Pika has a good photo essay of luminarias / farolitos in Albuquerque, New Mexico. mjh

Christmas Luminarias in Albuquerque: Making Holiday Luminarias

Solace of solstice by JOHN FOYSTON

Being merry in the depth of darkness is a darned sight easier knowing that the sun hasn’t gone away forever, and Tuesday’s winter solstice is when we turn the corner back toward the sun and light.

The winter solstice is the most hopeful of holidays, the one that requires utter faith in the great ticking clockwork of the heavens. It’s a day for the imaginative and the optimistic; the beginning of winter, yes, but also the day that promises that spring will come, and summer after that.

The winter solstice has been celebrated far back into the mists of history and beyond. Calculating the exact day of the sun’s return inspired some of humanity’s earliest technological feats, still visible in sites such as England’s Stonehenge, the Yucatan Peninsula’s Chichen Itza, Chaco Canyon in the American Southwest, the temple at Karnak in Egypt and a score more around the world.

At Newgrange in County Meath, Ireland, which was built about 5,000 years ago, the rising sun on the winter solstice sends a beam of light down a long passage to illuminate — for 14 minutes — a chamber that is dark the rest of the year. …

This time of year has been celebrated in many ways by many cultures. There’s the Norse Yule, which lends us our traditions of decorated evergreens, holly and mistletoe; in Pharonic Egypt, the god/man Osiris died and was entombed on the solstice; and ancient Greece had a solstice festival called Lenaea.

The Romans probably were the solstice champs with festivals such as Saturnalia and many others, which were consolidated by Emperor Aurelian in the third century into dies natalis solis invicti, the Birthday of the Unconquered Sun, which was celebrated on Dec. 25. Christmas eventually supplanted that celebration, but during a period of centuries spanning the fourth to the 10th centuries.

The point being that the solstice has been a cause for celebration for millennia. Here’s a brief primer on what actually happens on this day…. [entire article]

The Writer’s Almanac – DECEMBER 20 – 26, 2004

In the northern hemisphere, today is the Winter Solstice, the shortest day of the year and the longest night. It’s officially the first day of winter and one of the oldest known holidays in human history. Anthropologists believe that solstice celebrations go back at least 30,000 years, before humans even began farming on a large scale.

To His Coy Mistress, by Andrew Marvell

…Now, therefore, while the youthful hue
Sits on thy skin like morning dew,
And while thy willing soul transpires
At every pore with instant fires,
Now let us sport us while we may,
And now, like amorous birds of prey,
Rather at once our time devour
Than languish in his slow-chapped power.
Let us roll all our strength and all
Our sweetness up into one ball,
And tear our pleasures with rough strife
Through the iron gates of life:
Thus, though we cannot make our sun
Stand still, yet we will make him run.

The Daily Aneurysm at jabartlett.com

Even though I am a liberal (and thus, as we’ve been told all month, an enemy of Christmas) and not religious (which makes me an enemy of America), I celebrate Christmas without cognitive dissonance and no feeling of hypocrisy. Christmas was long ago transformed from a religious holiday into an event so thoroughly secular that the wingnuts’ efforts to force it back to its religious roots, annoying though they are, represent closing the barn door long after the horse is gone. Santa and Jesus are side-by-side elbowing for space under trees from coast to coast, and I daresay in most households, they co-exist peacefully, making no demands on one another.

Kudos to our own John Fleck for responding to Michael Chrichton, the fiction writer.

ABQjournal: Anti-Greenhouse Argument Hot Air By John Fleck

I call it “the Galileo argument.”

It frequently pops up in defense of people whose ideas lie out of the scientific mainstream. When Galileo argued four centuries ago that the Earth circles the sun, the argument goes, he too was out of the mainstream.

It is an argument that has some currency this month, with the release of novelist Michael Crichton’s new anti-global warming thriller “State of Fear.”

I think people should be reminded that Galileo wasn’t “outside the scientific mainstream.” It is chillingly germane that Galileo’s science was viewed as threatening to the power of the Church. When those with power feel threatened, as the Church did, they will do anything to stop those who threaten them.

“The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus. There is no such thing as consensus science,” Crichton continued. “If it’s consensus, it isn’t science. If it’s science, it isn’t consensus. Period.”

It’s a rhetorically powerful line of argument [says Fleck]

Hold on. Look at Chrichton, who writes TV drama, claiming that “if it is consensus, it isn’t science.” Wow — if we agree, we’re wrong — an argument that definitely appeals to me. But this same argument is used to shoot down Darwin.

Science is under attack by people who believe there is one truth — a completely anti-Science ‘truth’ — and it belongs to them. There is no debate, no discussion, just The Truth as they see it.

Watch for Chrichton’s assertions to be taken up by the Republican Echo Chamber. Enjoy the irony of the Right Wing insisting that unanimity is bad and dissent leads to the truth. Ha! mjh

Fleck frequently blogs on global climate change at inkstain.net with copious links.

Free Will Astrology : Taurus Horoscope

I’d ask you to begin building a Truth Shrine in your home. This source of power might help you stay alert for and immune to the elevated levels of BS you’ll be called on to fend off in 2005. Maybe it would also inspire you to be in service to us all as you earn the title of “Radical Truth-Teller.”

This advice is not as poetic as Soul Celebration Day but easier to follow. mjh

But, then again,

Say not, ‘I have found the truth.’ but rather, ‘I have found a truth.’ — Kahil Gibran

Hey, kids, here’s some advice from your grandfolks on avoiding the draft.

Roberta Price’s Huerfano: A Memoir of Life in the Counterculture alibi . december 16 – 22, 2004

Joe, a friend from Yale got out of the draft by meditating and getting his blood pressure down below the minimum. Danny smoked cigarettes and drank so much coffee in the twenty-four hours before his physical that his blood pressure twitched above the maximum. Tom, who’s six feet tall, fasted, lost fifty pounds, and got his weight down below the minimum for his height, one hundred and thirty four, for two different physicals. The second time, they said, “You’re not going to go, are you?” Archer got FUCK YOU tattooed on the side of his right hand, the part that faces out when he salutes, and they didn’t want him, though after that another guy got his hand tattooed the same way and was drafted. A guy from Harvard acted crazy and got himself chased into the bathroom, where he secretly slipped two unwrapped Baby Ruths into the toilet bowl. When they caught up with him and tried to restrain him, he scooped up the candy bars, which were sitting in the toilet like turds, and ate them. I’ve heard that some men drink egg whites, hoping they’ll increase the albumin level in their urine and get classified 4-F for diabetes. Todd didn’t go to his physical, and he’s somewhere in the Sierras in Northern California the last we heard. Brian didn’t go to his either. He’s probably in Mexico. A friend from Columbia took three tabs of White Lightning the morning of his physical. He hallucinated and yelled gibberish throughout his processing, but he got inducted anyway. A friend of a friend at Buffalo shot off his big toe the night before his physical, like a wolf that gnaws off his paw to get out of a trap. …

He counted to ten before answering any question the captain asked, to suggest that maybe he wasn’t a good candidate for following orders promptly, but he was getting nowhere until he played his last card.

“What makes you think you’re unsuitable for Vietnam?” sneered the captain, looking across his desk at David in his underwear.

“I think I’d have a tendency to shoot my officers in the back, sir,” David said.

Keep in mind Malcolm X’s strategy. He told his draft board he was looking forward to learning how to use a gun and kill so he could come home and start a race war. mjh

God’s clock By James Carroll

Religion is to God what the clock is to time.