Celebrating Friday the Thirteenth

Crash (1996) on IFC (Independent Film Channel) Midnight - Eastern DS Time; 12:35am Pacific

dir. David Cronenberg ... the controversial underground car crash subculture movie!

I remember this movie from 1996 as having more horror than the best Holywood horror flicks.

It was quickly disappeared; the tracks being covered by a 5th rate flick usurping the title. Now it's back thanks to IFC. I'm glad I didn't cancel my cable subscription now.

I hope my memory isn't just being hyperbolic.

Mountain Sitting

Mountain is sitting

Thinking like a rock

Slow and very stable:

So who all need emote

Empathy or Antipathy

Sympathy or Lunacy?

Silence still knows best.

Quiet thus beats the heat.

Dead Poets Society movie in Finland

I saw in a blog the Dead Poets Society movie is still having effects in Finland.

http://kotkavuori.blogspot.com/2007/05/hidden-curriculum-in-7th-graders-books.html

I wanted to leave a comment but my password didn't work. I posted a link in

http://movies.groups.yahoo.com/group/deadpoetssocietymovieclub/

Biology of skin color

Zebra-fish and the biology of skin color:

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com/2005_12_11_dissectleft_archive.html

The Muslim Brotherhood

Is the Muslim Brotherhood moderate and peace-loving as our political representatives say?

http://www.americanthinker.com/2007/04/the_muslim_bortherhoods_duping.html

Extinct Fauna --- Do you miss them?

http://www.fws.gov/midwest/Endangered/lists/extinct.html

Perhaps people with unrepaired hare-lips may miss the hare-lip sucker. Nature appears to have filled in the ecological gaps left by the carolina parakeets and the passenger pigeons and most other extincted fauna. I sorta miss the sabre-tooth tigers but the cats we now have fill the gap since there are no more wooly mammoths nor boars that required 15 strong men to carry nor even those huge aurochs that were the pride of Poles as recently as the 17th century.

http://users.aristotle.net/~swarmack/aurohist.html

I've heard there are Russians working on a project to bring the wooly mammoths back. They must be the most missed of extincts.

Re: Horror of VT mass slaughter

Fox News Channel wants to protect us from the horror of 'Cho's Manifesto Package'. I've gotten a few glimpses of his video and suppose worse may have been shown on NBC tv. It would be more equitable if the media gave us a choice about viewing this material; but, of course, they would rather play nanny and make the decisions for us [just like legislators are prone to do].

Those of us who would choose to view the whole thing are not necessarily 'sickos motivated by morbid curiosity'. There are important lessons for the future of humanity to be learned from looking deeply and clearly into such material; the apparently 'most-qualified', the academically certificated are often misled by their narrow specializations and bias.

Many of us distance ourselves from such perpetrators, often attempting to dehumanize them verbally to increase our separateness. But we do share the uncanny dynamics of human nature with them and "homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto" [I am human therefore I think nothing human to be alien from me] as Ciciero, Seneca, and Terence wrote so long ago. One doesn't have to believe that we are all one big soul [*Grapes of Wrath*] to be able to appreciate this.

Horror of VT mass slaughter

The horror of the Virginia Tech mass slaughter!

Were they casualties of one boy's war?

What was he really warring against? Wasn't he envious of the opulently successful like his sister with her important position with the U.S. State Department? Extreme sibling rivalry?

*The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith*, an Australian novel by Thomas Kenneally, give one some clue of such a shooter's on-the-spot dynamics. Cho Seung-Hui was, of course, much less innocent and much more cold-blooded than the character, Jimmy Blacksmith.

The Fianna & the fae termagants

This tale, known as "The Enchanted Cave of Cesh Corran", is found under *Irish Fairytales by James Stephens* in this marvellous anthology of online fairytales:

http://www.surlalunefairytales.com/

La Fée Verte

http://www.oxygenee.com/absinthe.html

Happy New Year!

This is the springing of the year in the lunar cycle.

May all sentient beings live well, prospering in peace and love!


http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/6368383.stm

http://www.gio.gov.tw/info/festival_c/spring_e/spring.htm

Le Coup de Foudre

I mean "love at first sight" or rather hearing, pertaining to instant bonding with certain pieces of music.
I find myself amazed at these bondings I experience upon hearing certain pieces of music. The most recent of these experiences occurred while watching episode 14 of Samurai Champloo on Cartoon Network when I first heard Ikue Asazaki singing "Obokuri Eemui", a traditional Okinowan song. It is not available on any of the Samurai Champloo soundtrack albums, but only on the Okinowan CD, *UTABA UTAYUN*, which does not appear to be available on this side of the Pacific Ocean, unfortunately.

