Good morning, Whitewater.
November ends, and Advent begins, with a partly cloudy day and a high of thirty-five degrees. Sunrise is 7:05 AM and sunset 4:22 PM, for 9h 16m 31s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 63% of its visible disk illuminated.
Friday’s FW poll asked whether respondents thought a deer should (apart from Wisconsin regulations) belong to the boy who first shot it, or the adult hunter who later killed it. Just over sixty-one percent of respondents felt it should have gone to the boy (that is, that at the adult hunter should have let the boy have the deer.)
The Chernobyl area, decades after the nuclear accident that befell a nuclear plant near Pripyat, remains an empty, eerie place. Danny Cooke recently returned from a visit, during which he recorded the scene, twenty-eight years on:
Postcards from Pripyat, Chernobyl from Danny Cooke on Vimeo.
Earlier this year I had the opportunity to visit Chernobyl whilst working for CBS News on a '60 Minutes' episode which aired on Nov. 23, 2014. Bob Simon is the correspondent. Michael Gavshon and David Levine, producers.
For the full story http://www.cbsnews.com/news/chernobyl-the-catastrophe-that-never-ended/
—-> ***Soundtrack 'Promise land' by Hannah Miller – licensed on themusicbed.com
Chernobyl is one of the most interesting and dangerous places I've been. The nuclear disaster, which happened in 1986 (the year after I was born), had an effect on so many people, including my family when we lived in Italy. The nuclear dust clouds swept westward towards us. The Italian police went round and threw away all the local produce and my mother rushed out to purchase as much tinned milk as possible to feed me, her infant son.
It caused so much distress hundreds of miles away, so I can't imagine how terrifying it would have been for the hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian citizens who were forced to evacuate.
During my stay, I met so many amazing people, one of whom was my guide Yevgen, also known as a 'Stalker'. We spent the week together exploring Chernobyl and the nearby abandoned city of Pripyat. There was something serene, yet highly disturbing about this place. Time has stood still and there are memories of past happenings floating around us.
Armed with a camera and a dosimeter geiger counter I explored…
www.dannycooke.co.uk Follow me on twitter @dannycooke
Shot using DJI Phantom 2 (GoPro3+) and Canon 7D
It’s Mark Twain’s birthday:
Samuel Langhorne Clemens (November 30, 1835 – April 21, 1910),[1] better known by his pen name Mark Twain, was an American author and humorist. He wrote The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and its sequel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885),[2] the latter often called “the Great American Novel”.
Twain grew up in Hannibal, Missouri, which provided the setting for Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer. After an apprenticeship with a printer, he worked as a typesetter and contributed articles to the newspaper of his older brother, Orion Clemens. He later became a riverboat pilot on the Mississippi River before heading west to join Orion in Nevada. He referred humorously to his singular lack of success at mining, turning to journalism for the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise.[3] In 1865, his humorous story, “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County”, was published, based on a story he heard at Angels Hotel in Angels Camp, California, where he had spent some time as a miner. The short story brought international attention, and was even translated into classic Greek.[4] His wit and satire, in prose and in speech, earned praise from critics and peers, and he was a friend to presidents, artists, industrialists, and European royalty.
Though Twain earned a great deal of money from his writings and lectures, he invested in ventures that lost a great deal of money, notably the Paige Compositor, a mechanical typesetter, which failed because of its complexity and imprecision. In the wake of these financial setbacks, he filed for protection from his creditors via bankruptcy, and with the help of Henry Huttleston Rogers eventually overcame his financial troubles. Twain chose to pay all his pre-bankruptcy creditors in full, though he had no legal responsibility to do so.
Twain was born shortly after a visit by Halley’s Comet, and he predicted that he would “go out with it”, too. He died the day following the comet’s subsequent return. He was lauded as the “greatest American humorist of his age”,[5] and William Faulkner called Twain “the father of American literature”.[6]