shared between ourselves and death

"We do not suddenly fall on death, but advance towards it by slight degrees; we die every day. For every day a little of our life is taken from us; even when we are growing, our life is on the wane. We lose our childhood, then our boyhood, and then our youth. Counting even yesterday, all past time is lost time; the very day which we are now spending is shared between ourselves and death. It is not the last drop that empties the water-clock, but all that which previously has flowed out; similarly, the final hour when we cease to exist does not of itself bring death; it merely of itself completes the death-process. We reach death at that moment, but we have been a long time on the way."

--Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Ad Lucilium epistulae morales, ca. 65 CE, translated by Richard M. Gummere

Coastline Paradox

"From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

"The coastline paradox is the counterintuitive observation that the coastline of a landmass does not have a well-defined length. This results from the fractal-like properties of coastlines.

"The measured length of a coastline depends on the scale of measurement: the smaller the increment of measurement, the longer the measured length becomes. Since a landmass has features at all scales, from hundreds of kilometers in size to tiny fractions of a millimeter and smaller, there is no obvious limit to the size of the smallest feature that should not be measured around, and hence no single well-defined perimeter to the landmass.

"Over a wide range of measurement scales, down to the atomic, coastlines show a degree of self-similarity, and as the measurement scale is made smaller and smaller, the measured length continues to increase, tending towards infinity.

"An example of the coastline paradox. If the coastline of Great Britain is measured using fractal units 100 km long, then the length of the coastline is approximately 2800 km. With 50 km units, the total length is approximately 3400 km (600 km longer)."

Grande y Felicisima Armada

Defeat of the Spanish Armada

Philip James de Loutherbourg

1740-1812 French/English

"From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

"An attempt to press home the English advantage failed the following year, when a comparable English fleet sailed for Portugal and the Azores in 1589. The Norris-Drake Expedition or English Armada limped home after failing to co-ordinate its strategy effectively with the Portuguese.

"High seas buccaneering and the supply of troops to Philip II's enemies in the Netherlands and France continued, but brought few tangible rewards for England. The Anglo-Spanish War dragged on to a stalemate that left Spanish power in Europe and the Americas dominant."

a grandeur, and unnecessary duplicates

“Seat thyself sultanically among the moons of Saturn, and take high abstracted man alone; and he seems a wonder, a grandeur, and a woe. But from the same point, take mankind in mass, and for the most part, they seem a mob of unnecessary duplicates, both contemporary and hereditary.”

--Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale

Stupid, Greedy, Fat, Stupid Americans

> Subject: FW: OH USA YEAH RIGHT
>
> Right here in our own country:
>
> food banks are empty
>
> unemployment is over 15 million
>
> repossessed homes are at a record pace
>
> probably 1,000,000 in 2010
>
> repossessed cars at a record pace
>
> bank failures almost 2 per week
>
> 401 plans slipping
>
> medical insurance out of sight
>
> No Social Security C.O.L.A. 2010,11,12
>
> Doctors are stopping Medicare patients
>
> Gulf Coast states in deep trouble
>
> Our young men coming home in body
>
> bags from unnecessary wars in record numbers
>
> record numbers of illegals in OUR country.
>
> Our political leadership throughout our
>
> Federal & State level are worthless!!!
>
>
> These are just SOME of the reasons that I
>
> support the information in the copy below.
>
> Please be sure to read the last 4 lines
>
> and see if you WILL pass this along.
>
>
>
> SO 'Pathetically'  TRUE..................
>
> OH USA   YA RIGHT!!
>
>
> We're "broke" & can't help our own Seniors, Veterans, Orphans, Homeless etc.,?????????
>
> In the last month we have provided aid to  Haiti , Chile , and  Turkey .
>
> Our retired seniors living on a 'fixed income'
> receive no aid or get any breaks while our
> government and religious organizations pour
> Hundreds of Millions of $$$$$'s and Tons of Food to Foreign Countries!
>
> We have hundreds of adoptable children who are shoved aside to make room for the adoption of foreign orphans.
>
> USA a country where we have homeless without shelter,  children going to bed hungry,
> elderly going without 'needed' meds, and
> mentally ill without treatment -etc,etc.
> YET...................
> They have a 'Benefit' for the people of  Haiti
> on 12
> TV stations, ships and planes lining up with food, water, tents clothes, bedding,
> doctors and medical supplies.
>
> Imagine if the *GOVERNMENT*  gave 'US'
> the same support they give to other
> countries.
>
>
> Sad isn't it?
>
> 99% of people won't have the guts to forward
> this.
> I Just Did!

