From the ever excellent A.Word.A.Day.

"To know how to say what other people only think is what makes men poets and sages; and to dare to say what others only dare to think, makes men martyrs or reformers, or both". Elizabeth Rundle Charles, writer (1828-1896)

Perhaps this also applies to all the arts, after all, what is most satifying in architecture is what is recognisable. "I could live there", I say to myself, when I see what delights me.

That's Nevi on the left. She is on holiday in Italy last year. I met her online in a  pub run by the Irish tourist board six years ago when I was working nights. Recently I found her again on Facebook, where I got this picture. She has her own life far away in Australia, but I have this fatherly watchful eye feeling about her pictures and her posts. Her birthday is tomorrow. She was born long after me in 1978, when I was already older than she is now.

Six of the seven most mysterious
archeological finds in the world

How glorious is the morning or evening sun on high mountains.....

Alpenglow

But even better is the reflction of this light. This is hard to find on Google Images, but may be here.

My wife is more frightenned of death than I am. I will keep this quote which I got from the always entertaining A.word.A.day and read it to her some day

A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:



Perhaps the best cure for the fear of death is to reflect that life has a beginning as well as an end. There was a time when you were not: that gives us no concern. Why then should it trouble us that a time will come when we shall cease to be? To die is only to be as we were before we were born. -William Hazlitt, essayist (1778-1830)

I think it was Carl Sagan who calculated

 that all humans would last less than three years

 if all bees were obliterated first.

It is also a fact that America is too democratic at home to be autocratic abroad. This limits the use of America's power, especially its capacity for military intimidation. Never before has a populist democracy attained international supremacy. But the pursuit of power is not a goal that commands popular passion, except in conditions of a sudden threat or challenge to the public's sense of domestic well-being. The economic self-denial (that is, defense spending) and the human sacrifice (casualties, even among professional soldiers) required in the effort are uncongenial to democratic instincts. Democracy is inimical to imperial mobilization."

Zbigniew Kazimierz Brzezinski. 1997.

Yo-Yo Ma playing part of the suite number 6 in D Major

Cocoon Nebula Cloaks a Colossal Star Destined to Become a Black Hole

/Supernova in the making.