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For reasons that we do not entirely understand, all the chief civilizations developed along parallel lines, even when there was no commercial contact (as between China and the European area). There was a new prosperity that led to the rise of a merchant class. Power was shifting from king and priest, temple and palace, to the marketplace. The new wealth led to intellectual and cultural florescence and also to the development of the individual conscience. Inequality and exploitation became more apparent as the pace of change accelerated in the cities and people began to realize that their own behavior could affect the fate of future generations. Each region developed a distinctive ideology to address these problems and concerns: Taoism and Confucianism in China, Hinduism and Buddhism in India and philosophical rationalism in Europe. The Middle East did not produce a uniform solution, but in Iran and Israel, Zoroaster and the Hebrew prophets respectively evolved different versions of monotheism. Strange as it may seem, the idea of "God," like the other great religious insights of the period, developed in a market economy in a spirit of aggressive capitalism.

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Who then knows whence it has arisen,
Whence this emanation hath arisen,
Whether God disposed it, or whether he did not,--
Only he who is its overseer in highest heaven knows.
Or perhaps he does not know!

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Religion starts with the perception that something is wrong [...] Effectiveness rather than philosophical or historical demonstration has always been the hallmark of a successful religion

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Indeed, God is dependent upon man when he wants to act in the world--an idea that would become very important in the Jewish conception of the divine.

That idea is so lovely - and so foreign to the simplistic version of the "Judeo-Christian" God I was taught, where it would be blasphemy to think of Omnipotent God as dependent on anyone or anything.

You know what? I take it back. Hearing some of the God-ish justifications given for passing anti-Abortion, Fertilization=Human bullshit passing Oklahoma? "We believe that God has a special plan for every single life and every single child" -Stitt -- clearly thinking like you are a conduit and manifestation of God's Will is fraught, and can be used for good or for evil. it's not all just cute and pleasant little mitzvahs, it's bodily-autonomy-violating bullshit, and we do not live in a theocracy.

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The Greek God could be discovered by human reason, whereas the God of the Bible only made himself known by means of revelation. A chasm separated Yahweh from the world, but Greeks believed that the gift of reason made human beings kin to God; they could, therefore, reach him by their own efforts. Yet whenever monotheists fell in love with Greek philosophy, they inevitably wanted to try to adapt its God to their own. This will be one of the major themes of our story.

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In about 178 the pagan philosopher Celsus accused the Christians of adopting a narrow, provincial view of God. He found it appalling that the Christians should claim a special revelation of their own: God was available to all human beings, yet the Christians huddled together in a sordid little group, asserting: "God has even deserted the whole world and the motions of the heavens and disregarded the vast earth to give attention to us alone."

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A distinction between esoteric and exoteric truth will be extremely important in the history of God. It was not to be confined to Greek Christians, but Jews and Muslims would also develop an esoteric tradition. The idea of a "secret" doctrine was not to shut people out. Basil was not talking about an early form of Freemasonry. He was simply calling attention to the fact that not all religious truth was capable of being expressed and defined clearly and logically. Some religious insights had an inner resonance that could only be apprehended by each individual in his own time during what Plato had called *theoria*, contemplation.

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Within the soul there are three properties, therefore: memory, understanding and will, corresponding to knowledge, self-knowledge and love. Like the three divine persons, these mental activities are essentially one because they do not constitute three separate minds, but each fills the whole mind and pervades the other two

The book has long passages outlining the vision of the Trinity, which honestly to me feels like on of the more arbitrary and ad hoc aspects of modern Christianity.

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In the same way, the scientific vision of our own day has made much classic theism impossible for many people. To cling to the old theology is not only a failure of nerve but could involve a damaging loss of integrity. [...] Yet the ultimate failure of [the Faylasufs'] rational deity has something important to tell us about the nature of religious truth.

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One of the problems of ethical monotheism is that it isolates evil. Because we cannot accept the idea that there is evil in our God, there is a danger that we will not be able to endure it within ourselves.

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Luria identified anger with idolatry, since an angry person is possessed by a "strange god."

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Mendelssohn saw life without God as meaningless, but this was not a passionate faith: he was quite content with the knowledge of God attainable by reason. God's goodness is the hinge on which his theology hangs. If human beings had to rely on revelation alone, Mendelssohn argued, this would be inconsistent with God's goodness because so many people had apparently been excluded from the divine plan.

