André Rieu is a Dutch violinist and conductor famous for creating an international revival in waltz music and for his many  top selling recordings with his “Johann Strauss Orchestra.” You will instantly recognize this beautiful piece, performed live in Tuscany and available on DVD here.

You don’t have to look far to see signs of spring. From the budding of  trees and the warming of temperatures to the animals coming out of their winter hideaways, there seems to be a promise of new birth and color in the springtime air. In our area, signs of the change in season have been popping up for weeks. El Niño has left us shy of normal rainfall, but we’ve certainly enjoyed the early spring-like weather.

The first day of spring is usually March 20 but sometimes, like this year, it falls on the 21st to correspond with the vernal equinox when the sun rests directly above the equator on its apparent trip northward. As the earth revolves around the sun, the Northern Hemisphere tilts more toward the sun as winter turns to spring. Conversely, the Southern Hemisphere tilts more away from the sun ushering in the beginning of autumn for people in that hemisphere.

The word “equinox” is derived from Latin and means “equal nights.” Around March 20 (or 21st as the case may be), sunrise and sunset are about twelve hours apart everywhere on Earth. Because of that, some folks mistakenly believe that day and night on that date are of equal length. In reality, though, the day is a little longer and here’s why. Sunrise occurs when the top of the sun rather than its center is on the horizon. But the sun actually appears to be above the horizon when it is in fact still below it. That’s because the earth’s atmosphere refracts, or “bends,” light coming from the sun, so we “see” the sun a couple of minutes before it actually rises over the horizon. And if you add the daylight that persists after sunset, you’ll find the day on the equinox is several minutes longer than the night.

Spring is a time of transition, not only for plants and animals, but for the weather, too. It can mean weather extremes from very cold and snowy days to humid and stormy days. Some of the country’s biggest snowfalls have occurred in March and the period from March to May brings severe thunderstorms, hail and tornadoes to much of the south. In the Sacramento area, Spring is my favorite season. It means hiking and other outdoor activities, longer days and warmer nights, and myriad opportunities for landscape and wildlife photography.

And let’s lay to rest the myth about your being able to balance a raw egg on end on the first day of spring when, supposedly, the pull of gravity is more equal because the sun is more directly overhead. There’s simply no scientific support for this.

The balancing egg legend apparently got its start in 1945 when a reporter for Life Magazine wrote a story about a Chinese ritual in which people stood eggs on end on the first day of spring. But the Chinese recognized the first day of spring in early February, or about six weeks before the spring equinox! Hmmmm…

Later, in 1983, a hundred New Yorkers got together on March 20 to balance eggs and an article about the event appeared in the New Yorker magazine. A year later, five thousand New Yorkers repeated the tradition on the first day of spring, and the egg legend grew. The truth is that if you can get a raw egg to balance upright on the spring equinox, you can get it to balance any other day of the year. The pull of gravity or the position of the sun in the sky has nothing to do with it.

But balancing egg or no balancing egg, by all means embrace spring! Get outside, listen to the birds and smell the flowers. Take long walks. Explore. Immerse yourself in the newness of the season!

Thanks Mike!

One of Randall Munroe’s cartoons. Randall is a CNU graduate with a degree in physics who, until recently, worked on robots at the NASA Langley Research Center in Southeastern Virginia. I’m not crediting CNU with his sense of humor… That’s just something he can’t help. Anyway, I enjoy his ‘toons which I suppose he draws to relieve job stress.

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Got this from Denny Wilson. It’s “Gen. George S. Patton” advising the president on “surge.” I have to agree with Denny; I’m with George, too!

The following are stragglers, the things I didn’t get around to commenting on this week or last. Calling them “leftovers” seems, well, unattractive. So I’ll dub them “bits and pieces…”  It’s all about packaging, right?

