The Blaisdell Blog

Scenes from Nepal this weekend remind all of us that this planet is a moving, living beast.   When it shrugs its skin mountains move and we small, soft, vulnerable humans are collateral damage.   The Earth of course is not alive in the carbon-based sense.   Its actions are indifferent to human presence in their application of tectonic cause and effect.   Pressure produces heat; heat causes expansion; expansion in a confined space produces tension that is released with geometrically expanded expulsions of energy and matter.   All of this is completely out of our control. What would you do in the event of a truly world changing event?   Perhaps you have simply put your fate in the hands of an immortal and omniscient deity and set the thought aside.   That course of action is not helping the Nepalese right now. In the same week that Atlas shrugged in Nepal, the University of Utah published a study in the journal Science proving that the Yellowsto...

Throwback Thursday is also Shakespeare's birthday, so I couldn't resist this one.   “God has given you one face, and you make yourself another.”   Hamlet My mother and I managed to fight about almost everything.   She was always trying to raise me.   To top it all off, Mom considered me to be the, “strange” one of our bunch.   [Trust me, I am not.   I know who the strange one is, and that free radical has been darting around the gene pool, luring people toward the drain for some time now!]    While Mom expected us to do well is school, she didn’t expect me to adopt what she considered to be, “exotic” tastes.   Mom was a constant reader, but she liked Edna Ferber and Willa Cather.   Her favorite book was, The Shepherd of the Hills , a soap opera of a book about the settlers of the Ozarks.   Mother thought I had gone way off the rails when I discovered a taste for Shakespeare. “If you prick us do we not bleed?   I...

The Boston Marathon was run today.   Tomorrow the penalty phase of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s trial begins.   He is guilty of a heinous, cowardly and deliberate bombing.   Yet, I hope he is not given the death penalty.   Here is why:   At 6:52 p.m. on the evening of November 1, 1955 United Airlines Flight 629 took off from Stapleton Airfield in Denver.   Eleven minutes later the Douglas DC 6B disintegrated in the air and plunged into a sugar beet field near Longmont, CO.   All 44 people on board died.               A bomb, 17 pounds of dynamite with a timer, had exploded in Daisie King’s luggage.   It had been placed there by her son, John Gilbert “Jack” Graham.   At check-in Mrs. King paid a $27 fine because the bags were overweight.    She asked her son if she really needed that much in her luggage.   Cold as ice he said to her, “Yes, mother, I’m sure you will need ...