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To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself to us as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty, which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive forms--this knowledge, this feeling, is at the center of all true religiousness. In this sense, and in this sense only, I belong to the ranks of devoutly religious men.

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Don't know if I posted "everything in this picture is now in your pocket", how one smartphone does all this stuff like someone raided a Radio Shack, but I love it.

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There's also this ad via this huffington post 2014/2017 article

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If you hear a human ask, "What could go wrong?" Do NOT involve yourself. If you hear one ask for their beer to be held, leave immediately. If you encounter a man named "Murphy" that no humans seem to see, RUN.

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...the decision of one man to launch a wholly unjustified and brutal invasion of Iraq. I mean of the Ukraine. Heh. (...iraq too - anyway.) 75. Uhh...

What's really cool is Trump is even older, and Biden older than that.

It may seem odd for me, a military man to adopt such a comparison. Truthfulness compels me to. I spent thirty- three years and four months in active military service as a member of this country's most agile military force, the Marine Corps. I served in all commissioned ranks from Second Lieutenant to Major-General. And during that period, I spent most of my time being a high class muscle- man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the Bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.

I suspected I was just part of a racket at the time. Now I am sure of it. Like all the members of the military profession, I never had a thought of my own until I left the service. My mental faculties remained in suspended animation while I obeyed the orders of higher-ups. This is typical with everyone in the military service.

I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912 (where have I heard that name before?). I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested.

During those years, I had, as the boys in the back room would say, a swell racket. Looking back on it, I feel that I could have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.

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Managed to replace oven light making job only 8 times extra difficult than it needed to be. Last night I headed out for my daily constitutional and followed a sudden impulse to walk past the Old Powder House (I was today years old when I realized that's the oldest stone building in the Commonwealth) to Tufts Campus, where I was an undergrad in the 90s.

The first half of my life was marked by moving - usually across states - every few years, so it sort of weirds me out that I'm just able to walk here. The view from on top the library is great (though I always wanna smack the architect who put a big random squat minitower on top of the library roof, breaking up the panorama.)



My mood was leaning hard into the nostalgic.

Tufts has a random cannon replica, and there's a tradition for groups to paint it. It's current paint job kind of broke my heart:
Those poor damn kids. (Yeah, I know a lot of them are coming from privilege and most will be fine, but still- class of 2020 has had a super unkind cut almost anyway you slice it, whether college or high school.)

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Excellent video on if different type of rockets were transparent, so you can see the fuel supplies.

Somehow it seems weird to me that the best way into space is straight up. A few weeks ago I had a small epiphany at my therapist.

The back story: my parents are officers in The Salvation Army, which (in parallel with its emergency and charity operations) is a church; a denomination called "Salvationism", a near offshoot of the Methodists that took the idea of waging a war against sin to heart, and modeled itself after a military - churches are called corps, members are called soldiers, pastors are called officers and there are uniforms, with tunics and hats and everything.

As in the military, officers get assigned to live wherever the 'Army feels their skills will be put to the best use, and so "OKs" (Officer's Kids) have to be braced for moving every few years.

So, looking back, here's roughly how I viewed the structure of authority:

I'm perched on top, the most precarious place. I am taught how I should live - and then, told WHERE I will live - by my parents. (Here represented by a home) But my parents are supported by The Salvation Army. It has the authority to tell them where to go and what to do, and they comply. The Salvation Army, then, was anchored on and drawing its authority from God. From God! Can't get much bigger than that!

I'm sure the whole "parents are your minister and representative of God" thing is another topic for therapist fun, but right now I'm thinking more about the top 3 levels; when you combine it with the Good of the many outweighs the good of the few or the one attitude I think I inherited from my mom (where our personal needs should not be ignored, but weighted in the general balance for choosing best course of action), you get an especially acute sense of "the group will ask sacrifices of you, and you must make them."

As an "OK", less than average of your material life is actually owned by your family... the quarters- the assigned house (or apartment over the church in my case) - will be mostly stocked with its own furniture. Utilities and reliable transportation will be arranged for and life will otherwise be frugal, and your parents are potentially on call at all kinds of hours - especially during that Thanksgiving-Christmas "Red Kettles" season. I'm not trying to bellyache, there are plenty of worse environments to grow up in - but still, the sense of authority and chain-of-command was strong, and The Salvation Army was a calling, not just a job - for example I had a precocious and impeccable "business" phone mojo going when answering the shared line, evn as a pipsqueak elementary schooler - my folks would be commended on their extremely polite secretary.

