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Edward Coats Mark Brady Lou Varricchio Leslie Scribner Denton Publications Production Team EDITORIAL WRITER Martin Harris
MARKETING CONSULTANTS Tom Bahre • Brenda Hammond • Heidi Littlefield Hartley MacFadden • Mary Moeykens • Joe Monkofsky CONTRIBUTORS Angela DeBlasio • Rusty DeWees • Alice Dubenetsky Roz Graham • Michael Lemon • Joan Lenes Catherine Oliverio • Karissa Pratt • Beth Schaeffer Bill Wargo • Dan Wolfe PHOTOGRAPHY Stephanie Simon, Intern
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The mysterious centaurs
S
trange space objects called centaurs have recently been discovered in the far reaches of the solar system. Orbiting our Sun in a region called the Kuiper Belt, located beyond Pluto, centaurs are small objects—up to 125 miles (200 km) across; they now bridge the mini-planetoid classification gap between asteroids and comets. Centaurs are a little bit like By Lou Varricchio asteroids and a little bit like comets; they are composed of rock, ice, gases and various organic compounds. Water ice has been confirmed on a number of centaurs. In deep space, far from the Sun, centaurs behave as nomad asteroids. But when a centaur occasionally wonders closer to the Sun, its surface ices boil off and the object becomes more comet-like, even developing a gauzy tail. These strange objects, like the dwarf-planet (or just plain planet) Pluto and its moons, are part of a vast debris field left over from the formation of the solar system 4.54 billion years ago. Orbits of centaurs are highly unstable. Occasionally, Neptune’s gravity field will affect a centaur ’s orbit nudging it closer to the Sun. When the centaur ’s surface heats up due to increased solar energy, some of its ice sublimes to sport a blunt comet’s tail. Chiron is the largest centaur object discovered so far. It’s named after the mythological centaur named Chiron. Chiron is best remembered as the amazing tutor of both ancient Greek superheros Achilles and Hercules. Originally classified as a deep-space asteroid, Chiron was reclassified as the first centaur in 1977. A similar object, called Pholus, was discovered in 1992. Ever since, astronomers have been finding more centaur objects beyond Pluto’s orbit. Despite the distance between Earth and the remote space pastures where centaurs roam, astronomers have been able to detect some surface color variations. Most centaurs appear to be red due to similar chemicals, perhaps organics. Chiron, however, appears darker than its lonely companions. No one knows for sure, but this may be due to the fact that its original surface material has been boiled off countless times in its drunken-like orbit around the Sun. Then again maybe Chiron is more rocky than its fellow centaurs. We’ll probably have to wait a very long time to get a closeup view of Chiron or other centaurs. Neither the U.S. nor Europe has any plans for a robot space mission to visit a centaur object at least through the year 2020. NASA, thanks to tinkering by the anti-space Obama regime, may no longer be a significant player in the planetary exploration game. What’s in the Sky: During early August, look low in the west at sunset for four planets visible to the unaided eye: Venus, the brightest, and to its left are Mars, Saturn and elusive Mercury.
Seeing
Stars
Lou Varricchio, M.Sc., lives in Vermont. He is a former NASA science writer. He is currently part of the NASA-JPL Solar System Ambassador program in Vermont.
SATURDAY August 7, 2010
Herbie the love cat H
erbie was my mom’s cat. He had to be put to sleep today. I was in the room with ma and Herbie when he passed, and I want to apologize to Herbie. Here’s why. Herbie had been having trouble getting his business done for the past year or so, especially the past week, so mom called her vet., who was on vacation, so she called another vet and made Herbie an appointment. Herbie was seventeen and a half and lived four of those years with mom and dad, five more with mom alone. Herbie would smush his twenty-five pounds of coon catness beside dad on the recliner, and dad would pet Herbie all night long. When dad died, and you don’t have to care or believe me, or believe in the spirit of this, but when dad died, Herbie mourned him by not getting up into dad’s recliner for nearly a month. Herbie would sit in front of the recliner, look at it for a good spell, and go rest somewhere else. Good soul. Since dad died, Herbie had become mom’s main man. His giant green eye’s looking after her like his life depended on her. Which of course it did. Mom feared Herbie might not come home from the vet. this time; but she hoped the vet .would be able to get Herbie flushed out enough to send him home for one more run. I hoped the same. We always want a little more. “Fries with that?” Yeah, fries, and another two weeks with ole Herbie around would be just fine, thank-you. So when ma got the call this morning from the vet. saying Herbie’s kidneys had done their last work, she wasn’t surprised. I watched the slow but dignified death of my father; saw him lying passed away in his bed. Saw my Aunt lifeless in her bed at the nursing home too. I’ve been around my share of old, and very sick, and extremely hurt people, but I’ve never been witness to putting an animal down, which I feel is why I screwed up just a little. Ma and I were in the room when a nurse brought Herbie in, two IV’s held with gauze and stuck in his little forearm. On the table Herbie cawed a bit, but it didn’t seem like he was in pain. I’d like to think his caw was more from discomfort then blatant pain. Ma kissed Herbie and told him she loved him and that she will always love him. I pet him, and listened to what the doc had to say. I put my ear down to the bulk of Herbie’s body to hear if he was purring. Brilliant eh? He wasn’t.
