Down on the Farm... Part 1

Being as how I’m contra-social, and equally being possessed of a deep desire to live an ethical life I often find myself in the position of bouncing off things other folks take for granted. For example, the now common “Friend Request” there on Zuckerberg’s farm.

I didn’t put a paw down on the farm to my own intentions, it was the publisher and publicist who thought, demanded actually, that I should have a footprint in the “social media” machine. The entire point of my presence there is to advertise my writings. And that, odd as it might sound to you, is why “friend requests” are a bit of an issue to me.

Ok, you don’t need to watch out for the heat, you don’t need to buy condoms by the case and KY in five gallon buckets to load in the painted pink dildo-tipped grease gun you zip tied to a cordless drill motor turning an off center lead banana for a flywheel ( to use on the really tough cases), but still… when your motive is advertising is it ethical to accept a “friend request” from people you actually know world of real life? The folks who really are your friends? The idea itches, not tickles, and not in good places. Feels a bit to close to prostituting the very idea of friendship to me. But then again, I’m a geezer who has been contra-social longer than most of these good folks have been alive.

Somehow I’m seeing ghost images from a nightmare: a classroom, large display in the front of a room where shows a complex geometric grid representing some N^th dimensional matrix of associations, accompanied of course by several dauntingly simple equations from perhaps advanced calculus, and that droning voice of damnation which is the professor… perhaps marketing, perhaps mathematics or statistics, saying… “The first through third order interstices represent a friend, which is NOT to be confused with any state of emotional bonding between corporeal individuals capable of transmitting burden of life…”

Yea, nightmare. I’m right there with you Leonard (Cohen)… “I’ve seen the future brother, it is murder…” Or worse. Oh, well. There’s always gasoline, gunpowder and whiskey for a safety net.

Of Bottoms… Line, or ripe round and ready…

*gulp* Starting a new job is always a bit nerve wracking. But, that’s where I find myself, starting a second career as a writer. For years and years now I’ve written for a hobby, but if I’m to bring to reality any of several dreams I’ve indulged for that same number of years, things off on the technical rather than artistic side of this all consuming imagination of mine (solar powered air conditioning, residential micro-power grids to make a house run dang near free, all those good old yellow pad – middle of the night coffee shop things banging heads with the guys), well, that’s going to need more coin that what can be scratched from the retirement. The crash of ’08 really did hurt. So… back to work. Believe it or not I’m thinking about finding an old time clock, just so I have something to punch… and cuss. Later gang.

Rough Air Ahead...

Ladies and Gentlemen: Please fasten your seatbelts and secure your tray tables in an upright position… because there’s no way around this particular storm and it is going to get very bumpy before we get clear of it.

Yet another consequence of the Donald appearing on the political scene is a threat to democracy not really seen before. That risk? The consequences, coming and going, of situation specific incompetence in a candidate who is a potential leader of the nation.

I can’t speak to the overt consequences of such incompetence, of course not, I no more than you no more than they have any way to know just what the subject or focus of the incompetence might turn out to be in some real world - live to the world situation where a temper tantrum might unleash the terror of modern warfare.

But what all of us need to cast a thought across is this: no matter how gross it gets it is an  IMMENSE danger to democracy to even think about trying to establish some formal structure to certify political competence as a condition of candidacy. That job MUST remain the sole domain of the voters at the polls.

Gentle reader, such a certifying process as that would be one of the quickest ways possible to finish off the job of gooking out America, totally destroying real democracy and allowing the puppet masters and the Corporate Neo-Fascist to claim the victory over freedom. The last thing in the world we as American’s need is have the already massively suspect loyalties of the education establishment in conjunction with some grouping of the existing political status-quo empowered to play Central Committee (yes, think good old Marxist-Leninist COMMUNISM on that one) in regards as to who is and who is not competent enough to be allowed to run for office. That translates as instant oligarchy and deadly choke point on the democratic process identical to what destroyed the Soviet Union in a matter of only sixty some years.

Don’t do it, America. Don’t even think it. Just vote against what you know CAN’T do the job, and reform and rework your primary processes to pick better candidates in the future.

Observations and Field Work …

I haven’t posted anything here of late, but no, I’m not dead and I’m not in a coma. Just busy, and working at (emotional) load limit in several directions. Bouncing deep into the overloads on intellect and perception as well, but for the first time in a quarter century it’s the emotional that hit limit first.

