Good morning. 🌅

Please enjoy this #RainbowGirls cover version of Jordan Smart’s “Who Would Jesus Bomb?”
m.youtube.com/watch?v=lQa3JvF7…

rainbowgirlsmusic.com/

#Lyrics :

If Jesus Christ came back today
Like you threaten he will
Which poor group of people
Do you think that he would kill
Who would Jesus choose to starve
If you gave him the chance
And if there was a genocide
Would he take a neutral stance
Who would Jesus Bomb
Tell me, who would Jesus Bomb
Would it be kids in Palestine
Or how 'bout Vietnam
Would Jesus bomb the Atheists
The Muslims or the Jews
I want you to ask yourself
"What would Jesus do"
Would he say "it's complicated
There's sinners on all sides"
Or would he say that some people
They just deserve to die
If Christ the Savior rose again
Then on a sidewalk slept
Would you extend a hand to him
Or just watch where you stepped

Who would Jesus Bomb
Tell me, who would Jesus Bomb
Would it be kids in Palestine
Or how 'bout Vietnam
Would Jesus bomb the Atheists
The Muslims or the Jews
I want you to ask yourself
"What would Jesus do"
Would Jesus hate the Gay folks,
The Queer folks or the Trans
Would he suggest they end their lives
According to God's plans
Would Jesus tell the homeless man
To get a f*cking job
Or turn his back on the poor
Would Jesus be a snob
Who would Jesus Bomb
Tell me, who would Jesus Bomb
Would it be kids in Palestine
Or how 'bout Vietnam
Would Jesus bomb the Atheists
The Muslims or the Jews
I want you to ask yourself
"What would Jesus do"

Would Jesus Vote Republican
Or would it be democrat
Would he be chanting 4 more years
Or wear a MAGA hat
Would Jesus run for president
Or dictator or worse
Would Jesus be the pastor
Of his own mega church
Who would Jesus Bomb
Tell me, who would Jesus Bomb
Would it be kids in Palestine
Or how 'bout Vietnam
Would Jesus bomb the Atheists
The Muslims or the Jews
I want you to ask yourself
"What would Jesus do"
Would Jesus build a border wall
Would Jesus drive a tank
Would Jesus own an arsenal
Would Jesus run a bank
Would Jesus feel safe in his skin
If he came to your town
Would you believe in Jesus still
If Jesus Christ was brown
Who would Jesus Bomb
Tell me, who would Jesus Bomb
Would it be kids in Palestine
Or how 'bout Vietnam
Would Jesus bomb the Atheists
The Muslims or the Jews
I want you to ask yourself
"What would Jesus do"
I want you to ask yourself
"What would Jesus do"
I want you to ask yourself
"What would Jesus do"

source: lyricsondemand.com/jordan_smar…

#Music #MusicVideo #JordanSmart #FolkMusic #Jesus #WhatWouldJesusDo #WWJD #Easter #Christianity #AntiWar #PeaceActivists #StopWar #StopGenocide #MusicMonday #ActivistMusic #StopEthnicCleansing

deviled

dreaming… a random bit

** in the ending of The Daily Post’s Weekly Photo Challenges from WordPress, here’s your Sunday Weekly Photo Prompt: travel **

medicine buddha mantra: Tayata Om Bekandze Bekandze Maha Bekandze Radza Samudgate Soha

health, wealth, and prosperity: Om Vasudhare Svaha

Rate this:

#dailyPost #deviled #deviledEggs #dill #dish #Easter #easterDay #EasterSunday #easterSupper #egg #eggs #food #foodPorn #foodie #homemade #host #hosting #mayonnaise #meal #mustardSeed #paprika #photography #postaday #salt #supper #weeklyPhotoChallenge #whitePepper

yi-ching lin photography

2024-10-28 21:15:49

lift-off

dreaming… a random bit

** in the ending of The Daily Post’s Weekly Photo Challenges from WordPress, here’s your Sunday Weekly Photo Prompt: travel **

medicine buddha mantra: Tayata Om Bekandze Bekandze Maha Bekandze Radza Samudgate Soha

health, wealth, and prosperity: Om Vasudhare Svaha

Rate this:

#birds #brooklyn #dailyPost #gatewayNationalRecreationArea #geese #golden #goldenHour #hiking #inFlight #jamaicaBayWildlifeRefuge #liftOff #newYorkCity #nyc #path #photography #postaday #queens #sunlit #sunset #tour #weeklyPhotoChallenge

🔴 𝗕𝗨𝗗𝗗𝗛𝗜𝗦𝗧 𝗠𝗢𝗡𝗘𝗬 𝗠𝗔𝗡𝗧𝗥𝗔 (𝟭𝟬𝟴 𝗧𝗶𝗺𝗲𝘀) 🔴

ॐ Many thanks to International Feng Shui and Zi Wei Dou Shu Wealth Guru 𝗠𝗮𝘀𝘁𝗲𝗿 𝗭𝗬 𝗧𝗮𝗻: +65 9862 8161 (https://www.facebook.com/zytanstars) for his...

^{Buddhist Money Mantra (YouTube)}

Plainfield’s latest art installation The Dream Gazer, dedicated March 7th.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: in between our conventions and road trips, sometimes my wife Anne and I find new sights in our own Indianapolis backyard. On this very Easter morning we discovered a new park in nearby Plainfield that we’d heard nothing about until I looked it up just now. In light of the ongoing saga of the ambitious Artemis II Moon-orbiting mission that’s been a promising endeavor and a welcome distraction from everyday headline hysteria, it was fun to spend a few minutes with a super-sized astronaut of sorts.

Four statues of the li’l hero are planned in all. Either we both overlooked the fourth one, or it’s still in the works.

Last month Plainfield officials unveiled the 25-foot statue in our lead photo — The Dream Gazer, the centerpiece of the newly dedicated Swarn Park. Still a work in progress, the park is located in the neighborhood of Hobbs Station, a $300 million mixed-use development resembling some of the upscale suburbs we’ve encountered in our travels, such as our very own Carmel up in Hamilton County. (Read: houses starting in the $400K range and up, apartments for $1400-$2500/month, etc.)

The park is a mile north of the outdoor mall that contains my usual movie theater and the only Barnes & Noble within 20 miles of our house — not too far from some of our usual haunts, on the residential side of US 40 away from the commoner chain restaurants and big-box stores. Its namesake is one Lemuel Swarn, a Black man who was born into slavery in North Carolina, moved to the area after the Civil War and became a landowner with a large family before his death in 1937.

Much of Swarn Park was muddy after a fairly rainy Saturday. Little avalanches of unfinished landscaping covered some of the sidewalks.

The subject of Swarn Park’s largest decorations is a character named Aku, the creation of retired pro baseball player Micah Johnson. Born here in Indy, Johnson played second base for the White Sox, the Dodgers, and the Braves before retiring and changing career tracks to become an artist and storyteller. For a time his affairs involved NFTs and blockchain (firmly not among my areas of interest), but lately he’s focused on the plucky spaceboy whose first children’s book Aku: Journey to Ibra was just published by Penguin Random House last month. The book’s illustrator Durk van der Meer previously debuted Aku in print on a 2022 Time Magazine cover for a feature about the Metaverse, though Time apparently credited Johnson for the work.

I don’t know if the other three statues have their own names like The Dream Gazer does. Sadly this Aku’s visor is already chipped.

We discovered Swarn Park using the same method that’s brought us pleasant surprises in other past travels: by Googling “breakfast restaurants” and accidentally wandering into it. Anne and I attended 8 a.m. Easter services at our home church and decided to have brunch afterward. (Neither of our families does anything special for Easter anymore ever since our nieces and nephews got too old for Easter egg hunts. Or if they do still hold Easter soirees, we aren’t invited.)

After much vetting and hemming and hawing, our winner among the many nearby search results was Another Broken Egg, a midsize chain with locations mostly to the south and/or the east, from L.A. to Philly, as far north as Cleveland. We’ve been to one or two of their central Indiana locations before, but we didn’t know they’d established a Plainfield beachhead and were pretty sure the menu featured new items, or at least new to us.

