Bouncing off the moon

I have to pass this on . . .

From CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corp.):

The Barenaked Ladies, a children's choir, and the commander of the International Space Station. Put them together and what do you get? The first space-to-earth musical collaboration.
The song, "I.S.S. (Is Somebody Singing) was commissioned by CBCMusic.ca and The Coalition for Music Education with the Canadian Space Agency to celebrate music education in schools across Canada.

The lyrics:

On solid fuel and wires
Turn the key and the light the fires.
We’re leaving Earth today
The rockets burning bright
We’ll soon be out of sight
And orbiting in space

Pushed back in my seat
Look out my window
There goes home
That ball of shiny blue houses everybody anybody ever knew 

So sing your song I’m listening out where stars are glistening
I can hear your voices bouncing off the moon
If you could see our nation from the international space station
You’d know why I want to get back soon (get back soon) 

Eighteen thousand miles an hour
Fueled by science and solar power
The oceans racing past
At half a thousand tons
Ninety minutes Moon to Sun
A bullet can’t go half this fast 

Floating from my seat
Look out my window
There goes Home (There goes home)
That brilliant ball of blue
Is where I’m from, and also where I’m going to 

So sing your song I’m listening out where stars are glistening
I can hear your voices bouncing off the moon
If you could see our nation from the international space station
You’d know why I want to get back soon (get back soon) 

All back and white just fades to grey
Where the sun rises sixteen times a day
You can’t make out borders from up here
Just a spinning ball within a tiny atmosphere (atmosphere) 

Pushed back in the seat
Look out my window
Here comes home (ho-ho-home)
What once was fueled by fear
Now has fifteen Nations orbiting together here. 

So sing your song I’m listening out where stars are glistening
I can hear your voices bouncing off the moon 

If you could see our nation from the international space station
You’d know why I want to get back soon (get back soon)
You’d know why I want to get back soon (getting back to you)
You’d know why I want to get back soon (getting back to you)
You’d know why I want to get back soon (getting back to you)
You’d know why I want to get back soon 

Source: LYBIO.net

Sometimes I get so discouraged, watching how we are so busy fouling our nest; carving out more roads for more unneeded merchandise, across irreplaceable wetlands, river banks, farmlands; hauling trainload after trainload of coal that will poison the air; laying leaky oil pipelines from the wasteland we have created on bird flyways, across still-green mountainsides to pristine waterways; heating and lighting ever larger houses for fewer people. And on and on, the list grows.

So I turn to the small, the close to home, the tiny beauties. There, I can forget, for a time. There, life goes on as always; there, I can make things better than I found them.

This video turns my eyes the opposite way, zooming out from the piles of gravel and clatter of heavy machinery, to see the earth from a different perspective.

"You can't make out borders from up here
Just a spinning ball within a tiny atmosphere."

We've got a long way to go, but this gives me hope. We can work together, we can learn to see beyond our noses. We can make things better, even the big things. Give us time!

A Skywatch post.

Reflection in a Rain Bucket

Rainwater for the garden, unneeded in this cool weather, sits in an old 5-gallon pail.

Above the porch and vines, a grey, cloudy sky.

We've been partying, celebrating a granddaughter's engagement. It turns out that his side of the family is as musical as hers; the afternoon turned into a lively jam session, with three generations of two extended families on guitars, violincello, harmonicas, accordion, piano and banjo, doing Golden Oldies from one end of the 20th century to the other. They even had Laurie and I singing along!

I'm too tired to get up the energy to go to bed. Maybe I'll just put my head down on the desk here ...

Caught the Bug!

Bev, at Burning Silo, passes on an interesting meme about literature, music and art, and I couldn't resist filling in those blanks. I passed it on to Laurie, and he had his own list. So, here we go, two lists in one:

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Q: Name a book that you want to share so much that you keep giving copies away.

A: WW (me) --"Breaking Smith's Quarter Horse" by Paul St. Pierre. I lived in the area ("down the hill" in Bella Coola) for 8 years, so I've met Smith's twin, many a time. St. Pierre has it down pat.

Laurie -- Nobody reads the ones he would pass on. He names Shakespeare's sonnets, Palgrave's Golden Treasury and Hazlitt's Essays. And he gave me a copy of the Oxford Shorter Dictionary and went out and bought himself a new one. Does that count?

Q: Name a piece of music that changed the way you listen to music

A: WW -- The protest songs of Bob Dylan/Joan Baez, etc. I still hadn't developed a taste for classical (too much forced listening as a kid) and otherwise, I only knew hymns and 1950s pop, which were fine to sing and play but which didn't "relate" to anything in me. The protest songs spoke to my values.

Oh, and Mexican folk, especially the dances, as portrayed by Amalia Hernandez. That set my blood to racing!

Laurie -- Quote; "bloody umpteen". Every few minutes for the rest of the evening he came up with another one.

Q: Name a film you can watch again and again.

A: Both of us named "African Queen". Laurie added "Casablanca".

Q: Name a performer for whom you suspend all disbelief

A:WW -- none, whatsoever. I'm a born skeptic, I guess.

Laurie -- Peter O'Toole, in Lawrence of Arabia.

Q: Name a work of art you would like to live with.

A: WW -- Fragonard's "A Young Girl Reading". I live with a copy (ripped out of a Readers' Digest) that my son framed for me some 30 years ago.

Laurie -- Lives with art all the time. He collects antique Japanese porcelain and houses an ever-changing display case. Beautiful, unique pieces every one of them.

Q: Name a work of fiction that penetrated your real life

A: WW -- Several. As a young girl, the "Anne" series. I was Anne. (I didn't know why, back then; now I do.) The Bible. 'nuff said about that. Later, "The Cry and the Covenant", about Ignac Semmelweiss. And finally, the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy. Samwise became my hero; I saw in him the same strength I found in Semmelweiss. And no, I never saw the movie. Perhaps he is portrayed differently there.

Laurie -- A bit of history here. Laurie was a teenager when WWII broke out. He spent the war years as a private in India and SE Asia. Afterwards, while he was waiting to be demobbed, he had a chance to read. One book was Somerset Maugham's, "The Trembling of a Leaf"; Laurie says that it "opened his eyes to reality." Another was Chekov's short stories translated by Constance Garnett. Once back in England, he found Arnold Bennett's list of "Essential Reading" and worked his way through it.

Q: Name a punch line and/or a sight gag that always make you laugh.

A: WW -- Hard to say. I find life itself vastly entertaining. I laugh a lot. At all kinds of things.

Laurie -- He didn't know. But I mentioned one word, and he cracked up. Recently, he (and I for a couple of episodes) watched a 50-episode Korean soap/drama/epic/history, with subtitles, called "Emperor of the Sea". One of the characters, a Madame Jami, had a limited repertoire of expressions, "sly", "angry", "conniving", "superior" and occasionally "complacent". All I have to do to make Laurie laugh is imitate one of those expressions, or even say her name.

~~~~~~~~~~

Thanks, Bev. That was fun!