6.21.2

chris in jim's kitchen when he realizes it's after 8 o'clock
"In the last 15 years alone, software defects have wrecked a European satellite launch, delayed the opening of the hugely expensive Denver airport for a year, destroyed a NASA Mars mission, killed four marines in a helicopter crash, induced a U.S. Navy ship to destroy a civilian airliner, and shut down ambulance systems in London, leading to as many as 30 deaths."
Technology Review - Why Software Is So Bad

a good description of the tech hallucination so many of us believe is real. rush to market = profits = klunky software.

bookmark this: CounterPunch. newsletter edited by alexander cockburn and jeffrey st. clair. in todays climate, this is necessary muckraking.

ran across this by old friend tucker. intresting story with a moral.

6.20.2

from an old email (cleaning up my inbox): more on the bush dynasty:

> Judicial Watch, the public interest law firm that investigates
> and prosecutes government corruption and abuse, reacted with
> disbelief to The Wall Street Journal report of yesterday that
> George H.W. Bush, the father of President Bush, works for the bin
> Laden family business in Saudi Arabia through the Carlyle Group, an
> international consulting firm. The senior Bush had met with the bin
> Laden family at least twice. (Other top Republicans are also
> associated with the Carlyle group, such as former Secretary of State
> James A. Baker.)
> The terrorist leader Osama bin Laden had supposedly been
> "disowned" by his family, which runs a multi-billion dollar
> business in Saudi Arabia and is a major investor in the senior
> Bush's firm. Other reports have questioned, though, whether
> members of his Saudi family have truly cut off Osama bin Laden.
> Indeed, the Journal also reported yesterday that the FBI has
> subpoenaed the bin Laden family business's bank records.
> Judicial Watch earlier this year had strongly criticized
> President Bush's father's association with the Carlyle Group,
> pointing out in a March 5 statement that it was a "conflict of
> interest (which) could cause problems for America's foreign
> policy in Middle East and Asia." Judicial Watch called for the
> senior Bush to resign from the firm then. "This conflict of
> interest has now turned into a scandal. The idea of the
> President's father, an ex-president himself, doing business
> with a company under investigation by the FBI in the terror
> attacks of September 11 is horrible. President Bush should not
> ask, but demand, that his father pull out of the Carlyle
> Group," stated Judicial Watch Chairman and General Counsel
> Larry Klayman.
> "This has the potential of making 'Billygate' (Jimmy Carter's
> brother's dealings with Libya) look like small potatoes," added
> Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton.
> See "Bin Laden Family Could Profit From a Jump In Defense
> Spending Due to Ties to U.S. Bank," by Daniel Golden, James
> Bandler, and Marcus Walker, The Wall Street Journal,
> 9/28/01(www.wsj.com, subscription required).

6.19.2

so far today is today. at the local convenience store i had a chance to chat with a very nice palastenian clerk there. no politics, but he talked about the difference between daily life here and there. at home during "normal" times he worked in his garden and flower shop until about one in the afternoon, went home, cleaned up, maybe took a short rest, and for the rest of the day lived a life consisting of friends, conversation, etc., the way we once did here in this country. he kept a stack of books by his bed which he read daily. here, he worked and slept a little. no reading. no time.

i once worked with a couple of indians who agreed that here we have a time-based culture, but when they returned to thier villages they enjoyed a relationship based culture, where there was time to visit with friends and family. a disappearing world.

why? profit and big money, speaking of which you might check this (long) piece out: Clamor Magazine - Heir to the Holocaust. ps - the bush dynasty featured.

6.17.2

the 2002 republican strategy as revealed by lost file can be found here. warning: it's a slow loading pdf file. i believe the origional disk lost by an intern contained a powerpoint presentation that the .pdf may be made from. it certainly looks like powerpoint: ugly, klunky, minimum amount of information contained per k.

there are those that think that the wide-spread use of microsoft powerpoint is partly responsible for the lack of real thought in so many institutions: corporations, politics, any large organization where a headline followed by three bulleted generic items passes for discourse. i'm one of them. but i think it's use has just reinforced lack of thought, not caused it.

6.16.2

it has come to my attention that the political and social commentary i used to ramble on about on this site is slowly evaporating. why is this? well, it just seems so distant and unreal to me. the deluge of "current events" has left me behind. none of it seems real.

however there is no doubt that unfortunate things are happening behind the scenes that may impact our daily existence way beyond what is apparent:

the nature of our government and the world of business is changing rapidly. most of these changes are "secret", that is not immediately visible in the public arena. this despite, or because of, the "war" and enron etc.

the neo-democracy that our government is transforming into has more to do with public relations, advertising, and profit than democracy.

the citizenry of USA is in a state of denial about just about everything.

dissenting voices are hard to hear.

most folks are willingly ignorant of some of the most extreme changes the country has ever experienced.

but even those of us who refuse to think are feeling the pressure and "wrongness" of the current situation.

the underlying unease of the current situation can be felt by all, but is attributed to the wrong sources.

the country has been taken over by the mega-rich in a very real way - most of them have been working on this for a long time, and their time has come.

profit justifies anything, including secrecy and manipulation of an uncomfortable but compliant populace.

6.15.2

Plastic: PwC Consulting Changes Name To: Monday
Awesome Gary keeps it appropriately brief: "The consulting arm of PricewaterhouseCoopers, has decided to change it's name to Monday."

6.14.2

i took my daily walk today for the first time this year. flowers are blooming and it's not winter. hope i can get back into this habit.

No More Mr. Nice Guy!
Take the No More Mr. Nice Guy! Self-Assessment

Plutocracy and Politics
a ny times piece on kevin phillips new book "wealth and democracy". he seems to be saying that the out-of balance present situation and cultural denial that this is so doesn't look good for the future of democracy. and it doesn't, does it?

6.13.2

watercolor i painted for my dad - father's day
haven't been thinking about anything much lately. except the thought that thoughts are disguised emotions and emotions are disguised...something. i recall james hillman saying something along the lines that the subtle body we hear so much about from various sources may be the somatic unconciousness. stuff like that.

6.11.2

last week's ink
todays plan is to finish watercolor and get it in mail for father's day. and add a few more scribblings to manuscript of odd notes i have found in my pockets and other places over the last 2 years. then i think i will hide under bed for a few days.

received an interesting petition fowarded by tucker, "not in our name". excerpts:

----------------------------------------
A STATEMENT OF CONSCIENCE
NOT IN OUR NAME

Let it not be said that people in the United States did nothing when their government declared a war without limit and instituted stark new measures of repression.

