Nora Kelleher, A'2005, Releases Album
Did you know that , A'2005, sings and plays flute in her Brooklyn band ? On October 9, 2007, they released their first album, "Reichenbach Falls". According to Billboard, "The debut album from Brooklyn's RAVENS & CHIMES exhibits an indie folk pop personality with aromas of Wolf Parade, Voxtrot or Bright Eyes. An explosive well-balanced richness and texture unfolds track by track, powerfully, yet gently. Hints of Leonard Cohen or Bob Dylan linger through the finish. Perfectly complements any meal."

Read more and listen to soundclips at .

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Owen Kelley, A'93, Hurricane Researcher
Since 1997, , A'93, has been a researcher at NASA Goddard. Kelley uses space-based and ground-based instruments to study changes in hurricane structure that occur over several hours or days. He has recently published two papers in Geophysical Research Letters describing how radar data can be used to predict when a hurricane's surface wind intensity is about to increase. In the future, Kelley would like to discover why "Hot Towers," tall rain clouds often just three miles across, are so intimately connected with what happens to hurricanes, which are several hundred miles across. Kelley also develops visualization software for the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) satellite launched in 1997 and the Global Precipitation Measuring (GPM) satellite to be launched after 2010. Kelley feels that this is an exciting time to study hurricanes because many discoveries are about to be made through frequent, high-resolution observations.

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Donald "Captain Don" Taube, A'65
Fielding Dupuy, A'88, tells us of the sudden death of Donald "Captain Don" Taube (A'65) in October, 2007. Since moving to New York in 2001 Don had become a well-known character on the city waterfront. In June 2006, we took a ride on the schooner Pioneer with Don at the helm. You can see pictures from that event in our .

A memorial tribute to Don can be found at .

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Andrew Klipper, A'80
In January, Andy Klipper, A'80 lost a long battle with cancer. But during the last few years he made a major contribution to a pet project whose purpose is to raise money for cancer research. Andy was a major force behind his team's rapid growth from 16 batters in 1999 to over 100 batters in each of the past 2 years. A number of friends and family paid tribute to Andy at Fantasy Day in Fenway Park on June 23, 2007, participating in an annual fundraiser for the Jimmy Fund for Cancer Research.

Eugene Thaw, A'47
Did anyone read the on challenges to a recent trove of Jackson Pollock paintings? The Times said, "A physicist who is broadly experienced in using computers to identify consistent patterns in the drip paintings of Jackson Pollock has determined that half a dozen small paintings recently discovered and claimed by their owner to be original Pollocks do not exhibit the same patterns." The examination of the paintings was done with the use of fractal geometry. One of the foremost authorities on Pollock is Eugene Thaw, A'47, who was quoted extensively in the article.

You can read an interview with Mr. Thaw on , and see the statement issued by the .

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James Schamus, A'81
No, Heath and Jake aren't members, but have you heard that James Schamus, A'81, is the co-producer of Brokeback Mountain and that he was up for an in 2006? He was also co-producer of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. This was his third Oscar nomination.

You can read an interview with James Schamus at , and see a catalog of his work at the .

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Adam Pinsker, A'52
Those of you with an online subscription to Crain's New York Business might want to take a look at their about serious financial problems the Martha Graham Dance Company is experiencing. Adam Pinsker, A'52, a frequent attendee at our events, is quoted near the end of the article.

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Peter Pesic
Has anyone read SF tutor Peter Pesic's new book, ? He visited us in May, 2006, to give a presentation at our . According to the dust jacket,

Children ask, "Why is the sky blue?" but the question also puzzled Plato, Leonardo, and even Newton, who unlocked so many other secrets. The search for an answer continued for centuries; in 1862 Sir John Herschel listed the color and polarization of sky light as "the two great standing enigmas of meteorology." In Sky in a Bottle, Peter Pesic takes us on a quest to the heart of this mystery, tracing the various attempts of science, history, and art to solve it.

According to the ,

In 10 cleanly written, well-paced chapters, Pesic traces the progression of our understanding of atmospheric hue through dozens of scientists, philosophers, and artists. His smartest move was to structure "Sky in a Bottle" like a mystery story, coaxing us puzzle by puzzle through the (very) uneven advances of knowledge over the centuries. You find yourself forgetting what you think you already know. What is air? What is reflection? Is light a particle or a wave, anyway? Why is the sky red at sunset? What role, if any, does interference play? If science is a systematic search to understand the universe, understanding why the sky is blue is perhaps the most accessible question the universe can offer. It's also a beautiful illustration of how the very largest things in our world are affected by the very smallest. Without atoms, our sky isn't blue. Indeed, except perhaps for our bodies themselves, the color of the sky might be the quintessential example of how excruciatingly small things -- molecules, and the atoms that make them up -- manifest themselves in our physical reality.

