A month or two ago when I was doing a series of music posts using music inspired by the moon, one post featured a work by Italian composer Ludovico Einaudi. As I seem to do whenever I find a new piece (new to me, anyway) by Einaudi, I always end up saying something like "I need to explore Einaudi's music more!" And then I don't, really, until the next time I'm looking for inspiration. Which brings us to the current series, which is "Music inspired by water". Yes, I need to listen to the album this comes from, which is apparently highly regarded; it's called 

I never knew about a thing called submechanophobia until we traveled to Hawaii in 2021, and The Daughter reacted very strongly against the idea of going to the Pearl Harbor Memorial and seeing the Arizona. The idea of looking down at a sunken ship freaked her out. I looked it up and I learned that this is very real. Here's a video I saw online today: Apparently this is a shipwreck off the shore of Tobermory, Ontario. Tobermory is a town at the end of Bruce Peninsula, which extends into Lake Huron, and from what I have found out, there are around twenty shipwrecks in those waters.

She flamed out and she faded away. 'Vanity Fair'’s West Coast Editor returns to the written word to survey scorched earth.

KUWAIT CITY — There are times when the sheer ignorance and ingratitude of the American public makes you sick. This week marks the 150th anniversary of Sherman’s March from Atlanta to the Sea, which...

Well...that's that, then. I hope he said hello to Kissinger on his way to the lake of fire.

Here's a quiz from Sunday Stealing! I'm doing this because it's early Saturday morning and I'm sitting here with a mug of tea and I don't really want to do anything productive quite yet but I need to post something (I'm sitting on a nice little string of consecutive days posting stuff!), so here we go: What 10 Questions Can Tell You the Most about a Person 1. If you were an animal, what animal would you be? Well...I'm prone to long periods of inactivity punctuated by short bursts of activity, and I can be motivated by food, so I guess I'd be a greyhound.

Earth, from the rings of Saturn: "In this rare image taken on July 19, 2013, the wide-angle camera on NASA's Cassini spacecraft has captured Saturn's rings and our planet Earth and its moon in the same frame. It is only one footprint in a mosaic of 33 footprints covering the entire Saturn ring system (including Saturn itself). At each footprint, images were taken in different spectral filters for a total of 323 images: some were taken for scientific purposes and some to produce a natural color mosaic. This is the only wide-angle footprint that has the Earth-moon system in it." Via, with more info, here.

We all have those movies, don't we? They're the movies where we'll be going about our day, doing stuff that we've planned out and intended to get done...but then we'll see that one of those movies is on teevee or something, and that's that, screw the To Do List, we're watching that movie again! One of those movies for me is The Hunt for Red October, that wonderful submarine thriller based on the Tom Clancy novel. (I never read that particular Clancy book. I read a couple other ones and honestly, I wasn't super-impressed beyond an appreciation for his plotting.

There's a social media account called "Terrible Maps" which is exactly that: absurd maps, where the absurdity either comes from the weirdness of the information being mapped, or just plain meta-absurdity. Here is a version of the latter: And here is a version of the former: Now, I like the fact that this one doesn't include the caption, because you're probably wondering what on Earth Florida, Louisiana, and Illinois have in common. What could possibly group those three states, and no others? Here, I'll even provide a bit of quiz-show music to play while you think about it:

Looking across the Niagara RiverMiranda (Lumix FZ1000ii)f/7.1, 1/1000sec, ISO 250 Continuing our self-guided tour of classical music inspired by water, we have perhaps one of the two greatest works ever directly inspired by a river (well, maybe three, depending on how strongly we consider Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen to have been inspired by the Rhine). The other work will surely show up in this series, but for now, we'll stick with Bedrich Smetana's Vltava, known to English-speaking audiences as The Moldau. The work opens with a quiet shimmering that evokes the flow of Vltava, the longest river in the Czech Republic.

Sunset over Lake Erie Fifty years ago today, one of the most notorious maritime disasters in American history happened when the Edmund Fitzgerald, a mighty freighter of the Great Lakes, foundered and sank near the eastern end of Lake Superior. The story is well known, of course: the huge ship with the long and distinguished career, famous for being one of the biggest ships on the Great Lakes, and the way it sailed into one of the most ferocious storms in memory, finding itself in a more and more harrowing position, and striving against time to reach the relative safety of Whitefish Bay, and Captain McSorley's haunting last radio message--"We are holding our own"--likely send just seconds, maybe minutes, before the ship went down with all hands.