Archive for Life - page 32

According to this story  in the U.K. Daily Mail, a Swedish family was terrorized by a 15 inch (not including the tail) rat that made it’s home behind their dishwasher.  Their first clue that there was trouble afoot:  the cat refused to go into the kitchen.

Artist’s depiction

The pros were called in and got out the “industrial sized traps”.  The rat took the bait, the trap snapped, and the rat took off with the trap around his neck.  According to the homeowner, the rat crawled under a plant and “choked himself to death”.  So apparently a suicide.  I’m not sure if that will qualify the rodent for entry to Valhalla.

Most likely you know of Pompeii – the city buried by Mount Vesuvius’ eruption in 79 A.D.  It lay buried under volcanic ash for some 1500 years when it (and other sites in the vicinity) were rediscovered by construction in the late 16th Century.  Here is a wikipedia link if you would like to learn more.  The excavations have continued since the 16th Century but began in earnest in the mid 19th Century.  They continue to this day.  What I learned of today and found interesting is this:

“Cave Canem”: Beware of Dog

This was the decoration on the floor in the vestibule or entry to a house.  It seems they may have had burlgars in those days, too.  This was discovered at a site known as “The House of the Tragic Poet”, a tragic poet being a poet who writes tragic poetry or poetry in the vein of tragedy.
The actual name of the house’s owner is unknown.  Should my home be excavated 1500 or so years from now they will more likely find something like this:

The cat’s not trustworthy, either

Canis Numquam Animum Curam Monte!

Today, Malaysian Authorities officially declared Flight 370 lost at sea with no possible survivors.  Based on close analysis of the attempted communications between the plane and satellites it was determined that the flight was on the southern of the two possible courses and this would have put it 1500 miles west of Australia in the Indian Ocean when it’s fuel would have been exhausted.  Since there are no possible landing sites, the lost at sea declaration was made.  The search continues though now as a recovery effort.  Conditions in the area are such that it is believed no one could survive for what has now been two weeks even if they had survived a crash or ditching.

Still unanswered are the questions of how or why this happened.  Authorites have all but ruled out an accident because of the circumstances surrounding how the plane “disappeared” from communications and radar, and because the flight’s behavior afterward indicated that the deed was done with purpose and some skill.  There is speculation as to who was responsible and as to whether one or both of the pilots may have been involved, though to what end is not known.

Imagine a place….put yourself there….let your imagination take over….relate your experience to yourself, someone else or no one at all.

It Was A Dark And Stormy Night…

One obstacle to writing is the same obstacle that I have come up against many times in life: fear of failure.  Writing is an act of creation and as such the very commission of the act is success.  Others who see my work will judge it based on their own biases which I have no control over.  Nor can opinions destroy my work, once realized it exists as an object in it’s own right.  I resist the urge to edit and re-edit my work over and over again in the pursuit of perfection and generally only revisit it to correct factual or blatant grammatical errors.

This blog is part of my attempt to dare to live the life I have dreamed for myself.  I have imagined a place and  now put myself there.  My imagination is working and so you read these words.

In 1978 Steely Dan released their album Aja.  Since the band’s founders Walter Becker and Donald Fagen were influenced by jazz fron their very beginnings, this album was somewhat of a milestone in that (to me anyway) it marked their transition from a jazz influenced rock band into a rock influenced jazz band.  This live performance of the title track Aja was uploaded to youtube in 2011.  I don’t know when it was performed but I assume it was somewhere around that time.

Serious jazz chops all around.  Dude.

UCSB professor assaults pro-life activists in University’s Free Speech Area resulting in misdemeanor charges. How tolerant.

Full story here, but the short version is that on this past March 4th, some members of a pro-life group called Survivors of the Abortion Holocaust (hereafter referred to as “survivors”) were at The University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) at what I guess you’d call a “protest”.  There were a few of them staked out in the quad area of the campus known as “The Arbor” handing out literature and holding graphic pictures showing the effects of late term abortions.  You know what I mean, dead babies.  A UCSB professor named Mireille Miller-Young (Feminist studies) came along and was incensed.  First a heated verbal exchange began between the professor and some students, and the survivors.  Miller-Young then ripped one of the signs out of a survivor’s hands and ran off with it.  Two of the survivors, sisters Joan and Thrin Short, followed after her trying to get their sign back while recording video on a smartphone.  In the struggle for the sign and as one of the students tride to take the smartphone from Thrin the altercation got physical.  The professor and the few students she was accompanied by got in an elevator with the sign which was later found in the professor’s office destroyed.  The UCSB Police investigated and later determined that Miller-Young had broken the law.

I will say up front that I am pro-life and so I am pre-disposed to being sympathetic to the pro-life side here, but that is not my point.  If you believe in Free Speech then you believe that the people you disagree with have the right to express their opinions.  I find it ironic that on a University of California campus where are offered courses of study in all manner of nonsense (i.e. pornography, sex work, feminist & queer theory) in the name of academic freedom that the exercise of free speech is not welcome in a so-called free speech area.  How tolerant of them.

Here in Northern California today it is sunny and in the 70’s.  Not trying to brag, just making a point.  If you live in another part of the country or the world it may be warmer or colder, wetter or drier.  The weather will change wherever I am or wherever you are.  It’s going to happen, only Bond villains and certain Superheroes can do anything about it.  By that I mean no one can do anything about it.  Where am I going with this?

Here’s where.  I am a Anthropogenic Global Warming Denier.  Just call me Galileo Galilei.  No, I did not say simply Global Warming Denier, I added Anthropogenic which means “induced by man”.  In the title and the opening paragraph I used climate and weather interchangeably when technically they are two different things.  HOWEVER…the weather is a microcosm of the climate and they share charactersitics.  The Climate is a system made up of many smaller weather systems.  So Climate = big picture; Weather = lots of small pictures that make up the big picture.  And here are some of the dots I have connected to arrive at my opinion.