The signers of this statement call on the people of the U.S. to resist the policies and overall political direction that have emerged since September 11, 2001, and which pose grave dangers to the people of the world...
[snip]
...But the mourning had barely begun, when the highest leaders of the land unleashed a spirit of revenge. They put out a simplistic script of good vs. evil that was taken up by a pliant and intimidated media. They told us that asking why these terrible events had happened verged on treason. There was to be no debate. There were by definition no valid political or moral questions. The only possible answer was to be war abroad and repression at home...
[snip]
...In our name, the government has brought down a pall of repression over society. The President's spokesperson warns people to watch what they say. Dissident artists, intellectuals, and professors find their views distorted, attacked, and suppressed. The so-called Patriot Act along with a host of similar measures on the state level gives police sweeping new powers of search and seizure, supervised if at all by secret proceedings before secret courts...
[snip]
...We must take the highest officers of the land seriously when they talk of a war that will last a generation and when they speak of a new domestic order. We are confronting a new openly imperial policy towards the world and a domestic policy that manufactures and manipulates fear to curtail rights.

for more info:
Contact the Not In Our Name statement at: nionstatement@hotmail.com
----------------------------------------

6.10.2

monday morning. if i can finish living maintenance chores today i plan to hibernate for a few days. i've been on the go since last fall when sally my ex-wife was diagnosed with lung cancer. she died early january. my mother died early april. i spent 3 weeks in arizona with my father. a visit to Baba Center was much needed relief. then my daughter was victim/witness in serial-rapist trial. that was over last week. today i want to finish watercolor for my dad (father's day). then i'll hide under bed for a few days.

very useful link for bibliophiles like me:
The Internet Classics Archive: 441 searchable works of classical literature

and some internet pizzaz for you high bandwidth folks:
theculture-simon tyszko

6.9.2

having a nice quiet sunday but did manage to spend the whole day in front of the computer working with songs. here's one:

another interesting link, a little heavy on tech, but something real interesting about old maps:

"...about some stone maps that have been found in China that may date to some 120 million years ago. The map appears to be a topographical relief map done on a scale 1 : 1.1 Kilometers. To blockquote:

The map indicates the use of civil engineering to
create a system of channels about 12,000 km in
length and 500 meters wide, and 12 dams that are
300-500 meters wide.

Their work is being peer reviewed in the scientific community, so there is some hope and reasonable possibility that this is not a hoax."

kuro5hin.org || technology and culture, from the trenches

6.8.2

seen on highway 40, heading west:

"the best things in life
aren't things".

6.7.2

after a long and exhausting trip i am ready to drive back to aville. i visited friends jim and marsha/doug, my children and grandchildren. truck towing and repair was added bonus.

but i spent most of the time in a hillsboro courtroom. serial rapist dwayne edwards was convicted yesterday. my daughter was one of the victims and a witness.

the wait for a verdict, the reading of the verdict, and the sentencing was highly emotional and brought tears to many eyes including my own. the other victims, their families, the assitant DA and his staff, the detectives, and the ladies of the rape crisis center were all great people who went beyond the call of duty in the interests of justice. the judge said the system worked. it would not have worked without these folks

story

6.2.2

after a long day yesterday of phone calls and waiting 2 hours for a tow truck, i said let's do it tomorrow. i didn't feel well at all during the whole day, reckon it's from the 2 or 3 preceding days, too much exhaustion, even tho i've been sleeping well.

woke up early and painted a watercolor i would very much like to finish because i've got another to paint right after it.

truck towed to tim's auto shop, they've already got the clutch fixed, it was the master cylinder so i guessed right on that. but it won't turn over, starter motor is asleep. i think it has something to do with electricity, not the starter motor. but then doesn't everything?

6.3.2

the content of this blog suddenly shifts (again) (no pun intended) today to the personal foibles of yours truly. truck quit at eli's out in the country, had it towed into the urban remainder of chapel hill usa yesterday. i think the clutch master/slave cylinders, or at least one of them, is kaput. no loss of fluid. trying to monkey with it early sunday morning i somehow activated the do not start if not in neutral or clutch depressed interlock so now it won't turn over.

as soon as i sign off here i begin the find-a-shop-to-fix-it routine. breaking down on the road has it's own quality. it could be worse, i unloaded all my camping gear and toys (guitar, shortwave radio, watercolors) which are temporarily housed in daughter nicole/husband doug's garage. trial in hillsborough plods on. if i am still here when final arguments, summations, whatever they are called take place i'll attend. meanwhile it's off to the world of auto repair.

6.1.2

sunday evening, parked under a tree at my son eli melissa, and grandaughter lily's. big rain storm finally got here, i hope it cools the sultry weather. i am experiencing some kind of clutch linkage problem, will look carefully at it in the am when i can think (i hope). big decision coming as to whether to nurse it back to asheville or (shudder) try and get it fixed in foreign country (chapel hill usa).

i am here because my daughter is a witness, along with two other women, in a rape and assault trial. spent some of thursday and a lot of friday at trial. the defense is hitting on the police procedures:

"you mean you didn't keep your hand written-notes after you input them into computer??!!"

answer i hope is given next week:"no, i am trained to take notes and create reports from them".

the defense objected non-stop to the reading of any police report that quoted anyone unless it was corraberating (i'm on the road - don't know how to spell this) someone's testamony. the judge sustained these objections.

i'm not a lawyer but i play one on tv. why can't a police report, filed on a certain date, be read in court, presented as what it is, a police report, a"snapshot" of what the police thought was going on at the time?

anyway to see a lawyer doing his business picking apart methods of work on a highly technical and arcane basis instead of dealing with the suspect's guilt or innocence is a sorry sight indeed. he is a public defender and "just doing his job". see article in durham herald.

5.31.5

i'm at jim c.'s typing this and the keyboard is doing strange things. jim says that taking typing is what makes going to high school worthwhile. this is about word wrapping or word rapping so it just keeps going.

5.30.2

i'm at eli, melissa, and lily's. overcast heavy day. will visit with nicole this afternoon i hope.
meanwhile been looking at this site with ie/windows. definite problem with quictime (even after updating it. what's wierd is sometimes the midis play and sometimes they dont. and picture below (hill.jpg) doesn't show. will fix the latter, hum a little about the latter.

5.29.2

i'm off to chapel hill for the next 7 or so days. hope to visit a lot of friends. my 3 children, -in-laws and 2 grandchildren are all going thru a lot of changes and i hope to have some quiet time with them all.

here's a quickie i did early this morning. some mornings the quickest way for me to get going is to work with the muse:

and here's a midi file i just did. will switch to mp3's soon; this will take a lot of the guesswork out of what you hear.

now i gotta get outa here, i'm running late.

5.27.2

pleasant afternoon at the reilys. i don't have much to say these days so i'm dipping into my collection of random scribbles. here's one i found today.

"you cant have your question and answer it too.
i knew too far when i knew it was you.
three am madness weathers the storm.
already gladness is fading a form.
i walk without magic without a care.
because if im here you must be there."

5.25.2

memorial day weekend - heading out to party at john r.'s. i've been dinking around with blog archive formatting all morning. still isn't making any sense. for such a "laid back" guy i must have a touch of compulsevness because simple curiousity could not drive a person to spend so long tapping at the keyboard with such a beautiful day waiting outside.

5.244.2

now here is a home page that is to be admired. check out the stuff on the working world.

"a platform for self-expression"
analyticalQ presents self-expression, world travel, flexibility

5.24.2

here's an item i stumbled across; something we all already know i guess. wonder why it's news?

ABCNEWS.com : Hippie Culture Just Keeps Truckin' On
"The truth of the matter is that there are literally millions of people in this country who still live with and are interested in the ideals of the counterculture."

maybe the interesting part about this item is how we as a culture recycle the past, usually turning it into a cartoon in the process. time keeps movin' on.

5.222.2

interesting item:

from Letters to the Editor, The New York Times, May 21, 2002:

To the Editor:

It was perceptive of President Bush to discover that "second-guessing"
the president is "second nature" in Washington (front page, May 18).
It's called presidential accountability.