Their building mostly features a parking garage and empty storefronts to be filled in the future, including a creamery coming soon next door.

We figured this location was new enough that it wouldn’t have an hours-long wait for a table like a lot of older restaurants likely did that morning. We know Easter is a big holiday for morning outings. Back in my restaurant management days, the cycle was pretty predictable: extremely busy in the morning, dead as a graveyard by nightfall. Sure enough, the place was consistently busy during our visit, but I never saw a crowd impatiently sitting in the lobby.

Sign up for their email list like I did and get a free order of biscuit beignets served with honey marmalade.

(Our beignets were not fresh out of the fryer, but as freebies, we couldn’t complain.)

For Anne, the cookie dough waffle! The waffle itself was ordinary, but the cookie dough bites were the star of the dish. She didn’t even need pancake syrup.

For me, the Cajun shrimp and crawfish omelet, topped with tomato hollandaise and too many diced tomatoes.

We kept our walk short because it was chilly outside, we were looking forward to napping after such an early service, and the park isn’t quite packed with art installations yet. I’d expect that to change in the months and years ahead if all goes well for their plan to transform the area into Carmel Southwest. We couldn’t possibly afford to live in Hobbs Station, but we’d love to visit again sometime. The brunch menu had other dishes we’d like to try, we do love a good creamery, and it bugs me that we’re missing the fourth Aku.

Cute touch: the ABE off US 40 — a.k.a. The National Road — has its own location-specific coffee mugs. CAUTION: Mug not suitable for use on space missions.

Midlife Crisis Crossover!

2026-02-16 02:39:09

Valentine’s Day Morning in the Carmel Arts & Design District

Milady enjoys hot chocolate and her companion for the day.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: sometimes we celebrate holidays! Sometimes we leave the house! Sometimes we celebrate holidays by leaving the house!

With Valentine’s Day on a Saturday this year and our schedules cleared, my wife Anne and I made plans to grab an early breakfast before the rest of the world woke up and packed every restaurant in central Indiana for the next eighteen hours. We put our heads together, looked up places that we hadn’t been to before, and loved where we wound up. We didn’t cross-index our search results for sightseeing options in the vicinity, but were pleasantly surprised to wander into some. We ended up taking many more pics than we’d expected that day.

A mural welcomes us, a prologue to our forthcoming art walk.

The two of us are lifelong Indianapolis west-siders and don’t hang out in Carmel too often, that most prominent among the the well-to-do cities and suburbs up on the northeast side. At times the relationship between Indy and Carmel bears more than a passing resemblance to the Pawnee-vs.-Eagleton rivalry (as it’s always seemed to this class-underdog, anyway), but the fact remains their non-chain culinary creators outnumber the west side’s by roughly 10,000-to-1. We made reservations, made the half-hour drive, and made ourselves at home at Goodness Gracious Kitchen & Cupboard, a breakfast-and-lunch spot that celebrated ten years of coziness last year.

Note the winter and valentine flourishes harmonizing in their windows, including an entire Valentine’s Day tree in one corner.

For Anne, the lemon ricotta pancakes, dusted with powdered sugar,

For me, the Chick(Hen) and Waffles — with touches of hot honey and topped with an entire buttermilk-fried Cornish hen.

We figured that’d be the end of our expedition and we’d be heading straight home to binge some King of the Hill or whatever. Au contraire: Goodness Gracious is in the heart of the Carmel Arts & Design District, which overflows with each and every item in its name. Temperatures had risen into the 40s and the two-week-old suffocating snowstorm blanket had mostly melted away throughout the week. This happy couple took advantage and took ourselves a nice stroll to walk off those breakfast carbs.

Among our missed opportunities: down the street was the Museum of Miniature Houses and Other Collections, which wouldn’t open for a couple more hours.

Free sights in their windows included Kwanzaa figures.

Miniature average Carmel house.

The museum’s tiny library, probably with different books than their gift shop sells (assuming they have one).

