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The latest incarnation of Oedipus, the continued romance of Beauty and the Beast, stands this afternoon on the corner of Forty-second Street and Fifth Avenue, waiting for the traffic light to change.

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You can't believe [what's inside a computer]. It's a whole hierarchy of angels--all on slats. And those little tubes--those are miracles.

I have had a revelation from my computer about mythology. You buy a certain software, and there is a whole set of signals that lead to the achievement of your aim. If you begin fooling around with signals that belong to another system of software, they just won't work.

Similarly, in mythology--if you have a mythology in which the metaphor for the mystery is the father, you are going to have a different set of signals from what you would have if the metaphor for the wisdom and mystery of the world were the mother. And they are two perfectly good metaphors. Neither one is a fact. These are metaphors. [...] You must understand that each religion is a kind of software that has its own set of signals and will work. If a person is really involved in a religion and really building his life on it, he better stay with the software that he has got. But a chap like myself, who likes to play with the software--well, I can run around, but I probably will never have an experience comparable to that of a saint.

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CAMPBELL: We need myths that will identify the individual not with his local group but with the planet. A model for that is the United States. Here were thirteen different little colony nations that decided to act in the mutual interest, without disregarding the individual interests of any one of them.

MOYERS: There is something about that on the Great Seal of the United States.

CAMPBELL: That's what the Great Seal is all about. I carry a copy of the Great Seal in my pocket in the form of a dollar bill. Here is the statement of the ideals that brought about the formation of the United States. Look at this dollar bill. Now here is the Great Seal of the United States. Look at the pyramid on the left. A pyramid has four sides. These are the four points of the compass. There is somebody at this point, there's somebody at that point, and there's somebody at this point. When you're down on the lower levels of this pyramid, you will be either on one side or on the other. But when you get up to the top, the points all come together, and there the eye of God opens.

MOYERS: And to them it was the god of reason.

CAMPBELL: Yes. This is the first nation in the world that was ever established on the basis of reason instead of simply warfare. These were eighteenth-century deists, these gentlemen. Over here we read, "In God We Trust." But that is not the god of the Bible. These men did not believe in a Fall. They did not think the mind of man was cut off from God. The mind of man, cleansed of secondary and merely temporal concerns, beholds with the radiance of a cleansed mirror a reflection of the rational mind of God. Reason puts you in touch with God. Consequently, for these men, there is no special revelation anywhere, and none is needed, because the mind of man cleared of its fallibilities is sufficiently capable of the knowledge of God. All people in the world are thus capable because all people in the world are capable of reason.

All men are capable of reason. That is the fundamental principle of democracy. Because everybody's mind is capable of true knowledge, you don't have to have a special authority, or a special revelation telling you that this is the way things should be.

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The mystery of life is beyond all human conception. Everything we know is within the terminology of the concepts of being and not being, many and single, true and untrue. We always think in terms of opposites. But God, the ultimate, is beyond the pairs of opposites, that is all there is to it.

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I had a friend who attended an international meeting of the Roman Catholic meditative orders, which was held in Bangkok. He told me that the Catholic monks had no problems understanding the Buddhist monks, but that it was the clergy of the two religions who were unable to understand each other.

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Culture can also teach us to go past its concepts. That is what is known as initiation. A true initiation is when the guru tells you, "There is no Santa Claus." Santa Claus is metaphoric of a relationship between parents and children. The relationship does exist, and so it can be experienced, but there is no Santa Claus. Santa Claus was simply a way of clueing children into the appreciation of a relationship.

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Once in India I thought I would like to meet a major guru or teacher face to face. So I went to see a celebrated teacher named Sri Krishna Menon, and the first thing he said to me was, "Do you have a question?" The teacher in this tradition always answers questions. He doesn't tell you anything you are not yet ready to hear. So I said, "Yes, I have a question. Since in Hindu thinking everything in the universe is a manifestation of divinity itself, how should we say no to anything in the world? How should we say no to brutality, to stupidity, to vulgarity, to thoughtlessness?"

And he answered, "For you and for me--the way is to say yes."

We then had a wonderful talk on this theme of the affirmation of all things. And it confirmed me in the feeling I had had that who are we to judge? It seems to me that this is one of the great teachings, also, of Jesus.