This fine work of womanhood
is totally how I envision
Ms. Catherine Omega Winterwalk
in the story "The Care and Feeding
of Unicorns"

The redhead on the left is of course Ms. CC Donahue
from the tale "Rules of Engagement", and the brunette
lass on the right does full justice to Ms. Lisa Ranik,
a crossover character between the two stories. 

Been writing a lot on what started out as a story that rapidly turned into a book, ‘The Care and Feeding of Unicorns’, the synthesis of the emotional content of the Omega affair of a few years back. To full tell that tale has put me into places I had yet to go in my quest to know myself well enough that no one can take advantage of me by knowing me better than I know myself. Seen some deep introspection these past weeks, I’ve got several contract crews working in Escherville. Some of ‘em are using dynamite, and Blackwater Security got nothing on my battalion of mercenaries protecting them while they work.  

With that underway I’ve also been watching the current political circus as the momentum of the last fifty years is in the process of running headlong into the walls of reality. The dis-quality of the major players is shredding the camouflage and covers of so many low level collective entities it’s really not funny. It’s like seeing Wall Street and Madison Avenue stripped nude to naked and not knowing their clothes went away, watching them walk around buck nekid still doing business like the tailor who sewed the Emperor’s new clothes had taken them on for customers. Yea, there’s a few who aren’t that bad to look at, but damn… denim and sackcloth would do wonders for the rest of ‘em.

Side note: I’m planning to vote Libertarian this cycle. A third party president couldn’t be any more of a threat to the national welfare than what’s top of the ticket on the other two. The same constitutional checks and balances are in play, and a third party potus would of necessity have to be a consummate negotiator to get anything done, to negotiate from a position solid enough to make anything happen would require recruiting the people themselves to the cause, ergo, that potus’ best option would be to be as transparent an administration as possible and recruit the best of the other two sides into their cabinet.

The other two parties, divided and all but disgraced by what split them, would be unable to hide their partisan bullshit and old boy/girl corporate commitments in the face of a potus not part of their machine who could and should reprise the old FDR fireside chats of years gone by to give the American People his side of the story set in a political soap opera waaaay to steamy hot for Brazilian TV. All they show is sex while the perversions where the political meets the corporate make a thirty head Viagra saturated pansexual orgy on an indoor kindergarten playground look totally tame by comparison. All that might require by way of clean up would be soap and a garden hose running warm water, maybe a supply of ice packs and some anesthetic hemorrhoid medicines for those the victim of bad aim or overly enthusiastic.

Sheeesh… sorry about that. Didn’t really mean to load you up quite that heavy. Anyway, no reason potus can’t put a paw down on Zuckerberg’s farm* just like the rest of the world. *(aka facebook… seems I remember the farmer who owned the farm whence was set the cute little kids’ story about Charlotte’s Web shared a name with the facebook founder).

THINK about who you’re gonna vote for… this one may wind up in the history books like the fight between Augustus Caesar and Mark Antony did. All serious folks, this one will mark history even more than electing President Obama did. 

Other things are in the works as well, but for now they’re not ready for prime time, so… I share back to the internet universe a couple of pictures found there, and take it back to the other machine that does not get connected to the devil wire to go back to work.

Catch ya'll later...

That... would be me on the right...

The Honorable Woman...

Bumped forward from January 2012 

because where the Spitfire below 

was a pretty thing Leia was prettier...

***   ***   ***

I've mentioned her before, Leia, the dreamweaver who stepped up to take the throne when my muse Alex retired.  She's incredibly skilled at that art, when Leia dials it on the weathermen know it sight unseen, the jet stream changes directions.  One afternoon, well, afternoon for us, early morning for her, she did just that, she dialed it on and it was hot.  I mean hot.  I don't mean warm, or sultry, or provocative, it was that scorching melt things blue-white hot only the wholesome can fully achieve.  It was the kind of thing a woman offers her man when he's the one she'll trust when she knows she'll be beyond rational thought, utterly consumed by passion, or pain, the kind of thing to motivate a man to cut his way across hell and back to fetch her dill pickles and chocolate ice cream if that's what's needed.  It was just way hot.  Of course that wasn't the only time she'd done it, but that time sticks in my mind because of what she said when that segment of her show was over, something she obviously understood that I'm coming to understand that not all women do understand. 