(My family was graced with longer appointments - I was especially lucky by "OK" standards of the time to be in mostly the same place for most of middle and high school. But I was bummed about the move from Western NY to Upstate NY before third grade, and had so much adolescent resentment moving to Cleveland after sixth that I switched to going by my middle name Logan as a form of existential protest. (err, before I knew it was a "Wolverine/X-men" reference))

So, too much backstory, here is the point, and the small epiphany: So I had deeply ingrained sense of the importance of the group. Imprinted on me: Groups are manifestations of greater goods (even when they don't claim to be prayerfully reflecting God's will) and so can expect sacrifices of you. And not only of you, but of loved ones you're with! People who probably won't be directly involved with the group on a regular basis, and who may have only had been partially aware of the strength of your commitments

(and being reliable isn't just import to me in terms of my concern for my reputation in the group, but my integrity as a person - a group being angered with me for not being dependable would be awful mostly as a signpost towards me not being a dependable person. (I think. Causing someone or some group strong bad feelings because of my own "selfish" needs also does poorly on "greater good" scale, so there is a social aspect of it - not just the objective judgement of God of me, the individual potential sinner.))

So, I need to remember that groups - mostly brass bands for me these days (which actually are also kind of a gift from The Salvation Army for me, come to think of it) - aren't just asking sacrifices from me me, but of me and my presence and energy that might otherwise by my partner's. I need to be more cognizant of that.

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Bonus content: it took me years to notice there was a pun/metaphor in calling the printed offering envelopes "cartridges" - these are roughly the ones I grew up with

I remember the "If you are absent, remember the Corps expenses go on just the same". The admonition was watered down a bit from this antique one of the 1800s that has further instructions in a militaristic vibe.

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Ever wake up from a nap, and kind of disoriented? Your inner monologue is like "Ok... I think... I'm on a planet... called Earth? And it has... gravity? And sometimes frogs?"

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Today at the Friendshipworks Walk to End Elder Isolation - a lesson in photographic perspective, and why you usually put the tuba player and the horn behind the arc not where it angles around... it kind of towers over everyone!

Minty is just cold spicy

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And so, without intending to adopt any sort of triumphalist attitude toward sports, I became that most despised of figures in the eyes of the diehard: a fair-weather fan. For most of my life, this has been a heavy shame. I have muttered shy apologies to friends for not standing by the hometown teams, even as most of them failed to escape the vortex of mediocrity.

But I'm done apologizing. In fact, I'm pretty sure that I'm right and everybody else is wrong. Rooting for winners is more than acceptable--it's commendable. Fans shouldn't put up with awfully managed teams for decades just because their parents liked those teams, as if sports were governed by the same rules and customs as medieval inheritance. Fans should feel free to shop for teams the way they do for any other product.

. As a guy who used to change sports cities a lot, I always thought it was good karma to develop an affinity for the local team, just so you're rooting with your neighbors.

What I think is really weird is that it's not enough to dig your guys, but the other guys have to be bums - Peyton Manning was probably not as much of a clutch player as Brady, benefited form the dome, etc etc, but he also took a delightfully nerdy approach to the game and didn't have Evil Hoodie helping him out - but it kinda wasn't ok to like him over our hometown Ugs-wearing pretty boy.

Or- true blasphemy here - the Yankees have assembled a great and likable and youthful team and are spending like 2/3 the cash the Red Sox are this year. The teams are roughly tied atop their division. This should be great! But it's all "our cave yay, your cave boo!"'

I'd dig the tribalism more if the local flavor of a team showed up in anything deeper than maybe the business owners who own 'em (and often extract way too much in terms of tax and financing breaks from politicians who would have a lot of angry voters if the team drifted for another deal)

And/or if we had a proper league system with relegation - if the bottom 2-4 teams in the NBA were fighting to stay in the top league, and the top 2-4 of the next league down would get to come on up to the big leagues? That would be brilliant.

