Funny link

A friend emailed me this note: "ok, I know you don't go to the childish, squabbling, st00pid forums that I visit, but still, this is a great take on endless internet forum chatter that you may recognize, and is a pretty damned funny little movie." It is. Internet Commenter Business Meeting


Ps. We're back. Long drive, great trip. I am exhausted.

0 Dark:30

Off to Montana in the morning to visit my son. Yay! Back Thursday. Confess your love. Be kind to the birds in your life. Photos forthcoming.

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translation here

Nevada mailbox

We're back. I'm exhausted. Did get much sleep last night. It is a delicate decision whether or not to interrupt the piñata party a skunk is having with the garbage bag hanging a yard from your tent. Anyway, here's a photo from the trip. I do love Nevada.

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UPDATE:

It's not an ice box. It's the Tardis. I always knew that police box was phony. The Doctor is too smart to think that people would believe a phone booth then, now or 50 million years in the future but an ice box. Thanks for the hints Barbara and Roy. Of course it's about getting ice cream, anytime ... anywhere.

Desert reflections

In the morning we're leaving for the Nevada interior. That almost certainly sounds pompous and affected. It would to me if I didn't know what it is like out there. I've wrestled with an accurate description for what we do every since our first excursion six years ago. Camping just doesn't cut it. Touring falls short. Exploring is a bit too much. I could say photo safari but the desert simply does not live up to the glamor a word like safari conjures ... elephants, indolent lion prides, chilling kills, rhinos bashing the jeep... So I end up using flat phrases like "going out there" and "poking around the desert". Not very descriptive. The thing is, once you've been out there, out there does make sense. It is out there. Out, not in where it is safe; not in with comforting familiarity; with water. Out there is not protected like it is in here. And there; Earth, without the people. Anyway, we're going camping tomorrow and won't be back until the end of week.

I have passed though a few different takes on what's out there, beginning with the astounding experience of meeting the planet beyond real estate ... earth, sky, wind, water ... not necessarily hospitable but fascinating and, other than the sound of the wind and voices of coyotes talking to each other across the night, and our noisy intrusion, stunningly quiet.

Over time, however, I became consumed by a grinding obsession with the history of the land, the miners, the crazy immigrants who threw their few possessions in wagons and set out in search of a new life, the West. Nevada is full of silent artifacts from those journeys, stone ruins, remnants of barns, fences, towns, wells, mines, roads. And under that, the desert holds records of humans crossing and crisscrossing each other's trails thousands and thousands of years before the
Europeans came. These records were made by now extinct, unrelated civilizations who left behind petroglyphs, cave paintings, lithic scatters and burial grounds. It is all being erased by the wind, all rotting in the sun but, along with the gigabytes of photos I have taken, the dimensions and solemn account burned into my psyche until finally it was all I could see, the Past, tragic, bold, and violent everywhere.

That and the strange, impenetrable Nellis Air Force base, home of the legendary Area 51, smack in the middle of Nevada and completely inaccessible. Wanting to explore that is the only reason I can see for entering the machine. Mr. Lee is ready for the Singularity. He loves taunting me about how, pretty soon, we will be able to upload ourselves into the machine but I like sentient life. However, I must admit, the opportunity to freely snoop around Nellis and Area 51 undetectable in the lifelike body of a robot hummingbird, is very appealing as long as I can transfer back into my corporeal form at will.

In the meantime, my interest in the desert is changing. The history of the West is of the brutal, ruthless exploitation of humans, animals and the land. The power grab in the 19th century established the fortunes and corrupted the men and families who rule America as its fascist shadow government today, become corporate entities now evolving into the rapacious global Corporatocracy. But don't get me started. Anyway, I'm looking for something new out there now because the weight of the past has worn me down.

This trip, I think I'll start back at the beginning where all that is left of civilization, the impression of a road, leads only to the sky and the planet, as it is, land adrift in space, in an atmosphere of its own making, a breathing sphere, an island within an unfathomed sea.

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Smallest park on Earth and other extremes

I bet you didn't know the smallest park on Earth is located in Portland Oregon. I didn't until I visited Google's Extreme Series page (updated daily). Mill Ends Park was created by a leprechaun by the name of Patrick O'Toole proving, once again, that one must be very specific when asking favors of the wee folk.