Re: FW: OH USA YEAH RIGHT


“In March 1997, a joint poll by the Washington Post, Harvard University and the Kaiser Family Foundation asked Americans which area of federal expenditure they thought was the largest. Was it Social Security (which actually constituted about a quarter of the budget)? Medicare? Military spending? Sixty-four percent of respondents said it was foreign aid—when in reality foreign aid made up only about 1 percent of total outlays (Washington Post, 3/29/97).

“Today, Americans think about 20 percent of the federal budget goes toward foreign aid. When told the actual figure for U.S. foreign aid giving (about 1.6 percent of the discretionary budget), most respondents said they did not believe the number was the full amount (Program on International Policy Attitudes, 3/7/05).

“It’s no wonder that most Americans think they live in an extremely generous nation: Media reports often quote government officials pointing out that their country is the largest overall aid donor, and the biggest donor of humanitarian aid. But what reporters too often fail to explain is how big the U.S. economy is—more than twice the size of Japan’s, the second largest, and about as big as economies number 3–10 combined. Considered as a portion of the nation’s economy, or of its federal expenditures, the U.S. is actually among the smallest donors of international aid among the world’s developed countries.”

--Ben Somberg, "The World’s Most Generous Misers," Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, 2005 Sept/Oct

===

In 2009, of the 22 wealthiest countries in the world, the Swedes, Norwegians, Luxembourgers, Danes, Dutch, Belgians, Finns, Irish, British, Swiss, French, Spanish, Germans, Canadians, Austrians, Australians, New Zealanders, and Portuguese all were more generous to their fellow humans than were the Americans.

--Poverty.com; Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development

===

US federal government funding for all of its international programs, of which international aid forms but a portion, is generally 1% of the total US federal budget (in 2008, it was 3% of the 38% discretionary budget spending, which equals 1.14% of total spending).

Most of the US federal government budget is spent on US citizens, mainly through the Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid programs:

“Social Security claimed just over one-third of mandatory spending in fiscal 2008 (see figure 4). Medicare and Medicaid took up 25 percent and 13 percent, respectively. The remaining 28 percent covered income security programs (such as food stamps), retirement and disability programs (including pensions for federal retireees), and other programs.

“About half of fiscal 2008 discretionary spending paid for defense, and most of the rest went for domestic programs such as agricultural subsidies, highway construction, and the federal courts (see figure 3). Only 3 percent of discretionary spending funded international activities, such as foreign aid.”

--Tax Policy Center of Urban Institute and Brookings Institution

===

“As percentage of GDP, Arab states of the Persian Gulf are the most generous, with Kuwait contributing 8.2% of its gross national product and Saudi Arabia contributing 4% in 2002.”

--Wikipedia; SAMIRAD

Because if, maybe

Do you know how long you'll live, how long you'll tell them what filth they are, how long you'll sway here in this cage?

Yes.

But you'll still do it?

Yes.

Why? Do you like being pointless?

It isn't pointless.

Why not, you said it was. Why?

Because if I do it forever, maybe at the end of forever they'll let me die.


--Harlan Ellison, “Silent in Gehenna,” 1971

Lyrical IIII

Marilyn Manson
I don't like the drugs
But the drugs like me

Orgy
Message from Opticon
Guess what? You're out of time

Mark Chesnutt
And then if she's still on my mind I'll try to drink enough to drown the hurt
And if that don't work
I'll think of something

John Denver
Come let me love you
Let me give my life to you
Come love me again

Rolling Stones
I'll be in my basement room
With a needle and a spoon
And another girl to take my pain away

Shakira
Solo tu sabes bien quien soy
Y por eso es tuyo mi corazon

Strong Bad
Oh that skinny blonde girl
And the circles and the ages and the ages

K's Choice
I'm not an addict (maybe that's a lie)
Nothing means a thing to me

Coheed and Cambria
Bye bye, Beautiful
Don't bother to write

All Lyrical

Sons of Norway

Sons of Norway!

http://sonsofnorwayblog.blogspot.com/

http://www.sofn.com/home/index.jsp

(Norway is district 8 -- Ha ha.)