The Constitution gives every member of the Senate and the House - not
merely the members of the toothless intelligence committees - the right,
even the responsibility, to question, censure and criticize an unduly
arrogant, incompetent or secretive president, to advise him, to investigate him, to subpoena, debate, denounce, impeach or even second-guess him.

After President Richard M. Nixon sought to be above all that, James
Mann, a South Carolina Democrat, warned his colleagues on the House
Judiciary Committee considering Nixon's impeachment, "If there is no
accountability, another president will feel free to do as he chooses."

If Congress fails to second-guess the president, the press will. That's
also in the Constitution.

TED SORENSEN
New York, May 20, 2002

The writer was special counsel to President John F. Kennedy.

5.22.2

i got back from the Baba center last night. delightful, extrordinary visit, the first in over 30 years that i have made. i was asked repeatedly why it took me so long to come back and all i could say was "time". i finished the watercolor above while i was there - it is not of the center which is a very beautiful place; i hope some of the photos i took while wondering around i can turn into watercolor. i met a lot of new and old (sometimes both) friends there.

meanwhile i gotta do laundry.

5.17.5

leaving for a 6 hour drive to the Meher Baba Center in myrtle beach sc. i'll be back monday.

meanwhile here is an email fowarded to me by tucker clark. pay attention:
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Dear Mr. Gephardt,

Today's news says you are about to convene inquiry into what the Bush
administration knew of possible terrorist plans before September 11.

To which I say, Finally! Thank goodness someone in Congress is waking up
enough, and summoning enough courage in the face of seriously slanted
polls, to start questioning.

While you're putting together your questions, you might consider these
points:

1. the Bush family-Bin Laden family connections

2. the Bush family (father and son) and Carlyle Group connections

3. the Bin Laden support for Dubya's first job in the oil business

4. Bush hosting the Taliban in Texas in 1995 in an effort to gain
approval for a trans-Afghanistan pipeline

5. the Unocal connection, including Karzai

6. Bush's continued support of the Taliban right up until early
September

7. the recent announcement that Unocal is, after all, going to be able
to build a pipeline across Afghanistan, now that there is an amenable
government in Kabul

8. the real question: what deal went so wrong that Bin Laden wants to
kill a lot of people for it?

No, I am not a black-helicopter conspiracy theorist, but I do read the
news from sources other than the very narrow reporting of the Washington
press corps, and I put together the pieces, and I ask questions.

Millions of other Americans are asking these questions, too, worried
about where their government is headed and why their civil rights are
being abridged. If the Dems are going to be anything other than a lapdog
for Bush and Ashcroft, they'd better start asking tough questions, as
well.

Sincerely,

Mary Grace Butler

5.14.2

a look at the (possible) self-organizing principle that may happen in the weblog world. like so many things on the web today, this involves google:

"The bloggers have the potential to do something far more original than offer up packaged opinions on the news of the day; they can actually help organize the Web in ways tailored to your minute-by-minute needs."
Salon.com Technology | Use the blog, Luke

and another google wrinkle:
net art : adwords happening

5.13.2

here's a pen and ink and watercolor i did recently while in arizona.

here's a huge and (to me) interesting site, lots of odds and ends, james hillman is highly visible, probably needs to be taken in small doses: Archetypal Psych Talk

5.10.2

had a great morning and a dark, moody afternoon. what's up? i got to thinking a little about jung's typology and the myers-briggs personality test. the personality types that jung posited are not set in concrete, and he was the first to say they represented just one useful way to look at personal temperments.

i have taken the Myers-Briggs test over a 30 year period, and the results are always the same: INFP. so what?

well "know thyself" seems to take all the time in a liftime, besides it can be kind of fun to decode this information; almost none of the attributes mean what you think they mean.

whole lot of stuff about this here: The Psychology of C.G. Jung Body and Temperament Types of W. H. Sheldon.
5.10.5

5.10a.5

new search engine; a little buggy on my system, ithe idea is to present google search results (ranked by traffic) combined with statistics on the site, plus user reviews. if the reviews catch on, that is if users take the interest and time to review the site, it might turn out in time to be interesting and maybe even useful:
Alexa Web Search - In Association with Amazon.coms

5.10.2

speaking of swarms, check this out :BioMedNet News and Comment

5.8.2

i love this kind of headline; maybe it's the use of the ex-oxymoron "swarm intelligence". my swarm intelligence reminds me that the opening line of one of tom dellilo's books is: "the future belongs to the crowd".

Swarm Music is believed to be the first application of swarm intelligence to music.

5.7.2

still don't have much to say. installed new memory in G3. took a walk and some pictures of flowers. put the 10th wash down on a watercolor. if i weren't trying to slim down the number of books to read in my old age, i'd add a bunch of these:
The Professor's Bookshelf: Recommended Reading Charles T. Tart Home Page and Consciousness Library Online

5.7.2

added a new midi file to multimedia section. my latest theory: midi files and mov files play fine on macs (via quicktime). on windows, midi files play via MS media player (altho i'm not sure what voices it uses) or some other midi internet helper app. movies play only if QuickTime is loaded (80% of PCs last count).

so maybe you want to do something collabortive with your computer. (i do). link below might do the trick, altho i'd rather my digital machine be used to predict meme patterns (or something like that).

BBC News | SCI/TECH | Worldwide weather watchers wanted

5.6.2

i'm finding it hard to write about anything because it all just seems the same. an endless wind of sameness. so i'll guess i'll do the quote thing while i'm banging out the shape of this blog.

Quotes "Memory believes before knowing remembers."
-William Faulkner

5.5.2

back home in the bunker.

thinking about how i avoid talking about the personal on this site. a virtual denmark. but maybe some sort of narritive will emerge.

this dicussed in general in interesting interview of blogger creator ev:

"And for day-to-day intelligence gathering and staying informed, amused, or even entertained, browsing a few blogs from well-informed, articulate, like-minded people who are out there finding things that may be interesting to you and commenting on them is way more efficient and rewarding than going from news site to news site."

..."Also, not being afraid to add your own personality is important. A big part of what attracts people to blogs is their personal nature, as opposed to corporate media, but some people aren't comfortable enough to let themselves show, so they tend to be less interesting than they could be."

on the other hand, there's this - seems like a joke now but might become...something new in a new world:BBC News | SCI/TECH | Here come the ratbots

5.4.2

cool. someone told me today this site was reviewed. probably he forgot address, tried search engine, and found this review.

i think it's pretty fair.

[BTW i was suppossed to review "dramimine" which i did but never put it up because of mother's death and lack of time. will fix thix.]

"thinking outloud" is i believe mentioned, and that is what i guess i am doing. not only does this demonstrate the pointlessness of thinking, but also samuel butler's quip:"life is like learning to play the violin on stage in front of a packed audience" comes to mind.

cause i don't know what this site is for. never have. just some blips off the top of my head, don't know how to document minute-by-minute life with words, more twinkle and blinkle needed to comminicate mood, perplexity, muse beyond words, cold eye on passing scene. passing very fast. sprinkle with images that have arrived from somewhere special delivery.

in arizona i hope to record my father who in mid 80's is youngest of 4 living brothers and sisters. want to talk to them all together at rosie's (the eldest) 90th birthday this december. now that would be content, because the world we each live in is in the process of dissappearing fast. whether written text can preserve part of these worlds is an open question but i like the idea of doing it just for the doing of it. (BTW our turn to lose our world is next.)

daughter nicole phoned tonight, her testimony not required till june trial rather than next week.so i'm not leaving monday for chapel hill and moral support which is a blessing. i need some free recovery minutes.

in order to keep off the streets the rest of the year my program is to 1) fix midis and quicktimes so they'll play under windows; 2) link image archive thumbnails to bigger images; and 3) watch my nails grow, watch my breath, learn some music; and 4) be ambivalant about death.