To be ridiculously sweeping : baby boomers and their offspring have shifted emphasis from the communal to the individual, from the future to the present, from virtue to personal satisfaction. Increasingly secular, we pledge allegiance to lowercase gods of our private devising. We are concerned with leading less a good life than the good life. In contrast to our predecessors, we seldom ask ourselves whether we serve a greater social purpose ; we are more likely to ask ourselves if we are happy. We shun self - sacrifice and duty as the soft spots of suckers. We give little thought to the perpetuation of lineage, culture, or nation; we take our heritage for granted. We are ahistorical. We measure the value of our lives within the brackets of our own births and deaths, and we're not especially bothered with what happens once we're dead. As we age -- oh, so reluctantly ! -- we are apt to look back on our pasts and question not did I serve family, God, and country, but did I ever get to Cuba, or run a marathon? Did I take up landscape painting? Was I fat? We will assess the success of our lives in accordance not with whether they were righteous, but with whether they were interesting and fun.

I stress this because it's often claimed that having kids makes people more conscious of the kind of world they're creating or leaving for their offspring. That would be why, in London, a city with excellent public transportation, parents have to make sure they have cars. Many of these cars come speeding along my street on their way to the extremely expensive private school on the corner. You can see, from the looks on these mums ' faces as they drop off their kids at this little nest of privilege, that the larger world -- as represented by me, some loser on his bike -- doesn't exist, is no more than an impediment to finding a parking space. Parenthood, far from enlarging one's worldview, results in an appalling form of myopia. Hence André Gide's verdict on families, "those misers of love."

Of all the arguments for having children, the suggestion that it gives life "meaning" is the one to which I am most hostile -- apart from all the others. The assumption that life needs a meaning or purpose ! I'm totally cool with the idea of life being utterly meaningless and devoid of purpose. It would be a lot less fun if it did have a purpose -- then we would all be obliged ( and foolish not ) to pursue that purpose.

Who could blame anyone, child or adult, for wanting to enrich his experience by sharing it with a friend, a caring witness? We all want that. We all want someone to say, "That thing you love is so interesting and worthy that I have to love it, too." Children's needs and desires are not so different from adults ' needs and desires; the only real difference is that, unlike adults, children are not yet bridled.

Reproduction as raison d'être has always seemed to me to beg the whole question of existence. If the ultimate purpose of your life is your children, what's the purpose of your children's lives? To have your grandchildren? Isn't anyone's life ultimately meaningful in itself? If not, what's the point of propagating it ad infinitum? After all, 0 × ∞ = 0. It would seem a pretty low - rent ultimate purpose that's shared with viruses and bacteria. The current human population is descended from a relatively low number of ancestors after a series of population bottlenecks in the late Pleistocene. Most human beings back then presumably felt their lives to be just as important and meaningful as we do ours. Is their existence negated just because they left no descendants?

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Yeah i know the animals were problematic but I am straight up bummed Ringeling Bros Barnum and Bailey is hanging it up, glad I got to see The Greatest Show on Earth Trying to figure out why my page for the Somerville Porchfest was looking wonky - the "Music Genre" selector was stretched to an ungainly degree. Apparently, up 'til now we haven't had "genres" such as "definitely not 'country' per se - but instead classic country" or "post MAN-o-pause-al rock super group"

Note to self: bands are bad at taxonomy.

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RIP Guy Clark

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Trying to read ancient literature (such as the older strata of the Hebrew Bible) without retuning our minds to lower-spectrum settings is a plain mistake--like listening to an old recording at the wrong speed, or watching a movie at the wrong frame rate, in the wrong aspect ratio, that's been dubbed. The brain doesn't change over the centuries, but the mind does, subtly, as habits of thought and the qualities of consciousness we cultivate change.

This harmonizes well with what I read from Karen Armstrong (see http://kirk.is/2009/11/05/ ), her points how in earlier centuries, religion kind of hitched its wagon to science, but when science pulled away religion doubled down on being literally factual, which is just nuts.

Gelernter also mentioned the child development researcher's koan "Is milk bigger than water?" which is kind of stuck in my head.

To animals, war is a cosmic horror story. Indescribable beasts lay waste to everything for reasons they can't fathom and have ungodly powerful methods of attack.

When I consider what would get me to justify buying a nextgen game console, "Photorealistic Katamari Damacy" tops the list.

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So, I fail to see how femininity is weak when masculinity can be defeated with something as simple as painted fingernails on a dude.

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http://explosm.net/comics/3557/ -- such a good thought about the "I $*@$in' Love Science" crowd...

