In an effort to distract myself from the aftereffects of the rain in my kitchen, along with the problems happening across an ocean that I can only hear news about, I’ve created a few new banners for the site.

Mostly, they are just different fonts of the title Random Fate, but I made a special banner for Halloween that will be the only one in the rotation on the holiday.

They are all collected here: All the banners in one place (although until I fix a few things, the sidebar in Internet Explorer will be messed up on this page).

Back when I was in graduate school, one of the few women studying Physics (actually Astronomy, but the the Astronomers were in the same department), and the only woman from the US in our entire graduate program, loved Halloween. It was her favorite holiday. She would send out Halloween cards and display an innocent excitement that resembled that of a child who still believed in Santa Claus at Christmas. It was wonderful to see.

With recent trends, however, even that innocent fun in scary stuff on Halloween is being lost, with real life Hannibal Lector wannabes becoming the all too substantial specters haunting our everyday lives, not to mention the other threats, both real and hyped, that pervade the news of the day in the quest for ever more eyeballs to view the advertisements.

Every generation longs for its innocence lost.

I wonder, however, if any generation before the twentieth century had more cause than those of the last 100 years…

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