5.2.2

Modern Peasant is Back

been in arizona since the 12th of april. mom's funeral and spent some time with my father who needs a little moral support but i think he is going to be all right, has clear priorties and knows what he will have to do, for example flying again, getting out a little. he knows it will all take time.

saw lots of relatives and friends. enjoyed meeting patrick and kathy and hannah in prescott. seeing cousin joe who i see once every 15 years, hope we can make it sooner next time. pleasant visit with sister jane, husband fred and children jon and anne in phoenix. thanks much to ann and janet for a very fiendly and peaceful bar b q send off.

jet lag is a lot like confusion; something is different but i'm not sure what. above watercolor painted on dad's front porch. cold turkey on computer time but did find out that midi and quicktime i have up is not playing well at all under windows. will fix.

4.19.5

i'm in prescott az updating this thing thanks to my father's neighbors katy and patrick. i arrived last monday (i think). my mom's funeral was last thursday; it was a roman catholic service - mom converted last year - first time i have been in a roman catholic church in 30 years or so. service was very nice, preacher was great (i guess i should call him a "priest", southern roots showing).


i'm staying awhile with my dad who is doing really well under the circumstances. i'll be here until last week in april, maybe first week in may. i need to be back in chapel hill nc by the 6th of may for a trial my daughter nicole is testifying in; she needs moral support.


been trying to paint the western mountain landscape, very different than smoky mountain green. will visit some relatives in phoenix i don't see often enough before i leave. after that "the future is uncertain, the end is always near" (jim morrison). reading "the crackup" by f. scott fitzgerald. a couple of chapters in it are the best thing he ever wrote in my opinion. aftermath stuff, after it's all (almost) over. here's a sample:

"i felt; therefore i was"


not as negative in it's context, but something to think about. i'll post more about it later. gotta go now and catch a coyote.

4.7.2

Modern Peasant on Hiatus
back april 29th.

going to arizona to attend mom's funeral and spend some time with my dad. meanwhile, here's the word on my week.

i don't speak astrology, but this guy seems to hit the nail on the head quite often. rob brezsney:"free will astrokogy". i believe that dealing with the realities is a good thing to do, depending... but maybe all at the same time is not such a good idea. i also believe this is the artist's delimma.

4.4.2

Winona Parsons
my mother passed away last night. she was a unique lady. she fought cumulative heart problems right up to the end. she knew what she was up against but never gave up. may she rest in peace.

"I rise above the crescent moon to the seven stars, beyond the history of man, beyond numbers and words that bind us. From the earth I rise like a falcon of gold released from a blue egg. I fly above and below the great worlds. I take the shape of a young girl working. In my belly I carry the seed that becomes me. Praise the corn that rots and the sedge that rises. Praise the emerald heart of earth. Praise the coming and going of creatures, the constancy of the world and the word.

I come from light and to light I return. My talons grasp the ring of colors: the gold beak of dawn, the blue eye of day , the deep red blood of dusk . I rise . In truth I burst on the world like an arrow flung from darkness, sparks of fire from my forehead like burning stars streak the sky. I gather myself, thought and bone, and burst again into flight. I soar and know the god who speaks with the voice of flame.

I am one of the great ones sitting in a field of corn. I eat and I am nourished. In turn I offer myself, the bread of air, the white spirit of fire. I am a falcon of gold. I burn with a passion and lie still . I flare and smolder, live and die in a breath. I sail on gold wings that fan the blaze. I am consumed by fire. This is what I was born to do: to live, to love, to know, to change and embrace the infinite. I shall not forget my becoming."

from "awakening osiris: the egyptian book of the dead" translated by Normandi Ellis.

4.3.2

about the middle east today i'm speechless. about the citizens of the usa and israel i'm stunned. so much doublespeak. we're paying for the distruction of a people.

yesterday when i noted that bush was "a jingle a day" man, i meant that in this time of disintegrating public discourse when we could use someone like charles barkley to stand up and talk sense, we have instead president bush who seems to get programmed each day to say one snippet, slogan, glib alliterative phrase over and over and over until the next day. i'm sure his handlers are from the ad world where the same principle has been gradually eroding the minds of "the consumer" for some time now. hitler used the Big Lie. today the powers that be in the usa (and believe me, they do be) use the little, short, catchy lie repeated endlessly for a heartbeat until the next one is churned out.

have a nice day.

4.2.2

maybe i'm not seeing what is happening in the middle east clearly. to me the problem seems simple, though not the answer. a people from far away dispossess another people, takes their land, fields, and homes, and puts the inhabitants in refugee camps. they do this on the on the authority of god. the victims and fair-minded onlookers see it as unfair.

the initial dispossession is done with the help of a few powerful nation states, and the invaders are continually financed and assisted by the world's most powerful nation state.

it might be worth mentioning here something from tom friedman's book "the lexus and the olive tree":

"if you planted a tree between jerusalem and tel aviv, visit it soon. it may not be there much longer because by 2020 the area from haifa to tel aviv to jerusalem is likely to become one big, seamless urban megalopolis. israelis are building as if they lived in australia-more is better, bigger is better, wider is better. if current population trends continue, israeli, outside the negev desert, will soon be one of the most densely populated countries in the world." (p.309)

and now they finish off the refugee camps, shutting down (or worse) arafat while blaming him and his people for the whole rout. and this from the people who invented the mossad and the stern gang.

so what is absolutely the worst thing about this horrible mess? there are a lot of candidates but my vote goes to the american citizen who seems to listen to "a jingle a day" bush and beam at the atrocities being committed right now. you've heard of the "good germans" during WWII, the stable, conventional citizens who went about their business while the jews were being exterminated? the "good americans" who ignore the sordid, prolonged, and vicious treatment of a people being eradicated are much worse. the germans could not see the warsaw ghetto destruction while it was happening

enough. i'm going to go watch disneyland.

4.1.2

i'm back home and glad to be. heard via electronic grapevine that there was concern for my health because my recent posts have been so short. i'm fine. the reason posts have lacked customery incisive commentary is that i've been camped out in 4 cylinder yurt for 6 of the last 11 days (where i sketched the scene above). also engaged in a lot of projects all of a sudden:

• paint watercolor landscapes, print via giclee, sell, pay bills.
• kludging together some kind of digital recording/mixing setup, operating out of my hip pocket
• programming various little utitlities and applets using realbasic. definite challange for dyslexic like myself
• edit and print book of 150 ditties i have accumulated, later add color a la "illustrated rumi"
• finish image archive links

so tommorrow back to the digital grindstone with the question "how is rumala 2002 different from warsaw ghetto whatever year that was?"

