Hubris and Gnosis
and psychohypnosis
the land of livejournal
is not in the knowsis
if your holding bag’s handy
you may need some doses
the minister’s daughter
is missing some toeses
there’ll be fewer survivors
than midwinter roses
Hubris and Gnosis
and psychohypnosis

Things seen on the walk this morning… looks like road construction is completed over on Atlantic, so I can take my ‘regular route’ again tomorrow. Lots of car traffic, but minimal pedestrians. I stopped in at the Walgreens, got a big honking bottle of water (1/2 gallon jug) and polished it off before I was halfway home… I think I’m going to try to cut down and slowly wean out soda-pop again.

Lots of little things on my mind, like fizz-bubbles in a soda. I move my mind to one thing, and a different bubble spins up, and gets in the way, making me think of something else. Story ideas, character studies.

Just did a little research… I’ve noticed that I’ve posted at least once a day (I’d say my average is maybe 5 a day) since mid-august of last year.

I wonder if I’ll make it a whole year without breaking stride? I also notice that I’ve plateaued with readers… I’ve been at about this number for the last few months… some come and some go, but the count remains the same. I notice that some people run away when I go on a post-frenzy (more than ten in a day seems to be what it takes) and I can understand that… I’m amazed that so many people really care about anything I have to say, and share my taste in what I find to be amusing. I feel good about that.

In other news, I just got an e-mail that a hippie acquaintance of mine died of a heroin overdose early this week… It’s a real shame, because I thought he had gotten past that part of his life, cleaned up in a detox about a year ago. I don’t know the whole story, but what I do know is that he was between places to live, having had an argument with his dad (Mikey was 26, and had moved back in with his father, last I’d heard). I guess he started using again as a result. I had really thought he’d gotten his act together… He was going to a trade school to be an electrician, had a girlfriend… I wonder how she’s taking it (I never even met her, he hooked up when he moved back up north.)

Ah well, his funeral is a long distance away…I can’t attend, but I’d better make arrangements to send flowers, and make a donation to the local shelter in his memory today. Maybe I should call his father, but I really don’t know him. How sad to outlive your child… and to part on what I assume were less than warm and fuzzy terms.

I’m really not too sad about this, maybe it hasn’t sunk in yet, more disappointed in the loss… a waste of a good, useful member of society. He was going to make a point of being more of a benefit to the species than a drain on it. He was friendly, and good company even with strangers. I hope you’re in a better place now, Mikey.

Well, I’m back on my schedule of waking up early to synch with my sweetheart, and to go on walkies while she’s tooling into work.

sun’s just getting up. I’ll be cruising out ther from 8 to 9 this morning.

pervicacious pur-vih-KAY-shus, adjective:
Refusing to change one’s ideas, behavior, etc.; stubborn; obstinate.

Pervicacious is from Latin pervicax, pervicac-, “stubborn, headstrong,” from root pervic- of pervincere, “to carry ones point, maintain ones opinion,” from per-, “through, thoroughly” + vincere, “to conquer, prevail against” + the suffix -ious, “characterized by, full of.”

Ostriches (from AZ Ostrich Company, Inc.)

The ostrich, Struthio camelus, is the world’s largest living bird. It is in the family classification of ratites, which includes emus, kiwis, and rheas. Ostrich fossils have been found in North Africa, Europe and Asia, but today the bird is indigenous to Africa, where it has been raised commercially for more than 100 years. They are not endangered species.

The ostrich is a flightless bird, but it can run up to speeds of 40 mph. It can sustained this speed up to 30 minutes. The ostrich is the only bird that has two toes on each foot. During the mating season the male develops a red coloring on the beak, around the eyes and on the skin on the leg bones. The blown-up, thickened neck is related to the strange sounds the male produces when courting a hen or challenging another male. Other sounds are produced by both sexes, hissing when enraged, low gurgling sounds when in fear and a short, sharp cry warning of danger.

It has thick black eyelashes that surround it eyes, which are almost two inches in diameter. Its speed and unusually good eyesight help the ostrich escape from its enemies. The ostrich does not hide its head in the sand, but is eating gravel, small pebbles or sand to aid in grinding food for digestion or for curiosity. Domesticated ostriches eat corn, alfalfa and soy bean meal and need to drink lots of water.

Ostriches are polygamous. Domestic breeding of ostriches are either in trios (one male (cock) and two females (hen)) or colonies with a prevalent number of hens. An ostrich reaches its breeding maturity at 2 1/2 to 3 years. An ostrich can breed for about 35 years and can live to be about 70 years old. They can weigh from 250 to 400 pounds and stand 6 to 8 feet tall.

A hen can lay from 10 to 70 eggs each year. Each egg weighs about 3 to 4 pounds and is nearly 6 inches in diameter. It has a thick shell and a dull yellow. One ostrich egg is equivalent to two dozen chicken eggs. The gestation period is 42 days. An infertile egg can be turned into objects of art by painting or engraving. Most birds are slaughtered from 10 to 14 months.

An ostrich will yield 70 to 100 pounds of meat, 2 to 4 pounds of feathers, and 12-15 square feet of leather.

spielen Sie ein Spiel

Sie erhalten, mir irgendeine Frage zu stellen, die ich antworten muß, indem ich ein schlechtes Programm in Übersetzungslinie benutze, und in der Rückkehr ich Sie um einen bitten kann.

(richtig habe ich die Regeln geändert).

Let’s play a game.

You get to ask me any question
that i must dishonestly answer
and in return i may ask you one.

(ok, I modified the rules a little)

Why can’t I remember things from a long time ago without a little mental poke? It seems like some stuff is a lot harder to retrieve than others.

I don’t remember much of 2nd grade through 5th. School friends, teachers, church…all foggy, faces that don’t come together. I have vague memories, but I remember army time in first grade much more vividly, and junior high on. Much of elementary school is a big blur. I sort of recollect telling my teacher in third grade that I had a twin, but he didn’t go to school with me because he was in an accident and had to go to a special school instead, with nurses…. But for the life of me, I can’t remember what any of my classmates looked like, or a favorite teacher. First grade was amazing. Mr. Adams, the teacher was tall and skinny, with thick, short black hair. He was an Aquarius like I am, and he showed me how to tell if it was raining outside by looking at puddles (through the window) for ripples from the invisible raindrops.

I remember telling my little brother that the yard behind ours was an African Game preserve,(reminded by that from mention of my sweetie’s fear of an African statuette as a kid) filled with gazelles, zebras and such… but we couldn’t go over there because the lions would eat us… maybe later, when dad would let us have bb guns, we could go. Instead we went out further back to the undeveloped woods and built tree forts… played army and threw pine cone grenades at one another. Those things scratched badly, and made amazing bubbles when hydrogen peroxide was poured over the cuts. (we were lucky not to have gotten each other in the eye…) Fall came, and tiny propeller seeds would fall like helicopters in the wind… dozens… maybe hundreds would come down at once in the woods.. it was amazing. Fireflies would come out at night, but we never really did the “capture them and stuff ’em in a jar” thing. it was just amazing to see lazy Christmas lights floating in your back yard… I would love to have a screened in back porch one day, and have them breed inside a contained space like that… so beautiful. We did capture frogs, and put them in mayonnaise jars with a stick and some leaves… salamanders, too.. but my dad had us let them go after a day or two, because it was cruel to keep them longer than that. (Later, as a sadistic little boy, I would throw frogs into boiling water to hear them scream. I’m glad I outgrew that phase… the memory of that sound still pierces my mental eardrums now.)

Animals I took care of as a boy-

Lilah, a laso-upso moppy dog. Sweet thing, it’d bark at all non-family.

Bear, a German shepherd that was as big as a house, and solid as a tank. super loving, and very smart.

Betty and Archie – A pair of mastiffs… like great Danes with shar-pei faces. stupid, yet lovable, they weren’t mine, but a friend of the family’s who traveled quite a bit.

Thor, Odin and Loki – gerbils, they were more trouble than fun

Mitzi (later Freya), adopted Ferret from a friend who moved away, and couldn’t keep her. My first experience with a hutch animal.

Nutmeg the box turtle. I didn’t think it was slow, just tired. (we painted his shell) My last hutch animal.

Many, many white mice from when I was in boy scouts, and going for my merit badge in genetics.

Julius Squeezer, a rainbow boa.

I and O. a blue and a red hermit crab, respectively. (my first pets in my first solo apartment living on my own. I miss them! They were set free on the beach when I moved in with James… I should’ve kept the HC’s, and not hung with him.)

We had to give up on indoor fur-bearing animals, because my little brother was allergic… I didn’t mind too much, but I did miss Lilah when she went to live with my aunt and uncle.

Well, time to go to work…it was sort of fun, rambling.

Back from walkies, showered, clean and dressed. 🙂

Wow… nothing like a hot, scalding shower to scrape all the yuck off. (my arms are still steaming.) Lots of folks out this morning… sort of surprised me. I may’ve gotten a little sun, my nose feels a bit red, too…I hope I didn’t burn.

I really want to get a digicam to take pictures of things I see as I walk, so I can post them hee, and keep them in a scrapbook…. They old saw about a picture being worth a thousand words is a cliche, but certainly true…

instead, here’s an arial photo of where I walk, my house in the center. (the brown roof, two north of the orange blobby one. 🙂 ) I walked the canal to the ocean, and back again. Lots of boats out, folks out on joyrides.. very surprising to me for a wednesday.. I’d love to go out for a little cruise, but work summons.

I saw shrek last sunday, and it was fun… had some parts where it felt hollow, though, but just as many cute bits to balance it out. I quite liked that “don’t judge” message wasn’t pushed down your throat, but was there nonetheless.

hoi polloi hoi-puh-LOI, noun:
The common people generally; the masses.

Hoi polloi is Greek for “the many.”

Usage: Some argue that the definite article (“the”) should not be used in front of “hoi polloi,” as hoi means “the” in Greek. However, “the hoi polloi” has been used since the earliest recorded instances of the term in English, and it is considered correct by most authorities.

first of all…

HOLY COW! Newt did what must’ve been a horizontal standing leap of about 8 feet… from the top of my monitor, over my head, and to the floor in front of my recliner.

Yipe! I was not expecting a flying overhead fuzzy body.. I wish the cam had caught it.

Now, on to my story.

Unlike most siblings, my brother and I got along really well all through our kinship together as kids. We rarely teased and tormented one another, but there were exceptions. I think we got on so well because we had a common enemy in our mother… He was a tag-along at times, but mostly, when it came down to it, I preferred his company. I think part of it was because we moved around a lot, and he and I were the only really constants in each other’s lives, too.

Most of the painful stuff I’ve done to him, or him to me was accidental. We’d have pinecone fights, or wrestle on the roof of the house, only to fall a story to the ground, me on top, his poor bony body squished underneath.

hm.. I’m rambling. What sort of torment did I put him through, or him me? There must be something.

We gave each other Indian burns, wedgies, purple nurples, donkey bites, noogies, Hertz donuts, and wet willies…I told him that an evil disembodied hand lived in the basement.

I’m trying to remember taunting him, and I can’t recall… random childhood memory instead.

It was summer 1977 and I lived in Alexandria at that point. There were some TV ads for this movie that was going to come out that had space fighters flying around fast and making cool noises. Unfortunately, my parents thought it might be too violent for me to see, like the old “Batman” show which I had to go down the street to Robert’s house to watch. My dad even got upset during fistfights (Biff! Pow! Sock!) on Star Trek, and would stand near the set saying mournfully, “Sorry Buddy (yes, he actually called me ‘Buddy’), I don’t think this is suitable for kids” and turn it off (even if it was one I’d already seen. I could never figure that out.)

But eventually pestering proved fruitful, and finally my parents gave in. Off we went one afternoon to see this movie, “Star Wars”. (Point of reference: My brother Derek was five then, my father was doing engineering, and my mom was a hairdresser(?!? I had a buzzcut!) at the local mall. I was 8, and had a Hyuuge crush on one of my mom’s co-workers, a sweet shampoo girl named Mary. She looked like Dorothy Hammil, bought me a dinosaur coloring book, and always hugged me when she saw me. I wanted to live with her, and leave my parents behind. But I digress.)

We saw the film… It started off kind of neat, there was this spaceship which was being chased by a bigger triangular ship, there were these two robots, and so on.[note to self, should I tell what I felt, or has everyone seen dang star wars enough to have to describe it all?] Derek and I shared a big container of pop corn, and a large root beer… (we just passed them both back and forth.. it was mostly for me, but he got to have some whenever he wanted.) We sat two aisles up form our parents, because the theater was full and there wasn’t room for all of us together. The first really wonderful sequence for me was when the Milennium Falcon was escaping from the Death Star and they were being chased by these fighters. To put this in perspective it’s important to remember that the only real experiences I’d had with cinematic science fiction were Star Trek and 2001: A Space Odyssey.

In Star Trek, space combat is fairly simple. As captain, you give the following orders:

1. Raise deflector shields
2. Lock phasers on target
3. Fire phaser one
4. Fire phaser two
5. Fire phaser three
6. Fire phaser four

Even though they are supposedly highly trained, the bridge crew still has to be told to perform each of these actions individually. Maybe it’s the captain’s job to remember that you gotta lock on before you shoot?

If you want, for variety’s sake you can use photon torpedoes…but there isn’t any apparent reason for preferring one over the other…if your ship is hit, it will shake around a lot, the bridge will tilt, and you will be tossed out of your chair. Starfleet is stingy, building a multibillion-dollar starship with warp drive, transporters — the whole bit– and leaving off the seatbelts.

Visually this wasn’t very exciting because the battles take place with the ships crawling along at what look like tugboat speeds (even if they’re supposedly moving at warp 5 or somesuch.) Combat was accompanied by suspenseful music, with pounding drumbeats and pulsating strings, which I really got into.

The only people who did get to see anything are Mr. Spock with his big eyepiece viewer that has blue light coming out, and Mr. Sulu with his smaller viewer that extends up from the side of the console when he needed it. I always wanted to see whatever it was they were supposed to be watching in there, but all you got was hearing what they said about it due to Roddenberry’s budget.

For 2001, it gets weirder: I had a big Marvel comic-book adaptation of 2001 when I was a kid, and I read it before seeing the movie. It tried hard to be visually faithful to the film; I recognized the scene where the stewardess walks around in a circle on the wall to get into the door that’s upside down, the spacecraft were all very true to what’s in the film, etc.

(man, pictures of everything are on the net, except for harmony cereal boxes)

Space travel in 2001 is silent (there is no sound in space, and the filmmakers acknowledged this) which is why the soundtrack had the Johann Strauss waltz and the Richard Strauss “Also Sprach Zarathustra” in it and brought them both firmly into the pop-culture sensibility. (If you see space and you hear a Strauss waltz or those big tympani, you can thank Stanley Kubrick — just as if you see helicopters and hear “Ride of the Valkyries” you can thank Francis Ford Coppola.)

So when I saw “2001”, thanks to the breathless captions which in comic-book style include lots of exclamation points I actually understood what was going on. Probably weirded me out for the rest of my life.

Both these films had to build the excitement up by using music because the actual space action was not very flashy. The totally ground-breaking thing that Star Wars did was introduce the dogfight. Spaceships don’t float placidly through space to classical music, they swoop and zoom and make swooping and zooming noises! Hoody-Hoo!

Scientifically, all of this is of course totally inaccurate. The physics of it are as bad as any weird tachyon particles on Star Trek, and there still shouldn’t be any sound in space…but the space dogfight is the most spiffy form of movie combat ever devised. You get this neat-looking spacecraft with long spiky weapons and big humungous engines and a rakish-looking flat-paned cockpit, and you fly around with guys named “Red Leader” and “Wedge” and a fat guy named “Porkins”. The bad guys fly spacecraft that are very ugly and nasty-looking, and they go around blowing up peaceful planets. So you gotta stop them!

We walked out of the theater after we saw the film, and my head was still swirling around in that climactic dogfight over the Death Star. Countless times I imagined flying around blasting away at those nasty Imperials. All I wanted was to climb into that cockpit and power up those engines… or failing that, get a nifty lightsaber and vrowm around a bit, lopping off arms of those who might give me some lip in the nearby bar. My little brother seemed to really dig it too, and thus began our being sucked into the huge pile of plastic known as star wars toys.

Ugh, this needs major editing, and I’m too tired. make of this what you will. See you kids in the morining.