A random Scotto factoid or two – I’ve never taken any course as Pass / Fail ever. Not sure why that is.

There’s not a whole lot that I’d do for a klondike bar. maybe take one if offered. Now if a friend asked me to cluck like a chicken or babysit, I would despite ice cream in the deal or not.

wacky link to my journal peapod the pocket squirrel… I’m number one on the google search for that!

I’ll spread the meme, but only because I really like the title page more than the after animation.

spooky pictures of castles and towers

What a totally sad ending for justice league…the least they could’ve done is helped rebuild the destroyed world… I am glad that they dedicated it to Gardner Fox, though. Sort of a nasty dig of “Ray Thompson” and Roy Thomas.

Looks like that tape is about full…I’ve just got to fit about 30 minutes more. This Saturday (after I get paid, and can get ot the PO) I can ship off so many of those things I’ve been meaning to mail for ages.

Fresh and clean from the shower, house smells like champa, and I have a slight patchouli aroma. Now, I crave the first meal of the day. Nibbling on Newt-ears doesn’t cound as part of this complete breakfast.

I think a walk to the grove and bakery is in order. A loaf of french bread, a gallon of orange juice, and tasty orange blossom honey…. I have some raspberry tea and cereal here to polish it off…. and it’s a beautiful day for a meandering trundle out in the sun. I’ll return home after, set up a little picnic, and relax here the rest of the day. Sounds like a plan to me.

I look forward to seeing my beloved tonight, hanging out and relaxing… recounting our Saturdays to each other, and just enjoying each other’s company. Hopefully, she got to blow off some work-steam out last night… she’s been working very hard these last few weeks.

Dirty dozen on the TV… man, Charles Bronson was always a dog-face, wasn’t he? He looks like he’s part monkey, part Robert Blake.

Ok, enough lounging… time to get up and feed my belly and wanderlust.

See you later, dear journal.

Backstory on the Newton de-skulling the skellie in a cemetary pic… this morning I was awakened by a gentle bippity-bip of a Newtie paw…somehow that got integrated into my dream of walking through a graveyard. In my half-awake stupor, I envisioned him hopping, predator-bunny like, from tombstone to tombstone, smacking the long-bleached bones into tall piles of shiny white that fall with the sound of wind chimes (or maybe gamelan and xylophone tones). It occurs to me that the skeletons should’ve been buried in the ground or at least had some tatters of clothing on, but that simply wasn’t the case… most of them were sitting crosslegged, or even standing on top of the different plots, leaning on the headstones.

After talking with my brother last night, I’ve got Bali and its music on the brain, which might be where the gamelan sounds came from… but the boneyard was very western, “almost a boot hill” style. The bippity-bip completely overwrote the rest of my previous dream memory.

Is chocolate-bubble gum a good milkshake flavor? I rather lean to mint-chocolate chip or pineapple/blueberry.

Well, I’ve slacked enough this Lazy Sunday…time to reboot and take a shower. see you later, dear journal.

Sweetie’s having a gals’ night out tonight, so I think I will go hoof it up to see Grand Funk Railroad… they come on at 8:30, so I think I’ll have time to grab a conch fritter or three, and bring the ol’ camera with me.

See you kids later… maybe nighty-night, dear journal.

People like this give me a headache.

But it is always illuminating to get a glimpse of the thought processes of people that don’t agree with you. It is also an education in the rational reasonableness of some rather extreme views. They don’t foam at the mouth or use INAPPROPRIATE CAPITALS or end every other statement with numerous exclamation points!!!! They use a spellchecker and correct punctuation, and if speaking would probably use a conversational tone.

And yet… Lewis Goldberg – “Promoting Abnormality”… has the lovely section:

“Through the last hundred and fifty years or so, we have been told that if we only accept such-and-such, this nation will be a better place. We abolished slavery, and the nation was no better off. We let women vote, and the nation was no better off. We forcefully desegregated society, and the nation was no better off. We flung the doors open to mass immigration of heathen, and the nation was no better off. We broke down the barriers of employment to women, and the nation was no better off.”

Note that none of these sectors of the general population (one of them constituting at least 50% of humanity) are considered to be a part of “the nation.” Apparently “the nation” isn’t black or female or anyone but his particular political or religious belief born in the US. *We* abolished slavery and *We* allowed women to vote and *We* graciously allowed those goshdarn heathens to take up residence and pay taxes and become citizens here, but *We* (the nation) are no better off.

That section could be delivered at the top of the lungs at a beer hall or in front of a burning cross and feel right at home, but it just slides on by when delivered in a conversational tone of voice. The guy questions the wisdom of abolishing slavery in the year 2002 and I doubt very many will call him on it. Ugh. How sickening is that? This guy gives freedom of opinion a bad name.

Freaky Bottomless Pit

ELLENSBURG A topographic map spread on the hood of a car showed where the search party would start. There is a hole out there, they believe, a hole that not only appears to be bottomless but has, on at least one occasion, brought an animal back to life.