I did find a brief sampling of "Obokuro Kemui" near the beginning of "A Children's Poem" at http://crookedneighbor.com just prior to the James Dickey poem about animal heaven.

Recent brain research indicates that bonding may be the result of release of a hormone in the limbic system. I think it's called oxytocin. Oxytocin, some brain researchers claim, forms a cocktail with norepinephrin and dopamine to produce the effect we interpret as love. The scientist I heard discussing this claimed that the absence of oxytocin from the limbic cocktail results in lust rather than love.

The French for "love at first sight" literally means "struck by lightning"; like Bilbo Baggins in Tolkiens' *The Hobbit*. The ancient greeks believed anything struck by lightning became sacred and uncanny forevermore.

nekkid

New Mythologies

I think that new mythologies are not as likely to develop from the
thinking intellectual and literary populations as from semiliterate
and poorly media-acculturated. Prison populations and 'hoods', barrios
and ghettos produce more myth and effective change than scientists,
academics, or think tanks. Look, for example at the mythic
attraction of youths to gangs and drugs! http://www.gangsorus.com/ganghistory.html

What about hip-hop culture?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hip_hop_music

These are like the tips of icebergs in our cultural seas.

nekkid

aude dilucide spectare

Invocation for Brigid

"Once again the Goddess arises from her slumber to
Walk abroad on the face of the Earth. Close your eyes and see
Her with me now.
Far away, across the Irish sea, She stirs in her sleep,
wakens, stretching and yawning, and rises to begin Her
journey. She walks through still frozen woods, and as She passes,
She brings the first stirrings of life to tender buds buried
beneath the snow.

She passes…and as She passes, the small burrowing creatures
rouse themselves, to behold her with eyes still heavy with sleep.

She passes…and as She passes, the groundhog senses Her
presence in his dreams. And he wakes, climbing from his
burrow for one brief hour, and as She passes, the groundhog
sees her shadow.

She passes…and as She passes, buds and wondering creatures
and groundhog all hear Her voice as wind in the barren
branches of the trees. And She whispers a promise that
Spring will come again. Not yet, not now, but soon, soon…

She passes…and as She passes, She walks over mountains
and hills, through the land that is her home.
And Her steps lengthen and She walks over the waters of the ocean
and through the deserts, and still She is home, for the Earth
itself is Her home, the very planet is Her domain.

And She passes…and She rouses our slumbering hearts
with Her passing, with Her voice murmuring in the wind.
Soon…soon…

And now She is here with us, She passes by us now,
nudging us from our winter dreams. Let’s invite Her to
linger awhile with us, to pause in Her journey and join our
circle, by lighting a sacred fire. In Her homeland, in Kildare,
Her priestesses kept a sacred fire burning at all times on the
hearth of Her temple. Let us now relight that holy flame,
rekindle the fires of Kildare. Let us gaze into the flames and
see the face of Brigid." ---Anonymous

Art

MOONINITE

Mooninite ilumines heron

Which has the more beauty?

Ignignokt claims the heron

when beset by Boston crabs.

nekkid [with help from Hannibal Rising]

Then and Now

"Ehmals und jetzt"


"In juengern Tagen war ich das Morgens froh,

Des Abends weint ich, jetzt, da ich aelter bin,

Beginn ich zweifelnd meinen Tag, doch

Heilig and heiter ist mir sein Ende." Friedrich Hoelderlin


"THEN and NOW"

"In my younger days I was fresh and clear in

the morn but weepy by even; now, being older

I often begin my day in madding confusion;

may get lucid and coherent by its ending."

[a perhaps too free translation by nekkid]

Holderlin

Robert Anton Wilson

Happy Disincorporation [7-11-07] to Robert Anton Wilson!Wilson Library

Priory of Sion and the blue apples

The ancient secret order of The Priory of Sion seems to be an important key to much of the speculation about Mary Magdalene, the Knights Templar and their treasures, and the mysteries of Rennes-le-Chateau.

So how do you like those
blue apples ?

Malum Malum Malum

Malo. Malo. Malo. Malo.
Malo: I would rather be
Malo: in an apple-tree
Malo: than a naughty boy
Malo: in adversity.
Malo. Malo. Malo. Malo.

Miles' Song in Benjamin Britten's

opera, *Turn of the Screw*

MALO

In the bleak midwinter...

Christina Rossetti wrote the poem and Gustav Holst composed the music for it.
http://www.cyberhymnal.org/htm/i/n/intbleak.htm

And now we can hear it sung out in the bleak itself by Christ Church Choir, Oxford along with other musical treats:
http://www.danielsparks.com/blog/