New Year's Eve Poem, Times Square Ball & Other Drops, And Customs

Happy New Year To All!!!  Here's a nice poem to ring in the new year, as well as the history of the Times Square Ball Drop and some other New Year's Eve words, thoughts and interesting customs elsewhere (courtesy of The Writer's Almanac with Garrison Keillor):

The End of This Year by Jack Ridl The best place to be is here, at home, the two of us, while others ski or eat out. It will be quiet. We won't watch the ball fall, the crowd in Times Square. They will celebrate while here there is this night. Tomorrow some will start over, or vow to stop something; maybe try again. Here the snow will fall through the light over the back door and gather on the steps. We will hope our daughter will be safe. She will wonder what the year will bring. Maybe we will say a prayer. "The End of This Year" by Jack Ridl from Practicing to Walk Like a Heron. © Wayne State University Press, 2013. Reprinted with permission. (buy now) Today is New Year's Eve, a day to take stock of the old year and make changes for a new year. People across the world tonight will be linking arms at the stroke of midnight and singing "we'll take a cup o' kindness yet, for auld lang syne," from the Scottish folk song popularized by Robert Burns (books by this author). In Scotland, New Year's Eve marks the first day of Hogmanay, a name derived from an Old French word for a gift given at the New Year. There's a tradition at Hogmanay known as "first-footing": If the first person to cross your threshold after midnight is a dark-haired man, you will have good luck in the coming year. Other customs vary by region within Scotland, but most involve singing and whiskey. English poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson (books by this author) wrote: "Ring out the old, ring in the new / Ring, happy bells, across the snow / The year is going, let him go / Ring out the false, ring in the true." Here in the United States, the custom of raising and dropping a giant ball arose out of the time when signals were given to ships at harbor. Starting in 1859, a large ball was dropped at noon every day so sailors could check their ship chronometers. The Times Square celebration dates back to 1904, when The New York Times opened its headquarters on Longacre Square. The newspaper convinced the city to rename the area "Times Square," and they hosted a big party, complete with fireworks, on New Year's Eve. Some 200,000 people attended, but the paper's owner, Adolph Ochs, wanted the next celebration to be even splashier. In 1907, the paper's head electrician constructed a giant lighted ball that was lowered from the building's flagpole. The first Times Square Ball was made of wood and iron, weighed 700 pounds, and was lit by a hundred 25-watt bulbs. Now, it's made of Waterford crystal, weighs almost six tons, and is lit by more than 32,000 LED lights. The party in Times Square is attended by up to a million people every year. Other cities have developed their own ball-dropping traditions. Atlanta, Georgia, drops a giant peach. Eastport, Maine, drops a sardine. Ocean City, Maryland, drops a beach ball, and Mobile, Alabama, drops a 600-pound electric Moon Pie. In Tempe, Arizona, a giant tortilla chip descends into a massive bowl of salsa. Brasstown, North Carolina, drops a Plexiglas pyramid containing a live possum; and Key West, Florida, drops an enormous ruby slipper with a drag queen inside it.

Archdiocese of Philadelphia's Bid To Lease Cemeteries Has Court Date

How will Catholics react to having non-Catholic Christians buried in Catholic cemeteries?

Archdiocese's bid to lease 13 cemeteries has court date [The Philadelphia Inquirer :: ]

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Dec. 30--The Archdiocese of Philadelphia's bid to lease its 13 cemeteries to StoneMor Partners L.P. $89 million over 35 years has a date in Orphans' Court next week.

Officials with the archdiocese and StoneMor have said they expect to easily clear the Orphans' Court hurdle on Monday, but there was one small hitch.

The hearing in Orphans' Court, which must approve certain deals involving charitable assets, was originally scheduled for Dec. 11, but Judge John W. Herron pushed the hearing back to allow more time to publicize the deal, which was announced in September.

The court hearing is a chance for interested parties to object to the 60-year lease of the 13 archdiocesan cemeteries.

"We are not aware of any formal filings of any objections although we do know that a few letters have been sent to the court expressing concern about the transaction," said Ken Gavin, a spokesman for the archdiocese.

Among the es most likely to be harmed by the deal are gravestone dealers -- because they will be plunged into direct competition with StoneMor, which is the nation's second-largest operator of cemeteries and also sells grave markers and other cemetery features.

Lawrence Miller, StoneMor's chief executive, said during a meeting with investors last month that between 60,000 and 80,000 Catholics in the Philadelphia region had already purchased a grave site in one of the cemeteries, but nothing else needed for burial.

"They don't own their vault, they don't own their marker, they don't own their casket, and they don't own the opening and closing. So there is going to be the enormous opportunity for the company to market," Miller said.

