Compassion

Today is the 26th day of September, 2021.  It's Serena Williams' and Beto O'Rourke's birthday (Sheri Moon Zombie's, too).  There are 90 days left until Christmas and today is the day for compassion.  With compassion, we do not kill or harm living things. 

The sun rose at 7:29 a.m. this morning and will set at 7:28 p.m. tonight.  That's 11 hours and 59 minutes of daylight, the night now being one minute longer than daytime.  Yesterday, daylight was one minute longer than nighttime, so we achieved equilibrium, the real Equinox, sometime around midnight last night.  Blink and you missed it.

The waxing gibbous moon is 72% full.  It ill rise at 10:52 p.m. tonight and set at 1:37 p.m. tomorrow afternoon.

Hurricane Sam is now a category 4 storm out in the mid-Atlantic Ocean.  It's a powerful storm with winds up to 145 miles per hour, but it currently looks as if it won't make landfall in the U.S., although it might strike the island of Bermuda.

One year ago today, journeyman baseball player Jay Johnston (California Angels, Chicago White Sox, Oakland Athletics, Philadelphia Phillies, San Diego Padres, Los Angeles Dodgers, Chicago Cubs, and even the fucking Yankees) died in a nursing home in Granada Hills, California at the age of 74 due to complications from  the covids. Impermanence is swift.

The average number of new covid cases per day in Georgia is 4,561, the same as yesterday.  That's probably more due to underreporting over the weekend than a stall in the decreasing trend. It's also largely a rural problem at this point - Fulton County has only 380 (8%) of the 4,561 new cases per day.

Last night, Osees, the West Coast rock band, finished a two-night stand at the club Warsaw in Brooklyn, NY.  They play tonight at Union Transfer in Philadelphia.  Coincidentally, just like Georgia, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania is also experiencing  an average of 4,561 new covid cases per day (312 cases per day in Philadelphia County).  

Osees play tomorrow night in Chapel Hill, North Carolina at Cat's Cradle.  North Carolina has a whopping 5,515 new covid cases per day; however, the counties surrounding Chapel Hill (Durham, Chatham and Orange) have only a combined 134 of those daily cases.  The band will then take one night off before performing on September 29th in Atlanta at Variety Playhouse.    

On this day in 1986, Italian mountaineer Reinhold Messner successfully summitted Makalu,  the fifth highest mountain in the world (27,838 feet), on his sixth attempt.  Makalu is located in the Himalayas southeast of Mount Everest on the border between Nepal and Tibet. Messner had twice unsuccessfully tried climbing the south face of Makalu in 1974 and 1981. He attempted the first winter ascent of Makalu via the normal route in 1985–1986, but even that third attempt had failed. 

Messner returned to Makalu in 1986. Although his team got turned back twice during this expedition, they made the summit via the normal route on their third attempt (Messner's sixth overall).  During the expedition, climber Marcel Rüedi was seen by Messner and the other climbers on his way back from the summit.  Although he was making slow progress, he appeared to be safe. The tea for his reception had already been boiled when Rüedi disappeared behind a snow ridge and did not reappear. He was found dead a short time later.  Impermanence is swift.

At 27,838 feet, Makalu is the fifth highest mountain in the world.  The sixth-highest mountain in the world (26,864 feet) is Cho Oyu, which means "Turquoise Goddess" in Tibetan. Cho Oyu was first climbed on October 19, 1954 via the north-west ridge by an Austrian team of Herbert Tichy, Joseph Jöchler and Sherpa Pasang Dawa Lama.  Geologist and climber Herbert Tichy of that expedition passed away on this day in 1987. Impermanence is swift.