roddenberry

roddenberry and Wallace

Brushwood and Church stuff

Okay, we're home. We're trying to catch up on the mail, and by gosh we have everything out except a couple of certificates. They will go out in a few days.

Last year we missed Brushwood altogether because of Gavin's health. But during our time there this year we made some tentative Church decisions:
1. To issue another church charter
2. To move the annual general meeting of the Church in the future to probably the Wednesday of the Sirius Rising festival.
We want to invite all the old Church trustees, plus the trustees of the churches that were members / charter holders but which have gotten their own church charters, which churches we have lost track of. Anyone and everyone who was associated with the Church of Wicca in earlier days is more than welcome to attend. There are faces we'd love to see again, and people with whom we'd love to update ... and compare the cape-and-tights grandchildren we're all so proud of.
Yes, we know it will cost you money to pay Brushwood's entrance and/or camping fees; but it's a great festival anyway, even if the reunion turns out to be a disappointment ... This year there were 1,600 happy frolicking pagans on site. The bonfires were as spectacular as usual and the musical groups were exceptional. You can soon check out pictures and next year's tentative program at
brushwood.com . We'd love to see you all there. Blessed be! Gavin and Yvonne

roddenberry

Hi, readers of this site. Yvonne has a query concerning a strong and ongoing personal interest of hers. It concerns
For many years she has felt that Alfred Russel Wallace has been undeservedly overlooked (indeed, declared a non-person). Here's why. Dr. Wallace was a naturalist--but a middle-class individual without Charles Darwin's upper-class status. His work in that field led him (Wallace) to develop the theory of survival of the fittest and natural selection. He wrote to Darwin outlining this idea; and, to put it bluntly, Darwin usurped the idea and claimed it as his own. After all, a middle-class naturalist couldn't possibly have a better idea than an upper-class one.
What Yvonne is interested in is this: How did Roddenberry know of Wallace? In an episode involving a holodeck experience of a 19th-century reception, why did he have Samuel Clemens/ Mark Twain repeatedly mention Wallace so forcibly? Did Roddenberry share Wallace's--and

Arthur Conan Doyle's--belief in spiritualism (spiritism)? Did Clemens share it?

Going to Brushwood

Hi, readers of this site, and merry meet!


It's a sign that Gavin is getting better: We're off to Sirius Rising and SummerFest at Brushwood Folklore Center, setting off on Sunday July 15 and driving gently northward. Of course this means that the School's mail will be a little bit delayed, though not so much as it has been a couple of times during the worst of Gavin's health problems. We'll get it all back on schedule as soon as we can. Don't go away; don't lose hope. We're still here.

We'd love to see some of you troops there. Oops--not just some of you, but any or all of you. Save mid-July 2013 for what can be a life-changing experience. See

www.brushwood.com

to get precise dates and all the particulars. Blessed be all. Gavin and Yvonne

We's Back

We's okay. Yes, our power went out, but it's back on now: It came on after three (3) days. We've had similar power outages before. Living in the mountains in a place of reasonably severe winters gives you this natural experience on a fairly frequently basis. On reflection, it seems that that the pattern is once every two years or so.

This time it was more interesting than most because it was so unexpected. A minor summer thunderstorm abruptly turned into a series of microburst tornadoes that swept across the northern part of the country from somewhere around the Chicago area and left four million people in the dark ... during a persistent heat wave. A large number of those people also didn't have water because our water supply depends on electric pumps. Of course the gas stations get pumped dry first thing, and ice becomes a commodity as rare as gold nuggets. The battery-powered radio worked well enough in our house, so that we could pick up all the tales of disaster from local towns, although interestingly, none from our own; mainly because the telephones, both landline and cell, went down.
Still, it gave us a chance to meditate on how lucky we are having lost only one piece of siding from the house, whereas a local church lost half its roof--just peeled off. An act of "God"? Or maybe of a malicious demon? We heard no one gasping, "Thank you, Lord!" or "Hosanna!" Still, as the pastor told everyone, "We're well insured." Rather he seemed to have a "What? Me worry?" attitude like that of Alfred E. Neuman. They hadn't bothered even to haul tarps over the exposed roof to prevent further damage.

Thinking outside the box

When most of us were children, or even not yet born, a man named Hubble found that distant stars had what is called red shift in the light that we on earth received from them. The red shift is caused by something called the doppler effect: The motion of bodies moving away from us stretches the light waves that reach us, just as a passing train's whistle seems to change pitch as it rushes away from us. This great discovery of Hubble's led to the whole notion of an expanding universe and then to the origins of the universe at the Big Bang.
But what if Hubble was wrong? Of course this very idea is like ranting against apple pie and motherhood: no one in the scientific community is likely to support the idea that there is another way of thinking about red shift.
Mainly through meditation, we Frosts have received an alternate possibility. It is what we call tired light.
Today there is consensus that a large part of the energy in the multiverse is made up of dark matter. We have no idea what dark matter is; but we do know that it acts like a fog, obscuring distant stars. So now let's imagine that the light coming toward us across the vast distances in the galaxy travels through dark matter--as it does--and that the dark matter absorbs some of the energy from the light. So far so good? Just as in the case of the doppler effect, absorbing energy from the light causes a red shift. The further the light from a distant star has to travel, the more dark matter it has to push through. Thus distant stars would appear to be moving away from us faster than stars closer to us would appear to be doing.
This simple explanation of the red shift phenomenon obviates the necessity for the much-admired Big Bang theory. It is simple; it is elementary. Having lived in foggye olde England, I (Gavin) know that a car's headlights shift into the more-yellow range when viewed through fog. Why then wouldn't light shift more into the red range when some of its energy is absorbed by the elusive dark matter?

Tired light? Remember that phrase. You heard it first from (shudder) those people, the Frosts.