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Deux Arabesques, CD.74 / L.66 - II. Allegretto Scherzando In G Major (Deuxième Arabesque)

By Composer Claude Debussy

Performed By Pianist Francis-Joel Thiollier

Columns of the Pantheon of Paris, source

You’re the immortal dictator of the world, ruling with an iron fist…and bored out of your mind. To spice things up, you start setting up little rebel cells, stoking revolts and keeping records of which group makes it the closest to actually reaching your throne room.

Hey if you’re not tired of all the eclipse posts in every other corner of your life, here’s one more!

Eclipses aren’t just cool to view - they also give scientists a small window of time to study things. Many animals shift to nighttime behaviors, only to reemerge a few minutes later when the sun returns. Temperatures can drop up to 20 degrees. Most importantly, the Sun’s corona becomes visible - normally it is difficult to study because its light is weak compared to the rest of the Sun. With the Moon blocking the Sun, scientists can make observations about the corona and try to understand the coronal mass ejections that can knock out satellites and power grids.

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M64: The Black Eye Galaxy : This big, bright, beautiful spiral galaxy is Messier 64, often called the Black Eye Galaxy or the Sleeping Beauty Galaxy for its heavy-lidded appearance in telescopic views. M64 is about 17 million light-years distant in the otherwise well-groomed northern constellation Coma Berenices. In fact, the Red Eye Galaxy might also be an appropriate moniker in this colorful composition. The enormous dust clouds obscuring the near-side of M64s central region are laced with the telltale reddish glow of hydrogen associated with star forming regions. But they are not this galaxys only peculiar feature. Observations show that M64 is actually composed of two concentric, counter-rotating systems. While all the stars in M64 rotate in the same direction as the interstellar gas in the galaxys central region, gas in the outer regions, extending to about 40,000 light-years, rotates in the opposite direction. The dusty eye and bizarre rotation is likely the result of a billion year old merger of two different galaxies. via NASA

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Arabesque No. 1 | Isao Tomita

Lunar Eclipse 2019

Please don’t delete the link to the photographers/artists, thanks!

Omelas = Paradiese/Heaven???

The only chronological element of the work is that it begins by describing the first day of summer in Omelas, a shimmering city of unbelievable happiness and delight. In Omelas, the summer solstice is celebrated with a glorious festival and a race featuring children on horseback. The vibrant festival atmosphere, however, seems to be an everyday characteristic of the blissful community, whose citizens, though limited in their advanced technology to communal (rather than private) resources, are still intelligent, sophisticated, and cultured. Omelas has no kings, soldiers, priests, or slaves. The specific socio-politico-economic setup of the community is not mentioned, but the narrator merely explains that the reader cannot be sure of every particular.

Self-admittedly, the narrator reflects that “Omelas sounds in my words like a city in a fairy tale, long ago and far away, once upon a time. Perhaps it would be best if you imagined it as your own fancy bids, assuming it will rise to the occasion, for certainly I cannot suit you all.” The narrator even suggests that, if necessary, the reader may include an orgy in their mental picture of Omelas.

Everything about Omelas is so abundantly pleasing that the narrator decides the reader is not yet truly convinced of its existence and so elaborates upon one final element of the city: its one atrocity. The city’s constant state of serenity and splendor requires that a single unfortunate child be kept in perpetual filth, darkness, and misery.

Once citizens are old enough to know the truth, most, though initially shocked and disgusted, ultimately acquiesce with that one injustice which secures the happiness of the rest of the city. However, a few citizens, young and old, silently walk away from the city, and no one knows where they go. The story ends with “The place they go towards is a place even less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness. I cannot describe it at all. It is possible it does not exist. But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.”