Debby Detering Wordcraft

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Curiosity Forever!

11.10.2017 by Debby Detering // Leave a Comment

Curiosity is a normal human trait.  Some people are insatiably curious.  Most explorers and scientists possess more curiosity than average.  For some of them, it is their strongest talent.

David McCullough quotes Miriam Rothschild who quotes Karl Jordan who may be the epitome of curiosity.  Karl, 96 years old, curator of the Tring Museum (I didn’t recognize either his name or the museum either, so don’t think I expect you to have heard of it),  is peering through a microscope.  He tells Miriam,  “I shall know it all in the next world.  I shall know it all in the next world.”

Suppose God made us to be naturally curious, which seems evident if you’ve ever tried to answer a small child’s questions.  Suppose there is new life in “the next world,” after death.  If we are ourselves in that life, we will still be curious.  Can you imagine the excitement of finding answers to every question you ever had, a solution to every problem you ever faced?   That’s what Karl Jordan expects.

David McCullough interviewed Miriam Rothschild for his book Brave Companions.  He obviously enjoyed knowing her.  She’d be fun as a friend; there’s no time to be bored with her!

“Miriam Rothschild knows all about butterflies and fleas, birds, fish and poisons, lady bugs (my first real love), medieval meadow grasses, Shetland sheep dogs, photography, farming, Clark Gable, and the wild flowers of Israel.  She designs her own clothes.  She has an art gallery devoted to paintings by schizophrenics.  She owns a pub.  She has raised six children…”

So begins David’s chapter on Miriam in his book.  His interview ends with the quotation from Karl Jordan, the curator of the museum the Rothschild family founded.  Check out the museum website for a photo of Lord Rothschild driving his carriage with a team of three zebras and one horse!

Most of McCullough’s books are at least as thick as the Harry Potter books, but this one is not so thick, and because each chapter tells of a different person, you can read the chapters that interest you most.  The subjects include pioneer pilots, the Brooklyn Bridge architect, explorers, a photographer, of course Miriam Rothschild, and more.

Curiosity drives exploration into every kind of knowledge.  Curiosity must be why David McCullough finds out so much about the people and events he writes about.  Miriam and Karl possessed so much curiosity that maybe you could say they were possessed by it.

“I shall know it all in the next world!”

Categories // Reading Tags // curiosity, science

Eclipse Through a Collander

08.22.2017 by Debby Detering // Leave a Comment

We stayed home for the historic eclipse and watched totality five times on the NASA live-streaming site for which we didn’t need eclipse glasses. We aren’t on the path of totality, but we did feel a slight cooling like when the sun sets, although our sky remained bright blue.

The NASA site offered tips for safe viewing.  One was:  “You can use a kitchen colander for a pinhole view.”

YES!

The colander, such as you might use to drain spaghetti.

I held it over a sheet of white paper.   Our photos show about how much of the sun was eclipsed in our part of Southern California.

Our colander view is fuzzy, but you can see that almost half the sun was eclipsed where we are.

 

 

 

Categories // About Debby Tags // science, technology

Debby’s fiction explores family relationships with mingled conflict and caring and reflects her experience in emergency foster care, often for teenagers abandoned in one way or another.

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