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CAMPBELL: Yes, that is what I'm saying. Eternity isn't some later time. Eternity isn't even a long time. Eternity has nothing to do with time. Eternity is that dimension of here and now that all thinking in temporal terms cuts off. And if you don't get it here, you won't get it anywhere. The problem with heaven is that you will be having such a good time there, you won't even think of eternity. You'll just have this unending delight in the beatific vision of God. But the experience of eternity right here and now, in all things, whether thought of as good or as evil, is the function of life.

MOYERS: This is it.

CAMPBELL: This is it.

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The idea of the supernatural as being something over and above the natural is a killing idea. In the Middle Ages this was the idea that finally turned that world into something like a wasteland, a land where people were living inauthentic lives, never doing a thing they truly wanted to because the supernatural laws required them to live as directed by their clergy. In a wasteland, people are fulfilling purposes that are not properly theirs but have been put upon them as inescapable laws. This is a killer.

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CAMPBELL: I came back from Europe as a student in 1929, just three weeks before the Wall Street crash, so I didn't have a job for five years. There just wasn't a job. That was a great time for me.

MOYERS: A great time? The depth of the Depression? What was wonderful about it?

CAMPBELL: I didn't feel poor, I just felt that I didn't have any money. People were so good to each other at that time.

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You can't say life is useless because it ends in the grave. There's an inspiring line in one of Pindar's poems where he is celebrating a young man who has just won a wrestling championship at the Pythian games. Pindar writes, "Creatures of a day, what is any one? What is he not? Man is but a dream of a shadow. Yet when there comes as a gift of heaven a gleam of sunshine, there rests upon men a radiant light and, aye, a gentle life." That dismal saying, "Vanity, vanity, all is vanity!"--it is not all vanity. This moment itself is no vanity, it is a triumph, a delight.

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I had an illuminating experience from a woman who had been in severe physical pain for years, from an affliction that had stricken her in her youth. She had been raised a believing Christian and so thought this had been God's punishment of her for something she had done or not done at that time. She was in spiritual as well as physical pain. I told her that if she wanted release, she should affirm and not deny her suffering was her life, and that through it she had become the noble creature that she now was. And while I was saying all this, I was thinking, "Who am I to talk like this to a person in real pain, when I've never had anything more than a toothache?" But in this conversation, in affirming her suffering as the shaper and teacher of her life, she experienced a conversion--right there. I have kept in touch with her since--that was years and years ago--and she is indeed a transformed woman.
[...]
I gave her the belief that she was herself the cause of her suffering, that she had somehow brought it about. There is an important idea in Nietzsche, of Amor fati, the "love of your fate," which is in fact your life. As he says, if you say no to a single factor in your life, you have unraveled the whole thing. Furthermore, the more challenging or threatening the situation or context to be assimilated and affirmed, the greater the stature of the person who can achieve it. The demon that you can swallow gives you its power, and the greater life's pain, the greater life's reply.

My friend had thought, "God did this to me." I told her, "No, you did it to yourself. The God is within you. You yourself are your creator. If you find that place in yourself from which you brought this thing about, you will be able to live with it and affirm it, perhaps even enjoy it, as your life."

I admit I'm not sure I am ready for this - it sounds so much like blaming the victim and power of positive thinking woo-woo.

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Frequently, in the epics, when the hero is born, his father has died, or his father is in some other place, and then the hero has to go in quest of his father.

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Eros is much more impersonal than falling in love. You see, people didn't know about Amor. Amor is something personal that the troubadours recognized. Eros and Agape are impersonal loves. [...] Eros is a biological urge. It's the zeal of the organs for each other. The personal factor doesn't matter. [...] Agape is love thy neighbor as thyself--spiritual love. It doesn't matter who the neighbor is.

This one struck home for me. I used to pretentiously sign my letters "Agape", but that is telling - to this day I have a hard time leaning into "personal" love, since I have the compulsion to think of the objective and not the subjective, which is where troubadour love lives.

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Our way of thinking in the West sees God as the final source or cause of the energies and wonder of the universe. But in most Oriental thinking, and in primal thinking, also, the gods are rather manifestations and purveyors of an energy that is finally impersonal. They are not its source. The god is the vehicle of its energy. And the force or quality of the energy that is involved or represented determines the character and function of the god.

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From the ultimate energy that is the life of the universe. And then do you say, "Well, there must be somebody generating that energy"? Why do you have to say that? Why can't the ultimate mystery be impersonal?