Porn - Surprising to many, porn occupies only about one percent of ‘Net sites according to a recently published study based on extensive random sampling. Of course, that’s little consolation to parents - there are an estimated one billion ‘Net sites, so one percent is still ten million. …

Cisco vs. Apple - Apple and Cisco had negotiated for over two years without reaching agreement over the use of the word “iPhone” at the time Apple’s iPhone was introduced, prompting a trademark infringement lawsuit. Well, it looks like the two have reached an accord. Both will continue use of the name with each sticking to their respective current uses - Apple will use it to describe their cell phone devise and Cisco to describe their VOiP device. Seems reasonable. …

Vista - The new Windows OS, hyped for two years, coming for five, isn’t drawing any “you gotta have it reviews.” In fact, two reviewers I read compared it unfavorably to Mac as requiring far too many unnecessary prompts; It needs a big computer; It’s likely to be SLOW on your computer (that ran XP just fine.) Problem: there is no uninstall - You must reformat your hard disk, losing any stored data and apps, to reinstall XP. …

DRM - Steve Jobs’ call to drop DRM (music copy protection) is meeting passionate opposition from those who still hope to make money from new music releases. Don’t expect any breakthrough soon. …

Google - Telecoms are worried. Rumor has it that Google is planning to provide ‘Net phone service. It’s now easy to do well; Vonage is doing it and must be making money to afford all that TV advertising. Google’s clout and funding ability, together with the possibility of a combined phone and ‘Net access service, could cause some real headaches for phone companies. …

And there you have it. Enjoy a wonderful weekend!

According to recent research, the female brain is the human default structure. The male brain, they say, is just a female brain on testosterone.

The effect starts when the male fetus is only six weeks old and develops testicles. The female brain is not significantly hormone affected until puberty. That explains why little girls are so sensible and also explains high school girls.

All this was discovered after research psychologists overcame their fear of feminists a few years ago and decided to really study male-female mental differences. The work included functional brain scans and tests of all ages.

Feminists should be pleased. The very few widespread social differences are about as expected. Men tend toward more automatic cooperation under stress (soldiers, football); women tend to be better at nurturing (that’s how we’ve survived) and indirect aggression (women are smaller and need some response to direct male aggression.)

Except for very small portions of the population, the individual differences are even smaller. Men tend to be more able to mentally rotate a solid object. And while vocabularies are about the same for similar education, women tend to have fluency in more of it.

In the style of Weird Al Yankovich…  

A dramatic fire this evening along the American River Parkway near Cal Expo destroyed a Union Pacific mainline track sending billowing black smoke into the blue skies and disrupting train traffic through the Central Valley. The hot-burning fire, first reported at 5:41 p.m., quickly consumed about 300 feet of  trestle timber and tracks in a secluded section of the American River Parkway just north of the American River.

The fire erupted just moments before Dawn and I left our Point West office. From the parking lot, we could see the giant plume of thick, black smoke rising a thousand feet, meeting the high pressure layer that’s been responsible for our recent spring-like weather, and then extending at a right angle off to the east. Dawn snapped a couple of photos from the parking lot (I’ll post later) while I drove down Tribute to the levy to get a closer look.

It was a spectacular sight. The hundred year old trestle had been built using creosote-soaked bridge timber which produced the heavy black smoke and made extinguishing the fire all but impossible. As water was applied to the flames, the resulting white steam created a mix of swirling black and white smoke that combined in places to a deepened shade of grey. The sheer quantity of smoke was astounding.

Slowed by the lack of traditional access to water in the area, firefighters from the Sacramento City Fire Department and Sacramento Metro Fire District relied on relay-pumping from hydrants in developed areas on the north side of the parkway levee near Cal Expo. At least one pump boat was maneuvered into the area to pump additional water on the flames. The plan, according to a Fire Department spokesman, was to concentrate on the two ends of the trestle and allow the middle to essentially burn itself out. Protecting the nearby bridge was of paramount importance.

The fire, several hundred yards west of the Capitol City Freeway, caused backups for miles during the evening rush hour and,  according to news radio, the smoke plume could be seen from 50 miles away. As more and more fire vehicles and spectators arrived, I headed home. No sense adding to the confusion. I understand that, as night fell and firefighting continued, burned sections of the 25-foot-high rail trestle were beginning to collapse and the blaze showed little sign of dying down.

I’ll be interested to learn what caused the fire. Amazingly, I haven’t heard much speculation and officials have stated that it’s too early to assess possible causes. I heard people saying that a gas line of some sort runs beneath the trestle. Perhaps even more surprising, I heard no mention of the dreaded “T” word…

I feel sorry for Amtrak commuters who routinely travel the line; they’ll have to find alternative transportation unless Amtrak sets up bus lines to handle their usual traffic. The trestle looks to be a total loss, so I don’t expect things to return to normal for quite some time. 

