While taking a few photographs of a double rainbow in Spanish Springs, Nevada, I captured several unidentified objects in one frame. And by the next click of the shutter, they were gone.

They’re unidentified because I don’t know what they are and there isn’t any others like them in any of the other pictures I took. The best I can do is describe them as white spherical-shaped light that appear to be moving upward and to the right as you look at it.

Kind of interesting, huh?

Soon I should be suffering from withdrawals if I’m truly addicted to Facebook. I draw this conclusion based on the fact that I recently closed my account.

Facebook for me has been a way to get back and stay in touch with people I have known over the years — from grade school, through my time in the military right on through my years working in broadcasting. But after sitting in the dark, talking to God, it came upon my heart to disconnect myself from the Internet as much as possible for the time being.

For the last several years I’ve worked hard to find fame through my writing abilities. But it has yet to turn out as I’ve planned.

There in lays the problem — MY plan. None of this should be my mine, but rather God’s plan.

So to return to where I should be, I’ve left my online life behind for a while. I am now searching to fulfill what it is Christ has planned for me.

The death of James Brady — President Ronald Reagan’s press secretary who was wounded in the attempt on Reagan’s life in March 1981 — was a homicide, a medical examiner has ruled. Brady died as a result of the injuries, the Office of the Medical Examiner for the Northern District of Virginia said.

That means gunman John Hinckley Jr. could be charged with Brady’s murder. It also means Lewis Powell, the attacker of President Abe Lincoln’s Secretary of State William Seward can be charged with the secretary’s death – even though he lived another seven- years following the attack.

How stupid!

Born in London, March 16th 1836, Andrew Hallidie was a pioneer of cable railway transportation.  On January 28th, 1852, he and his father left Liverpool for America on the steamship ‘Pacific’ arriving in New York on February 12th, after a fifteen day crossing.

Following a 16-day stopover, the pair departed on the ‘Brother Jonathan.’ Thirteen years later, the Brother Jonathan would sink after striking an uncharted rock near Point St. George, off of Crescent City, while carrying 244 passengers.

After crossing the Isthmus the travelers reached Panama on March 15th. On the 26th they embarked on the ship ‘Brutus’ and landed at Clark’s Point in San Francisco 59-days later.

The younger Hallidie spent the next nine-years working mines in Mariposa, Calaveras, Amador, El Dorado, Placer, and Nevada counties. He also worked as a blacksmith along the American River, later building bridges across the Bear, Trinity, Stanislaus, and Tuolumne rivers.

In 1861, Hallidie constructed a bridge across the Klamath River at Weitchpeck, but had to leave it unfinished because of an uprising of Indians. Its completion didn’t happen until 1901, about a year after his death, with the construction of the Ash Creek Bridge in Siskiyou County.

Six years later, he took out his first patent for the invention of a rigid suspension bridge. He also patented the “Hallidie Ropeway (or Tramway),” a method of transporting ore and other material across mountainous districts by means of an elevated, endless traveling line, which he had invented.

Hallidie, in 1871, completed plans by which street cars could be propelled by underground cables, from Clay and Kearny Streets to the crest of the hill, a distance of 2,800 feet, making a rise of 307 feet. With his success, the cable railroad system spread to Oakland, Los Angeles, Kansas City, Chicago, St. Louis, Philadelphia, New York, London, and Sidney.

At the age of sixty-five, he died of heart disease at his San Francisco home, April 24th, 1900. His name is memorialized by way of the Hallidie Building at 130 Sutter Street, between Montgomery and Kearny in San Francisco.

During a discussion on ‘The View,’ August 6th, 2014 that centered on a story out of Georgia where a group of power-walkers were told by mall security that they were not allowed to bow their heads in group prayer, co-host Whoopi Goldberg went off on the subject saying:

“I’m sorry. I don’t necessarily want to trip over anyone who’s praying. I want you to pray. I want you to pray whenever you are. But I don’t want to know you’re doing it. I don’t want to know, because it’s your private business and if you do it everybody else gets the right to do it.”

Odd that even when making a negative statement about individual liberty like this that Whoopi could also be so right.

Jus’ so Whoopi understands, freedom of religion is a principle that supports the freedom of an individual or community, in public or private, to manifest religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship, and observance. In fact, in the U.S. there is a document that enshrines these rights called the Constitution. This principle is clearly expressed in the First Amendment:

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof…”

I feel sorry for Whoopi Goldberg, as it is hard to live and thrive under such intolerable conditions like she has.

With Hawai’i set to be battered by two storms, there seems to be some confusion over the different types of storms that affect our earth. So what are the islands going to be hit with?

From the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s webpage:

“Hurricanes, cyclones, and typhoons are all the same weather phenomenon; we just use different names for these storms in different places. In the Atlantic and Northeast Pacific, the term “hurricane” is used. The same type of disturbance in the Northwest Pacific is called a “typhoon” and “cyclones” occur in the South Pacific and Indian Ocean.