This resonates for me and my mythology, which focuses on how miraculous complexity (and maybe even the "ought from is") EMERGES. But that thought is pretty impersonal - in fact the hope it needs only contemplation and not revelation is a critical aspect of it for me!

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Whereas in our religions, with their accent on the human, there is also an accent on the ethical--God is qualified as good. No, no! God is horrific. Any god who can invent hell is no candidate for the Salvation Army. The end of the world, think of it!

(Emphasis mine.) Dang, this quote near the end of the book seemed laden with synchronicity for me - how much the fear of hellfire shaped me, but how the organization of The Salvation Army so shaped my life. (It's interesting that he using it as a comic short hand for "do-gooders")

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Wherever there is time, there is sorrow.

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Watched "It's a Wonderful Life" for the first time...

Sophie's Smokin' Solstice Soiree, and then the small haul for Christmas w/ me and my folks

I met an admin on an antique site,

Who said: two vast and broken hyperlinks

Stand in the cyan menu. To their right,

A glitter gif of Mickey Mouse still winks,

Whose pixel smile, and endless looped delight

Tell that its maker well those passions knew

Which yet survive, stamped on this lifeless shell:

The mind that shaped them, and the hand that drew.

And on the header green, pink words appear:

My name is Ozzie Mandias LOL

This is my homepage--come pull up a chair!

Little beside remains. Round the decay

Of QuickTime music tracks, boundless and bare,

The leveled geocities stretch away.

For a while now, I've had one of these BT speaker/radios on my bedside table, the iHome iBT4:

They also made a "boom box" style version of it:


The design of both was quite appealing in an artsy retro and "Museum of Contemporary Art" way - but there's something weird about the coating they used that over time it becomes a gross and sticky/tacky.

For Christmas Melissa got me the SEVIZ Four off of my wishlist so I can retire the iBT4. (I've noticed even cheap BT speakers have gotten much, much better over the past few years, much richer sounds, so I think it will be an upgrade in the audio department. And both have an FM radio, which seems like a nice backup for information even in an age of podcasts.)

Still, it was a really cool design! I had a School of Honk / Graphics Design nightmare last night!

Background: When I'm playing with BABAM or JP Honk, I have banners I put over the bell of my tuba to give the name of the band or to write on with magic marker the message of the event BABAM is backing - it makes my horn less pretty but it's useful billboard space.

But this morning, I had this weird nightmare where School of Honk was asking ALL the tuba players to use a banner like this one - this tacky rich red, bad serif font, photo of a tuba... this is the best I could do to reconstruct it.

OK, "really bad choices in brand identity" is probably pretty low on the list of worthy nightmare topics BUT STILL. I woke myself up enough to write it down...

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--Metroid II From this utterly amazing collection of (usually looping) animated video game screenshots...

We are AS gods, and may as well get good at it.
This might include losing the pride that went before the fall we are now in the process of taking.
Rolling with such a fall is our present lesson-- learning whatever resilience, ingenuity, basic skills, and enthused detachment that survival requires.
And learning perhaps to reverence some Gods who are not AS us.

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As more and more people get a voice, a voice needs a special stridency to be heard above the din. On the street, people tolerate diversity because they have to -- you'll get from here to there if you don't get in anybody's face. But the new media environment is always urging you to mock up an instant opinion about The Other ... You can be part of the biggest mob in history. Atavistic fun, guys. Pile on!

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The Net is opening up new terrain in our collective consciousness, between old-fashioned 'news' and what used to be called the grapevine--rumor, gossip, word of mouth. Call it paranews--information that looks and sounds like news, that might even be news. Or a carelessly crafted half-truth.

"If you don't know the guy on the other side of the world, love him anyway because he's just like you. He has the same dreams, the same hopes and fears. It's one world, pal. We're all neighbors."

Between this and his 1963 interview in Playboy, I'm really impressed by how humanist and thoughtful he is. For grins I finally got around to putting up a tag system here on the site. Right now the most useful addition is as a guide to my Malaysia photos.

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I should be grateful I don't get periods...I don't even know what that stuff would come out of, frankly.

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Americans now spend more money on casino gambling than on music purchases and going to movies and sports events combined

That blurb was from the print version only maybe, but the article was good. I admit, I don't really "get it" - and this isn't meant to be judge-y at all, but when I'm play slots, anxiety about the slow drain of money (along with echoes of a puritanical 'doing a bad thing' concern, my church growing up was zero gambling) overcomes any boosts I get from winning. But it's not just me - there's that tenet of "loss aversion" in psychology, right? You can frame things so that people clearly are more at pains to avoid loss than to go out for potential gains - but something in the casino experience masks that. Is it just the pile of all the little tricks? All the near misses (the article says the lizard brains reads those as practically wins), or all the tiny semi-wins that might not even make your money back, but still feel like something?

And this kind of association is not confined to men; in animals also it is very strong. A horse which has been often driven along a certain road resists the attempt to drive him in a different direction. Domestic animals expect food when they see the person who feeds them. We know that all these rather crude expectations of uniformity are liable to be misleading. The man who has fed the chicken every day throughout its life at last wrings its neck instead, showing that more refined views as to the uniformity of nature would have been useful to the chicken.

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Christmas is an endless fountain of cookies.

I just read the graphic novel "Andre the Giant: Life and Legend". Great read! This image isn't from that but for some reason I saved it earlier TIL: Frogger has otters.
It is possible there are too many Dunkin Donuts in my neck of the woods

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Back when I was your age, spaghetti code was the curse of the industry. Random gotos pointing anywhere. Branching into the middle of subroutines, or out.

Then came lasagna apps. Layer upon layer of abstraction so deep nobody knew how it really worked -- if it did. Before you could dig down to the meat you had to scrape aside tons of moldy cheese.

Now we have onion corporations. No one really does anything. They just contract with someone else to do it. And if you peel away that shell (tearfully) you find another contact handing off responsibility but skimming some of the dollars.

It's turtles all the way down! Recursion FTW!

I have to admit, I had mixed feelings telling people we were "going to my folk's place at the Jersey Shore" which gives the wrong impression it at least two directions. But, it is also kinda nice.

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Jingle bells, Batman smells, Robin laid an egg! Batmobile lost a wheel, and Joker got away!

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Just watched "Real Genius". It really gave geeks of the 80s and 90s something to aim for. Longing for a Richard Feynman biopic though. Wow, that was a whole lot of Advent Calendering! I want to do a day or two of photos, mostly as a reminder of a kind of nifty (and photogenic!) Holiday Season I had to end the 00s... More tomorrow!

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https://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=35555A783D7883AD - youtube videos HarveyJames likes. I liked the Nintendo "no disk inserted" animations.

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Google Calendar Mobile seems to lack a "All Day Event" checkbox.Man, Google, why you gotta be like that?

--thanks trunkbutt

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Quote of the Moment

The universe is simple; it's the explanation that's complex.

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For Christmas my mom got me Klutz's "The Encyclopedia of Immaturity". Way to bring Coals to Newcastle, ma!

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Welcome back to Boston! ...I think I just stepped in flattened dead rat. One final bit of silly holiday virtual arts+crafts:

It didn't scale down to small gif cinema standards so I decided to focus on the snowman:

RIP James Brown, the godfather of soul.

Can't say we had to like everything about him, but damn he had soul.

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Snarky News Comment of the Moment
I accidentally flipped on CBS news and got this story about a hospital experimenting with a live harpist, to see if the music would help in the hospital recovery unit. The story has this line:

Since many people equate a harp with heaven you might expect a little anxiety among patients waking up from life-saving surgery, but nurses say they get the opposite reaction.

Err, like "Wow, I must be in hell!"?

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Website Gripe of the Moment
You know, tv.yahoo.com used to rock, far and away the easiest and quickest way to find out what's playing, but now it pretty much sucks. The frontpage is just celebrity bla-bla-bla, you have to dig and scroll for the listings, and then they seem to be doing some javascript-ish crap so that the whole page doesn't load all at once, the lower part of the page doesn't seem to try and load 'til you scroll down to see it... so it totally breaks the browsers in-page search, and it's own search engine was worthless for letting me know what channel the NFL game I had heard about might be on.

It's like crap for crap's sake.

I miss tvgrid.com. It was great.

K.I.S.S., you boneheads.

(It's kind of funny, though, that I still can't remember which channel is which, despite the fact that all I seem to watch is Bravo, Comedy Central, Cartoon Network, Fox, and wherever there might be an NFL game on.)

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Video of the Moment



--James Brown on Ed Sullivan (with bad A/V synching?) IMO, the contrast with Ed makes it the most interesting video from this recent tribute page. Watching his stuff makes me realize where Deee-lite got so much of its stuff from in the early 90s. But Ed seems to be trying a little hard to justify James Brown, emphaisizing the gospel roots, and hard work ethic it springs from (well, he was the Hardest Working Man in Show Business... I love his role as bandleader, and that whole call and response bit.