StoneMor, which is based in Levittown, also anticipates expanding the market. "We will be able to open the properties up to not only the owners or people of the Catholic faith, but also open the cemeteries up to anyone of the Christian faith. So it's going to give us an enormous opportunity in Philadelphia," Miller said.

The archdiocese said in a frequently asked questions document on the cemeteries web site that StoneMor will be able to bury non-Catholic Christians after two years, if the archdiocese approves.

To increase public awareness of the hearing since Dec. 11, the archdiocese sent notices to all parishes and asked pastors to mention the Jan. 6 hearing on multiple weekends and sent a letter to all lot owners who are currently making installment payments, among other measures.

The hearing is scheduled for 1 p.m. in City Hall Courtroom 416.

hbrubaker@phillynews.com

215-854-4651

@InqBrubaker

Evolutionary Fossil Secrets Within the Messel Pit: Tales From The Pit

The Evolutionary Secrets Within the Messel Pit

An amazing abundance of fossils in a bygone lake in Germany hints at the debt humans owe to animals that died out 48 million years ago

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• By Andrew Curry
• Smithsonian magazine, January 2014, Subscribe

 

A time capsule of life in the Eocene: Ailuravus, a three-foot-long, squirrel-like rodent. (Berthold Steinhilber)

In the middle of a forest about 20 minutes from the city of Darmstadt in central Germany is a decommissioned strip mine half a mile wide. Today scrubby bushes cover the bottom, where dirt paths wind past rainwater ponds filled with bright-green algae. A gaping 200-foot-deep gouge in the forested countryside, the Messel Pit doesn’t at first glance seem worth preserving, never mind visiting, but since 1995 it has been a Unesco World Heritage site, thanks to a series of unfortunate events beginning some 48 million years ago.

The world was a very different place then, during the period known to scientists as the Eocene. The levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere were higher than today (at least, for the time being), producing a greenhouse effect of soaring temperatures. In the Arctic, giant crocodilians swam in warm waters among the ferns. A tropical rainforest covered Antarctica. The shapes of the continents would be mostly recognizable, though India was still on the collision course with Asia that would form the Himalayas. Sea levels were about 150 feet higher than today, so Europe wasn’t a largely continuous landmass but a vast archipelago.

The spot now occupied by the new, conspicuously sleek, concrete and glass Messel Pit visitor center—which includes a trip back in time through a virtual borehole—was, in the Eocene, near a deep lake that at its peak was around two miles across. The lake became a deathtrap for countless animals, and geochemistry in concert with millions of years of accumulating plant and mineral sediments would preserve features of the sunken carcasses to an astonishing degree.

Decaying animal and vegetable material buried and squeezed under tremendous pressure over millions of years yields, every school kid knows, fossil fuel, in this instance primarily oil shale—layers of soft gray stone impregnated with oil. Those deposits attracted miners from the late 1800s to the 1970s, when the open-pit mine closed down and was forgotten by all but a small group of people bent on extracting not the fuel but the fossils.

Word of amazing finds spread fast. And aside from a perhaps understandable bout of civic shortsightedness when the local government considered turning the giant hole in the ground into a garbage dump—a proposal that paleontologists and others sharply opposed for 20 years, prevailing in 1992—the site has been cherished as the greatest fossil trove of its kind. “Everyone in vertebrate paleontology knows Messel,” says Johns Hopkins University paleontologist Ken Rose. “There’s really no place in the world that compares. A great deal of what we know from that time period is from there.”

The Eocene, from 56 million to 34 million years ago, was a crucial turning point in the history of life on Earth, a time to which we ourselves owe a considerable debt, for that’s when mammals came into their own and evolved to occupy the ecological niches vacated by the extinction of the dinosaurs. At Messel Pit, mammal skeletons galore are preserved intact, often with the outlines of fur and flesh still visible in the surrounding rock. Primitive opossums, horses the size of fox terriers, an anteater, eight bat species and a lemur-like primate that could be an early branch on humanity’s family tree—these and many more fossils provide glimpses of the distant ancestors of species we know today.

While paleontologists often frown at the prospect of visitors tromping around their digs, Messel Pit, which is run by the Senckenberg Research Institute in Frankfurt, is open to the public for guided tours. One fall day I follow geologist Marie-Luise Frey from the $6.5 million visitor center, opened in 2010, to the bottom of the pit. She leads me off the paved path onto the gentle slope of a recently closed excavation. Flakes of dried-out oil shale crunch under my boots. A sharp corner reveals where paleontologists cut through layers of shale with a chain saw, removing large blocks before carefully prying them apart to look for hidden fossils.