Mill Ends Park,
Portland, Oregon :
Smallest Park on the Earth

Mill Ends Park in Portland, Oregon is the smallest park in the world, according to the Guinness Book of Records. The "park" is a 2 foot (610 mm) wide circle which in 1948 was intended to be the site for a light pole. When this failed to appear, Dick Fagan, a journalist for the Oregon Journal, planted flowers in the hole and named it after his column in the paper, "Mill Ends". Fagan told the story of the park's origin as follows: He looked out his office window and spotted a leprechaun digging in the hole. He ran down and grabbed the leprechaun, which meant that he had earned a wish. Fagan said he wished for a park of his own; but since he had not specified the size of the park in his wish, the leprechaun gave him the hole. Over the next two decades, Fagan often featured the park and its head leprechaun, named Patrick O'Toole, in his whimsical column.

Fagan died of cancer in 1969, but the park lives on, cared for by others. It became an official city park in 1976. Mill Ends Park is located at SW Naito Parkway and SW Taylor in downtown Portland.
The park's area is 452 in² (0.29 m²). The small circle has featured many unusual items through the decades, including a swimming pool for butterflies (complete with diving board) and a miniature ferris wheel (which was delivered by a regular-sized crane).

I Ching in a nutshell

(The title is meant to be a joke)

A friend recently posted, "Some time tell me how to learn I Ching? Please."

Naturally I am only too happy to oblige however the best I can do is an introduction.

Roy, I Ching ... I Ching, Roy.

Good luck guys.


But of course .........



I can't help offer an opinion or two. This is a blog after all.

First off, the name of the book translates as Book of Changes; "I" meaning change and "ching" meaning book. Don't ask it "yes or no" questions. You will really short change yourself ... sorry. The way I see it, when you toss the coins, you dip into the synergy of the moment as focused by your question so the more specific, the better. As above, so below. This is not the same as asking to be told what to do. For me, using the I Ching is like looking into the cosmic mirror. If I phrase my question properly, I get a peek at what is influencing a situation/me, and perhaps see more clearly the waters I am in and need to navigate.

Think about your question awhile. Wording is very important. Write it down. For instance, when I did the reading on my birthday recently, I asked "What is the Tao for my coming year?" Or suppose you want to quit the soul crushing corporate job that has you imprisoned in the dead dry center of middle America and go back to Santa Cruz so you can pick up your old life as a surfer dude. Then your question would be something like, "What are the influences surrounding my desire to ......" or perhaps ... "What would be the outcome of quitting my current soul crushing corporate job and ....." Get the idea?

The I Ching often confirms what I already know, which is amazing when you think about it but not particularly mind bending if you prefer carnival raz-ma-taz. My birthday hexagram reflected a condition I have been aware of for a while, Standstill, so I asked a second question in search of more information on a way forward. "How can I correct the mistakes I made that have resulted in stagnation" and got, "Cultivate yourself, await your alloted time, then you will be able to bite through." The changing hexagram, Biting Through, went into some helpful detail.


Be patient. It takes time to get use to the language and metaphors. The I Ching is among the oldest of Chinese classic texts and not dumbed down for the current age or its consumers. On the other hand, it is oddly modern. It shares a common language with computers, zeros and ones. The I Ching arrives at all 64 hexagrams and their changing lines through combining and recombining zeros and ones just as computers use what's called binary code, also made up solely of ever changing combinations of ones and zeros. Everything both systems do is based on zeros and ones. Elegant, yes?

That's it. Try it if you like. I recommend the Wilhelm/Baynes version of the book for your basic text. It's the original. It's easy once you get the idea of how to count each coin toss. If you don't want to buy anything you can find online versions of the method here or here or here or just look around for a site that suits you. On the other hand, if all this bores, mystifies or otherwise offends your religious and/or scientific bias, forget about it. Have some fun. Translate your name into binary code. Otherwise, what are you waiting for?

Step through the door...

~ 01100001011100110110100001100001


Update: Be sure to write your (well thought out, carefully worded) question down before tossing the coins. Being able to refer back to exactly will help you interpret the results.