As of December 31, 2009:
Total Members: 66,342
Members in the United States: 62,022
Members in Canada: 2,873
Members in Norway: 1,447

Definition of “Oof da”

Oof da is:

-trying to pour two buckets of manure into one bucket
-trick-or-treating in a blizzard
-eating hot soup with a runny nose
-discovering that your blind date is your teacher
-having more miles on your snowblower than on your car
-sneezing so hard that your false teeth end up in the bread plate
-knowing that somewhere in Minnesota is a flagpole with a frozen piece of your tongue still attached to it
-seeing non-Norwegians at a lutefisk dinner using lefse as a napkin
-waking yourself up in church with your own snoring

mourn

“I am not included within the pale of this glorious anniversary! Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us. The blessings in which you this day rejoice are not enjoyed in common. The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity, and independence bequeathed by your fathers is shared by you, not by me. The sunlight that brought life and healing to you has brought stripes and death to me. This Fourth of July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn.”

--Frederick Douglass, “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” speech, New York, Rochester, 1852 July 5

liberators

“They said they came to liberate us. Liberate us from what? They came and said they would free us. Free us from what? We have traditions, morals, and customs. We are Arabs. We’re different from the West. Baghdad is the mother of Arab culture, and they want to wipe out our culture, absolutely.”

--Mohammed Abdullah, as quoted in Fiasco: The American Military Adventure In Iraq by Thomas E. Ricks, 2006

no instance

“There is no instance of a country having benefited from prolonged warfare.”

--Sun Tzu, The Art of War, 6th Century BCE

Mongolia Horses and Goats

photo from Burmaa

Sivas Massacre

"From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

"The Sivas massacre (Turkish: Madımak Olayları or Sivas Katliamı) refers to the events of July 2, 1993 which resulted in the deaths of 33 Alevi intellectuals and two hotel employees. The victims, who had gathered for a cultural festival in Sivas, Turkey, were killed when a mob of radical Islamists set fire to the hotel where the group had assembled.

"The attack took place not long after traditional Friday prayers, when the mob broke through police barricades to surround the Otel Madımak, where artists, writers and musicians had gathered to celebrate 16th century Alevi poet Pir Sultan Abdal. Reportedly angered by the presence of Aziz Nesin, a writer who had translated and published extracts from Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses, the enraged fundamentalists surrounded the hotel, shouting 'Death to the infidel!' and threatening the assembled artists with lynching. The hotel was set alight, and the fire claimed 35 lives, including those of musicians, poets, tourists and hotel staff, while assembled police did nothing to intervene. Aziz Nesin was able to escape only because attackers initially failed to recognize him. According to reports, when rescuers eventually realized his identity, he was beaten by firemen while a city councilman from the Welfare Party shouted, 'This is the devil we should have really killed.'

"The event was seen as a major assault on free speech and human rights in Turkey, one which seriously deepened the rift between religious and secular segments of society. After lengthy court proceedings, the State Security Court sentenced 33 people to death on 28 November 1997 for their roles in the massacre; 31 of these sentences were upheld in a 2001 appeal. When Turkey overturned the death penalty just over a year later in 2002, the sentences were commuted to life in prison.

"Each year on the anniversary of the massacre, demonstrators hold protests and vigils to commemorate the victims of the fire. Many wish to see the hotel, which has since re-opened, declared a memorial and turned into a museum. In 2008 a government minister indicated that it would be turned into an Alevi cultural center, but this has yet to occur. In June 2010, the Minister of Work and Social Security announced that the money for buying the hotel had been transferred, and that the Ministry would provide additional resources for restoration."

Flag Variations

"Blood Flag"

"Black-Spangled Banner"

"Reverse Black-Spangled Banner Against All-White"

"Reverse Flag"

"Blue Barcode Stain"

"Grey Grille"

"Orange Reverse"

"Pink Grille"

"Vomit Grille"

"Barcode Stain
(Black-Spangled Banner Against All-White)"

Flag Variations

Radigan Neuhalfen

2010

Gödel and the Grundlagenkrise der Mathematik (and Knowledgelessness)

“From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

“Since the time of Pythagoras, mathematicians have wondered about the nature of mathematical truth, the ontology of mathematical entities and the reasons for the validity of proof and, more generally, mathematical knowledge. From the Enlightenment until the middle of the 19th century, the prevailing scientific ideology saw mathematics as the only way of reaching a truth that is final, absolute and totally independent of the human mind's capacity to understand it. The basic notions of mathematics were thought to reflect essential properties of the cosmos and the theorems to be the truths of a higher reality.... Yet, in the 19th century this traditional belief was undermined in the minds of some people and eventually led to a serious foundational crisis in mathematics. The first of the discoveries which caused the loss of faith, dating from the time of the Renaissance, was that of the imaginary numbers (i.e. those involving the square root of minus one)....

