A blanket of snow covers a large part of North America today.  This made for an unusually quiet morning where I am. I thought of a haiku by Masaoka Shiki (1867-1902) --

A thin layer of snow
coats the wings of mandarin ducks --
such stillness!

Now that the snow has stopped, however, the neighborhood is filled with the sounds of scraping. I hear snow shovels scrape the roads, and people are digging their cars out of snowdrifts and scraping the windows.

The deep morning snow
yields to shovels and scrapers --
on to the mall!

I'm staying home, out of the cold, damp, and noise.

Here's a post for you physics geeks. According to Katherine Gustafson at Tonic, there's a link between 2nd century Buddhist art from Gandhara and a recent breakthrough in quantum physics. The link is a theory based on Borromean rings, a figure of three rings that first appeared in the above-mentioned early Buddhist art.

Borromean rings are an arrangement of three interlaced rings, no one of which can be taken away without breaking the other two.  Back in the 1970s, a physicist named Vitaly Efimov proposed that "particles like atoms or protons might act the same way, binding together in a stable triad that would be destroyed if one were removed," Gustafson writes. However, there was no way to demonstrate this.

Very recently a team of physicists at Rice University in Houston, Texas, produced triangular bonds out of lithium atoms that demonstrated Efimov's theory was valid. They presented their findings at a science conference in Rome in October. I have no idea how physicists do these things and why they might be significant, but there it is.

Last year I asked readers what they did about Christmas -- ignore? go all out? minimalize? -- and got some interesting answers. So I'll ask again -- what do you do about Christmas?

I'm a minimalist myself, mostly because going all out is too draining. My housemate, Miss Lucy, feels the same way, although being a cat she will take a fleeting interest in ribbons.

Blogger Jack Daw reports that he received a Jizo Bodhisattva card from a Pure Land church. So what's more Christmas-y -- grumpy Bodhidharma in a Santa hat or the Bodhisattva of the Hell Realm? Maybe we could put Pu-tai in a reindeer sleigh.

Rep. Hank Johnson, a U.S. Congressman from Georgia and long-time member of Soka Gakkai International (SGI), is profiled by Bob Keefe in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. In "Hank Johnson Won't Back Down," [link fixed] Keefe writes that the Congressman is "a Buddhist who serves on the U.S. House Armed Services Committee, strives for world peace but doesn't shy away from a fight."

The Congressman says he is driven by the middle way.

"I don't get carried [away] when things are going great‚ and don't get carried [away] when things are going badly, because both of those things are going to happen," he said. "So, therefore, the middle path is the best place to be."