp is logy and slow-moving about at the same time highly overstimulating. Even in the dim, sultry places deep within it, it is easy to stay awake.

I feel so far away from them, on the top of this hill. It seems as though I belong to another species. They come out of their offices after their day of work, they look at the houses and the squares with satisfaction, they think it is their city, a good, solid, bourgeois city. They aren’t afraid, they feel at home. All they have ever seen is trained water running from taps, light which fills bulbs when you turn on the switch, half-breed, bastard trees held up with crutches. They have proof, a hundred times a day, that everything happens mechanically, that the world obeys fixed, unchangeable laws. In a vacuum all bodies fall at the same rate of speed, the public park is closed at 4 p.m. in winter, at 6 p.m. in summer, lead melts at 335 degrees centigrade, the last streetcar leaves the Hotel de Ville at 11.05 p.m. They are peaceful, a little morose, they think about Tomorrow, that is to say, simply, a new today; cities have only one day at their disposal and every morning it comes back exactly the same. They scarcely doll it up a bit on Sundays. Idiots. It is repugnant to me to think that I am going to see their thick, self-satisfied faces. They make laws, they write popular novels, they get married, they are fools enough to have children. And all this time, great, vague nature has slipped into their city, it has infiltrated everywhere, in their house, in their office, in themselves. It doesn’t move, it stays quietly and they are full of it inside, they breathe it, and they don’t see it, they imagine it to be outside, twenty miles from the city. I see it, I see this nature . . . I know that its obedience is idleness, I know it has no laws: what they take for constancy is only habit and it can change tomorrow. What if something were to happen? What if something suddenly started throbbing? Then they would notice it was there and they’d think their hearts were going to burst. Then what good would their dykes, bulwarks, power houses, furnaces and pile drivers be to them? It can happen any time, perhaps right now: the omens are present.

FROM THE WAVERLEY KITCHEN JOURNAL Angelica - Will shape its meaning to your need, but it is particularly good for calming hyper children at your table. Anise Hyssop - Eases frustration and confusion. Bachelor’s Button - Aids in finding things that were previously hidden. A clarifying flower. Chicory - Conceals bitterness. Gives the eater a sense that all is well. A cloaking flower. Chive Blossom - Ensures you will win an argument. Conveniently, also an antidote for hurt feelings. Dandelion - A stimulant encouraging faithfulness. Frequent side effects are blindness to flaws and spontaneous apologies. Honeysuckle - For seeing in the dark, but only if you use honeysuckle from a brush of vines at least two feet thick. A clarifying flower. Hyacinth Bulb - Causes melancholy and thoughts of past regrets. Use only dried bulbs. A time-travel flower. Lavender - Raises spirits. Prevents bad decisions resulting from fatigue or depression. Lemon Balm - Upon consumption, for a brief period of time the eater will think and feel as he did in his youth. Please note if you have any former hellions at your table before serving. A time-travel flower. Lemon Verbena - Produces a lull in conversation with a mysterious lack of awkwardness. Helpful when you have nervous, overly talkative guests. Lilac - When a certain amount of humility is in order. Gives confidence that humbling yourself to another will not be used against you. Marigold - Causes affection, but sometimes accompanied by jealousy. Nasturtium - Promotes appetite in men. Makes women secretive. Secret sexual liaisons sometimes occur in mixed company. Do not let your guests out of your sight. Pansy - Encourages the eater to give compliments and surprise gifts. Peppermint - A clever method of concealment. When used with other edible flowers, it confuses the eater, thus concealing the true nature of what you are doing. A cloaking flower. Rose Geranium - Produces memories of past good times. Opposite of Hyacinth Bulb. A time-travel flower. Rose Petal - Encourages love. Snapdragon - Wards off the undue influences of others, particularly those with magical sensibilities. Squash and Zucchini Blossoms - Serve when you need to be understood. Clarifying flowers. Tulip - Gives the eater a sense of sexual perfection. A possible side effect is being susceptible to the opinions of others. Violet - A wonderful finish to a meal. Induces calm, brings on happiness, and always assures a good night’s sleep.

For most people moving is a tiring experience. When on the verge of moving out to a new home or into a new office, it's only natural to focus on your new place and forget about the one you’re leaving. Actually, the last thing you would even think about is embarking on a heavy duty move out clean. However, you can be certain that agents, landlords and all the potential renters or buyers of your old home will most definitely notice if it's being cleaned, therefore getting the place cleaned up is something that you need to consider. The process of cleaning will basically depend to things; how dirty your property and the size of the home. If you leave the property in good condition, you'll have a higher the chance of getting back your bond deposit or if you're selling, attracting a potential buyer. Below are the steps you need to consider before moving out. You should start with cleaning. Remove all screws and nails from the walls and the ceilings, fill up all holes and dust all ledges. Large holes should be patched and the entire wall checked the major marks. Remove all the cobwebs from the walls and ceilings, taking care to wash or vacuum the vents. They can get quite dusty. Clean all doors and door knobs, wipe down all the switches, electrical outlets, vacuum/wipe down the drapes, clean the blinds and remove all the light covers from light fixtures and clean them thoroughly as they may contain dead insects. Also, replace all the burnt out light bulbs and empty all cupboards when you clean them. Clean all windows, window sills and tracks. Vacuum all carpets or get them professionally cleaned which quite often is stipulated in the rental agreement. After you've finished the general cleaning, you can now embark on the more specific areas. When cleaning the bathroom, wash off the soap scum and remove mould (if any) from the bathroom tiles. This can be done by pre-spraying the tile grout with bleach and letting it sit for at least half an hour. Clean all the inside drawers and vanity units thoroughly. Clean the toilet/sink, vanity unit and replace anything that you've damaged. Wash all shower curtains and shower doors plus all other enclosures. Polish the mirrors and make sure the exhaust fan is free of dust. You can generally vacuum these quite easily. Finally, clean the bathroom floors by vacuuming and mopping. In the kitchen, clean all the cabinets and liners and wash the cupboards inside out. Clean the counter-tops and shine the facet and sink. If the fridge is staying give it a good clean. You can do this by removing all shelves and wash them individually. Thoroughly degrease the oven inside and out. It's best to use and oven cleaner from your supermarket, just take care to use gloves and a mask as they can be quite toxic. Clean the kitchen floor well by giving it a good vacuum and mop . Sometimes the kitchen floor may need to be degreased. Dust the bedrooms and living room, vacuum throughout then mop. If you have a garage give it a good sweep. Also cut the grass, pull out all weeds and remove all items that may be lying or hanging around. Remember to put your garbage bins out for collection even if collection is a week away as in our experience the bins will be full to the brim from all the rubbish during the moving process. If this all looks too hard then you can always hire a bond cleaner to tackle the job for you or if you're on a tight budget you can download an end of lease cleaning checklist or have one sent to you from your local agent. Just make sure you give yourself at least a day or to take on the job. Its best not to rush through the job, just make sure everything is cleaned thoroughly, so it passes the inspection in order for you to get your bond back in full.

A rainbow’s spectacle reveals that sunlight is composed of several colors. Of these, red and blue are captured by chlorophyll, whereas carotene and xanthophylls intercept only the blue-green part of the visible spectrum. At In autumn-colored leaves, chlorophyll molecules break down, unmasking the yellow carotene and xanthophylls. Some leaves, such as those of liquidambar (left), turn red when anthocyanin pigments add the final touch to the tree’s colorful spectacle. The inherited color patterns of leaf variegation result from the various pigments occurring separately or in combinations in mesophyll cells. Shown here are striped inch plant wavelengths represented by these colors, the energy of light is transferred, via the pigments, into the synthesis of foods. Artificial illumination is only effective if it provides the blue and red wavelengths absorbed by chloroplast pigments. Ideally, incandescent bulbs, which radiate abundant red, should be supplemented with selected fluorescent tubes radiating blue wavelengths. To achieve photosynthetic yields comparable to those in natural conditions, several lights are needed to provide high intensities, but care must be taken to control the build-up of heat.

People don't know they should be looking for 3000 degrees Kelvin, or what we call warm light. Look at the color rendering index ( CRI ) of a bulb. Choosing bulbs with a CRI close to 100 will keep you and your spaces looking bright and colorful. If we want more wildness in our lives, we have to be willing to let go of some control. Harmony offers visible evidence that someone cares enough about a place to invest energy in it. Disorder has the opposite effect. Disorderly environments have been linked to feelings of powerlessness, fear, anxiety and depression and they exert a subtle, negative influence on people's behavior. Joy is the brain's natural reward for staying alert to correlations and connections in our surroundings. This principle helps explain why collections feel so joyful. Even if the individual items don't have much value, our eyes read a collection as more than the sum of its parts. Surprise has a vital purpose: to quickly redirect our attention. In stable, predictable situations, the parts of the brain that attend to our environment slip into a kind of background mode. Situations rich in ambiguity tend to spur magical thinking. When we witness something mysterious, it disrupts our sense of certainty about the world and our place in it.

Light and the human is poorly understood by the astronomical profession, with many astronomers not understanding which light bulbs they should have in their own homes and offices! It is embarrassing that astronomers do not understand the many forms of artificial lighting that they are exposed to every day and how it affects them.

Andy’s Message Around the time I received Arius’ email, Andy’s message arrived. He wrote: Young, I do remember Rick Samuels. I was at the seminar in the Bahriji when he came to lecture. Like you I was at once mesmerized by his style and beauty, which of course was a false image manufactured by the advertising agencies and sales promoters. I was surprised to hear your backroom story of him being gangbanged in the dungeon. We are not ones to judge since both of us had been down that negative road of self-loathing. This seems to be a common thread with people whom others considered good-looking or beautiful. In my opinion, it’s a fake image that handsome people know they cannot live up to. Instead of exterior beauty being an asset, it often becomes a psychological burden. During the years when I was with Toby, I delved in some fashion modeling work in New Zealand. I ventured into this business because it was my subconscious way of reminding me of the days we posed for Mario and Aziz. It was also my twisted way of hoping to meet another person like me, with the hope of building a loving long-term relationship. It was also a desperate attempt to break loose from Toby’s psychosomatic grip on my person. Ian was his name and he was a very attractive 24 year old architecture student. He modeled to earn some extra spending money. We became fast friends, but he had this foreboding nature which often came on unexpectedly. A sentence or a word could trigger his depression, sending the otherwise cheerful man into bouts of non-verbal communication. It was like a brightly lit light bulb suddenly being switched off in mid-sentence. We did have an affair while I was trying to patch things up with Toby. As delightful as our sexual liaisons were there was a hidden missing element, YOU! Much like my liaisons with Oscar, without your presence, our sexual communications took on a different dynamic which only you as the missing link could resolve. There were times during or after sex when Ian would abuse himself with negative thoughts and self-denigration. I tried to console him, yet I was deeply sorrowed about my own unresolved issues with Toby. It was like the blind leading the blind. I was gravely saddened when Ian took his own life. Heavily drugged on prescriptive anti-depressant and a stomach full of extensive alcohol consumption, he fell off his ten story apartment building. He died instantly. This was the straw that threw me into a nervous breakdown. Thank God I climbed out of my despondencies with the help of Ari and Aria. My dearest Young, I have a confession to make; you are the only person I have truly loved and will continue to love. All these years I’ve tried to forget you but I cannot. That said I am not trying to pry you away from Walter and have you return to me. We are just getting to know each other yet I feel your spirit has never left. Please make sure that Walter understands that I’m not jeopardizing your wonderful relationship. I am happy for the both of you. You had asked jokingly if I was interested in a triplet relationship. Maybe when the time and opportunity arises it may happen, but now I’m enjoying my own company after Albert’s passing. In a way it is nice to have my freedom after 8 years of building a life with Albert. I love you my darling boy and always will. As always, I await your cheerful emails. Andy. Xoxoxo

also dates from the war years. J. D. Starkey describes how he would lower a cluster of electric bulbs over the side of an Admiralty trawler to attract fish, which could then be easily caught. One night in the Indian Ocean he found himself gazing at a “green unwinking eye”. Shining a powerful torch into the water, Starkey saw tentacles two feet thick. He walked the length of the ship, studying the monster, with its parrotlike beak, and realized that it had to be more than 175 feet long. The squid remained there for about fifteen minutes; then “as its valve opened fully . . . without any visible effort it zoomed into the night”. The major problem, as far as science is concerned, is that it seems virtually impossible to study sea monsters in their natural

you’ll see that most of the halls are lit by natural sunlight streaming through skylights. Nice, right? However, that doesn’t mean this joint doesn’t use up frickin’ light bulbs by the case.

At the window, with it open, as rain sang across the land once dry, so the rain slipped in threads of current down cracks and toward the lows, the man wiped his glasses free of spray—beads that had hit the sill and splattered at him. He cleared his throat, put the glasses back on, picked up a cigarette weaving smoke into the pale-yellow room—a light cast by a single bulb dangling above the kitchen table from a cord, makeshift. “Would you say,” said the man now ashing his cigarette, smoke staining his words, his eyes toward the rain, “that I am very brave?” He then looked at the woman, wrapped in a blanket, her eyes tight against the chill, her body frail with age and labor, her hair winced gray by days. She tightened the blanket across her shoulders, leaned against a wall—faded white paint, cracked and spotting. “These days?” she said, and looked now at the rain, sighed as if she knew it only came to wash her off the land, to hoist their home from its foundation in a torrent toward the death of it—nature ravaging its boards and bones to splinters and shingles and scraps and refuse that would toss wildly in the breath of flood until it came to rest unrecognizable. She closed her eyes. Turned from the man. “I wouldn’t even call you handsome.

It was in the 1880s, when German companies tried to develop more efficient light bulbs

As a perfect emitter at any given temperature, a blackbody emits the maximum amount of heat, infrared radiation. The blackbody spectrum would serve as a benchmark in calibrating and producing a bulb that emitted as much light as possible while keeping the heat it generated to a minimum.

TIP: Do you know that an onion works like a magnet? It doesn’t even need to be consumed to be attracted to bacteria and toxins. The next time you or someone you know gets sick, keep an onion bulb or pieces of onion nearby (or under the feet). It will naturally draw the toxins out.

Part of the problem is, you've got a lot of D students left on the farm today," Joel said, as we drove around Staunton running errands. "The guidance counselors encouraged all the A students to leave home and go to college. There's been a tremendous brain drain in rural America. Of course, that suits Wall Street just fine; Wall Street is always trying to extract brainpower and capital from the countryside. First they take the brightest bulbs off the farm and put them to work in Dilbert's cubicle, and then they go after the capital of the dimmer ones who stayed behind, by selling them a bunch of gee-whiz solutions to their problems." This isn't just the farmer's problem, either. "It's a foolish culture that entrusts its food supply to simpletons.

To recover an intuitive sense of what will be in season throughout the year, picture a season of foods unfolding as if from one single plant. Take a minute to study this creation—an imaginary plant that bears over the course of one growing season a cornucopia of all the different vegetable products we can harvest. We’ll call it a vegetannual. Picture its life passing before your eyes like a time-lapse film: first, in the cool early spring, shoots poke up out of the ground. Small leaves appear, then bigger leaves. As the plant grows up into the sunshine and the days grow longer, flower buds will appear, followed by small green fruits. Under midsummer’s warm sun, the fruits grow larger, riper, and more colorful. As days shorten into the autumn, these mature into hard-shelled fruits with appreciable seeds inside. Finally, as the days grow cool, the vegetannual may hoard the sugars its leaves have made, pulling them down into a storage unit of some kind: a tuber, bulb, or root. So goes the year. First the leaves: spinach, kale, lettuce, and chard (here, that’s April and May). Then more mature heads of leaves and flower heads cabbage, romaine, broccoli, and cauliflower (May–June). Then tender young fruit-set: snow peas, baby squash, cucumbers (June), followed by green beans, green peppers, and small tomatoes (July). Then more mature, colorfully ripened fruits: beefsteak tomatoes, eggplants, red and yellow peppers (late July–August). Then the large, hard-shelled fruits with developed seeds inside: cantaloupes, honeydews, watermelons, pumpkins, winter squash (August–September). Last come the root crops, and so ends the produce parade. Plainly these don’t all come from the same plant, but each comes from a plant, that’s the point—a plant predestined to begin its life in the spring and die in the fall. (A few, like onions and carrots, are attempting to be biennials, but we’ll ignore that for now.) Each plant part we eat must come in its turn—leaves, buds, flowers, green fruits, ripe fruits, hard fruits—because that is the necessary order of things for an annual plant. For the life of them, they can’t do it differently. Some minor deviations and a bit of overlap are allowed, but in general, picturing an imaginary vegetannual plant is a pretty reliable guide to what will be in season, wherever you live. If you find yourself eating a watermelon in April, you can count back three months and imagine a place warm enough in January for this plant to have launched its destiny.

Though the garden brought no profit in winter, it had its own beauty. The white canopy over the glass house sparkled on bright days. The gazing ball grew a crystalline moon. Downy snow on the herb beds and flower gardens caught the light in soft, variant blues and mauves. Reddily clustered berries against the drifts formed a pretty picture. A frosted crescent blanketed the bench where Lavender and her father used to sit, listening to Amaryllis Fitch's divine harp concerts. And the winter garden wasn't silent, either. Chickadees in their black caps twittered about, and Lavender left a pan of seeds out for them. Rabbits' tracks crooked across the slumbering perennials and bulbs.

Humans believe they serve some great purpose on the earth; they do not. They believe because they created things like the light bulb or cars, that it makes them great. It only serves to make their life comfortable and appear to fit into the grand scheme of things. We are not born with special abilities like flight, tusks, or leaping capabilities like many of nature's animals. We trick ourselves into thinking we are special but we only take and never give. We are an anomaly that evolved from the crustacean that we now eat for pleasure. We are essentially eating our own. An animal that secretes serotonin, just as we do. It feels just like we do. The best thing that can happen to the human race is that it dies off and we leave the earth be.

This is light.” He tightened his fist and then quickly opened his fingers releasing a magical burst of flame from his right hand. Swirling around his palms in different directions he caused the scarlet blaze to dance in thin air before he firmly clutched it and caused it to disappear, ”Light is the natural agent that stimulates sight and makes things visible. It causes things to burn and sparks the act of ignition…In the Mortal Bible in the book of Genesis it is the beginning of life...” The Professor opened his arms wide as he spoke with great bravado “‘And God said, “Let there be Light!’” and there was light.’’ His hands released a stream of lightning bolts that flashed so majestically that it caused all of the onlookers to mask their eyes from its harsh glow before the bolts ceased in their gleaming, “But remember God also labeled that light as good and God divided the light from the darkness…” As quickly as the flame flourished in his hands before, he used his fists with the same intensity causing all of the fluorescent bulbs to dim and the room to suddenly fall into complete darkness.

The Moon is not an electric light bulb that you can change with another!

The sunlight energy absorbed by the earth (and hence the heat energy radiated by the earth) amounts to an average of 239 W/m2. Since a 100-watt incandescent light bulb gives off, well, one hundred watts (almost all as heat), this means the planet radiates heat as if there were a bit more than two light bulbs in every square meter (eleven square feet) of its surface. Human influences today amount to just over 2 W/m2, or slightly less than 1 percent of that natural flow (about the same influence as half a cucumber on the daily human diet).

This Spiritual Coming of Age cannot be hurried or forced, but must appear in its own good time, when the consciousness is ready, exactly as the flowering of a bulb can only be the result of natural growth.