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from the NY Times -- What You Learn in Your 40s Tried to run a bit faster this morning. My first fresh 5 minutes led to roughly 11.5 minute miles, but at the end of ten minutes it was only 12.5 or so. I guess I have more empathy for my 10 minute mile running high schooler. Also given the relative warmth of the day and pushing it, I got reminded how my head becomes a giant pinkish heat radiator when I do exert myself like that... I'm not sure if I'd seen that for a while.
--Amber drew and colored this heart on the paper tablecloth at Full Moon restaurant.

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Last month BK posted this quote on the Blender of Love

"Love is a temporary madness. It erupts like an earthquake and then subsides. And when it subsides you have to make a decision. You have to work out whether your roots have become so entwined together that it is inconceivable that you should ever part. Because this is what love is. Love is not breathlessness, it is not excitement, it is not the promulgation of promises of eternal passion. That is just being "in love" which any of us can convince ourselves we are. Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away, and this is both an art and a fortunate accident. Your mother and I had it, we had roots that grew towards each other underground, and when all the pretty blossom had fallen from our branches we found that we were one tree and not two."

Also, Amber found this on one of her favorite tumblrs:



Not sure what I think of committed love as being "empty" but still it's kind of a neat infographic.

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Amber thinks near ubiquitous DVR + stuff like Hulu means less common talk about big shows. Or it's the fragmenting audience?

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Tip of the Day: if IE seems to be insisting a div be taller than the height you set for it, try cranking down "font-size" as well...

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followup to that "Dinner with Cupid" Boston Globe blind date from last year. I have "self-described chatterbox" ways!

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For years I've been bummed about how little noise I make when I blow my nose; Amber says the trick is to nasally inhale first. INHALE? Whoa. Have I been missing out this whole time???

The exploration into cardholders' minds hit a breakthrough in 2002, when J. P. Martin, a math-loving executive at Canadian Tire, decided to analyze almost every piece of information his company had collected from credit-card transactions the previous year. Canadian Tire's stores sold electronics, sporting equipment, kitchen supplies and automotive goods and issued a credit card that could be used almost anywhere. Martin could often see precisely what cardholders were purchasing, and he discovered that the brands we buy are the windows into our souls - or at least into our willingness to make good on our debts. His data indicated, for instance, that people who bought cheap, generic automotive oil were much more likely to miss a credit-card payment than someone who got the expensive, name-brand stuff. People who bought carbon-monoxide monitors for their homes or those little felt pads that stop chair legs from scratching the floor almost never missed payments. Anyone who purchased a chrome-skull car accessory or a 'Mega Thruster Exhaust System' was pretty likely to miss paying his bill eventually.

Martin's measurements were so precise that he could tell you the "riskiest" drinking establishment in Canada - Sharx Pool Bar in Montreal, where 47 percent of the patrons who used their Canadian Tire card missed four payments over 12 months. He could also tell you the "safest" products - premium birdseed and a device called a "snow roof rake" that homeowners use to remove high-up snowdrifts so they don't fall on pedestrians.

It's kind of funny how stereotypical this stuff seems, and now I REALLY want to see the bug tough biker guy who goes ahead and buys the premium birdseed.

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iPhone does some useful tricks to disguise app switching lag- tho at times I'd say it needs an "hourglass" cursor, but Apple would HATE that.

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Haven't said much but man... what a bummer of a time for the Bruins, Celtics and Red Sox. Bruins might have the least excuse though.

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I've been growing my beard for charity. Was I supposed to tell anyone about it first?

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RAGING AT THE MACHINES,Good mother loving crisco damn it, why are ALL SERVERS rhino sucking MAESTROS at obfuscating stupidity? HATE HATE HATE Much fretting over the layout of my new place. More on that tomorrow I guess...

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Homage of the Moment

--Jeremy added this to my facebook "fun wall" (it's kind of amusing watching it draw in there, it replays the strokes he used.) He draws a mean looking 'Bill! (Here's a explanation of the reference, though I think it has been pretty exposed by now...)

Passage of the Moment

[My mother] had more different expressions for gaits than anybody I have ever known: hightailing it, lightfooting it, hotfooting it, highballing it, going at a dogtrot, coattails in the breeze, with coattails flapping, lallygagging, traipsing, sashaying, moseying, ploughing along, parading along, prissing along, frisking along, flouncing along, shooting along, barreling along, galloping along, poking along, dragging along, trucking along, breezing along down the avenue, waltzing right in, shaking a leg, going zrooop, going lickety-split, going at a dogtrot, going like a house afire, going like a crazy man, highlining, flying low, burining up the road, making a beeline, going dancing by, slewfooting. Many of these were judgemental. She didn't approve of breezing along the avenue; she didn't have time for it; but you could tell she liked the idea.

Over all it expresses a kind of a bitter viewpoint, and the book never really jells.

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Link of the Moment
Cleveland Proms. I wonder if it's a bigger part of the deal in that part of the country? I know for the midwest (in general I think) it's important enough to lose the article. You are "going to prom" not (necessarily) "going to the prom". (Hence the Pretty in Pink "What about prom, Blaine? What. About. Prom.")

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moving can be unsettling. having good questions about "which room for what" makes it even tougher. Here's a photo I took...



Any guesses as to what it is? Guesses to the comments section!

I might put up a larger version on my desktop wallpaper page after people take a stab.

ANSWER: (highlight with the mouse or hit Ctrl-A to read):
it's simply the inside of a cheap umbrella. The droplets are actually on the other side of it, lit by the sunlight behind.
Hope that wasn't too anticlimatic!

Yesterday morning I had the end of a dream where I was walking on some kind of campus w/ Evil B. The moon was HUGE, low over the horizon and I could see all this detail (I think the fact that the moon looks larger the lower it is has sunk into my subconscious, which tends to exaggerate it a bit) I admired it for a moment but then it suddenly leaped to the left, then up... I just had time to process "Oh crap, that's not just the moon, something bad must be happening to the earth", then I heard some shouts and yells and was engulfed in heat and red light. I had just enough time to utter a prayer to the Universe of "thanks, I've had a pretty good run" before waking up.

I've been remember dreams a bit more often lately. On the one hand I'm grateful for that, because it seems like a way of "reclaiming" some of the value the need to sleep for so much of a 24-cycle takes away. On the other hand, I think I'm waking up more frequently in the morning hours, which is why I'm remembering stuff, and I don't think that that's good.

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Video of the Moment
Not The Nine O'Clock News on Animal Communication... funny!

I like distinction Bill the Splut makes:

"funny" is when I laugh, "amusing" is when I just smirk

That seems useful but I'm not sure if it's universal enough to use without explaining it every time. But it's better than "I actually LOL'd!"

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Photo of the Moment

--I thought this photo would be cool when I took it a few days ago, but now it just looks like a bad photoshop filter.

I'm going to see what might be the final Star Wars movie today! (And although, judging by the lack of comments, my retrospect tool didn't make much of an impression, it did tell me that it's 3 years to the day since I reported on watching "Episode 2".) Personally I do hope they do Episodes 7-9, if they're anything like some of the comics and novels set in that time it could be interesting. Maybe anticipation of what is generally regarded as a decent Star Wars flick is coloring my memory of the past two...they definitely had their problems but I don't think they deserve to be as reviled as they are. On the other hand, R2D2 with booster jets is just frickin' retarded.

Newbies can check out Slate's Outsiders Guide to Star Wars, just a glossary of all the major characters and events, and poining out that accent = "bad guy".

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Photoshop of the Moment

--"beepity beep whistle CRACK splat" by Chris from a Worth1000 Star Wars contest -- most of the other entries are clever mashups with different movies but I liked this one. (You know, I *just* got why it's called "Worth1000". Duhhr.)

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Site of the Moment
Heh, someone from my UU church (who teaches a class I've gone to a few times) is starting I-Do-Yoga, yoga classes designed for people soon to be married, and the people around them. Interesting idea.

Image of the Moment

--More fun with yesterday's Scale2Xd filter. I have to get some new base images to play with, I use this one way too much...and now it's even worse, because I'm less inclined to use some of the nice shots of Mo I have. I'm not sure why I like this one so much...I guess having my eyes covered make it easier to mess with, plus it has some bold colors and an interesting pose.

Hmmm. Thinking about this now, I guess I'm kind of like some photoshop n00b just discovering filters...the fact that I have to do some semi-clever steps (reduce in size, tweak the palette reduction, saving as a .PNG, then running a command line program for the atual filtering) doesn't really change that...