“The foundational crisis of mathematics (in German: Grundlagenkrise der Mathematik) was the early 20th century's term for the search for proper foundations of mathematics.

“After several schools of the philosophy of mathematics ran into difficulties one after the other in the 20th century, the assumption that mathematics had any foundation that could be stated within mathematics itself began to be heavily challenged.

“One attempt after another to provide unassailable foundations for mathematics was found to suffer from various paradoxes (such as Russell's paradox) and to be inconsistent: an undesirable situation in which every mathematical statement that can be formulated in a proposed system (such as 2 + 2 = 5) can also be proved in the system.

“Various schools of thought on the right approach to the foundations of mathematics were fiercely opposing each other. The leading school was that of the formalist approach, of which David Hilbert was the foremost proponent, culminating in what is known as Hilbert's program, which thought to ground mathematics on a small basis of a logical system proved sound by metamathematical finitistic means. The main opponent was the intuitionist school, led by L. E. J. Brouwer, which resolutely discarded formalism as a meaningless game with symbols. The fight was acrimonious. In 1920 Hilbert succeeded in having Brouwer, whom he considered a threat to mathematics, removed from the editorial board of Mathematische Annalen, the leading mathematical journal of the time.

“Gödel's incompleteness theorems, proved in 1931, showed that essential aspects of Hilbert's program could not be attained. In Gödel's first result he showed how to construct, for any sufficiently powerful and consistent recursively axiomatizable system -- such as necessary to axiomatize the elementary theory of arithmetic on the (infinite) set of natural numbers -- a statement that can be shown to be true, but that does not follow from the rules of the system. It thus became clear that the notion of mathematical truth can not be reduced to a purely formal system as envisaged in Hilbert's program. In a next result Gödel showed that such a system was not powerful enough for proving its own consistency, let alone that a simpler system could do the job. This dealt a final blow to the heart of Hilbert's program, the hope that consistency could be established by finitistic means... Meanwhile, the intuitionistic school had not attracted many adherents among working mathematicians, due to difficulties of constructive mathematics.

“In a sense, the crisis has not been resolved, but faded away: most mathematicians either do not work from axiomatic systems, or if they do, do not doubt the consistency of ZFC (the Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory with the axiom of choice), generally their preferred axiomatic system....

“It may or may not be the case that there is a fundamental limit to what humans can understand about numbers (i.e., there may be true number-theoretical principles which cannot be perceived as being true by any human), but Gödel's theorem does not tell us which of these is the case, and we have no way of knowing.”

www.TheSteppe.com

Queens of Mongolia

"Jack Weatherford will give a talk entitled 'Queens of Mongolia' this coming Wednesday the 16th of June at 8pm.

"His presentation will focus on the daughters of Genghis Khan, their history and achievements and their place in Mongolia’s society. This is the story of his second book: The Secret History of the Mongol Queens: How the Daughters of Genghis Khan Rescued His Empire.

"Jack Weatherford is a professor of anthropology at Macalester College in Minnesota. He is a specialist in tribal peoples and the author of Indian Givers, Native Roots, Savages and Civilization, The History of Money, and Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World.

"Come early as this talk is expected to be exceedingly popular. See you all then!

"--Café Amsterdam"

www.Amsterdam.mn

The Adventures of Dr. McNinja

DrMcNinja.com

heard of him; but don't believe in him at all

“Come aboard, come aboard!” cried the gay Bachelor's commander, lifting a glass and a bottle in the air.

“Hast seen the White Whale?” gritted Ahab in reply.

“No; only heard of him; but don't believe in him at all,” said the other good-humoredly.


--Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale

Америкийн Dj Memnok

Notice from Sancho, Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia:

“Date: Friday, May 28, 2010
Time: 9:00pm - 11:00pm
Location: Зөгий Fm 107.0

“Энэ Баасан гарагт буюу 2010-05-28 ны дугаараар Америкын Dj Memnok бид нартай шууд холбогдон тун сонирхолтой ярилцлагыг өгөх гэж байна. Мөн түүний Dark Minimal урсгалаар хийсэн сэтийг сонсох болно Гадаадын Dj нарын сэт болон тэд нарын сэтийг сонсноор дэлхий дахинд электрон хөгжим хэрхэн хөгжиж байгааг мэдэхээс гадна Dj хүн ямар байх ёстой мэдэх боломжтой. Холбогдох цаг 21.00 цагт Клуб Соёл булангаар.”

http://www.myspace.com/memnokonmem

“Memnok's music evokes dark spirits and black energies. His name is Jeremy Brown, a native of West Michigan not too far from Detroit, and his music speaks this reality. Despite the renowned bleakness of this area of the world, Memnok masters the ability to channel his creative energy, yielding a product that is sinister and moody while retaining a level of stripped-to-the-bone dark funk.”

Hagar the Realistic

b3ta > Cartoon Identity Crisis > Doctor When

Risk and Peril

"This Book explains the Universe....

"Each one of us has an universe of his own....

"The object that you see is never the same as the one that I see ; we infer that it is the same because your experience tallies with mine on so many points that the actual differences of our observation are negligible. For instance, if a friend is walking between us, you see only his left side, I his right ; but we agree that it is the same man, although we may differ not only as to what we may see of his body but as to what we know of his qualitites. This conviction of identity grows stronger as we see him more often and get to know him better. Yet all the time neither of us can know anything of him at all beyond the total impression made on our respective minds....

"The study of this Book is forbidden. It is wise to destroy this copy after the first reading.

"Whosoever disregards this does so at his own risk and peril."


--Aleister Crowley, The Book of the Law, 1938

www.TheSteppe.com

all my life the cost of living has been rising

"An hour of light will cost you about a quarter of a second of labour -- a little more if you include the cost of the bulb.

"According to economist William Nordhaus, to get the same amount of light with a conventional filament lamp in 1950 and the then average wage, you’d have needed to work for eight seconds. Using a kerosene lamp in the 1880s, you’d have needed to work for 15 minutes; a tallow candle in the 1800s, more than six hours. From a quarter of a day to a quarter of a second is an 86,400-fold improvement. That’s how much better off you are than your ancestor two centuries ago -- in lighting, at least....

"Yet all my life the cost of living has been rising. Why? It’s partly because prices are quoted in money, rather than in hours worked, and partly that the basket of goods used to measure inflation is slow to include new inventions, which are the items that are the fastest to fall in price....

"The computing power of one of today’s pocket calculators would have cost you a lifetime’s wages in 1970, yet I don’t recall ever calculating that it would be sensible to wait until 2009 before buying one....

"Moreover, in satisfying your needs more cheaply, you have more money to spend, so you chase up the cost of your wants. So the money that you’ve saved on candles now gets spent on homoeopathic pet medicines."


--Matt Ridley, Wired UK, 2009 April 21

bug reports

"So, you have had a glitch. Send in a bug report. The programmers need a laugh too."

--Cracked.com

Yes, per logical consistency, and in denial of self-righteous fiction

"The conditions of combat place human beings under unbearable and extraordinary circumstances of stress that can and have provoked decent and good men to perform terrible acts. Is it just for those judging these acts to place standards on combat behavior that they cannot say with any confidence that they could meet themselves, if placed under the same conditions?

"The United States walked right into this one when it launched the first international war crimes trial at Nuremberg after World War II. Nobody doubted that what the Nazis had done to Jews and others during the war was monstrous, but subjecting it to official and legal condemnation under the category of 'war crimes' was, and remains, problematical. The tribunal at Nuremberg would not accept 'following orders' as a defense, but neither does the US military permit soldiers to pass their own moral judgements on which orders they will obey.

"Ultimately, the importance of officially condemning the atrocities of the Holocaust was determined to be more important than consistency. What the Nazis did could not stand unpunished, even though, in truth, there were bound to be actions by American soldiers in future wars that could be called war crimes under the Nuremberg definition. There were such actions during W.W. II: should the crew of the Enola Gay have refused to drop the atom bomb?"