Last time we were in this specific neighborhood was some 15-20 years ago when we visited Bub’s Burgers & Ice Cream for my birthday and I had my very first elk burger. Bub’s is still rockin’ on, but Main Street Carmel has built up a lot around them since then. Their stretch was revamped into the Carmel Arts & Design District, with public art on just about every block and the Monon Greenway trail blazed north-south through one end for pedestrians and bikers to enjoy to their hearts’ content.

The art assortment includes 23 statues by a single artist: J. Seward Johnson II, grandson of one of the founders of Johnson & Johnson (whose “no more tears” shampoo was a childhood household staple I endured under protest), whose son J. Seward III was one of BuzzFeed’s co-founders. Under the aegis of their previous mayor, the city purchased the statues between 2005 and 2023, the last one installed after Johnson himself passed away in 2020. These entries from his “Man-on-the-Street” series, dispersed across multiple localities, illustrate a sort of throwback community mostly conforming to a “Forever Small-Town 1950s” motif. Carmel hasn’t been a small town in decades, and definitely didn’t spend like a small town to acquire these. The Indianapolis Star compiled a complete list of locations, dates, and price tags.

If we’d known we would be in the middle of all this, I might’ve done the legwork so we could track down all 23. On our own without any online guidance, we approached 16 of them in all, in the following order:

There, Now You Can Grow. (The kid’s got work to do.)

Sidewalk Concert. (That’s fake money in his violin case, not real.)

Who’s in Charge, the nearest statue to Goodness Gracious.

Things To Do, plus a bonus Indiana-flag-themed deck chair.

Unconditional Surrender, based on the amazing true story of that one famous WWII photo.

Strolling Professor, whose textbook is turned to a chapter about chemical motion, illustrated with parabolic graphs.

Captured, the most recently installed Johnson statue as of 2023.

Holding Out, demonstrating how folks in the good ol’ days used to go buy their groceries themselves in person from fellow live humans.

Confirming Predictions, demonstrating how there used to be companies that printed entire news sites on paper and delivered them to your house every morning. The best part was that angry troll replies sometimes took days to show up.

Waiting to Cross, attached to a real stop sign.

The 2005 inaugural Johnson statue First Ride, with a father encouraging his daughter.

Shaping Up, appropriately along the Monon Greenway.

Wine, Food, and Thou. Fortunately for her there’s no Yogi Bear statue nearby.

Oh, It’s You, Welcome! Gee, Officer Krupke, you shouldn’t have!

One Man’s Search, featuring wardrobe by the Carmel High School bookstore.

Ambassador of the Streets and its pet human.

A selection of works by the outnumbered other artists:

Sail by Owens & Crawley, near the southern entrance to the District along the Greenway. I understand it lights up at night.

Brickhead Human by James Tyler.

Gavin – Aspiration by Jason Myers. The latest in his worldwide series, the 30-foot Gavin – Divergence, has been causing quite the fuss among Broad Ripple residents.

Swing Me Higher, Mama by Dominic Benhura.

Eternal Spring by Jerry Joslin.

We couldn’t resist one last stop along Main Street before returning to the car: a round of snacks from Tous les Jours, a chain of French-Asian bakeries that originated in South Korea and have apparently been around since 2004. We’d never heard of them till last year, when we had breakfast at one in Huntsville, Alabama, on our 2025 road trip. (Someday I’ll post those pics too. Someday! Lord willing!) Until this very Saturday we didn’t know they have at least three Indiana locations. We had no idea because of course none of them are on the west side. This Valentine’s Day was just full of learning experiences for us.

Sample luscious cakes.

Sample macarons, including double-stuffed options, because Indiana.

Our haul: one chocolate creme donut, one matcha creme donut, a strawberry croissant snack sandwich, a hazelnut-filled chocolate muffin, and a loaf of mascarpone cream bread.

…and then we returned to our malnourished side of town, ran errands, went home, exchanged gifts, and enjoyed the rest of our weekend except for the part where we didn’t stumble across any more surprise gourmet delicacies.