3.28.2

leaving in the morning for chapel hill where i hope to spend a little time with children and grandchildren. today i picked up a giclee (accent over the last "e", i'll figure out later how to put it on the page) print of five of my pictures, pretty impressive. i'll be using this technique to produce western north carolina landscapes, soon i hope. there are still some missing pieces in my repetoire at this point.

this morning i found the following scribbled on a piece of paper laying around the place; so far i've found over 150 of these things and will publish if i ever find the last one:

a wink of the eye
a flash in the pan
there i was
and here i am

god's odd moments
in between
breath heading south
if you know what i mean

it seems apparent
there's noone there
to answer the door
to god knows where

3.27a.2

last thursday morning i was waiting with my packed truck to meet some folks and caravan down to a retreat in ga. they were a little late, it was a beautiful morning, so i stood outside and leaned against the truck drinking coffee. off in the distance i saw a figure jump down from a parked semi with a beard and a backpack. young man. eventually he passed me and i asked "where you headed?" he stopped and said "the strip".

now this was happening in asheville NC, and the only 2 strips i know are commercial, huge, ugly, sprawling, and uneccessary. which i told him. "no, no" he said, "you know, where the hippies are".

"you want to go downtown", i said, and pointed out the way.

"i read about it in rolling stone", he continued. "i'm from topeka. i was too late for the height".

i thought what a wonderful country and western song might be made of his last sentence and replied "you better hurry".

3.27.2

got hit with some kind of bug: sore throat, crossed-eyes, etc. probably something just "goin araound", like the earth. still can't watch the mediated snooze, i mean news, so not a lot to say about it.

altho it does occur to me that the catholic church shenannigans, the enron mess, the anderson accounting firm brou-haha and all the other institutional melt-downs happening today involve the loss of suspended disbelief by the public/consumer/audience/viewer. the difference between the way it's done and the way it is said it is done is dissolving. not fast enough in my opinion to free up some energy for important tasks like saving the world.

3.26.2

i'm trying to get back to thoughtful (?) observations about our world. maybe that's an oxymoron. two things are delaying this:

1) devolution into techno-marathons involving computer memory, software patches, debugging, digital recording, etc. which have of late kept me locked in front of a monitor; and

2) i've been in the woods and missed sam donaldson last sunday.

from the news i've gathered in the wind (kurt vonnigut called it "visceral knowledge", ie you don't need mediated news to know what's happening) (apologies to bob dylan) i would say:

arafat's days are numbered. it's a done deal. i repeat what i said earlier, that in this day and age the fact that god tells you someone else's land is yours does not justify what isreal is doing. admittedly it is too late to be undone, but an apology is in order to the people they dispossessed and put into refugee camps. after that the isreal could share the land with the people who hold deeds to it, ie palastinians. in fact share their homes. i am not being flip, the palastinians are an honorable people who would respond in kind. sort of like they are doing today.

the saddest thing about this situation is that mediated reality does not include this point of view. so many people, like the "good germans" during wwii, keeping silent. afraid of being labeled antisemite i guess. i'm not and never have been. but fair is fair.

on a lighter note check out Robot Wisdom Weblog. concise, direct, current, informative. what "the news" could be.

3.25.2

made it back from Meher Baba Southeast Gathering in Toccoa Ga. late last night. i camped out for 3 nights, very cold, below freezing. great setting, river, rocks, mountains. trees just begining to bud out. very relaxing, timely break for me, enjoyed both mehera and ursula's talks, thought the guy who played jimi hendrix on a ukulele was outa sight. a lot of old and new friends. stopped on way back in jackson county where i lived when the earth was cooling and had pleasant visit with old friends john and cookie for the first time in a veeeery long time.

3.20.2

it's a hurry up day for me, watercolor class and pack truck. i'll be camping out for 3 days in toccoa ga. i'm leaving in the morning and i'll be back in my world sunday evening, march 24th. meanwhile i just found a whole bunch of watercolors, not sure when i did them.

3.19.2

gloomy day. we're on the edge of all that southeast flooding. spent the morning organizing "stuff" for 3 day retreat out in the mountains later this week. fixed incipient disk problem, it went well thank goodness, no marathon required.

as far as the "real" world goes, i heard a little something about there being no guarantee that the government must be truthful in dealing with it's citizens. works both ways i guess.

3.17.2

somewhere in the last couple of days i have noticed that the govt vs anderson accounting or whatever it's official name is has stirred up the question of how do corporations and people differ, or to put it another way, how are they the same? should the corporation be indicted for obstructing justice, or a few humans that worked for the corporation?

i recall running into the same question when i worked for intel corp., and was astounded to learn that from a legalistic point of view, humans and corporations have a lot in common: they both can buy, sell, own, sue, etc. of course corporations can theoretically live for ever and we humans can't.

the bad thing is that the "official" global culture has reduced concensus-reality to that of the corporate. anything in the human world that once would have distinguished it from the corporate is regarded as unreal, or at least not very important. these things include conciousness, imagination, creativity, self-expression, and perhaps some relation to the invisible world.

3.16.2

going to try some Giclee printing today. i'll let you know how it goes.

Q: "We could also put it this way: What do you know that the Buddha doesn't?"
A: "How to drive a Jeep."

from an interesting and perplexing interview by a new name to me, KenWilber

3.15.2

description for my activities for this week and the near future (from "free will astrology" column by rob brezseny) and before you ask no i don't particularly believe or speak astrology but i enjoy his weekly column.

tinkering = puttering = doing stuff with no fixed agenda and vague curiosity: creative meditation at the speed i'm most comfortable with.

3.14.2

today i'll be reformatting this site a tad. so you may get some funny stuff here for a few hours.

soon i will get back to slightly askew and very much passing comments on the passing scene. like arafat being shoved, possibly terminally, off the world stage by isreal. or the approaching action against saddam. the "emerging contaminants" phenomena.

or the more mundane. when i was in the old folks home at the collage, harvard coop bookbags suddenly became very popular. it was the beginning of people having to have lots of stuff with them as they went about thier business.

years later (now) kids carry backpacks, biz denizens have thier compulsary attache cases and daytimers, the invisible people (read homeless) have their plastic garbage bags and grocery carts, and everyone has a cell phone. the proliferation of "stuff" has become so extreme that you can't leave home without some of it.

son eli's old woodshed, chatham county

3.12.2

modonna of low res heaven
this picture is many years old, so i guess it's understandable i lost the source file and had to rebuild it from index color gif.

no breakthroughs today, altho i did get my emailer back up and running.

quote of the day, many meanings, altho i can't think of one:

"all the business of war, and indeed all the business of life, is to endevour to find out what you don't know by what you do; that's what i called 'guessing what was on the other side of the hill'." - duke of wellington

3.11.2

email is down but by jumping thru hoops backwards i can still grab them. so keep those letters, emails, doodles, songs of glory, and dour observations rollin in and first thing tommorrow i'll fix something, anything that crosses my path, and maybe even fix email too.

ran into an "activist-survivalist" today while working on my truck. she lives "off the grid". i want to relay to you her favorite bumper sticker. it may become a meme (Memes are contagious ideas) if its not one already:

denial is not a river in africa

3.10.2

yesterday was another fun day in the 22nd century. my email totally flaked out. i figured i could fix it without to much fuss, but it's still broke today. at the same time i was attempting to install OMS midi driver on another computer and it isn't quite right yet. on the other hand i finally finished a watercolor i don't like (they are the hardest to finish.) worked on camper, getting ready for a trip in a few weeks. pleasant visit by old friend J.R. and best of all talked to my daughter nicole on the phone.