--Ethics Scoreboard, "The Housewife and the Marine," 2004 November 22

Daka's New Website

www.HappyMongolia.net

in the great loneliness

"The only true wisdom lives far from mankind, out in the great loneliness."

--Igjugarjuk, as quoted by Joseph Campbell in The Power of Myth, 1988

www.TheSteppe.com

Of all this fiery life

"Of all this fiery life of thine, what will at length remain but one little heap of ashes!"

--Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale

Alfred Korzybski Koan

"From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

"One day, Korzybski was giving a lecture to a group of students, and he suddenly interrupted the lesson in order to retrieve a packet of biscuits, wrapped in white paper, from his briefcase. He muttered that he just had to eat something, and he asked the students in the front row if they would also like a biscuit. A few students took a biscuit. 'Nice biscuit, don't you think,' said Korzybski, while he took a second one. The students were chewing vigorously. Then he tore the white paper from the biscuits, in order to reveal the original packaging. On it was a big picture of a dog's head and the words 'Dog Cookies.' The students looked at the package, and were shocked. Two of them wanted to throw up, put their hands in front of their mouths, and ran out of the lecture hall to the toilet. 'You see, ladies and gentlemen,' Korzybski remarked, 'I have just demonstrated that people don't just eat food, but also words, and that the taste of the former is often outdone by the taste of the latter.' Apparently his prank aimed to illustrate how some human suffering originates from the confusion or conflation of linguistic representations of reality and reality itself."

Volunteer Summer School in Buryatia 2010

“You are invited to participate in the Volunteer Summer School in Buryatia 2010!

“The Volunteer Summer School in Buryatia is an independent educational charity project. Volunteers from all over the world are welcome to spend two weeks, July 16 - August 1, in two villages in Buryatia in Russia near Lake Baikal, the deepest lake in the world, to teach local kids and motivate them to study for a better life. It aims to broaden the minds of both kids and volunteers.

“There is one school in Mikhaylovka village and one school in Yengorboy village with about 400 students in total, and some of the children have no further prospects of getting higher education.

“In 2009, the Volunteer Summer School in Buryatia took place for the first time with Kate from Canada (English), Eva from Switzerland (Health), Miguel from Portugal (Internet), Juergen from Austria (Judo), and myself, Ayuna from Russia (Journalism) participating.

“If you are going to travel through Russia this summer, make a stop at the Volunteer Summer School in Buryatia!

“Please spread the word! Tell your friends and people who might be interested in participating, post this announcement in groups or on your website, or print our poster and hang it in your university or place of work: http://buryatiasummerschool.org/wp-content/uploads/poster.pdf

“Thanks!

“Ayuna Shoyzhitova
Organizer of the Volunteer Summer School in Buryatia


“WHAT: Two weeks of teaching kids and exploring Buryat culture, food, and nature
WHERE: Russia, Buryatia, Mikhaylovka and Yengorboy: two Buryat villages in the south of Buryatia, on the border with Mongolia
WHEN: July 2010
WHO: Eight volunteers from different countries of the world who want to go where they've never been, see what they've never seen, live a unique experience, broaden their minds, and help local children get wider exposure to the world and educational opportunities.

“The aims of the Volunteer Summer School in Buryatia are to promote higher education for local children and to become a life-changing experience for you.”

www.BuryatiaSummerSchool.org

“Educate yourself and others.”

Dharma Bums VIIII

"In bed at night, warm and happy in my bag on the good bunk, I'd see my table and my clothes in the moonlight and feel, 'Poor Raymond boy, his day is so sorrowful and worried, his reasons are so ephemeral, it's such a haunted and pitiful thing to have to live' and on this I'd go to sleep like a lamb."

--Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums, 1958

E-Prime

"From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

"E-Prime (short for English-Prime) is a form of the English language in which the verb to be in all its forms does not exist. E-Prime therefore uses alternate means to express most statements which use the passive voice, thus encouraging writers and speakers to clearly state an action's agent.

"Some people use E-Prime as a mental discipline to filter speech and translate the speech of others. For example, the sentence 'the movie was good' could translate into E-Prime as 'I liked the movie' or as 'the movie made me laugh'. The E-Prime versions communicate the speaker's experience rather than judgment, making it harder for the writer or reader to confuse opinion with fact."

