Good Morning!
And Happy Left-Handers’ Day! to all the left-handed out there.
On this day in 1792 French revolutionaries took the entire French royal family and imprisoned them.
In 1846 the American Flag was raised for the first time in Los Angeles, CA.
In 1912 the first experimental radio license was issued to St. Joseph’s College in Philadelphia, PA.
In 1932 Adolf Hitler refused to take the post of vice-chancellor of Germany. He said he was going to hold out “for all or nothing.”
And in 1961 Berlin was divided by a barbed wire fence to halt the flight of refugees. Two days later work on the Berlin Wall began.
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Quote of the Day
“I’m a typed director. If I made Cinderella, the audience would immediately be looking for a body in the coach.”
Alfred Hitchcock
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Today is Dan Fogelberg’s birthday.
And it’s also Joey Belville’s, of Echoing Green.
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Wandering Views 
Am I first?
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Yes. 🙂
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Rather slow around here today! I plan on checking out for a few hours to get some sleep. Enjoy your day everyone. Up and at em.
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Good morning, all. I’m having a difficult time as today is L.’s first day of high school. I’m feeling very nostalgic and teary. I’m not ready to let her go in four short years…
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School started already?
You have to let her go, when the time comes Ann. Some guy will grab her up and run off with her. Then, they will start coming over with grandkids. That’s worth it all.
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Good Morning, Y’all!
AJ – One of my favorite memories…my sister took me to a Fogelberg show for my 19th birthday. Primo seats and an awesome performance.
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Yes, Chas, school starts earlier every year. Except this year our school is starting a little later than last year, since there is no a/c and it is impossible to teach when the classroom is 85-90°. We had several days last year that we got out early because of heat, so the district decided to start later. I would rather start after Labor Day and go until the first week of June, but around here everyone starts the third week of August or earlier.
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Annms- I tell all the Freshmen I have that my class (Spanish) will be the most difficult class a lot of them have. After the first test they begin to believe me.
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Elvera worked for a high school in Northern Virginia. She wasn’t a teacher. There was a state law that school couldn’t start before labor day. The reason for this was that Virginia has two theme parks, King’s Dominion at Richmond and Busch Gardens at Williamsburg, They depend on high school students during the busy time.
It was good business for the parks and good money for the kids.
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Good morning! I am back at the office today, at least for part of the day. We just dropped son off at the airport. It looks like a good day for flying unlike many of the stormy days we’ve had lately. I am sad that son could not stay for longer. Bosley will be missing the extra attention, too.
I really like all these bird header photos. Great shots, all. Now if we could just hear them!
My husband is a leftie. I will have to tell him we have another reason to celebrate today. Last night we had birthday cake to celebrate his March and son’s July birthdays.
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That’s a lot of goldfinches! And most of them male–impressive.
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At least goldfinches can be friends. I’ve never seen two hummingbirds eat together.
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We have daily hummingbird wars in my yard!
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There was a state law that school couldn’t start before labor day.
There is such a law in Missouri because of amusement parks in St. Louis and Kansas City. But they made an exception for rural schools, of which about all of them took advantage.
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There may have been an exception in rural Virginia, Peter. I don’t know. It applied to N. Va. because it is also a tourist location because of DC.
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The confirmed reports about Christian and Yazidi refugees fleeing the advance of ISIS are cause for prayer and concern. However, not everything ISIS is accused of may be true: http://thegospelcoalition.org/article/factchecker-is-isis-beheading-children-in-iraq
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Hummingbird wars, that sounds pretty brutal.
LA schools started this week, too. But it still doesn’t seem right that school starts before Labor Day, that final 3-day weekend (up until very recently out here) used to be the last hurrah (unofficially) of summer, the beaches and back-to-school supply sales were packed.
Nice bird pic — and I loved Alfred Hitchcock. He had a touch for the macabre that usually included a wry twist or two.
I had one of those nights where I woke up around 2:30 or 3, could not get back to sleep until maybe 4:30, and when it was time to get up it was almost painful. I’d just fallen back into a nice, deep sleep, only to have it end.
It’s overcast here this morning, which usually means the day will be cooler.
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roscuro, I’ve reacted cautiously about some of those claims, too — there didn’t seem to be a lot of hard evidence, although I’ll admit I haven’t looked at all the stories or photographs coming out of the region. I did see the baby with the 3 rifles on FB the other day and wondered (and was suspect) about its origin.
It may have happened to one child (or not, though one child is horror enough). But is this something that’s happening in a systematic way? There don’t seem to be good first-hand sources out there.
That said, sometimes we also find that atrocities were far worse than realized as was the case with the holocaust.
War zones, especially ones as chaotic and dark and volatile as this one, are very hard for journalists to cover.
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Donna, when I heard the reports, my thought was that it was not characteristic of Islamic extremists – in other, equally violent groups like the Muslim Brotherhood in Sudan or Boko Haram, they take non-Muslim children captive and force them into slavery or conversion. Also, I remembered a report that came out when ISIS took Mosul, that they had decreed that all women should be circumcised – once again, it seemed uncharacteristic as Middle Easterners typically do not practice female genital mutilation, as it is more of an African cultural practice than an Islamic one; the report later was found to be false and no such decree had been made.
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We have several of those little yellow guys out here at our feeder, too. I’ve never seen them fight with one another but I have seen them snip at other birds.
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Well Donna almost got it…..
The Alfred H. quote……
The birds…….
😯
The finches tolerated each other, and they tolerated the lone male cardinal, but not any of the other birds. If the blackbirds or the jays came around, they flew off together. When the others left, they came back. The blackbirds chased everyone else away, except the cardinal. They stayed away from him.
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The pics are from Mason Neck State Park in Virginia. There were tons of finches because they had a whole colony of bubble nests for them. They looked like cleaned out squashes, but they were plastic.
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Very clever, The Real. I prefer to forget about ‘The Birds’. Watching it was my first excursion into the horror genre, and that was enough for me. I know, it is ridiculous to be shocked by a movie based on such an unrealistic premise and in which most of the shots were done by glass painting*; but such is was his genius that even on such a shaky foundation he could convince you that there was really something to be horrified about. On the other hand, I love to watch his suspense films, especially the early ones from his British film period: ‘The Lady Vanishes’, Young and Innocent’, ‘The Thirty-Nine Steps’,…
*Hitchcock loved glass paintings, because it meant he didn’t have to leave his studio – in his suspense film ‘Torn Curtain’, some major scenes take place in a Berlin museum that was then behind the Iron Curtain and people who had been to the museum and seen the movie, wondered how he had got permission to shoot on location. His artists had painted the scenes from photographs.
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Donna: “…it still doesn’t seem right that school starts before Labor Day.” Even Labor Day seems early to me. Back in the day, the LA schools didn’t start until the second, or even third, week of September.
Five or ten years ago Michigan passed a no-school-before-Labor-Day law also. I don’t think it was for any particular big attractions, but generally much of northern Michigan depends on summer tourism. I don’t think there’s any rural exception.
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In LA in the 60s and 70s we were in school from mid-September to mid-June, and summer vacation was 13 weeks long. Is the shorter summer now made up for by more breaks during the school year? We used to get two weeks at Christmas and one week at Easter (yes, back then it was Easter vacation!). At least out here in Michigan there seem to be more breaks.
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My garden grows a huge crop of thistles. Nasty prickly things – but it brings an abundance of goldfinches, who love to eat the seeds!
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School starts before Labor Day so they’ll be finished in time for Christmas break, which makes sense to me.
The Birds was filled in Bodega Bay, about 20 miles from my house. Every time I see a line of birds “casually” gathered on a wire, I get nervous . . . .
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😦 We haven’t heard from Kim today?
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I think that we have the earliest start with only a five week break. No complaints though as we have two weeks between terms and 5 weeks at Christmas. So nice to prepare for 10 weeks and work hard and then have time to prepare for the next term.
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More on Mark Driscoll of Mars Hill, but in a different way–how to tell if you’re in a controlling church or not: http://www.charismamag.com/blogs/fire-in-my-bones/21041-so-what-do-we-do-now-with-mark-driscoll
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😯 I just heard on TV that astronomerst have discovered a black hole that is spinning so fast that it alters time and space around it.
??????????????????
What would an altered time and space look like? Feel like? Are time and space something that can be altered?
It is likely that the Spiritual world transcends time and space, but time and space defines our world.
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Chas- I think they discovered the Twilight Zone!
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I miss that show.
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Me too.
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Chas, I’m no physics expert (not being very mathematical), but from all the lay articles about space, I understand that the rate of time and the dimensions of space are not the same (constant) throughout our universe. Actually, it is that inconsistency which has caused some young-earth creation scientists to postulate the explanation for the apparent age of the stars: http://www.icr.org/article/starlight-age-universe/. I have often wondered if black holes, with their powerful draw that bends space and time, are a model of how the heavens will be rolled together as a scroll (Revelations 6:14).
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