today is another beautiful sunny day which i will probably spend most of making things right on computers.

meanwhile here is some food for thought i stumbled on:

"He [james hillman] writes that the image, although it is a snapshot of a personally inflected archetypal process, is not static. He quotes Ezra Pound: "...the image is more than an idea. It is a vortex or cluster of fused ideas and is endowed with energy....a vortex, from which and through which and into which, ideas are constantly rushing."

from an article by Cliff Bostock. Towards a Jungian Psychology of Technology ( 1989, p. 264)

3.9.2

reading "only yesterday - an informal history of the 1920's" by frederick lewis allen. it's about the 20's in america, and was published in 1931 so he was there and memories were fresh. amazingly accurate in retrospect and relevant to today. here's a quote:

"...james truslow adams lamented in the atlantic monthly, 'i am wondering, as a personal but practical question, just how and where a man of moderate means who prefers simple living, simple pleasures, and the things of the mind is going to be able to live any longer in his native country.'" interesting question, only today it would probably be phrased "live any longer in this world".

3.8.2

i'm typing this while i watch folks work in space. and listen to their conversation. since i am over 20 years old this amazes me.

i try to post thoughts, observations, and visuals on this daily log, not too much on my daily life, what i ate for lunch and so forth.

but yesterday i got two emails and had a subsequent conversation that seemed to point out that i was a monastic recluse.

this was all light-hearted no doubt but did give me pause for thought. because i am sort of an accidental monastic recluse. it's time to take time to hunker down, lay low, be quiet. i don't know why. and though i value my friends more than almost anything else, i don't see much of them.

now that i know this, what to do? get out of the house more often i guess, excercise my atrophied social instincts. i guess i need a laptop.

3.7.2

"It may seem strange to imagine the blogging community as a force that will shape the information environment almost as powerfully as corporate media. We learn in the history books about Samuel Morse's invention of the telegraph but not about the thousands of operators who shaped the circulation of messages."
from an optimistic article in Technology Review - Blog This

3.6.2

man i'm so tired i can't think straight. i hope this is not a permanent situation. i know this weblog is scattered all over the place but hey, that's life (literally).

the war against terrorism is an evolution of the war against drugs. the concept i mean, not a war between nation states but between a nation state and...something else.

afghanistan is a part of the world tom friedman calls "the slow world" that he correctly points out will probably not survive the globalization of post-modern capatilism.

the inhabitants can wait. and wait. american troops on the ground there is a tough proposition, a scary situation for the troops. it seems as if their hi-tech arsenal may be too fast, whiz right by the enemy hunkering down in some of the most rugged terrain in the world where they have been at home since g.khan was finally stopped there.

i really dislike the way mr. bush and cohorts are handling this, making radical changes in the machinery of government that the public does not know about. he really hit the ground running with his dad's country club friends who had had a few years to brood and plot. it's all a big secret. need to know. what they don't understand is we all need to know.

we're following the war via standard neo-republican protocol, a sentence a day, the more cliche the better, repeated ad nauseum. it's not a war: it's a secret government plan. and then 9-11 happens and everything is justified.(excuse me for a minute while i gulp down a pill for paranoia).

the 9-11 attack helped bush justify secrecy and maintain popularity.

there is no doubt that some kind of action is called for, but prehaps a slower, evolving action involving personal values and clear discourse rather than wham-bam you're history (forgotten history at that, if there is such a thing. and there is. the 20th century world pioneered it.)

these guys have become a meta-class. you know them. might even want to be one of them. every now and then they slip up, like on the nixon tapes recently released in which billy graham explains to mr nixon that the jews don't know what he really thinks of them, he talks one way to them but thinks they are ruining the country. and mr graham is not nearly in the class of, say cheyney. you hear this kind of quiet discussion at the golf games where the powerful dress up in wierd garb, pose and bluster, drink, wheel and make deals.

i don't like these guys and if the world comes apart at the seams they are the aristotilian efficient cause. something far deeper than this is the formal cause so these 21st c. rubes are being used to destroy not only my world but my experience of myself.

enough babble. here's a quote:

"however entrancing it is to wonder unchecked through
a garden of bright images, are we not enticing your
mind from another subject of almost equal importance."
ernest bramah 1868-1942.

notice the "almost".

3.5.2

5AM this morning i'm either dreaming or listening to NPR or both. a young lady who seemed to have about 5 years in the corporate world and is currently unemployed was talking about how happy she and her friend's in a similar situation were. walking the dog, spending time in coffee shops, gradually disengaging from the american nightmare. time, in fact, was her main point. she now had time instead of the hysterical go-go-go of almost any professional life. it was encouraging to hear this from a temporary refugee from the adrenalized stage-set we in the 22nd century call "the world".

picture of man wondering what's going on in the office

3.4.2

today i spent in the technical realm. still trying to use earthlink who seem to have a major problem with my logon. worked on image archive - it's gonna take awhile. went to kinko's and printed 2 restored photos of my grandfather's for my mother. one was perfect, i came home and just finished redoing the second. worked on a minute and a half quicktime movie. refreshed watercolor palette for 4 landscapes i'll do next.

i don't have much of a life besides this stuff at present. so as far as the economy, the world we have made (largely invisible to the normal mind: it's like disneyland, all the action is hidden), endrun, pseudo-war, and so on i guess i need to poke my head outdoors and "follow my nose" as mr. dylan recently allowed.

3.3.2

dinner in outer space

3.2a.2

i've added more muzak to the multlimedia section. i need a better name for this section. if i am really lucky a quicktime movie will be up in same section by tomorrow. meanwhile another art object right here:

Mount Athos

2.2.2.

i'm trying to fix a troublesome picture on opening archive page. i think i need to post something, anything, to make it work and this is it.

3.2.2

another older picture included here for later picture archiving:

i'm throwing a bit too much into this blog. someday i may split it into 2 sites: text and porfolio of pictures, multimedia fragments, wierd sounds etc. i do like to break up page with pictures, but i'm stretching it, i don't think blogger is designed to accomodate all of this. however i think it will work. we'll see.

i really want to get back to posting cosmic (or is it cosmetic?) notions. (funny the words both have the same greek root).

i want to get into image and text, their differences, some unintended consequences of them both in the past. also the idea of "image" found in some (not all) writings by jung, hillman, and corbin.

they seem to think that the unconcious has an infinite abitiy to create images, a regular image factory. these inexhaustible images bombard us, and behind each is a larger, more fundimental, inaccessible but universal (eternal?) archtype. we can't experience the archtypes except indirectly, they are not images themselves. {lots more later). [note: i am not orthodox anything, just curious.]

3.1.2

good morning. it's time to keep rollin. very cold here at nights (15 degrees), keeping the curtains closed, door blocked, warm inside, it almost reminds me of some other life i lived and the long silent winters. don't get me wrong: i like these kind of days. i've got a bunch done during this week, mostly slow obscure technical gee-gaws upgrading site and stuff, maybe now i can once again dive into daily postings of vaporous factoids about our present condition.

2.28.2

just put another catagory of stuff up top, Animation". midi, quicktime and shockwave files coming.
a fluid hypomaic state is like a vacation to me.

