I guess I'd better get my two cents in on BP trashing the Gulf of Mexico and surrounding environment before they clean it all up and there's nothing to talk about anymore (YEAH, RIGHT!).
There's a very applicable comment on responsibility by Admiral Hyman George Rickover (January 27, 1900 – July 8, 1986). Rickover (right, aboard the USS Nautilus) was a four-star admiral in the United States Navy who directed the original development of naval nuclear propulsion and controlled its operations for three decades. He was known as the "Father of the Nuclear Navy." I think he knows whereof he speaks!
"Responsibility is a unique concept. It can only reside and inhere in a single individual. You may share it with others, but your portion is not diminished. You may delegate it, but it is still with you. You may disclaim it, but you cannot divest yourself of it. Even if you do not recognize it or admit its presence, you cannot escape it. If responsibility is rightfully yours, no evasion or ignorance, or passing the blame can shift the burden on someone else. Unless you can point your finger at the man who is responsible when something goes wrong, then you never had anyone really responsible."
This quote appeared in, among other places, John Bentley's 1974 book The Thresher Disaster.
SpaceX successfully launched their Falcon 9 rocket from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station yesterday. While watching the video of the launch, we noticed this wasp buzzing the camera lens at lift-off, obviously stirred up by the noise and vibration of the launch.
Looks like a scene from a bad science fiction movie!
Can a Cardinal be a godparent?! A pair of Carolina Wrens built a nest this past month in the top of a roll of fencing that was propped up against our house. While watching the parents feeding the babies, we noticed a pair of Cardinals seeming to watch over the babies, actually chasing squirrels away from the nest. There was no other nest in the area (no place for one), so we knew the Cardinals weren't protecting their nest.
After the Wren babies left the nest, we saw them following their parents around the yard, seemingly still under the watchful eye of the two Cardinals! Has anyone else noticed behavior like this? If so, please click the COMMENTS FOR OUR BLOG link to the left and let us know about it.
Carolina Wren photo by Ken Thomas; Cardinal photo courtesy of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
We use Statcounter to keep track of visitors to The New Southern View Ezine. It gives, among other information, a list of the most popular (read most visited) pages in our publication. One page in particular keeps appearing at or near the top of this list — our article about Our Rowdy State Bird: The Mockingbird. We're assuming that students are required to write reports on the Mockingbird (or on state symbols) as quite a few of the visits to this page are from schools around the country.
Another page that's visited quite often is our pictorial of Waverley Plantation Mansion, located near the Tombigbee River in east Mississippi. Interestingly enough, the majority of the visitors to this page are from Europe. This is the house that's allegedly haunted by a little girl ghost. You may have seen this story on television.
The third most visited article this week is one that we pulled together from a NASA press release on the use of tugboats at the John C. Stennis Space Center in south Mississippi. Who would have thought that a technology that had its beginnings in the early 1700s, before the founding of this country, would have played such a critical role in establishing the United States space program? Be sure to check out the aerial view of the facility.
Here's a random thought for you: Toronto has its CN Tower, St. Louis has its Gateway Arch, Paris has its Eiffel Tower, Tokyo has its aptly-named Tokyo Tower, and Giza has its Great Pyramid. Jackson could have joined this august group. If only . . .
We can't help noticing that somebody missed a great opportunity with the communication tower that was built in west Jackson just off I-220 and Highway 80. If it had been designed just a tad larger with an observation platform and located on the hill just south of the Mississippi Museum of Natural Science, say, Jackson could have had a great tourism draw.
Granted there's not as much to look at in the Jackson Metropolitan Area as there is in Tokyo or Paris, but there is something compelling about gaining a different perspective through a simple altitude adjustment. When was the last time you found yourself on an upper floor in a skyscraper able to ignore the view through the nearest window?
Some wiley local politician could have had his or her name immortalized with just a little bit of foresight!
Got a phone call today from a guy who works for the Smithsonian Magazine. They're running an article soon (July?) on sea jellies and he was seeking reprint permission from us for the photo of the Stomolophus meleagris (photographed by Ron Larson and shown at right) that appears with several other jellies in our article Diaphanous Denizens: Mississippi's Sea Jellies.
The photos and text in our article were contributed back in 2005 by Harriet M. Perry, director of Fisheries Research and Development at the University of Southern Mississippi’s Gulf Coast Research Laboratory in Ocean Springs, Mississippi.
This is pretty cool to have a national magazine like Smithsonian Magazine approach us for a photo reprint. Makes us feel certified! We'll keep you posted as to when their article runs.
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