• Modeling is useless as a tool to predict weather and therefore climate
• Up until just a few tens of thousands of years ago the North American Continent and much of the Northern Hemisphere was covered with a sheet if ice miles thick.  The climate warmed (without man’s help) the ice sheets retreated, the earth and it’s inhabitants adapted, survived and dare I say thrived.
• The science is not settled 
• The only proposed solutions so far are taxes on carbon emissions (allegedly to reduce the emissions) and then a carbon credit exchange which will allow carbon emitters to buy licenses to continue to emit carbon.

The single greatest influence on earth’s climate is that big yellow thing in the sky.

IN THE SKY!! I said big yellow thing IN THE SKY!

That’s better.

Not happy with the weather?  Don’t worry, it’ll change.  Not happy with the climate?  Same thing.  Things change.  The earth started out as a hot ball of gas then cooled on it’s own.  The dinosaurs were not responsible for their own demise.  Nature will take it’s course and as it has been shown the creatures that are capable of adaptation will survive, those incapable of adaptation will die out and become extinct or if a situation devlopes that is impossible to adapt to then it’s curtains for all.  Man did not invent the processes – they have been going on long before we arrived (evolved? sprouted? were dropped off by aliens? whatever.) and they will continue regardless of our continued existence.  Indeed, if it were possible for mankind to influence the climate by varying carbon emissions then the result of limiting emissions could also catastrophic if the earth were entering, unbeknownst to us, a (natural) cooling period.   A reduction of our carbon footprint would exacerbate (if the carbon theory is correct) the cooling perhaps causing an ice age which would have a devastating effect on agriculture and food production possibly leading to global famine and economic collapse.  So we’re screwed either way.  I say let nature take it’s course.  And if anyone tells you the solution to any problem is communism and higher taxes, you should mock them mercilessly.  

Did I mention that it’s nice and sunny here today?  I believe I did.

Time for another post about the missing Malaysian Airways Flight 370.  I haven’t been posting on this because there has been little actual news, just lots of (often crazy) speculation.  However, it was reported last night the Australian Authorities using satellite recon pictures may have spotted potential debris in the Indian Ocean southwest of Australia.  Aircraft and surface vessels have been dispatched, but the sheer size of the search area and bad weather make actual confirmation/recovery a long shot at best.

Good Luck

So, while not really wanting to board the speculation bandwagon, I will put a couple things out there.  I’ll call it educated speculation.  There are some responsible people with knowledge of the aircraft, airline flight procedures, etc. that are attempting to put together scenarios that fit in with the known facts.  Recently a theory was put forth that this was an accident and the cause was a fire on board that eventually incapacited the crew and passengers and the plane continued to fly on automated systems until it eventually crashed when it ran out of fuel.  Link to that article here.  You may want to read it then come back.  Back now? OK.  Now a pilot debunks that theory here in what seems to me to be a very credible way.  Go ahead and read that.  Back?  OK, good.  I still believe that the simplest explanation will turn out to be the correct one.  And I’m leaning toward the simplest explanation being an act of air piracy though we don’t know by whom or for what purpose or whether they succeeded (landed) or failed (crashed).  This mystery is a long way from being solved.

Here’s another puzzle piece to put on the table since I am working on the double sided 3D jigsaw puzzle of Life Or Whatever This Is.  The easiest pieces are those from the past because I know where I’ve been.  The colors, shapes and edges are distinct which makes it a little easier for me to see where they fit together.  The present pieces are somewhat more challenging.  They’re not solid – the shapes change; the outlines are fuzzy.  They might fit in anywhere – I have to keep moving them around until they lock in.  The future pieces have no form at all, however…..the spaces I need to fill are taking shape.  Will the pieces I create fit in those spaces?

Are You a Novice, or Expert?

How’s you’re puzzle coming along?

I am a big Peanuts fan and I have mixed feelings about this.  It will probably be very good or very bad.  I guess I will hope for the best, the trailer looks pretty cute.

I seem to associate Peanuts with good memories from my childhood,  One of my friends had a few paperback anthologies which were just collections of Peanuts comic strips and we would spend hours reading those.  Of course Snoopy was a favorite.  There were life lessons in those comics, very subtle, not preachy.  They could be absorbed effortlessly, almost unknowingly.  Subliminally, as it were.  I remember when the Peanuts TV specials came out and honestly at the time they seemed a little lame.  The only one I really care for today is “A Charlie Brown Christmas”, though “It’s the Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown” is not bad if just for the World War I Flying Ace sequence.  “A Charlie Brown Christmas” was the first of the specials made and done on a shoestring budget.  The story of how it was made is interesting in that it nearly wasn’t made at all.  TV executives wanted to cut the classic scene of Linus telling the true meaning of Christmas and Schulz was adamant about it being kept in.  Then there is the iconic theme music, the title song which is “Linus and Lucy” by jazz musician Vince Guaraldi who is coincidentally also a northern California native, hailing from San Francisco’s North Beach neighborhood.  This little song has withstood the test of time and I belive it will still be heard long after I am gone.

There is a Charles Schulz Museum in Santa Rosa, California that I have visited.  It is surprisingly large and as an adult you can easily spend an afternoon there.  The kids may be bored after an hour, but most kids today probably don’t even know what Peanuts is (yet).  Definitely worth a visit if you are in or going to be in northern California.  Well, here’s hoping that Peanuts in 3D! will be a classic and keep the Peanuts legacy going for a few more generations.