Happy Australia and New Zealand Army Corps Day

Anzac Cove

1999 June

“Dr Martin Crotty, a New Zealander who lectures Australian students, tells a story of one student who 'thumped the table after I'd given a seminar and complained at having a New Zealander come and tell us about Anzac.'

“'He was genuinely shocked when I told him what the N and the Z stood for.'

“The historian said Australians had a very 'parochial' view of WW1 and were even less aware of France and Britain's involvement than they were of New Zealand's.

“'The push should be not to just understand New Zealand but to see the Gallipoli campaign and the war in general in more internationalist terms,' he said.”

--http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/2355369/Aussies-forget-the-NZ-in-Anzac

World War I and H.P. Lovecraft

"At the beginning of the twentieth century, belief in the rational suffered a massive blow on the charnel fields of the First World War. Here were the rational, modern, capitalist powers, expressing their supposedly rational interests with an eruption of mechanized human butchery unprecedented in history. The scale of the psychic and cultural trauma of the First World War is vast—perhaps even 'undescribable.' The war smashed apart the complacencies of 'rationality' and uncovered the irrationality at the heart of the modern world with a savagery that eclipsed any fantasist's nightmares. How, then, could the genre known as fantasy present anything that could compare with such horror? Certainly, its stock of werewolves and effete vampires were utterly inadequate to the task....

"Traditionally, genre horror is concerned with the irruption of dreadful forces into a comforting status quo—one which the protagonists frantically scrabble to preserve. By contrast, Lovecraft's horror is not one of intrusion but of realization. The world has always been implacably bleak; the horror lies in our acknowledging that fact."


--China Mieville, introduction to At the Mountains of Madness by H.P. Lovecraft, 2005

Prandtl-Glauert Singularity

U.S. Navy F/A-18 Hornet breaking the sound barrier

1999 July 7

photo by John Gay

adventurers

“Pity those--adventurers, adolescents, authors of young-adult fiction--who make their way in the borderland between worlds.”

--Michael Chabon, “On Daemons & Dust,” Maps and Legends: Reading and Writing Along the Borderlands, 2008

Ways to be Nasty

Use all the hot water.

Free your spider collection.

Pour honey in the mailbox.

Slobber on the couch.

Rake the leaves into your neighbor's yard.

Stick your hand in the clam dip.

Throw a tantrum when you lose.

Hard-boil all the eggs.

Scream in the dentist's office.

Cut the strings off all the tea bags.

Giggle during the eulogy.

Burn the toast.

Cut the clothesline.

Salt the Band-Aids.

Plant ragweed.

Deliver lectures on abstinence and temperance.

Stray into other people's snapshots.

Clog the sink.

Ignore everybody.

Don't train your Doberman.

Paint your house chartreuse with pink trim.

Grab someone's nose and don't let go.

Breed rats.

Take the last cookie.


--Jim Erskine and George Moran, Throw a Tomato and 151 other ways to be mean and nasty, 1979

Sudden Prosperity

“Mongolia’s billions of dollars worth of copper, gold, uranium and coal reserves promise the greatest influx of wealth for the country since Genghis Khan conquered much of the known world in the 13th century.

“They also may spawn a crisis. Sudden prosperity can overwhelm an economy, exposing it to commodity-price swings. Mongolia’s leaders say they are determined to avoid a sudden surge in wealth that ultimately hampers expansion....

“'If you go to most developing countries, they’ll tell you, “We’re saved; we’ve found uranium,”' said Hernando de Soto, a Peruvian free-market economist. Mongolia has 'a president who says, “We are in grave danger because we have discovered we have a lot of natural resources.”' The fact that 'they are forewarned gives you hope.'”


--Michael Forsythe, Bloomberg.com, 2010 February 15

gloomy contemplation

“Many Americans have never seen a corpse, and those who have probably encountered only the travesty of a beautiful death concocted in the mortician's beauty parlor. Nor is the prevailing present-day lifestyle in the United States and large parts of the Western world, set by egotistical, hyperactive people obsessed with amassing money and luxury goods, conducive to gloomy contemplation of death...”

--Jan Bondeson, Buried Alive: The Terrifying History of Our Most Primal Fear, 2001

ye believers in gods

"Lo! ye believers in gods all goodness, and in man all ill, lo you! see the omniscient gods oblivious of suffering man; and man, though idiotic, and knowing not what he does, yet full of the sweet things of love and gratitude."

--Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale