There's No Sunset in Virginia

Moved by the early April massacre at Virginia Tech, composer and pianist Evan Mack, a Forestburgh native and Port Jervis High School graduate, sat down one night last week and composed “There’s No Sunset in Virginia.”

Mack, who holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in piano, is a doctoral student at the University of Cincinnati’s College-Conservatory of Music.

There’s No Sunset in Virginia
The TV, replaying like a broken record
The image, it’s numbing, another record broken.
More questions, no answers, left to imagination,
Alarming, disturbing, what are the implications?
All as one and all at once, we ask why they had to die.
(Refrain)
There’s no sunset in Virginia
The Earth is standing still
The mighty may have fallen
The pain never will
There’s no sunset in Virginia
The pain is in our eyes.
But if there is no nightfall
The sun will never rise.
The candles are burning, blocking out the darkness
By thousands they flicker, light and sorrow linger
The silence is deafening, reliving consternation
Reminder, that violence cut short their aspirations
Now as one, we take a vow: protect the light for better days to come.
(Refrain)
All as one we’ll look up to the sky to remember all the ones we left behind.
As the sun begins to set, the sun will set us free . . .
(Final refrain)

The son of Ed and Danielle Mack, Evan was born and raised in Forestburgh.

He is a 1999 PJHS graduate. He is a doctoral student in musical arts piano performance at the College-Conservatory of Music, University of Cincinnati.

* article and lyrics courtesy The Times Herald Record

Ooops, Mars is Warming Up Too!

From the "Could that big bright ball of fire in the sky have something to do with warming the planet?" Files, with an addendum to the "Duh!" Files and the "More Proof Al Gore may be the dumbest man alive." Files:

From The Sunday Times
April 29, 2007

Climate change hits Mars

Mars is being hit by rapid climate change and it is happening so fast that the red planet could lose its southern ice cap, writes Jonathan Leake.

Scientists from Nasa say that Mars has warmed by about 0.5C since the 1970s. This is similar to the warming experienced on Earth over approximately the same period.

Since there is no known life on Mars it suggests rapid changes in planetary climates could be natural phenomena.

The mechanism at work on Mars appears, however, to be different from that on Earth. One of the researchers, Lori Fenton, believes variations in radiation and temperature across the surface of the Red Planet are generating strong winds.

In a paper published in the journal Nature, she suggests that such winds can stir up giant dust storms, trapping heat and raising the planet’s temperature.

Fenton’s team unearthed heat maps of the Martian surface from Nasa’s Viking mission in the 1970s and compared them with maps gathered more than two decades later by Mars Global Surveyor. They found there had been widespread changes, with some areas becoming darker.

When a surface darkens it absorbs more heat, eventually radiating that heat back to warm the thin Martian atmosphere: lighter surfaces have the opposite effect. The temperature differences between the two are thought to be stirring up more winds, and dust, creating a cycle that is warming the planet.

Hey, The Videos Don't Work!

Yeah, I know.

Earlier in the month we had a huge surge in traffic, as a result, toward the middle of the month our bandwidth quota for got gobbled up. Normally I'd just pay for the extra, but this month I didn't feel like it so I took the vids down.

Fear not, I'll slap them back up next Tuesday-ish.
- SkumChiken