Two time NBA MVP <Steve Nash> who has made the <Pheonix Suns> one of the top 2-3 Basketball teams in the world.

We call him <Captain Canada>.

Is sports <Low>, <High>, or <off to the side somewhere> Culture?

<Mack> we need your opinion on this since you mentioned the <Hitman> and the wonderful world of wrestling, which beats the <wonderful world of Disney> by a long shot.

<Niels> sorry to speculate on your bank account. I just want to go to <Yurp>

OK time for a quck quiz-- In mythology, who is <Europa>?

<scraping off the paint> won't work, as you point out. Also needed-- <massive engine work> and a <soul>.

Do cars have soul? Does North America have soul?

<Neil Young> told us <"Even Richard Nixon has got soul">

I see the last 500 years as Gutenberg Ghetto: the era of printed books, chess, individual conscience, privacy and nation states... all over now.

A historical aberration. The thin filling in a sandwich, with the oral zone before it and the electronic zone - the age of the Zapkinder - following it...

I alse left out Joni Mitchell. And <mack> is right about Duncan Suttles too. Innaresting openings.

Just keeping irregular hours, is all. One of my heroes is the 18th century mathematician Abraham de Moivre, a pioneer of complex numbers and much else. It's said he resolved to sleep for 15 minutes longer each night, until he reached 23 3/4 hours, and duly expired.

Sometimes I seem to be doing this in reverse.

So you're a bit like rapper <Fiddy Cent>?

"I'm <Dom>.. I make my own rules."

I like it

Which must be why the Jovian ice moon Europa has volcanic jacuzzis.

Funny thing, in fact. Yurp may have a common currency in the Euro, but everyone pronounces it differently: yoor-oh, erruh, evroe, oy-roar, ey'ro, hooray, etfarkingcetera.

It starts something like:

<When we think of the isles of Greece It was not coincidence or caprice
But, considering his environment
You can tell what Lord Byron meant...>

... and goes on to tell about a nymph that Jove had his eye on, and decided to seduce, but the bull costume and shower-of-gold scam were off being cleaned after previous adventures -- Clinton, who came within inches of an intern, had nothing on this guy -- so he decided to dress up as a lamprey fisherman. But he can't find the right costume for that either, and shows up as a <naked> lamprey fisherman. And the nymph rejects him. Why?

<She was a Southron Nymph, a Hellenic Dixiecrat, and she had been taught never to trust a nude eeler.>

Neo-kitsch piety hasn't really arrived yet, but there's plenty of new agey waffle about higher powers.

I got sent a hilarious old-kitsch book called Saints For Six O'Clock. Lots of gruesome xtian martyr tales with attached miracles, enlivened with jolly suburban anachronisms to make them familiar to children. Saint So-and-so went home for tea and had his tongue torn out but went on talking, and little Winifred was decapitated by step-daddy, and so on. There was even a guy named St Phocas, who was 'kind to beggars and sailors'. Hmm.

After marytrdom, these folk were transported into the presence of a benign, very English God - think of Sir Ralph Richardson in Time Bandits. This deity said things like "Gosh, you were frightfully brave, suffering like that for Me. I hope the torture didn't hurt TOO much?"

Very proper and polite of him. But maybe martyrs aren't quite the topic of humour they were in my salad days.

I still think anyone who forces a faith on a child has a moral duty to offer themselves for instant martyrdom as well.

Where do I get this moral imperative? From my god, of course. He's quite mad. Cue music:

Got a message from your maker
I'll keep it short and sweet
Death will come at midnight
For those of you who wear false teeth.

This summer, I noticed that the peppermill on my mom's table on the balcony, cast a shadow of exactly the same length as the peppermill's! Wow would that mean that the sun was at a 45 degrees angle at the earth's surface? Of course.. I raced for paper and pencil to start verifying and drawing and calculating.

At what angle would the shadow be twice the height of the peppermill? In stead of 22.5 degrees I found out that it was about 26.55 degrees. I used kitchen table 4th grade geometry and a steady drawing hand and centimeter.

In the end I was looking for a formula/equation where I just have to put in 3 variables and voila: For example.. length of shadow is 3 times <a> (height of peppermill) and what is the needed angle of the sun to make that happen..

I did find a site that just calculates that, but I was looking for a mathematical explanation. I tried to do it myself, but failed.

Can you help me out?

I know you're pressed for time but are also very knowledgable in Math and possibly Geometry.

Come to think of it I could post it at <chessm> or <danielpi>'s forum as well.

No hurry of course ;-)

Love the poems you quoted, particularly the last. Reminds me of Emily Dickinson-- All of her poems can be sung to the tune of <The Yellow Rose of Texas> (due to identical metre of the lines).

<Because I could not stop for death, He kindly stopped for me>

I don't have a problem with faith <qua> faith, but I do have a problem with people ramming it down the throats of kids, as you say. For me, a good example of a non-programmatic explication/exposition of faith is Kierkegaard's <Fear and Trembling and The Sickness Unto Death> (most optimistic title ever in Western letters, too). Although who knows what his parents did to him when he was young. Anyways I think he's brilliant. Recall that in the many versions of <Mount Moriah> Kierkegaard opens <Fear and Trembling> with it is not Abraham's faith in God that is the real human question, but rather Isaac's faith in his father.

But what if your father is a total tool? Smart man to raise these questions, was our "merry" Dane.

I gots no problem wit Jesus, Esai, I juss done want to be staring at a long haired pic of him on a decorative dinner plate hanging on the freaking wall. And no portraits of <Ganesh> featuring blinking colored lights either.

There's my shot of intolerance for the day.

<Zebra>-- Is that a shot at the people who post in <Dom's> forum, or a shot at the <EU> or whatever they call it these days. <EC>?

Plus, if the <Europa> monster had many heads, but only one line of rhetoric, wouldn't that make the multiplicity of heads redundant?

I'm not criticizing this notion; it's the thesis of <Marcuse's> <One Dimensional Man>

But I think <Dom's> forum rises above the <"mainstream"> level of rhetoric by a long shot. The people who post in here are quite clearly insane, but by the same token quite clearly unique and independent thinkers.

<Thus Spake Zarathustra>

Or, perhaps a more succinct translation might be <"so there">

Heh

I know next to nothing about geometry, but I do know this, and it makes formulae for exploring shadow lengths a real problem.

First, the way you characterize the problem at hand (pepper shaker shadow), remember that your assumptions would hold true only if the earth were flat.

The curvature of the earth affects shadow length, however marginally.

Plus, there are also at least three sources of natural light on a planet or moon. The direct rays of the sun, the deflected rays of the sun off the surface of the planet/moon, and the direct light from other celestial bodies (however faint). This latter fact is overlooked by <conspiracy> buffs who use <formulae> to uncover the "fact" that the shadows of the Apollo astronauts on the moon are the "wrong length" or "facing the wrong way", thereby "proving" that the Moon Landing was faked...

Hope that confuses matters further