The hole, the story goes, exists outside of town on land once owned by a man who calls himself Mel Waters. For years, he said, it was used as the neighborhood dump for trash, old appliances, dead cattle. When the hole never filled up, Waters measured its depth by lowering weighted fishing line into it. After 80,000 feet, he gave up. Amazed by this odd place (which dogs and birds avoided), Waters called radio host Art Bell, whose late-night show on conspiracies and the paranormal attracts a huge national audience.

More info at the article, but due to the presence of a fella named Brian Christ of Ellensburg, the article also included some of my favorite lines:

“Christ was clearly nervous. He’d heard what Waters said happened after he went public – that soldiers in yellow gear cordoned off his property and threatened to “find” a drug lab on it if he didn’t cooperate.”

and

“At base camp, Christ had big news.”

Totally unrelated… or is it? Even apples and oranges are tasty edible fruit. Want to be a Superhero, for real?

Saw a lovely Russian couple at the laundry… young and in love…really enjoying each other’s company, conversing and laughing together. I’m so nosy…I wish I knew what they were gabbing about, but my Russian is limited ot about five phrases, da, and pravda. If they ever have kids, they’ll be adorable… both of them had nice facial features.

This weekend is the seafood festival! How fast a year goes by… it seems like it was just a few weeks ago I was hearing about it packing up. Last night it was the Fabulons, then Otis Day was playing, and tonight it’s Grand Funk Railroad… maybe I’ll take a walk down there tonight if the mood takes me. Heh…in St. Auggie, it’s the cabbage and potato festival… I’d rather go there. *urp* The air and sea show is coming, too… I wonder if I’ll go this year, now that I have a camera.

Oh! I found a piccie of the mall of the dead’s beginning…soon I suspect it will return to the dirt from which it rose.

Maybe I can get Danny to go with me to the Cranberries concert on 6/1?

dragonball z is back on this midday. setting up the vcr. also, spongebob-zip on the 5pm to 6pm nick block

Cracking corn today, no work save for laundry…I started singing it after watching Bugs Bunny do it in a cartoon. I suppose I should get cracking on the wash, just to get it out of the way. No point in having the sword of damocles hanging over my head if I can help it.

Well, perhaps I’ll waste a little time by passing on a couple of widely believed scientific “facts” that are actually false… until proved otherwise again.

The age-old study in which they trained planarians to go through a maze, and then fed the trained planarians to untrained planarians and noticed that the recently-fed planarians learned the maze much more quickly than a control group of unfed planarians. No explanation was ever found for this property of flatworms.

Much later, another group of researchers figured out why this was. The fed planarians weren’t assimilating memories, they were simply better-fed than the control group, and so they learned faster.

I think it was just so embarrassing a find that it was largely ignored, and textbooks in the know stopped using the flatworm learning as an example of the scientific method. Of course, cannibals who eat their associates’ brains so as to gain their wisdom are largely ignorant of this fact as well, and they keep on using planarians to justify their actions.

Also, subliminal advertising doesn’t work…

full moon tonight..

thoughts of my beloved reaching out, and tucking her in… the sweetheart is so tired after this and last week’s heavy workload. I hold her in my heart as she sleeps, and trust she’ll wake refreshed and happy. I adore her so much.. I hope that her dreams are bright, and we get together in the sandman’s realm shortly.

I spoke with brother tonight, and I think he’s on the right track… he’s aware of the dangers at hand, and knows I’m around to hlep if he wants or needs it. Heh… he exchanged the guide to GTA3 for a fishing game for PS1, and is really digging the DVD player. He lives right next to the library, so free movies, five at a pop. I wonder how long it’ll be before he runs the library dry, and has to resort to inter-library loan?

Kirstie Ally doing those Pier 1 commercials is disturbing to me. Some of the gears are slipping, somewhere.

120 gig HD, video card, dvd drive and extra cabling all arrived today… I estimate the happy machine will be assembled, and ready to rock and roll inside of a week if time allows. Also bargained with my ride home, and I’ll be saving 25% of my travel expenses in the evenings now, which will be better spent on other things.

speaking of cool gizmos – Future Horizons
They don’t have the Oscillation Overthruster, but they’ve got plans to build just about every dang thing else, including the Flux Capacitor and the amazing Cosmic Diode, the Ion Ray Gun, the Hiller Flying Platform, and even complete schematics of a Maglev Superconducting Train. No, not movie props – real working stuff, or so they claim. It’s like reading the inventory of the storage room in the Baxter Building. Excelsior!

with that, nigh nigh from Han Scotto and Newtbacca, dear journal.

before bed –
What do roving bands of intrepid Vikings and a legendary lost city of gold have in common with something as prosaic as baking powder?

Him That Hears The Voice of Big Nuknuk gazed worriedly into the sky for the tenth night in a row.

How had he displeased Big Nuknuk? The rituals had been followed and the sacrifices made following the dreams: The dreams that had shown great destruction and hardship and strife for the tribe.

