The Featured Post Blog

A collection of the featured posts as they appeared on mo'time

by: AmericanGirl

Today is my very last day of working from home, and I have surpringly little to do.  Now, who knows when I'll get a chance to blog again, because I certainly won't be doing it from my office, so I'll say what I have wanted to say for months and months:

I love my blog friends because we tend to put it all out there.  The good stuff and the ugly stuff.  Every blog I love has posts written by someone who was feeling down about themselves alongside the posts where they were feeling good.  Because we all feel good and bad, sometimes.  At some point in history some blogger made the first "This is what sucks about me" post, and we all read it and sucked in our collective breath and related, and thought that if we dug deep enough maybe we could find the courage to post our uglies out there.  Hooray for admiting our faults so that others may relate and/or admit theirs!

And then, THEN...there's the others.
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posted by: howard at 13:12 | link | comments |

by: gongli

Reader Mail

A reader writes in to ask whether Newton's invention of calculus was inspired or motivated by Newton's desire to prove the existence of God.

I don't know about that. I do know that there were problems in the theory of gravitation that he wanted to solve that required calculus.

Here's something strange. I have a lot of pictures of B and me taken at various times over the last year and half and I notice that I look completely different in each picture. I look almost like a different person from picture to picture.
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posted by: howard at 17:22 | link | comments |

by: Leigh

I remember my friend M, a New Jerseyite, saying that when she visited soon after, it didn't bother her that these buildings were missing from the skyline. She had taken the kids to the top of the Empire State Building, and I asked how it was, was it sad to look south? She tends to take these stoic positions, which sometimes I don't quite believe, or seem hollow at the core, or never ring quite true to me. But I remember feeling so bereft when she said it, because even today, five years on, I feel such sorrow and loss when I look downtown, something I and everyone else used to do, habitually, to orient ourselves, part of the landscape at every time of the day, the light, the beautiful Manhattan light, bouncing off of or between these behemoths, unavoidable, always in flux. Now, as the firefighter in the documentary said, they aren't there, they are just not there, impossible.

I found Molly, the terrier mix who was my spiritual companion for my twenties and into my thirties, through the birth of A, put down a few months before C's arrival, at the foot of the towers, one sunday morning in the early 1980s. Andrew (the brit) and I were walking on the old elevated west side highway. I walked up the steps to the plaza, and there was the little starving puppy, a Yoda- look alike, asleep. She looked up and kissed me, then followed us home to Tenth st., nibbling at the heels of joggers and sunday strollers. A soul dog if there ever was one.
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posted by: howard at 01:19 | link | comments (1) |

by: EmmaPele

What an amazing creature a stingray must be to pierce a man's heart.  What a mythical way to go for Steve, as if his death were made for storytelling.  The last moment was the most intimate union with a creature described, on emedicine, as non-aggressive towards humans.  Did he experience pain? Perhaps, for we read, "the stinger apparatus then injects a protein-based toxin into the wound, causing immediate intense (even excruciating)  pain to the victim."  He knew the danger as he approached these creatures, but he always had the invulnerability of the enthusiastic adolescent, and we watched him week after week amazed at how fearless he was, as if blind faith protected him somehow in a way that it never would have protected us.
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posted by: howard at 17:48 | link | comments |