Stacy Horn

I’m always cutting and pasting bits and pieces of things I read. Like the other day I saved this:

“On the basis of their measurements, the team concluded that if the photons had communicated, they must have done so at least 100,000 times faster than the speed of light — something nearly all physicists thought would be impossible. In other words, these photons cannot know about each other through any sort of normal exchange of information.”

I thought experiments like this had been done many times and weren’t news. This was a reminder to read the whole article and figure out what’s what. But the snippet I want to talk about is this:

LONG ISLAND COUPLE KILLED IN SINGLE-ENGINE PLANE CRASH

“A Westhampton couple were killed in a plane crash in Massachusetts; a third person was also killed. The flight was an “angel flight,” via Angel Flight, the non-profit that flies people to medical centers for free; the couple (the husband had cancer) was headed to the Dana Farber Cancer Institute in Boston.”

That same morning I was on the subway, and for a minute the car went much faster than usual. For a second I thought, ‘run away subway car,’ and got scared. This is how you die sometimes, out of the blue. It’s a day like any other and than bam, your subway car goes out of control and you’re dead. It’s over. You never saw it coming. No time to prepare.

That couple (and my brief scare) reminded me of this picture I saw of Princess Diana and Mother Theresa shortly after Mother Theresa died. This young beautiful woman and this very, very, very, old woman. When it was taken, if Diana thought about it at all, she would have thought that she had her whole life ahead of her and Mother Theresa was at the end of hers. But in reality, they were both at the end of their lives and died within days of each other. Mother Theresa died on September 5, 1997, and Diana died on August 31, 1997.

Same with the wife in this poor Westhampton couple. She was thinking her husband was the one in danger, and she was probably heartsick about him, but they must have boarded that plane full of hope, and then bam. They’re both dead. And even if she was full of hope, he was supposed to be the one that maybe would soon die and like that, she’s dead too.

Ha. Cheerful, huh? Yes, you can thank me for this Monday morning pick-me-up thought of the day. Sorry.

The picture is an isight camera shot of a picture of Civil War veterans that hangs next to my desk. My grandmother and great grandmother are in the shot. They were members of the Daughters of the Union Veterans of the Civil War (which I joined to learn what I could about my ancestors).

First, thank you Susan Brownmiller for the great party last night.  Susan threw a party for me (thanking me for Echo) and Jackie (her birthday). Great food, great company, saw a bunch of people I haven’t seen in a while.  But of course I didn’t have a camera to take pictures to show you.

Then, yesterday, on my way to the gym there was an explosion on 13th Street.  A big boom, the ground shook, the area filled with smoke!  A tourist bus happened to be there right then and I wondered if they thought, “So this is New York.” There was a second smaller boom shortly after, the place was filled with firemen and cops.  But of course I didn’t have a camera to take pictures to show you.

Very frustrating.  I think my camera might arrive tomorrow.  Can’t wait.  I took this picture of the flowers on my desk with my isight camera.  But man, not having a camera at the party was particularly hard.  One, I would have liked to take have been able to take pictures of the people there to prove I have friends, and two, you just wouldn’t believe the view Susan has.  She has this wrap-around terrace on the top floor of her building and it’s mind-blowingly paranoramic of downtown/West Village Manhattan.

Explosion Info:  It was from an electrical fire underground.  One of the explosions was from a manhole cover blowing.  I don’t know about the second, smaller one.

It’s official:  I’m insane.  Canon sent me an estimate to fix my camera and it was high enough where it made no sense to fix it. But it turns out they have something called a “Loyalty Program.” Instead of fixing my camera, I could trade it in and choose from one of three refurbished better-model cameras instead, one of which was a digital SLR!  I was just whining here the other day about not being able to afford a digital SLR and days later I was presented with the opportunity to buy one at an affordable price … and I didn’t go for it!!

I researched, to death, the three models they gave me to choose from and went with this one, the G9.  It seems to have most of the great things about point and shoot cameras and digital slrs, but at the point and shoot size.  I hope I don’t regret it.

I worked for hours and hours last night, getting this blog ready. See how tuckered out Finn is? That is me. Minus the drool. That’s actually an old picture from an old post. I had to go back and tweak many of the old posts, and in the process got to read so many of the old things I said, and about the things I did. It’s like I have an okay life. Kinda.

Anyway, there’s a weird problem. It keeps going back to pointing to the old blog. Weirdest, freaking Twilight Zone thing. It’s driving me crazy. Plus I’m tired. I woke up in the middle of the night in time to see Phelps win another gold, and to watch the women’s (children’s) gymnastics. For the love of God, please let the next Olympics be in my time zone. This is killing me.

I hope you like the new space. It looks pretty much the same, I know, but there are some key differences that I hope to take advantage of in future posts.

Hopefully today or tomorrow, or soon after I will be switching this blog over to WordPress. It’s going to look a little different but mostly the same. WordPress will be a lot easier to use and give me features that I don’t have now (like the ability to embed music, which I’ve been wanting to do).

In the meantime, this is my cousin Bill Kaelin and my brother Douglas Horn at the Pan Mass Challenge, a marathon bike ride which raises money for the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, where my cousin conducts research in “Functions of Tumor Suppressor Proteins”. Good god. He is also a Professor of Medicine at the Harvard Medical School. Apparently our cousin is scarily smart. We didn’t know that growing up, when he got up every year at Christmas to sing Edelweiss.