The edges of the excavation resemble the pages of a burned book. Even today, the oil shale is mostly water. As it dries, Frey explains in German, the oil shale turns as flaky as phyllo dough and eventually crumbles to dust. I’m trying to imagine the place as it was before, but the chill fall air, the turning leaves, the rumble of machinery at a nearby gravel plant aren’t helping me put myself in a jungle 48 million years ago.

I notice some suspiciously round pebbles and pick one up. It’s about the size of a praline. “Das ist ein Koprolith,” Frey tells me brightly—a “coprolite,” paleontologist-speak for a chunk of fossilized poop. This one was likely produced by a very big fish, she says: “You can still tell what they ate by examining them.” I follow Frey farther into the pit, eager to understand how this place came to be.

At some point around 50 million years ago, underground water came into contact with a vein of molten rock. High-pressure steam erupted, forming a crater with steep sides. As water seeped in, it created a lake shaped more like a drinking glass than a soup bowl. Any animal that fell in sank quickly to the bottom.

Still, that alone doesn’t explain why so many land mammals—not to mention birds, bats and insects—perished here. One theory is that carbon dioxide periodically bubbled up from deep beneath the lake bottom, smothering animals near the shore. Another possibility is that some of the summer algae blooms were toxic, poisoning animals that had chosen the wrong time and place to slake their thirst. Or perhaps smaller animals died nearby and were washed in by small floods or rushing streams.

The lake was so deep that oxygen didn’t circulate near the bottom, which meant that there were no bottom feeders around to consume the dead and dying animals. Year after year, algae scumming the lake surface bloomed and died, and so layers of fine clay and dead micro-organisms drifted to the bottom. Each layer was as thick as a strand of hair. It took 250 years to build up an inch of mud. Over millions and millions of years, plants and animals were preserved like flowers pressed between the pages of a book, and the algae and other organic matter turned into oil shale.

Among the thousands of fossils that paleontologists have recovered at Messel Pit are specimens representing nearly 45 different mammal species. Those finds are critical to understanding how warmblooded creatures evolved. Mammals and dinosaurs appeared at nearly the same time around 200 million years ago. But dinosaurs were so well suited to the environment that they crowded out any competition. Mammals lived on the margins, mostly tiny creatures eking out a living by eating insects under the cover of darkness. “They just tried to stay out of the way,” says Thomas Lehmann, a Senckenberg Research Institute paleontologist. And so it went for nearly 150 million years.

Then, in an instant, everything changed, apparently when an asteroid or comet struck Earth 66 million years ago and dramatically altered the climate, eventually wiping out the giant reptiles. The diversity of species found among the Messel Pit fossils reveals that mammals rushed to fill every empty ecological nook and cranny they could find. “They really tried everything—flying, jumping, running, tree-dwelling, ant-eating,” says Lehmann. “From the point of view of evolution, Messel is a fantastic laboratory to see what life might have given us.”

Might have, but in many cases didn’t. Messel’s most fascinating specimens may be those species that have no living relatives, though they look jarringly familiar. In the visitor center, kids crowd around to watch as a conservator armed with toothbrushes, dental picks and scalpels cleans layers of oil shale away from a fossil unearthed just a few weeks earlier. To me, the skeleton of Ailuravus macrurus looks like that of a giant squirrel. It’s three feet long, including its bushy tail. Near the ribs a black stain traces the creature’s fossilized digestive tract. Despite its tail, Ailuravus is no squirrel ancestor. It’s an evolutionary dead end; Ailuravus and all of its relatives died out more than 37 million years ago. Why? Maybe they fell victim to climate changes, or a better-adapted competitor, or disappearing food sources, or simple bad luck.

Ailuravus’ resemblance to a modern squirrel is an example of evolutionary convergence. Given enough time, adaptations may lead to nearly identical solutions—bushy tails, say, or powerful, kangaroo-like hind legs—popping up in different species. “It’s like using the same Legos to build different forms,” says Lehmann.

And there are forms aplenty at the Messel Pit. The exquisitely preserved fossils have provided paleontologists with unprecedented insights into the adaptive strategies­—some successful, others not—adopted by mammals for feeding, movement and even reproduction. For instance, the contents of the tiny prehistoric horse’s stomach—fossilized leaves and grape seeds—indicate that the animal was not a grazer but a browser, eating what it found on the forest floor. The paleontologists also found eight fossilized specimens of pregnant mares, each carrying a single foal. That discovery suggests that the early horses had already adopted herd behavior, since joint care would be the best way to guarantee the survival of small numbers of offspring.

Such findings make the place feel less like a graveyard than a time capsule encompassing a 48 million-year-old ecosystem. “It’s not only paleontology, it’s biology,” says Jens Lorenz Franzen, a retired paleontologist who worked at the Senckenberg Research Institute and helped excavate some of Messel’s most remarkable finds. “We can reconstruct the living world of that era."