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Poem of the Moment

I phoned from time to time, to see if she's
changed the music on her answerphone.
'Tell me in two words,' goes the recording,
'what you were going to tell in a thousand.'

I peer into that thought, like peering out
to sea at night, hearing the sound of
waves breaking on the rocks, knowing she
is there, listening, waiting for me to
speak.

Once in a while she'll pick up the phone
and her voice sings to me out of the past.
The hair on the back of my neck stands up
as I catch her smell for a second.

I adore the line "tell me in two words what you were going to tell in a thousand".

(2019 UPDATE: this poem really hits me as an example of how even our relationships are changed by the technology of the day. There's nothing quite like this with today's cellphones - and most people would prefer you'd text anyway...)

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News of the Moment
Texas...what a bunch of Yahoos. They want to deny the Unitarians tax-exempt status because it "does not have one system of belief". Jimminy frickin' crickets. Heaven forbid people be able to admit something besides blind "I just KNOW this is right" faith. Ugh, yesterday I prepublished 16 days worth of kisrael.com for my upcoming vacation, and now I'm burnt out on this stuff!

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Quote of the Moment

If you wish women to love you, be original; I know a man who wore fur boots summer and winter, and women fell in love with him.

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Video of the Moment
This is an excerpt from a Star Wars fan video that's making the rounds. Some guys secretly released a homemade video of a chubby kid acting out his Star Wars lightsaber dreams. (Probably the kid was messing with some of the DIY lightsaber ideas that were going around a while back. (followup--I guess according to this NY Times article, the saber effects were added by somebody else later.) You know, we laugh because it's a dorky thing to do, and because the kid's chubby and throws in some gratuitous kicking, but he actually pulls off some decent lightsaber spins.
Heh. The snippet shown here almost qualifies as an example of small gif cinema, though it's a bit larger than I usually go for.

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News of the Moment

What you want to be strong is you want people to have confidence in your currency.

I'm no economist, though I'm vaguely in favor of a weaker dollar, just the idea of making our exports that much more attractive. Still, couldn't he have waited 'til after my damn trip to Europe to announce that we're pretty much ok about a weaker dollar?

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Passage of the Moment

"Is he a fairy?" Rosa was, at that moment, asking Joe. They were still sitting on her bed, holding hands.

Joe was at first shocked by this suggestion, and then suddenly not. "Why would you say that?" he said.

She shrugged. "He has the feel," she said.

"Hmm," Joe said. "I don't know. He is--" He shrugged. "A good boy."

"Are you a good boy?"

"No," Joe said.

He leaned forward to kiss her again. They bumped teeth, and it made him weirdly aware of all the bones in his head. Her tongue was milk and salt, an oyster in his mouth. She put her hands on his shoulders, and he could feel her getting ready to push him away, and then after a moment she did.

"I'm worried about him," she said, "He looked a little lost. You should go after him."

I was struck by the description of the kiss, "milk and salt". Saw Episode 2 yesterday...pretty good! It didn't have a lot of the big spaceship battles that I love in the original trilogy, but some pretty amazing ground combat. I'm sure the links I posted yesterday influenced my perception of the new movie to a high degree.

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Link of the Moment
The Indie Game Jam (sponsored in part by Intel, interestingly) is pretty cool, though they don't have available downloads yet. They realized that a modern system can display tens of thousands of old school, DOOM-style sprites without breaking a sweat, so they got a bunch of programmers in one place, gave them a basic game engine, and over a long 4-day weekend let them go at. Looks like they came up with some pretty cool concepts. I've always liked games that used the "huge hoards of bad guys" approach...in fact, that was part of what I liked about some of the best Star Wars battles, the total chaos onscreen...

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Quote of the Moment

Damn everything but the circus.

Quote of the Moment

That made such an impression upon me as a boy that I decided that no boy friend of mine would ever accuse me of licking the butter off his sandwich and I kept my promise.

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Proof that girls are evil:

First we state that girls require time and money.

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Girls = Time * Money
And we all know that "time is money."

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Time = Money
Therefore

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Girls = Money * Money = (Money)²
And because "money is the root of all evil":

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Money = sqrt(Evil)
Therefore:

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Girls = (sqrt(Evil))²
And we are forced to conclude that
Girls = Evil

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Link of the Moment
Interview with Douglas Adams on Atheism. Interesting points on the distinctions between Atheism and Agnosticism.