2.28.2

i was looking for something commenting on the usage of the word "image" by jung or hillman. it's not just a picture, it comes from the word "imagination". i found this recent interview by james hillman who is one of the sanest people around, but there is not a whole lot on "image".
"I think we're miserable partly because we have only one god, and that's economics."

" there is an individual image that belongs to your soul."

i will be making 2 changes soon to this log. a place to go for archived pictures and a place to go for archived music, multimedia, probably quicktime and shockwave.

2.27.2

ok here's another midi file - this one in fact all ofem are future soundtracks for some assemblage of sounds, words, sense, nonsense and other stuff. maybe it's a soundtrack to old 30's radio program broadcast one late rainy afternoon. can't quite remember. definitely want to add voices and some kind of low tech low bandwidth screen action. it's found here.

i'll get back to the subject of imagination, thought, and world soon with a little meta-politics and liguistic cyberchance soon. in meantime i guess this just shows again that the busy have no church affilliation. i been busy. no friends either.

2.27.2

i'm still unsure what plain vanilla windows folks get when they try to hear these midi files. any comments? mail me. otherwise check here for windows file players:

Harmony Central�: Windows Software: MIDI File Players

2.26.2

working on web midi is pretty weird, i'm still not getting consistant (listenable over web) files. so here is my latest attempt :

hear

i'm not messin with it anymore today. gotta think about everything fading, the government, the war, the logistics, statistics, heuristics, picture of my grandfather.

2.25.2

Yay the midi link below finally works yippee!! so i've got the pipeline figured out. hours n hours n hours of informal figuring, moments of sheer manipulative boredom, instinctual activities taking the wheel, but what the heck i still got a good deal. you know what i mean, you're an artist too.

go here to hear a midi file i made today. it's experimental so let me know how it works.

you need quicktime. if you have a mac you've got it. if you have a PC you probably don't but can get it here.

chris

2.24.2

here come the graphics i'm dragging from the pix section so i can index them all into one new section. i bet i can make everyone of them better. did this one.

2.24.2

Ken Nordine's Word Jazz wordjazz.com is oh so near. incredable 30 minute multisignal radio programs done in the basement between gigs as audio engineer. you must check these out late at while the lights slowly dim. i heard snatches of nordine here and there several worls ago. he set up resonances still dancing today and he was also funny.

2.24.2

Trying out dreamweaver 4, what a breeze. i will embed a quicktime MIDI file here later today. you should be able to double-click it and hear some of the music i got lost in for the last 4 days.

2.23.2

i'll soon be pulling pictures out of pix section and add them interspersed with text to daily posts like i've been doing with other pictures, then yet another total redo where all pix are findable in text archives. i have to do it because a whirlwind scattered my wits to the ridgetops and my animal cohort told me to put it on the front burner. as near as i can tell he is much more dependable than louis rukhyser (phonetic spelling for the alphabet-dismayed like myself).

2.23.2

nother self-indulgent hyper-driven dream day: did a few phoot restorations for my mother, spent the whole day making 2-5 minute midi tunes that play over the net. i'll putem up soon. finished last of 200 poems and began laying out a book. worked on a painting.

the seasons of hypomania are the glassiest smoothest sailing weather, let the wind catch your sail and you're off. sometimes the impersonality of solitary imaginative work seems kind of sad, but i'm happy to have it. focus on it. find treasure in it (even if for just a moment after 10 consequetive hours of fanatic participation in creation).

it really seems sad only if there is an alternative. there's only one. i heard an irish lady writer on npr yesterday who said how rediculous she would feel chasing at her age what she chased in her 20's and 30's. the only alternative at this point is reality, and it might include things swept under the rug today, like obsessive guilt, creative randomness, messages in the sky, and a dylan song now and then:

"stranded in the city that never sleeps
some of these women really give me the creeps."

2.222.2

The Best Of The Beat Generation - Rhino Featured Product - This looks cool - nice small writeup. one of the tracks is by Ken Nordine. if you've never heard "word jazz" you're missing out on something really beautiful.

2.22.2

there is a backlash today against blogging. the phenomena is too big to ignore, and nobody knows what blogs are for. below is a good straight foward down to earth comment on blogs, bloggers, mass communication, TV and the present:

Blogging: Tune Out and Switch On
"Weblogging is changing our view of the world. Mainly because we are now writing about our own views. Instead of watching the editied for tv version we are taking the time to collect, rearrange, codify and publish our own version of what we see."

2.21.2

The Alphabet versus the Goddess by Leonard Shlain
this is the book mentioned in class yesyerday that set off so many ripples in my mind and probably some others too. i havent't read it. but it concerns my current obsession, the difference between words and images. his thesis seems to be that the influence of the two has alternated, and peace and love happen in the image eras, hunting, wars in text eras. and we are changing from being a test-based culture to an image-based culture. optomistic. interesting to compare with mcluhin.

2.20.2

conversation in watercolor class today: what's with the periodic prohibiton of images down thru history, for instance with the ancient hebrews, islam or the 2 century iconoclastic controversy of the byzantines.

possible answers: the image displaces the reality it is meant to symbolize, and so is an inferior degraded form of reality. we think we need to pay attention to golden calves or lexuses or tennis shoes instead of what is real.

another way to look at it (no pun intended): all psychic process of the human experience are rooted in imagery, including thoughts, emotions, and words, but these cut us off from the image. so we take the former literally. this is the way of carl jung and james hillman.

another: images are created by the imagination, and are inexhaustible. ie they are symbols, not signs. they should not be taken literally. but we do take them literally.

we live in an age where there exist more images than in the rest of history combined. they are beamed into our heads at an excruciating rate. the commercial forces push this ("image is all") ("the sharper image")("image makes you feel better about yourself").

and lastly there is a book, "the goddess and the alphabet" don't know author, who i understand third hand states that in eras of image peace and understanding rule, and in eras of words, rigid and literal, war and destruction occur. i am dubious about this last because 1) words are sprung from images but they are not immediately accessible to us and 2) we live in an unprecedented situation of inundation of images beamed straight to the head by commercial interests and may find that images can have a literal downside just as words have. in your mind's eye can you see the image of the world trade center vaporizing.

2.19.2

i was driving down the street (what else?) today when over the airwaves drifted into my personal space on ad for increasing your vocabulary. can't remember it exactly but it had to do with "impressive" words - why add any other kind to a demented mind? and this system shoots them directly into your mind, no effort, no excercises, no reading.
also a lot of noise was made about how much money these words were worth. true story. meanwhile...

Happy Birthday Saraswati!

"Saintly people and people inclined towards spiritual progress attach great importance to the worship of goddess Saraswati. As a practice, only educated people and men of principle worship goddess Saraswati for spiritual enlightenment. In their opinion, there can be no comparison between the king and the learned or the spiritually advanced. The king is honored within his kingdom, whereas the learned is respected or worshipped throughout the world."
Birthday of the Goddess of Wisdom

on the other hand...