From Grief to Good Works: Inquirer Citizen of the Year

WOW!  Do Good!!:

Inquirer Editorial: From grief to good works

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Dorothy Johnson-Speight, Executive Director of the antiviolence group Mothers In Charge, is the Inquirer's Citizen of the Year. In the background, left, is a portrait of her son Khaaliq Johnson. ( CHARLES FOX / Staff Photographer )

GALLERY: Inquirer Editorial: From grief to good works

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LAST UPDATED: Sunday, December 29, 2013, 2:02 AM
POSTED: Friday, December 27, 2013, 4:23 PM

Not many people could do what Dorothy Johnson-Speight does. Every day, she puts aside the often suffocating grief that grips her own soul so she can help other women come to terms with seemingly unbearable sorrow after the loss of a child to violence.
Johnson-Speight, of Mount Airy, is executive director of Mothers in Charge, an organization dedicated to reducing the number of murders in Philadelphia. This year, it marked its 10th anniversary. For reaching that milestone, and for the good work that preceded it, Johnson-Speight is The Inquirer's 2013 Citizen of the Year.
Johnson-Speight lost her 24-year-old son, Khaaliq Jabbar Johnson, in 2001. He was shot multiple times on an Olney street near his home by a man who had argued with him over a parking spot. Johnson-Speight wants people to know that Khaaliq didn't fit any stereotype of a black male shooting victim; he was no gang member. Khaaliq was a peaceful man, a counselor dedicated to helping children.
Two years after Khaaliq's death, and after five other young men in her neighborhood had been murdered, Johnson-Speight had a vision. "I don't call it a dream, because I wasn't really asleep," she said. She saw herself in a boxing ring, pleading with people to stop the killing. She began to contact other mothers who had lost children to violence, and they began to meet.

Among these women was Ruth Donnelly, whose 19-year-old son, Justin Donnelly, was stabbed to death five months before Khaaliq was killed. Johnson-Speight and Donnelly discovered that the same man had killed their sons. He was eventually convicted of both murders. Meanwhile, Donnelly and Johnson-Speight became close friends and partners in starting Mothers in Charge.
The organization is much more than a support group in which grieving women can share their stories and build each other up, though it certainly functions as that. Mothers in Charge members hit the streets to talk to young men about their behavior in person. They visit schools and churches to talk to teenagers. They participate in marches and rallies for peace. And they lobby state officials for stronger gun laws.
The group has grown from about two dozen participants who met in each other's homes to more than 200 who conduct workshops in a suite of offices in the Leon H. Sullivan Human Services Center, on North Broad Street. Mothers in Charge chapters have formed in Wilmington, Atlantic City, New York, Los Angeles, Kansas City, and San Francisco, helping the group reach thousands.
Under a program it calls Project Hope, Mothers in Charge offers workshops that teach women about handling intimate-partner violence, anger management, peer mentoring and coaching, and life skills. The organization also offers a curriculum called Thinking for a Change to teach prison inmates - men, women, and juveniles - social and problem-solving skills.
It's as if Johnson-Speight was born to do this work. Premature death first touched her family in 1986, when her daughter, Carlena, not yet 3 years old, died of bacterial meningitis. She joined the Compassionate Friends network for families that have lost children and started a chapter at Temple University. She went on to get a master's degree in human services from Lincoln University and to complete a school-psychologist certification program at Immaculata University.
Johnson-Speight and Khaaliq, who had a sociology degree from the University of Maryland Eastern Shore, had planned to open a counseling practice together. Now Johnson-Speight has different plans. Asked if she wants to continue doing what she's doing, she had a quick answer: "No, I want to stop doing what I'm doing. I want the time to come when I can stop helping mothers bury their children." That's a worthy goal for the entire city.
Johnson-Speight is receiving The Inquirer's 10th Citizen of the Year award. Previous winners were former New Jersey Gov. Tom Kean Sr., for his leadership of the 9/11 commission, in 2004; political reform activists Timothy Potts, Eugene Stilp, and Russell Diamond, in 2005; former Mayor W. Wilson Goode Sr., for his work with the children of incarcerated parents, in 2006; public schools advocate Helen Gym in 2007; good-government advocate Harry S. Pozycki in 2008; Juvenile Law Center lawyers Marsha Levick and Lourdes Rosado in 2009; Camden civic leader Helene Pierson in 2010; homeless advocate Sister Mary Scullion in 2011; and antihunger group leader Steveanna Wynn in 2012.

Read more at http://www.philly.com/philly/news/20131229_From_grief_to_good_works.html#tz67CCCHwsBVGmiQ.99