Cause she doesn’t stand well at eighty, ma settled in a bench a couple feet from Herbie. I stood behind Herbie as the doc went about presenting a sedative into his arm. I lightly stroked Herbie’s back a bit, but when the doc plugged the shot of relaxant into the IV, I let up petting. Herbie fell into a medicated haze, a sleep, basically. I walked over to ma and put my hand on her shoulder, tapped her a couple of times, and the doc quietly said “this will stop his heart,” as he administered the second and final dose. Gentle ending of a gentle giant seventeen and a half year-old, green eyes the size of marbles, nice as can be, at one time 25 pound, cat. Why do I want to apologize to Herbie? Because I wasn’t chatting with him as the doc gave the first sedative. For some reason I thought getting in too close to Herbie could muddle the procedure. I’ve always had good instincts; known what to do and say with folks who’re hurting. But this was different. This was someone who was going out, right then and there, and my usual dead on instincts let me down a little bit and allowed me to succumb to the odd certainty of the moment. So I’m sorry Herbie that I wasn’t chatting with you right before the end. I should have been right down with you, loving you up, going about all normal saying “ole Herbie, he’s the feller, he’s a good boy, a handsome feller, you’re my buddy.” Sorry about that ole Herb, cause maybe going about normal could have made the very, very end, a bit more comfortable for you. I’m not worried Herbie that you didn’t have a subtle end, I’m just thinking it might have been a tiny bit better had I talked to you through it. Live and learn for me, for you Herbie, die and teach. I’ll be better next time. Thanks Herbie, for everything. Rusty DeWees tours Vermont and Northern New York with his act “The Logger.” His column appears weekly. He can be reached at rustyd@pshift.com. Listen for The Logger, Rusty DeWees, Thursdays at 7:40 on the Big Station, 98.9 WOKO or visit his website at www.thelogger.com
Beau geste or mal geste? T
his column is about two venerable institutions which, until fairly recently, functioned quite differently from their present governance practices. Each institution has devoted special efforts to actions which seem to have been designed pointedly to affront that part of the constituency of each, once in the majority and now in the not-even-disguised-despised minority. One is my collegiate alma mater, which, for perhaps misplaced reasons of loyalty, I won’t identify here; the other is the fourteenth state, the historical label claimed by Vermont even though there was briefly a state labeled no. 14 named Franklin in Appalachia, its short political and geographical life ending just as Vermont’s began. Both institutions—university and state—share a common history; within living memory both were quintessentially conservative in population membership and governance outlook—neither one is any more. The once majority outlook on institutional purpose—education and/or governance in the historic “liberal”, not the modern “progressive” sense—having been reduced to minority status by an aggressively dominant left-leaning governing majority. A defender of what happened could well say that both were just as ideologically motivated then as they are now, albeit in different directions, then as what’s now called “conservative” and today as what’s now called “liberal”. A rebutter might argue that the university’s educational menu, particularly in the soft subjects (not the hard sciences), wasn’t nearly as ideologically directed then as it is now, while conceding that state governance on the Jeffersonian model is just as much of an ideological template as the progressive concept of the intelligent governing the stupid (for our own good, of course). The verb alienate should be enlarged to convey what I’d guess was the motivation for these symbolically valuable actions: to the minority of alumni and voters alike, the unspoken message is “sit down, shut up, and send money; we’re in charge now, and we don’t need or want your input”. Both actions are part of a broader pattern: in Vermont, the campaign to shut down Vermont Yankee is part of a much larger anti-business governance attitude which has been reflected by such new demographics. At my old school, the hiring of Obama’s leftist agitator, wealth redistributionist, and self-professed communist Van Jones as a visiting lecturer matches well the long list of recognized leftists (and absence of rightist ones) in the economics department. There, the Keynesian stimulus-viagovernment spending concepts are taught as if there were no such thing as the recent research proving that such “multipliers” are typically negative in their effect. And in the sociology department, a professor teaches that “whiteness is the (unfortunate) absence of blackness.” I’d argue that both the Van Jones hiring and the Vermont Yankee shutdown were designed for symbolic intent only;
the former accomplishing little beyond confirming the university management’s wish to be seen and admired as more eclectic, inclusive, diverse, multi-cultural, out reaching, and so on other ivyclad competitors. In contrast, the Vermont action started out as symbolic rhetoric, which to its authors’ consternation, metamorphosed into a real objective. Perhaps the turning point was the adoption of compostthrowing at a Nuclear Regulatory Commission hearing as an environmentalist debating strategy (which may well succeed at shutting down a third of the state’s electric power, with no concern for either its replacement or replacement cost). As a former news reporter, trained back in the days when we were instructed by our editors to build the lead graph around who, what, where, when, and not why or how unless it was provable fact—not opinion—I’ll admit to both an opinion (and lack of one) here. I have reported above on the four Ws and opined on the reasons for university and state action; but I have no opinion (beyond a fairly vague theory) regarding the fifth W. Why would the managers of each of these institutions take largely symbolic actions they knew would antagonize part (admittedly, an impotent minority) of their constituencies? It sure ain’t the “reaching out” inclusiveness they more typically advocate. Each of these initiatives might be explained as the victory lap or touchdown dance common in the sports world; until now, such dancing is uncommon in the halls of governance or education. Unfortunately, that explanation doesn’t enlighten anyone on why (beyond a primitive sort of cave-man—oops, make that “caveperson” or even better Homo neanderthalensis—triumphalism now expressed in more contemporary ways. Maybe my own level of sophistication is simply inadequate to an understanding what their strategy is and what their tactics were. Maybe this simply proves the progressives’ basic point of self-identification: that they are smarter than the rest of us, are therefore our natural-born leaders. We should be grateful for whatever they do even when we can’t comprehend why they’re doing it. What I have mistakenly interpreted as a pair of mal gestes or political gotchas, should be accepted with suitable humility—each as a beau geste of noble intent, executed by a pair of noble institutions each acting as pater familias for us their political children in constant need of adult supervision.
Longtime Vermont resident Martin Harris now lives in Tennesee.