Saturday, July 11, 2009

Is there Global Cooling?


Who knows what tomorrow may bring - global warming or global cooling?

I recently came across an interesting Web page which refutes Global Warming claims.

By the way, yesterday it was -97 in Antartica.

Tuesday, July 7, 2009

Page 5 of The Dancing Valkyrie


It had not always been so. She had been raised a Catholic and continued to consider herself a Catholic when going to college and studying to be a librarian. In fact, she was still a librarian at the Schenectady County Library in downtown Schenectady when not on stage at the club. But while going to college, she had taken a job dancing at The Limina to help pay for her education. After college, she continued to work at The Limina even after she had paid off her student loans. The fact was, she had come to admit, she liked to dance and she liked doing it with the fewest possible clothes the law would allow. She only kept her job at the library because she knew there would come a time when she would be too old to dance. But being nude had been a thing of hers, going back as far as she could remember. Even before her body flowered into womanhood, she liked to strip down and frolic in the woods that were part of her father’s farm. On warm summer days, she would often pack a lunch and head off for the woods where she would strip when she felt safe from prying eyes and pretend she was a Native American princess. When her body did blossom, she would sometimes pretend she was a witch. The idea of being a witch came about quite by accident. Something pagan had always been in Mary, though she never thought about Paganism until she read a book by Gerald Gardner, “Witchcraft Today.” At first, it seemed like a lot of nonsense and she thought she shouldn’t be reading it. But there were things in it that seemed to fit with her view of the world. What attracted her most were the nature aspects of Witchcraft and the idea of a loving Goddess as well as a God. She had always felt closer to God when contemplating nature than when she was in church at Sunday Mass. And yet, although there were elements of Witchcraft tempting to Mary, its ideas became dormant after finishing the book, largely because she never knew anyone who practiced Witchcraft and because she truly did believe in and loved Jesus. Also, a central idea in Witchcraft, the idea of reincarnation, did not make any sense to her. She viewed her body as herself. She could not be herself without her body. She could not be a man and could not imagine looking like any other woman but herself. But the idea of Witchcraft would make a sudden and unexpected comeback on this hike into the Adirondack woods

Wednesday, July 1, 2009

Pagae 4 of The Dancing Valkyrie

Those mountains, lakes, forests and streams in northern New York, that place defined by a blue line on maps and encircling an area of almost six million acres, about as large as Vermont but with only about one fifth the population, that rise of land where rocks and trees grow best and is sometimes called a park, sometimes called a forest preserve, a mix of state owned and private land where the state land is protected by the state constitution as “Forever Wild,” that place more commonly known simply as the Adirondacks had not been cooperating when Mary was on her solitary hike on the Northville/Lake Placid trail. When it wasn’t cool and rainy, the sun would come out and make for a sticky heat under a chicken white/yellow hazy kind of sky.
The hike forced Mary to slog through muddy trails with a fifty-pound pack on her back, wondering more than once each day why a girl like her was doing this. It was uphill and downhill. It was swatting bugs away and rubbing sweat from her eyes while smelling like a bug dope factory. It was stripping to jump in a lake if no one was around to watch, or go without the swim and feel clammy dirty. Yes, she liked hiking. She always had. Sometimes she would even walk to work just for the fun of it while coming up with the excuse she was doing it only to stay in shape. But Mary was a girl best known in Schenectady as Erica, a blond, voluptuous in all the right places girl with beautiful skin she was quite willing to bare to all at The Limina, the erotic dance club where she worked.