The ingredients for these storms include a pre-existing weather disturbance, warm tropical oceans, moisture, and relatively light winds. If the right conditions persist long enough, they can combine to produce the violent winds, incredible waves, torrential rains, and floods we associate with this phenomenon.

In the Atlantic, hurricane season officially runs June 1 to November 30. However, while 97 percent of tropical activity occurs during this time period, there is nothing magical in these dates, and hurricanes have occurred outside of these six months.”

A few months ago a friend sent me a list he called ‘Life Lessons.’ They are sound and now I want to share them with you.

Life is far too short to spend time with people who suck the happiness out of you.
If someone wants you in their life, they’ll make room for you.
You shouldn’t have to fight for a spot.
Never, ever insist yourself to someone who continuously overlooks your worth.
And remember, it’s not the people who stand by your side when you’re at your best, but the ones who stand beside you when you’re at your worst that are your true friends.

A date that will live in infamy is one that wasn’t particularly romantic or anything, but rather because it was embarrassing. I took a young lady named Linda to see the movie, “1941.”

The 1979 film was directed by Steven Spielberg, written by Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale, and featured a cast that included Dan Aykroyd, Ned Beatty, John Belushi, John Candy, Christopher Lee, Toshiro Mifune and Robert Stack. The story-line involves a panic in the Los Angeles area after the December 7th attack on Pearl Harbor.

At the time I didn’t know the plot, I jus’ knew it had Belushi in it and therefore in my pea-brain it was compulsory that I see it. In the end, the movie wasn’t all that funny even though some people I know now claim it has risen to some sort of cult status.

Finally, the reason I was so embarrassed came down to one reason and one reason only — Linda is of Japanese ancestry.  We never went out on a date again.

One of the first lessons I learned as an Environmental Health Technician while in the U.S. Air Force was to stop the spread of life-threatening disease by containing it at or nearest its source. That means all contaminates, including people, had to be held away from the public in the area in which the disease was first noted.

But somehow this isn’t being followed by current medical staff either abroad or in the U.S.

From the L.A. Times: “An American physician who fell ill with the deadly Ebola virus while treating others afflicted in West Africa arrived back on U.S. soil Saturday and was to be whisked via a specially outfitted ambulance to Emory University Hospital for treatment in an isolated ward.”

This despite a November 2012 report by the BBC that reads, “Canadian scientists have shown that the deadliest form of the Ebola virus could be transmitted by air between species.”

Meanwhile, the Center for Disease Control, which is overseeing the infected doctor’s treatment, says ‘don’t worry.’

CDC director Dr. Thomas Frieden told NBC News: “It is not a potential of Ebola spreading widely in the U.S. That is not in the cards.”

However this is the same government agency that Newsweek, in a July article, stated: “In June, the CDC revealed what it represented to be an accidental anthrax mishap. But in the investigation that followed, shocking conditions at federal laboratories were revealed. Long-forgotten smallpox samples had been discovered in a storage room at the National Institutes of Health’s Food Administration campus in Bethesda, Maryland, and cross-contamination of harmless samples with a potentially deadly flu virus had occurred in the CDC’s infectious disease lab.”

We should worry, because it is a horrible way to die.

From the World Health Organization’s website: “EVD is a severe acute viral illness often characterized by the sudden onset of fever, intense weakness, muscle pain, headache and sore throat. This is followed by vomiting, diarrhea, rash, impaired kidney and liver function, and in some cases, both internal and external bleeding.”

But the table may already be set for such a thing to happen, as Department of Religious Studies Professor James Tabor at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, explained in the PBS ‘Frontline’ series, ‘Apocalypse!”

“If you open the Book of Revelation and simply begin reading it as an unfolding scenario, it goes something like this. There will be wars and famines and disease epidemics and heavenly signs that will alert the world to some sort of crisis.”

With all this said, I’ve decided to take a hold of Mad Magazine’s Alfred E. Neuman’s personal mantra: “What? Me worry?,” as I drop to my knees and pray in earnest.

He isn’t sworn to uphold the U.S. Constitution like those he’ll command — so how can this be?

A German Army officer who recently served with NATO forces in Afghanistan is assuming duties as the chief of staff of U. S. Army Europe, the first time a non-American officer has held that position. Brig. Gen. Markus Laubenthal could report to duty as early as Monday.

Sources at the Pentagon say the first-ever assignment of a non-U.S. citizen to the USAREUR staff isn’t connected to the political trouble over the recent spying gaff committed against Germany.  Instead, USAREUR staff claim the appointment had been scheduled for several months prior as part of the Obama administrations effort to give a more multi-national flavor to its major overseas commands.