He had gathered the tribe before Big Nuknuk, and for a day and a night chanted and drummed and made offerings to Him, so that He might show them favor, show them mercy. Him That Hears The Voice of Big Nuknuk had spent days prostrate before the idol, forsaking food and water that he might hear the Will of Big Nuknuk more clearly.

But still Big Nuknuk was silent, glaring balefully down at him from the night sky.

Each night a little more brightly, more full of rage and menace.

Coming closer.

*pan to sky*

Were the meteor possessed of intelligence it would have known of its imminent death, drawn to its doom by a force it could not comprehend.

Were it possessed of will, it would have raged, frustrated, pulled from its flight by a force it could not control.

Possessed of humor, it may well have appreciated the irony that it’s own death would bring about life.

Possessed of emotion, it would have drawn malicious pleasure from the chaos this new life was to unleash.

But it wasn’t.

Simply:

The meteor fell.

It burned.

It crashed.

And from its impact ripples coursed, as it bounced and twisted and tore its way across the land. Plates shifted and the land bucked and heaved. Cracks and fissures clawed their way across plains and through forests tearing asunder all in their path and allowing fire to fountain forth from deep in the wounds they left.

And as it finally rolled to a stop, all was still.

For a while.

Have you ever been around blind folks “speed-reading” books on tape? I had a professor (of psychology) in college that was blind, and he used a special tape player with a variable playback speed for skimming recorded texts. It sounded like mosquitoes humming to me, but he said that he was so used to it that it sounded normal to him. Now, that’s what can be done consciously, the nervous system is even better at training itself without your conscious interference in the process. Consider the “cocktail party effect” and other audio tricks your nervous system learned without any conscious effort. There is a lot more ambient sound going into the ear and along the auditory nerves than ever gets to the conscious “hearing” centers in your brain. Most of the unnecessary input is evaluated and discarded before bothering “headquarters.” This is a subconscious, or pre-conscious routine, and is probably essential for living in an urban environment.

What you see and hear is not literally what comes in through the nerves. It is processed and interpreted. The literal image on the retinas is upside-down, it is the brain that turns the image 180 degrees for you to “see.” The flashes you “see” when your eyes are closed are not the result of light striking cones and rods. What you “hear” is not literally the waves striking your eardrum, but a condensed report of the important input made by the nerves. Prior to the activity in the brain that is your sensation of hearing, a lot of editing has been done by the nerves. But, in order to do the editing some evaluation of the message is made at a subconscious level to determine whether it is something that should be passed on to the conscious hearing.

This all sounds a little out there. The best way to get a visceral feel for the difference between the raw input and your perception is to try out the Blind Spot exercise. Prove to yourself that you actually have a blind spot on each eye, and your brain automatically fills in the missing part of the picture so that you have to do weird exercises on the Internet to detect them at all. What you see is not what you get. What you “see” is a phenomenon happening in the brain, not what is out in the world.

I wonder what could be missed or hidden in that spot, or how two different people see the same thing… or even the same person at different times.

assorted ways to kiss – awww! click on the folks in the crowd.

forgot to mention last night’s dream… transcribed from my bedside notebook –

Dreams of laying face-down in the dirt, a layer of skin painlessly removed, covered in tiny seeds, fine as powder, and then the skin replaced without even a seam showing. a tickle behind the knees where the sprouts began to show… but where I expected seedlings to be there was instead a fine, soft fuzz that changed slowly into iridescent feathers of a deep green to a golden hue.

soon, my entire back was covered with the same sort of stuff… from there, three pairs of wings sprouted… a set at the shoulder blades, another at the base of my back, and the last near my ankles. Despite having them, I didn’t try to fly.. instead, I just tested them out, flapping and raising a large wind… while not a tornado, a large wave of air was projected in front of me, sending most things directly in my line of sight up and away with the force of a hurricane.

Few things were immune to the wind…buildings and flagpoles, though vehicles would get caught up and sent rolling away from me like a toy cast off by a careless child. Trees didn’t seem to waver much, but loose debris was swept up and the area inside the gust was clutter-free.

I have an urge to make a scarecrow for the herb garden.

weird seach code to my website of the day – AltaVista – bob ross painting death 9 down

an interesting article about copyright law. I lean to his idea #2 at the bottom.

Newtella the mountain-goat is on munch-episode two on his catgrass. He just trots right up to it, takes a seat in front of the salad bar… wait, I stand corrected, the pot’s been overturned. Ack, time to get more soil. He does dig the plant-life, though. nice thing about sweeping up the spilled dirt is that I can toss it back into the pot.

sunny and bright today, but my mind is happily residing in a comfy nap-zone of dark clouds and soft rain…. my noggin is heady with good, snuggly thoughts.

more fun info on the planets lining up.

I find myself wondering what would happen if a Tunguska event-type thing happend today. What sort of alarms would it set off… how much annoying news coverage would there be? The conspiracy theories and accusations that would follow… who would believe that a meteor just fell out of the sky and did that to a major city… like New York or Washington DC… perhaps a lesser target, like Disney World? Perhaps a story seed, probably not one.