One of the places on our “must visit” list has long been the famous Lascaux Cave in the Dordogne Valley of southern France. If you studied art history, you probably spent time learning about Lascaux, Magdalina and other notable European sites containing Paleolithic cave art. Of these, Lascaux is perhaps the most renowned.

Lascaux Cave is truly one of the world’s great treasures. Discovered in the early fall of 1940 by four teenage boys exploring the hills near the town of Montignac in south central France, the cave contains tall frescos of cattle, deer, aurochs and horses painted in masterful strokes and vivid colors some 15,000-17,000 years ago. Exploration of its vast interior has revealed about six hundred paintings and almost 1,500 engravings. Subject matter of the cave paintings and engravings are mostly animals, birds, rhinoceros and bison as well as cattle, deer and horses, along with hundreds of “signs”, quadrilateral shapes and dots and other patterns we’ll probably never decipher.

Sadly, or perhaps inevitably, the beauty of Lascaux attracted large numbers of tourists by the late 1950s and the heavy traffic endangered the paintings. The cave was closed to the public in 1963 and, in 1983, a replica of the Hall of the Bulls was opened so that tourists would still be able to view the magnificent drawings, albeit reproductions. Paintings in the original cave have since received extensive restoration but still face environmental challenges brought on by visitors and maintenance personnel entering the cave.

One of the Internet’s first websites was that of the Lascaux Cave, a marvel of graphics-enhanced information and still one of my favorites. It includes numerous photos taken in each of the rooms along with extensive history and archaeological information. The discussion of the deterioration of Lascaux in 1963 and what the French government did to create the replica is particularly interesting. A time-line illustrates Lascaux’s place in time within the collection of known Paleolithic cave art sites, and active links along the line take you to Cosquer, Chauvet, La Ferassie, Cap Blanc and other caves in the Dordogne Valley.

The multi-language website and “faux cave” represent wonderful innovations on the part of the French government. Together they preserve one of the world’s most treasured art galleries and allow untold numbers of visitors to experience and enjoy the work of the true masters of Paleolithic cave art.

Aaron emailed: “I also feel like the blogging community is a bit impersonal. It’s a bit like sifting through a sandbox to find an interesting grain, and when you find it you put it in a box until you can think of something useful to do with it. …”

I have to agree to some extent. But that’s not so much the fault of bloggers as it is the newness of the medium, the “blogosphere,” itself. Sure, we can “Google” our way to subject matter but then we must sift through many, often thousands, of entries in the pursuit of something of perceived relevant value.

Let’s recognize, too, that blogging is not necessarily journalism. Sure, some journalists blog and some bloggers are journalists. But for the most part, I think it’s safe to say, journalists represent only a small segment of the sphere. So is it journalistic enlightenment we seek or simply entertainment?

Contributions by journalists are perhaps easier to find because of the specific nature of their subject matter. Non-specific entries are, well, more difficult to specify in our search criteria. So the arteries of the blogosphere may seem clogged  with superfluity (is that a word?) without a simple a way to filter through it all. Except, of course, by utilizing more specific search parameters. Generalistic search criteria yield generalistic search results.

So it sounds to me like Aaron may be using “interesting” as his search criteria. If so, then I suppose he is just sifting sand.

                 Still Life with EquinopsisRoberto Azank is a painter with a unique and unforgettable style. His renderings of common objects such as flowers, fruits and vessels, set against backgrounds of bold color planes, demonstrate superb draftsmanship and a great eye for detail. He  creates portraits of non-living objects that are seemingly transformed to another level of reality.

Now at mid-career, Roberto describes himself as a metaclassical artist whose interests lie in the abstract qualities of realism as opposed to the photographic copying of nature. With this extraordinary style, the artist has returned the long, historic tradition of realistic painting to its rightful place in contemporary art.

Represented by the Eleonore Austerer Gallery for many years, he is one of their most popular and successful artists. The gallery’s currently featured contemporary exhibit, Objects of Desire,  features works by Roberto Azank and sculptor Brian Russell.