You can find the background to The Three Questions in my recent post about it. I’ll be answering the questions each day for the next year and putting this experience into a book. Here we go!
What was the most beautiful thing I encountered today?
It was the first day this year that truly felt like spring, so the day was the most beautiful thing I encountered, sunny, warm and lots of flowers in bloom.
What did I learn today?
Asteroid near misses with Earth are not a rare thing, but YR4 is getting big press as it now has a calculated risk of 3% of hitting us. This is the highest ever rated percent chance of hitting Earth. It’s a decent sized asteroid, what they call a city killer. What I learned today, is that it also has a 1% chance of hitting the moon instead of Earth, that’s just nuts. Eight years and lots of observations will absolutely change those odds, but very interesting.
What made me happy today?
Today I got a call from an old friend I haven’t spoken to in some time, a very happy conversation.
You can find the background to The Three Questions in my recent post about it. I’ll be answering the questions each day for the next year and putting this experience into a book. Here we go!
What was the most beautiful thing I encountered today?
Walking out of my office today after four straight hours of meeting, a bright, sunny blue sky was the most beautiful thing I encountered today?
What did I learn today?
That the review of old mission data shows that Callisto, a moon of Jupiter, likely has deep oceans underneath an icy surface. Cool because that increases the chance that the planet has life.
What made me happy today?
I made a really fabulous gnocchi in Alfredo sauce for dinner, it was heavenly.
You can find the background to The Three Questions in my recent post about it. I’ll be answering the questions each day for the next year and putting this experience into a book. Here we go!
What was the most beautiful thing I encountered today?
I looked up as I was driving off campus today and saw the most unlucky snake ever. You see, it’s just barely become warm enough for a snake even to be out. My guess is that this one was literally just coming out of winter hibernation to sun on a rock when he got snagged by a red tail hawk.
What did I learn today?
Based on the Human Freedom Index the top 5 freest countries in the world are:
You can find the background to The Three Questions in my recent post about it. I’ll be answering the questions each day for the next year and putting this experience into a book. Here we go!
What was the most beautiful thing I encountered today?
While on my walk I saw the most ridiculous and beautiful thing. It was a chihuahua, with a green and red sweater vest and little pink booties. The poor thing looked both embarrassed and starved for attention. I tried to pet him but his owner thought the dog was in the way and yanked him along.
What did I learn today?
That medicine has advanced far enough that they pulled an infant out of the womb, operated on it and removed a spinal tumor and then reinserted the infant in the womb and it was later delivered via natural birth.
What made me happy today?
While at the dentist, bet you didn’t see that coming, the dentist told me her whole staff looked forward to me coming in because I put everyone in a better mood.
Mysteries once thought to be supernatural or paranormal happenings – such as astronomical or meteorological events – are incorporated into science once their causes are understood. ~ Michael Shermer
Three Questions, February 18, 2025
You can find the background to The Three Questions in my recent post about it. I’ll be answering the questions each day for the next year and putting this experience into a book. Here we go!
What was the most beautiful thing I encountered today?
Well, it was the first day back to work, after vacation and honestly I spent the day buried in my office. The most beautiful thing I saw was nothing, but the beauty of the three questions is it forces you to seek out beauty. So I Googled, show me something beautiful in nature and boom, hundreds of gorgeous images to look at and admire.
What did I learn today?
Today I learned about Dighton Rock, it’s a rock with some mysterious drawings that don’t have a clear origin story and was found in Dighton, Massachussets.
What made me happy today?
What made me happy today was getting through my first day at work back from vacation, getting home, putting on warm comfortable clothes and bundling up on the couch. I look forward to watching a movie and crashing.
Science fiction frees you to go anyplace and examine anything. ~ Octavia E Butler
Happy Saturday Sci-fi Films
So I’m an older guy and when I was a kid Saturday mornings meant Saturday morning cartoons. Of course it included the basics originally, Looney Tunes including Bugs Bunny, Road Runner, Foghorn Leghorn and even Speedy Gonzalez. Of course I was a little kid in the late 60’s and early 70’s so that also meant Syd and Marty Kroft and their acid trip Saturday morning fantasies, Signund and the Sea Monster, HR Pufnstuff (I mean come on puffin stuff), The Boogaloos and my personal favorite Lidsville (check out the opening video). But I was a bowler and Saturday morning was when our youth bowling league happened so most of my Saturdays were spent at the lanes and I’d get back home Saturday afternoon. And Saturday afternoons meant Sci-fi and Horror movies.
So given the time period it meant a huge load of Godzilla, King Kong and all of the other crazy monster movies of the the 50’s and 60’s. It also meant a heavy dose old science fiction movies on rotation. So this meant The War of the Worlds, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Day the Earth Stood Still, and Them! There were a lot of radiation monsters in films back then. There were also some really magnificent classic films like the Creature from the Black Lagoon, Forbidden Planet and Fantastic Voyage. I loved these movies, they led me into reading science fiction and I became a science fiction junky as a young kid which then turned into me being an avid reader in general. I owe a lot to those old goofy old science fiction movies.