"Asian herbal medicines are currently used by large sections of the population. Because they are not regulated as medicines and are freely available to everyone, serious safety concerns might be associated with these herbal medicines. In this article, evidence suggesting that some Asian herbal medicines contain toxic heavy metals or undeclared prescription drugs is reviewed. In particular, Indian and Chinese preparations have been implicated."
read all about it

2.18.2

last week i spent catching up with long delayed projects. some i started, some i puttered around with. one is a book of art and poems i would like to publish before end of year. so i have been gathering scraps of paper and pages out of various notebboks to transcribe prose snippets. i think i'm finished now (unless i find more), and i have @175 of these things in electronic file. BTW since i am the world's slowest typist i dictated these things using a kludge of software and it worked amazingly well, altho the first rule of digital work applied: the first time you do anything on computer it will take a looooong time. also working on cd-rom photo album of ex-wife sally and children. also working on adding some action to this blog, mutimedia pieces i have scattered about. i'll keep you posted.

doing all this stuff i have discovered various souvenirs of the past. below is an unusal one, part of a paer visa allowing me to visit Mount Athos, the holy mountain, located in greece but like the vatican with it's own government. interesting and instructive 3 weeks:

Athos The Holy Mountain ---- Mount Athos ----- Holy Mountain ----- Agio Oros

2.16.2

LOOSE WIRE -- February 07, 2002:
"Weblogs are where the real action is. They are the creation of individuals, usually musings on national, local or personal events, links to interesting articles, a few lines of comment or discussion collected and presented by one person. Weblogs are a milestone in the short history of the Internet."

i pretty much agree with this short optimistic piece.

for some reason i am reminded of the various characterizations of "the crowd" down through the ages:
"the meek", as in "blessed are"
"hoi polloi"
"serfs"
"peasantry"
"bourgeoisie"
"unwashed masses"
"the electorate"
"john q. public" (going strong when i was born)
"the audience"
"the consumer"

i hope that a newer catagory is rising and that it is more fun, healthy, and fufilling to be in it. will something like weblogs be included? or at least a native language for public discourse not owned by the corporations.

2.15.2

up very early this AM and wandering what to add to today's "mod pez". i have no idea like always - then i stumble on to
Historical Jesus FAQ
"Maybe Jesus is what peasant Jewish Cynicism looked like."

one of my goals this year is to read the bible. i read an awful lot of ancient history, religion, psychology, but never the bible. so i've begun the New International Bible Study Version and it's pretty good. plain english, lots of attention paid to historical narrative structure, about half of each page is footnotes, but interesting footnotes, archeological, linguistic, historic & so on. i'll keep you posted on this project, it's one i'd like to finish.

12.14.2

i've been reading "the lexus and the olive tree" by thomas friedman (see The Washington Monthly review of "The Lexus & the Olive Tree"), a birthday present from my sister (thanks jane). in describing the total victory of the free market system and the varied modes that have sprung up in countries new to it, he states that "lack of transparency" in some of these new markets systems is one of the areas (there are others) that will have to be improved before these systems will work.

"this sort of lack of transparency, notes richard medley, who does political risk analysis for financial houses, is what causes some of the worst stampedes...you go from believing everything to believing nothing. in fact, the paranoid illusionist believes more than nothing-he believes that there are hidden debts and off-the-book liabilities all over the place."

"indeed, one of the things that was first revealed by the 1997-98 asian economic crisis was that most of the Big Five American accounting firms had audited the books of the big asian financial houses that had failed in the crisis-audited them without raising any red flags about their troubles..."

in view of Endrun unraveling, it looks like this applies to the first-world free-market system too, does it not?

2.12.2

i've been in one of my semi-angular oops i mean semi-annual fits of organizing images, photos, drawings, graffitti. the picture below is from 1968! cool, huh?

i did gussy it up a bit when i found it yesterday. it's funny, all day long the subject of the past has come up. the past is another world.

2.11.2

watercolor i painted last week and sent today to my mother for her birthday. i had fun doing this one. it came together fast. words are so much more confusing than images. unless they're spokenwords, when the context is personal. two people talking to each other at 3AM in the night when it's too late for lies. otherwise the world of images says more to me.

2.10.2

"ok what else can you show me?" day of rest but it wasn't. got into boxes of old photos. catagorizing, organizing. not my strong suit. found the picture below, a gum-bichromate print from about 25 years ago. otherwise typical sunday, never spoke to another soul, not even on the telephone. finished watercolor for mom's birthday, which needs to be in mail monday. thought about tweedledee and tweedledum. slept for an hour this afternoon. i sleep different now than i used to: on my back, handsknit together on my chest, don't move much. i used to sleep so restlessly that waking up was like coming to in WWii, wreckage everywhere.

garden bells
in the wind
are silent

2.9.2

The Blog Phenomenon
by john dvorak, gadfly.
fairly pedestrian commentary, another try at figuring out what and why these things exist. gives a little flavor of present state of...something. my own view is that blogs are either 1) to save the world (not the what we call the world, the real world) or 2) the digital equivalent of standing on a street corner mumbling and gesticulating in a language noone else speaks.

2.8.2

the deluge of birthday cards has finally slowed down to a trickle. george w.'s was particularly inoffensive, and the one from "the gang down at endrun's" was a good yuck. barbara walter's was extremelyelegent, but i'm pretty sure it's the same one she's been using for years.

one i liked very much featured this quote by george eliot:

it is never too late to be what you might have been

2.7.2

today is my birthday. we all have one sooner or (more commonly) later.
happy birthday.
all i have to say is (with apologies to dylan thomas):

"...all the gardens
of spring and summer
were blooming
in the tall tales
beyond the border
and under the lark full cloud.
there could i marvel
my birthday away
but the weather turned around."

You Are Here (Really!)

2.6.2

everytime i hear (and i hear this several times most days) that a deal has been transacted "worth several zillion dollars", i ask myself "worth several zillion dollars to whom?"

that's the fatal error with money: what you get for it depends on what the entire population of the earth wants, not what you want. supply (ok) and demand (who is demanding what?)

maybe it's a race: to see if you and i can "simplify" before bizland can "downsize".

2.5.2

BBC News | NEWSNIGHT | Great impact of attacks on America

norman mailer interview on america after 9/11:

"The fact is I don't trust a man who uses the word evil eighteen times in ten minutes," he says.

2.4.2

gladwell dot com / Running from Ritalin
from Running from Ritalin:

"In "Ritalin Nation" the psychologist Richard DeGrandpre argues that Ritalin and A.D.H.D. are the inevitable by-products of a culture-wide addiction to speed--to cellular phones and beepers and faxes and overnight mail and computers with powerful chips and hard-driving rock music and television shows that splice together images at hundredth-of-a-second intervals, and a thousand other social stimulants that have had the effect of transforming human expectations."

2.2.2

the information explosion is not an imagination explosion. if it were you could probably find an answer to this question: what is the ratio of words (spoken, written, printed, electronic) to population today? is it more or less than the same ratio 1000 years ago? 2000 years ago? 10,000? 30,000?

who cares

words are like icebergs - what they are is 9/10 underwater. words per capita have a profound impact on the experience of being human.

2.1.2

mr moore insists on still making sense in a world full of nonsense. no wonder he's funny too: check this out about bush endrun gate: pulitzer material.

http://www.michaelmoore.com/

and for those of you interested in the half-world of the blog, a short and informative article:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/story/0,3605,641742,00.html

otherwise the day went smoothly for the most part with a minimum of biochemical whattzis. got a haircut in a shop still in the 50's, perry como on the am radio. saw jane fonda on good morning america. she and i both look very good for our age, experience, entropy, periodic flame-outs, and soul working overtime (or sleeping it off).