Have you heard about a member who's been in the news lately?
Send your tips & pix to .

Tony Hardy. I graduated from St. Johns Annapolis in 1951 with the goal of going into teaching. I obtained my M.A. at The Putney Graduate School of Teacher Education, then taught mathematics for 2 years at the Putney School, a private progressive secondary school. Interested in educational theory, I decided I needed to know more about human development and entered graduate school for a degree in psychology, first at the University of Chicago then at Clark University. Since then, I have been employed in various settings as a clinical psychologist.

I have maintained my interest in philosophy since leaving St. Johns, and became a student in particular of the neo-Kantian philosopher Ernst Cassirer. Interested in weaning psychology from its behavioristic model, I applied Cassirer's symbol paradigm to this discipline in a book entitled . Later I began working on a second book that gives a more complete representation of the Cassirean philosophy; this is entitled and was published in late 2006. I live in East Greenbush, New York, and, besides writing, am employed part time as a psychologist and work in my garden. I can be reached at .

[An excerpt from Tony's new book can be found .]

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Chris Denny, A'93, migrated to New York City and volunteered to be our chapter's Events Coordinator from 2005-2007. Dean Hannotte caught up with him in 2005 and had a conversation about two St. John's, Roman Catholicism, how teachers can better connect with their students in the 21st century, and blogs.

Dean: At what point did you become interested in great books or great ideas?

Chris: I took an American Literature class in my sophomore year in high school, and all of a sudden for the first time in my life literature took on a dominant tone in my life. So when I heard about St. John's — a school where you could just read for four years — I really lost interest in other possibilities fairly quickly. I knew that I wanted to go to St. John's probably the summer before my junior year in high school.

Dean: But you weren't headed for a school that was going to let you just sit around reading books all day, it was also going to challenge your mind about philosophical issues.

Chris: That's true. I went to my first don rag in freshman year expecting the approval that I was used to getting at prep school, but Robert Druecker really took me to task, saying that I needed to question and rethink my assumptions. I was really shocked at this and thought ...

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Meet David MacDonald, SF'89 — composer, ensemble director, professor.

David MacDonald teaches music theory and orchestration at the Manhattan School of Music, where he received his doctorate. He reflects that the best music class he ever took was Peter Pesic's sophomore music tutorial "in which the rules and techniques of composition were carefully justified instead of being swallowed like a pill."

MacDonald is also a composer whose music has been released on the CD "Hie Up the Mountain" in addition to recently being performed in New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Israel and Taiwan.

He directs , an ensemble which exclusively performs music less than ten years old. He also has an annual collaboration providing music for productions of .

David lives in Ossining, New York with his wife Ellen, a singer. He can be reached at .

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I, James Marshall Crotty (SFGI), remain the co-president of MONK, the company I co-founded several kalpas ago with fellow "Monk" Michael Lane, as the publishing arm of our travel "try-quarterly" (we tried to come out quarterly) Monk: The Mobile Magazine (). MONK has since birthed several offspring, including seven-year-old Monk Media (), a cute and bubbly graphic design firm, four-year-old Monk Host (), a steady-as-she-goes server farm, and the recent addition Monk TV, which produces and distributes the inflammatory Crotty Farm Report () among other channels.

This past July I attended a Freud seminar with my two older brothers at St. John's Summer Classics. When it was over, I wanted to kill my brothers and they wanted to sleep with the tutor.

Since graduating St. John's, I shuttle between live/work offices in NYC's Gramercy Park (where I lead a Johnny-style great books group) and L.A.'s Hancock Park (where I lead a great films discussion group — you must go slow with Angelinos). I also lead a Junior Great Books program at the Eagle Academy for Young Men in the Bronx.

I will gladly chat with graduates willing to live below the radar, outside the matrix, and on their own terms. I can be reached at .

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Jane McManus has been covering sports for The Journal News since 1999. Before joining the staff, she worked at Newsday and at the New York Daily News. She has won awards from the Associated Press Sports Editors Association, the Deadline Club and from the New York Associated Press. After graduating from St. John's in 1993, McManus lived in Brooklyn and worked at a law firm as a paralegal.

In addition to writing commentary, McManus covers college sports and tennis. During the spring semester, she is an adjunct professor for the sports journalism class at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, where she earned her Masters in 1997. McManus lives in Westchester with her husband, Steve, and daughters, Jean and Charlotte. She can be reached at .