"Can I count it off?"
    "Go ahead!"
"Can I count it off?"
    "Go ahead!"
"Can I count it off?"
    "Go ahead!"
"1 2 3 4!"
    *bop* *bop* *bop* *badop*

(2019 UPDATE: the original video is lost but I think I found the Ed Sullivan talking bit I was mentioning, along with an awesome awesome medley) Christmas Followup of the Moment
Slate had two good pieces about the "War on Christmas"...how how silly it is that the right can make up some kind of persecution complex about it, and how it forgets that for years, the "War Against Christmas" was mostly waged by various Christian sects who disliked all that paganism sneaking into their religion.

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Link of the Moment
PC World presents the best 50 gadgets of the past 50 years. A pretty cool list...you can forget how neat some of this stuff was when it first came out.

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Irritating News of the Moment
Police bust Supermarket Open on Christmas, even though the staff there is largely Asian. Yay Blue Laws! Heaven forbid we take away anyone's chance to think about Jesus, no matter what they actually believe.

Open Photo Gallery

(I love prophecies with expiration dates.)


(Ksenia (right) and her friend Tonya in Tonya's kitchen. I don't know why the hat either)


(Mama Mia working out chords on her trusty accordian)


(O Christmas Tree! And lots of presents.)


(I guess Ksenia just has a thing for hats.)

Spending the Holidays with my family. Over at my Aunt and Uncle's on the delightfully named street "Wigglesworth". For some reason neither of their PCs has a scrollwheel on its mouse...funny how much I miss that. It really is a positive ergonomic addition to the mouse in my opinion. Some high-end mice are going a bit nuts, with like a dozen buttons...kind of spoils the elegance of the thing, plus, if you start depending on obscure mice settings and gadgets, you'll miss them when using someone else's PC...

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Art Toy Download of the Moment
BallDroppings is a lovely little toy...draw lines that the dropping balls will bounce off of, musical tones result. (I had some trouble when I first tried to run it, if you get an "insufficient video memory" kind of error, try decreasing the number of colors your computer is displaying.) Fun to play with, plus you can tweak many of the settings (read the webpage for details.)

(FOLLOWUP: looks like there are many more cool toys at Josh Nimoy's website. Also, I had some trouble getting the balldroppings program to run at a quick speed on some other machines, this time fiddling with the resolution help.)

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Quote of the Moment

Dreams are important, otherwise sleep is just eight hours of nothing.

Kirk's Snow Observation #273
It is both more difficult and less satisfying to dig out a white colored car.

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Geek Quote of the Moment

why would you want to own /dev/null? 'ooo! ooo! look! i stole nothing! i'm the thief of nihilism! i'm the new god of zen monks.'

(For the geek impaired: /dev/null/ is a special location on a Unix computer, you can send the output of programs that you don't care to see there, and it gets whisked away into the 'bit bucket'. So why would someone care about the "file ownership" of it?) Is it just me or has google been a bit slow lately?

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Funny of the Moment

I carried a case of Sam Adams Winter Lager out to a customer's car yesterday. She popped the trunk, saying "I wonder what's in here." There was 1 of those wheeled golf bag carriers (but no golf bag), & something else.

ME: "Why is there an anvil in your trunk?" HER: "It's my boyfriend's car." ME: "Why does your boyfriend's car have an anvil in it?" HER: "I dunno!"

I suppose you should have something with which to defend yourself, in case you get carjacked by Wile E. Coyote.

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Link of the Moment
I already mentioned SmarterChild, a utility chatbot that's available via AOL-IM. I've been using it more and more... just add SmarterChild to your buddy list, then use a command like news for the latest headline, forecast for a weather forecast, movies for local movies (for the last two, it remembers where you live once you tell it), spell someword for a spell check (or define someword for a definition, or syn someword for a thesaurus lookup), and it has other features too, foreign language translation, some games, bible, etc. It's pretty impressive, and a very fast interface.

Brunching Shuttlecocks had a funny time proving despite all of SmarterChild's utility, it makes a pretty mediocre therapist.

Actually, I'm surprised SmarterChild never seems to be warned. With all the idiots out there, you would think the warning would go way up. I'm too chicken that I'll be cut off to experiment with it.