Finding Easter

As an Astronomist I am often asked “How do they calculate the date of Easter?”, so here goes.

The simple answer is that Easter Sunday is on the first Sunday after the first full Moon on or after the Vernal equinox. The Vernal Equinox took place this year on March 20th and the first full moon after that was on April 2nd.

I say “simple” answer above because it isn’t quite how the date of Easter is reckoned for purposes of the liturgical calendar.

For a start, the ecclesiastical calculation of the date for Easter – the computus – assumes that the Vernal Equinox is always on March 21st, while in reality these days it is more frequently 20th March, like this year.

On top of that there’s the issue of what reference time and date to use. The equinox is a precisely timed astronomical event but it occurs at different times and possibly on different days in different time zones. Likewise the full Moon. In the ecclesiastical calculation the “full moon” does not currently correspond directly to any astronomical event, but is instead the 14th day of a lunar month, as determined from tables (see below). It may differ from the date of the actual full moon by up to two days.

There have been years (1974, for example) where the official date of Easter does not coincide with the date determined by the simple rule given above. The actual rule is a complicated business involving Golden Numbers and Metonic cycles and whatnot.

Here is an excerpt from the Book of Common Prayer that shows Anglicans how to determine the date of Easter for any year up to 2199:

The calculations are based on the approximately 19-year metonic cycle, which is why the above table will not work indefinitely

For this year we find that (2026+1=2027) ÷19=106 with a remainder of 13 (106 × 19 being 2014). The Golden Number for this year is therefore 13, or XIII in the Table. This gives the date of the Paschal Full Moon, which occured this year on 2nd April, which is indeed the day in the centre column next to XIII in the left-hand column in the table. The Sunday Letter is determined by the remainder of (2026+506+6)÷7, which is 4, so this year’s Sunday Letter is D. The date of Easter Sunday is given by the entry in the centre column next to the first occurrence of D in the right-hand column after the Golden Number XIII appears in the left-hand column, i.e. April 5th. I hope this clarifies the situation.
#astronomy #BookOfCommonPrayer #computus #Easter #Equinox #GoldenNumbers #SundayLetters

In the Dark

2026-03-20 10:01:47

The Vernal Equinox 2026

Loughcrew Cairn: for a few days on and around the Vernal Equinox the rays of the rising Sun penetrate the passage and illuminate the back stone.

Just a quick note to mention that the Vernal Equinox (Spring Equinox) in the Northern hemisphere happens this afternoon, Friday 20th March 2026, at 14.46 UTC (which is 2.46 pm local time here in Ireland. Many people in the Northern hemisphere regard the Vernal Equinox as the first day of Spring, atlhough round these parts that is taken to be 1st February (Imbolg). Of course in the Southern hemisphere, this is the Autumnal Equinox.

The date of the Vernal Equinox is often given as 21st March, but in fact it has only been on 21st March twice this century so far (2003 and 2007); it was on 20th March in 2008, has been on 20th March every spring from then until now, and will be until 2044 (when it will be on March 19th). I’ll be retired by then.

Anyway, people sometimes ask me how one can define the `equinox’ so precisely when surely it just refers to a day on which day and night are of equal length, implying that it’s a day not a specific time? The answer is that the equinox is defined by a specific event, the event in question being when the plane defined by Earth’s equator passes through the centre of the Sun’s disk (or, if you prefer, when the centre of the Sun passes through the plane defined by Earth’s equator). Day and night are not necessarily exactly equal on the equinox, but they’re the closest they get. From now until the Autumnal Equinox, days in the Northern hemisphere will be longer than nights, and the days will continue get longer until the Summer Solstice on June 21st before beginning to shorten again.

#Equinox #Imbolc #SpringEquinox #VernalEquinox

Imbolg, St Brigid, and the Quickening of the Year

It is 1st February 2026, which means that today is Imbolc (or Imbolg in modern Irish), an ancient Gaelic festival marking the point halfway between the winter solstice and vernal equinox.  In …

^{telescoper (In the Dark)}