Nothing doing

After being swept up in the tide of finals and business- I've recovered, but without the desire to blog... perhaps in the next few days one will pop up about the cruelty of zoos (King Kong was paticularly saddening) or the politically correctness of Christmas pins and greetings or the drought in Kenya... Until then, enjoy Hermie's story

Posted on Thu, Dec. 15, 2005
Christmas miracle: Turtle gets braces
Associated Press

WATERTOWN, N.Y. - Hermie the Turtle's little defective beak made meal time a struggle. Unable to close his mouth completely, the tiny 20-gram reptile's very existence was at stake.
But today, this map turtle has a new lease on life thanks to the work of two doctors who outfitted young Hermie with braces. Now, some are calling the orthodontic work a Christmas miracle.

"I've worked on animals before but nothing this small," said Dr. Peter M. Virga, a Watertown dentist who along with veterinarian Jeffrey G. Baier performed the unique procedure.
After receiving Hermie in May, zookeepers at the New York State Zoo in Watertown's Thompson Park noticed the turtle was having difficulty eating. Medical exams then showed Hermie's lower jaw growing downward.

"He may have adapted to eat like this, or he may have not made it," Baier said.
Turtles, who are toothless, use their beaks to break food down before grinding it with the plates in their mouths.

After Baier injected Hermie with two anesthetics Wednesday morning, Virga inserted four pins into the turtle's jaws, according to the Watertown Daily Times which published an account of Hermie's ordeal Thursday.

During a meeting with reporters, the doctors placed the immobile turtle, believed to be between 2 and 3 years old, on a table. As Baier held Hermie's head, Virga placed two rubber orthodontic elastics - the same kind used by children with braces - on the pins across the turtle's mouth.
While Hermie recuperates, zookeepers will remove the rubber bands once a day to allow the turtle to eat. In keeping with the spirit of Christmas, the doctors chose red and green rubber bands for Hermie's beak.

"It's very exciting and I was glad to help," said Virga, who's performed root canal surgery on dogs. Baier's wife, Angela, the zoo's executive director, said she was thrilled such a small zoo could take part in such a rare procedure.

"Miracles happen this time of the year," she said. "Hopefully his beak will be fixed."

Sing a new song

I thought Psalm 19:1-4 applied well to this article! And though the sky is silent, God gave voices to other parts of his creation! (How little we know…)

1 How clearly the sky reveals God's glory! How plainly it shows what he has done!
2 Each day announces it to the following day; each night repeats it to the next.
3 No speech or words are used, no sound is heard; 4 yet their message goes out to all the world and is heard to the ends of the earth.

Scientists Discover Singing Iceberg in Antarctica

GERMANY: November 25, 2005

BERLIN - Scientists monitoring earth movements in Antarctica believe they have found a singing iceberg.

Sound waves from the iceberg had a frequency of around 0.5 hertz, too low to be heard by humans, but by playing them at higher speed the iceberg sounded like a swarm of bees or an orchestra warming up, the scientists said.The German Alfred Wegener institute for polar and marine research publish the results of its study, done in 2002, in Science magazine on Friday.Between July and November 2002 researchers picked up acoustic signals of unprecedented clarity when recording seismic signals to measure earthquakes and tectonic movements on the Ekstroem ice shelf on Antarctica's South Atlantic coast.Tracking the signal, the scientists found a 50 by 20 kilometre iceberg that had collided with an underwater peninsula and was slowly scraping around it."Once the iceberg stuck fast on the seabed it was like a rock in a river," said scientist Vera Schlindwein. "The water pushes through its crevasses and tunnels at high pressure and the iceberg starts singing.""The tune even goes up and down, just like a real song."

http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm?newsid=33647&newsdate=25-Nov-2005

Houston: What you did not hear

Admittedly I have always been inclined to agree with certain cultural “conspiracies.” One of them being the moon landing. I tried for a minute to think of a deep and solid justification for this, but it was bull, so I won’t make excuses. Anyway. I just found this article after exploring on the neat site: godandscience.org, and thought to share it. 

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Communion on the Moon- Buzz Aldrin
By Bill Carrell

Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were the first men to walk on the moon in the Apollo 11 space mission. Michael Collins third member of the group, was in charge of the command module, essential for their return to earth, which circled the moon while Armstrong and Aldrin landed. The moon lander touched down at 3:17 Eastern Standard Time, Sunday, July 20, 1969.

Aldrin had brought with him a tiny communion kit, given him by his church, that had a silver chalice and wine vial about the size of the tip of his finger. During the morning he radioed, "Houston, this is Eagle. This is the LM pilot speaking. I would like to request a few moments of silence. I would like to invite each person listening in, whoever or wherever he may be, to contemplate for a moment the events of the last few hours, and to give thanks in his own individual way."


"In the radio blackout," he wrote later, "I opened the little plastic packages which contained the bread and the wine. I poured the wine into the chalice our church had given me. In the one-sixth gravity of the moon, the wine slowly curled and gracefully came up the side of the cup. Then I read the Scripture, 'I am the vine, you are the branches. Whosoever abides in me will bring forth much fruit.' I had intended to read my communion passage back to earth, but at the last minute Deke Slayton had requested that I not do this. NASA was already embroiled in a legal battle with Madelyn Murray O'Hare, the celebrated opponent of religion, over the Apollo 8 crew reading from Genesis while orbiting the moon at Christmas. I agreed reluctantly..." "Eagle's metal body creaked. I ate the tiny Host and swallowed the wine. I gave thanks for the intelligence and spirit that had brought two young pilots to the Sea of Tranquility. It was interesting for me to think: the very first liquid ever poured on the moon, and the very first food eaten there, were the communion elements."