Recently, I was online and someone mentioned the Day of the Triffids and this was absolutely one of those Saturday morning sci-fi features. I remembered the film but honestly hadn’t seen it for literally 40 or 50 years. So a bit of nostalgia hit me thinking about it and I found it online at Tubi and watched it. It was awesome and terrible all at the same time. It’s obviously never been remastered so the video quality was awful. It definitely has the standard campy features of an old sci-fi film and some cheesy effects. But it was also awesome, and it hit me it was a definite parallel to a Romero zombie film. If you like campy old sci-fi films, definitely worth a view. For me, it brought about a bit of nostalgia and happy memories from my childhood. So go find an old film that does the same for you and have a happy day my friends. ~ Rev Kane
You better cut the pizza in four pieces because I’m not hungry enough to eat six. ~ Yogi Berra
Three Questions, February 17, 2025
You can find the background to The Three Questions in my recent post about it. I’ll be answering the questions each day for the next year and putting this experience into a book. Here we go!
What was the most beautiful thing I encountered today?
While on my walk in San Francisco today I watched a four or five year-old boy holding his two year-old sister’s hand and teaching/guiding her to walk around the edge of a flower planter. It was a really safe situation but was obviously new, scary and exciting for her. Watching him take really good care of his little sister and giving her this exciting moment in life was really beautiful.
What did you learn today?
Today I learned about a really cool concept called a coalescence cascade for water drops, it’s this concept of drops hitting water, bouncing, then popping into smaller drops and repeating. It’s absolutely fascinating to watch.
What made me happy today?
This was easy, my first good, real pizza in three weeks.
It is difficult to free fools from the chains they revere. ~ Voltaire
Three Questions, February 16, 2025
You can find the background to The Three Questions in my recent post about it. I’ll be answering the questions each day for the next year and putting this experience into a book. Here we go!
What was the most beautiful thing I encountered today?
Saw a beautiful picture online today of a really magnificent sun dog. It’s one of my favorite meteorological phenomenon. It’s when there are a pair of suns in the sky to either side of the sun. They occur as a result of ice crystals in the sky and the sun’s halo showing at a specific angle.
What did I learn today?
Today I learned about, Granville T. Woods, born to free African Americans, held various engineering and industrial jobs before establishing a company to develop electrical apparatus. Known as “Black Edison,” he registered nearly 60 patents in his lifetime, including a telephone transmitter, a trolley wheel and the multiplex telegraph (over which he defeated a lawsuit by Thomas Edison).
What made me happy today?
I made some really amazing steak burritos for dinner, they made me happy.
Whosoever is delighted in solitude is either a wild beast or a god. ~ Aristotle
The Importance of Happy Places
It’s important to have happy places, places you can retreat to when you need to recharge yourself. These places can be big or small, can be major adventures or minor step backs for a minute to breathe. It’s important to have small places you can fall back to for a few minutes or a half and hour to just breathe. For me, there’s always a pizza place in my life where I can hide away and eat a really good pizza and have a coke.
It’s always good to have those intermediate places if you can, for me right now and one that has been a place for me for a very long time has been both Monterey and the Monterey Bay Aquarium, particularly the jellyfish room.
Monterey Bay Aquarium
I’m an ocean junkie from way back, as a kid I was absolutely fascinated by the Jacques Cousteau specials on TV. I would come to love snorkeling and being on the ocean. I wanted to become a marine biologist like a million other people. I trained to be a fresh water biologist instead and would eventually end up doing some marine fisheries development work at one point in my career. I also take every chance to be around whales, whether that is basic whale watches or adventures in Baja with Grey Whales.
On my very first trip to California I went to Monterey because it seemed like a really amazing place. In fact it was everything I had hoped and the aquarium blew me away. I vowed to live there some day, it took fourteen years but I lived in the Monterey area for three years, it was amazing. Currently I live ninety minutes away so it’s become my intermediate retreat.
One of my bigger happy places has become the Mojave Desert. I lived there for a couple of years and really fell in love with the desert. I would often retreat to Anza Borrego State Park and it for a time became my runaway place for my hardest time each year, the week between Christmas and New Years. Recently I discovered a Nevada State Park in the Mojave, Valley of Fire State Park and it’s become my new go to winter hideaway.
The thing about happy places is there restorative value. These need to be places where you can simply be, and therefore can be yourself, free from judgement and deadlines and the expectations of others. Preferably places where the phone can’t ring or if it can, places where you’re absolutely comfortable turning it off. The jellyfish room in the Monterey Bay Aquarium is such a special place for me. Watching the jellies swim is absolutely mesmerizing, and for a few minutes on this last trip I had the room to myself, no humans to interrupt my experience and it was absolutely exactly what I needed. I followed that up with a trip to the Mojave, not my usual, but a couple of days at a hot springs spa. What was perfect about this stop was that I had a hot springs tub in my room, so I could fill it up and just soak in my room with some music playing low, it was amazing.
I truly needed some time in my happy places, I needed to wind down from humanity. It hasn’t brought me all the way back to level, but it has helped tremendously. I hope you have the opportunity to get to one of your happy places soon my friends, they lead to happy days. ~ Rev Kane
Happiness held is the seed; Happiness shared is the flower. ~ John Harrigan
Three Questions, February 15, 2025
You can find the background to The Three Questions in my recent post about it. I’ll be answering the questions each day for the next year and putting this experience into a book. Here we go!
What was the most beautiful thing I encountered today?
Even after thirty years of living here I’m still surprised by how early spring hits. The most beautiful thing I encountered today were all of the flowers currently blooming.
What did I learn today?
Odd fact, Japan and Iceland have the world’s lowest homicide rates.
What made me happy today?
A simple thing, a sunny day, nice temperatures and blooming flowers on my walk.
The Ministry of Happiness 