Starship Asterisk*

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geauga_County,_Ohio wrote:
<<Geauga County (pronounced jee-AH-gə) is a county located in the state of Ohio, United States. It is named for a Native American word meaning "raccoon". In 2008, Forbes Magazine ranked Geauga County as the fourth best place in America to raise a family.>>

jaya wrote:
I will never forget a harvest moon I saw in October (or is that a hunter's moon?) at a high school football game I was attending many, many years ago. I was a student at Solon HS in Ohio and we were the away team at West Geauga HS. We visitors sat in the visitors' stands on the side of the field away from the home team, press box, etc. We were facing east so the sky was the background to our view of the opposite stands.

As we watched the game, the moon began rising behind the home stands. It was full and as seen against the stands, the "moon effect" was pronounced. The Moon looked huge against the stands and all we visitors were stunned to silence as we watched it climb into the sky and become small again. I just watched it all the way and I'll never forget that sight. Too bad for the home side that they never saw it and had no idea why we Solonites all went quiet for a few minutes.

Many's the time that I have perfected a post with the Preview button
and then I just amble off forgetting entirely to hit the Submit button.

bystander wrote:

Ann wrote:I posted something and it's gone!!! ::pouts::

Really? I don't see any evidence of it in the logs.

Ann wrote:I posted something and it's gone!!! ::pouts::

Ann wrote:
Anyway, thanks for the Hungarian church ruin info, Art.

And thanks for giving us the super-easy opportunity to listen to Carmina Burana again!
That's a great piece of music!

Bad Bad Pun wrote:Did you know that this time of year you can see Uranus with just a flashlight and a mirror?

http://www.planetary.org/blog/article/00002681/ wrote:

Cartoon published in the October 12, 1981 Voyager Mission Status Report (#67).

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billmurrell wrote:I clicked the link for the photographer Tamás Ábrahám and was rewarded with an attempt to put a virus on my PC. Did anyone else have that experience?

orin stepanek wrote:
Darn; it was cloudy last night. It's supposed to be clear tonight though.

bystander wrote:

beyond wrote:
That music in the Zsambek, Hungary video that Neufer posted, sounds much like Conan the Barbarian music.

Actually, Ed posted it first. Not only is neufer starting to repeat himself, but he is repeating others, too.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carmina_Burana_%28Orff%29 wrote:
<<Carmina Burana is a scenic cantata composed by Carl Orff in 1935 and 1936. It is based on 24 of the poems found in the medieval collection Carmina Burana. Its full Latin title is Carmina Burana: Cantiones profanæ cantoribus et choris cantandæ comitantibus instrumentis atque imaginibus magicis ("Songs of Beuern: Secular songs for singers and choruses to be sung together with instruments and magic images.") Carmina Burana is part of Trionfi, the musical triptych that also includes the cantata Catulli Carmina and Trionfo di Afrodite. The best-known movement is "Fortuna Imperatrix Mundi" ("O Fortuna") that opens and closes the piece.

Orff first encountered the text in John Addington Symonds's 1884 publication Wine, Women and Song[citation needed], which included English translations of 46 poems from the collection. Michel Hofmann, a young law student and Latin and Greek enthusiast, assisted Orff in the selection and organization of 24 of these poems into a libretto, mostly in Latin verse, with a small amount of Middle High German and Old Provençal. The selection covers a wide range of topics, as familiar in the 13th century as they are in the 21st century: the fickleness of fortune and wealth, the ephemeral nature of life, the joy of the return of Spring, and the pleasures and perils of drinking, gluttony, gambling and lust.
[edit] Reception

Carmina Burana was first staged in Frankfurt by the Frankfurt Opera on June 8, 1937. Shortly after the greatly successful premiere, Orff wrote the following letter to his publisher, Schott Music:

"Everything I have written to date, and which you have, unfortunately, printed, can be destroyed. With Carmina Burana, my collected works begin."

Several performances were repeated elsewhere in Germany. The Nazi regime was at first nervous about the erotic tone of some of the poems, but eventually embraced the piece. It became the most famous piece of music composed in Germany at the time. The popularity of the work continued to rise after the war, and by the 1960s Carmina Burana was well established as part of the international classic repertory.

Alex Ross wrote that "the music itself commits no sins simply by being and remaining popular. That Carmina Burana has appeared in hundreds of films and television commercials is proof that it contains no diabolical message, indeed that it contains no message whatsoever."

The desire Orff expressed in the letter to his publisher has by and large been fulfilled: No other composition of his approaches its renown, as evidenced in both pop culture's appropriation of "O Fortuna" and the classical world's persistent programming and recording of the work. In the United States, Carmina Burana represents one of the few box office certainties in 20th-century music. Much of the compositional structure is based on the idea of the turning Fortuna Wheel. The drawing of the wheel found on the first page of the Burana Codex includes four phrases around the outside of the wheel:

"Regnabo, Regno, Regnavi, Sum sine regno".
(I shall reign, I reign, I have reigned, I am without a kingdom).

Within each scene, and sometimes within a single movement, the wheel of fortune turns, joy turning to bitterness, and hope turning to grief. "O Fortuna", the first poem in the Schmeller edition, completes this circle, forming a compositional frame for the work through being both the opening and closing movements.

orin stepanek wrote:Darn; it was cloudy last night. It's supposed to be clear tonight though.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zs%C3%A1mb%C3%A9k wrote:

Ruin of the Zsámbék Premontre monastery church

<<Zsámbék (German: Schambeck) is a town in Pest County, in Hungary. Zsámbék has been inhabited since Paleolithic times. It has had Celts, Roman and Avarian populations throughout its history, according to archaeological finds. A Celtic mail coach's remains were found here as well as a bronze trumpet.

In the 1050s the wife of Béla III of Hungary, who was the sister of the French king, gave the village to a knight named Aynard. The Aynard family built the Premonstratensian church (of the White Canons) beginning in 1220. During the Mongolian invasions, the church was destroyed in 1241. After that year, during the reign of Béla IV of Hungary the church and monastery were rebuilt. Positioned at one of the most important merchant routes.

In 1541 Turkish troops had occupied the fortress and built a Turkish bath, the ruins of which can be seen in the village up to this day. In 1686 general Bottyán János fought here against the Turks.

The earthquake in 1763 ruined the church once again. It was not reconstructed after this horrific event. Settlers from Germany who came to live in the abandoned village after the Turkish occupation, took the stones from the church and used them for building houses and fences. Many of the church's stones can now be seen in the walls of old houses now.>>

APOD Robot wrote: Equinox and Harvest Moon