As the chorus of wows and oh-my-god's and sundry such exclamations of delight from her audience began to wind down I added my compliment to the roll, words to the effect of "sweetheart, that was awesome, but don't ever do that for a man live and in person unless you plan to keep him for a lifetime."  She smiled, her wise woman smile, the one that really is so very warm, and with a wink and a twinkle in her eye replied "nos, I'm not fifteen."

No beautiful woman, you're not fifteen.  But if you at the age of fifteen understood the unspoken thought you were indeed a prodigy of feminine wisdom, and judging by what I've seen in the world at large since then it is a wisdom apparently a great many of your sisters need to understand. 

Leia is full dreamweaver, it is her art to paint a dream using the psychology of her audience as her palette.  As such of course she understands the full power of the erotic persona, the power the feminine allure has in the life of a man.  Equally of course she'd have to understand the resentment a man will feel if that power is over used, she'd almost have to understand how deeply a man's life is actually diminished if he must defend himself against that power being mis-used beyond its' proper domain, how that power mis-used is actually the source of a great deal of the misogyny in our world. 

Leia understood that, I'd say pretty much all of her sisters-in-seduction worthy of mentioning in the same context with her gave evidence they understood it to one degree or another.  But apparently this is not a widely understood thing among all women.  The longer I look the more consequences I'm beginning to lay to the feet of that ignorance.  Interestingly, those who seem to actually understand it the least are those you'd think would be most likely to have a grip on that thought: the fashion industry, the feminists, the women's advocates of one form or another.  

I'm going to give them the benefit of the doubt and work from the assumption it is ignorance, because to assume they behave as they do with that understanding in place would be to say they act with malice towards men, deliberately exploiting their own femininity to maintain a status quo of unhappiness and conflict for the sake of a profit motive, or worse, the motive of justifying a life based on bigotry and prejudice.  For their sake I'm going to assume it's ignorance and not evil.

YouTube Blues…

Yea, I’m gonna ramble tonight… got absolutely nothing better to do than listen to music and break in a new keyboard. 

Thinking about the Problem…

Back in the days when I did useful work for a living, aka, shift supervisor in a pocket size little chemical batch plant, there was a situation that took several days, the better part of a week, to resolve. One of our distillation systems was misbehaving in a most novel manner. Damn thing simply refused to run, and no one including yours truly could figure out why. It was a head scratching cuss and discuss kind of problem, way off the book and nowhere in the history or the horror stories.

After a couple of days, when all the conventional things had been tested and dismissed as the driving cause, the situation came to a standstill. As the production line emptied out downstream of the bottleneck we all just shook our heads and, each to our own best guess, started thinking outside the box. What MIGHT make the system behave like that? It had to be something, and the general consensus was we were not on the bad side of any witches powerful enough to tinker with the laws of physics.

After a twelve hour shift where the situation had not changed in the least the operator in charge of the system wrote in her logbook “thinking about the problem.” Everyone chuckled, and no one said anything formal, she’d told the absolute truth. That was the function of the operator logbooks, to pass those critical tidbits of information shift to shift so that even if things were not running smoothly the oncoming operator had a good handle on the system status, what had been tried and to what results. The logs eliminated a lot of duplicated effort and made it easier to know what remained to be tried to get things back on track. The operator logs were a most useful thing, an evolved system and convention that shy of gross neglect or mass calamity were off limits to management critique. They were the operator’s logs, we had our own.

That distillation system was not a simple thing, but it was nowhere near, not even close, to being as complex as any social system, which brings me to the point of this post.

The social system which is the United States of America is not running right, not at all, and as far as I can see no one has enough of a workable handle on the ultimate why to attempt a repair. Needless to say, I’ve been thinking about the problem. You can call this my log entry on the subject.

The Migration…

A small factoid crossed my path today, one I haven’t validated but have no reason to challenge. I heard that Oklahoma City now has a higher per capita concentration of gays and lesbians than San Francisco. That sounded pretty strange to me, didn’t make much sense at all. Why would that have happened? You’d think the LGBT folk would migrate to where they were more accepted. OKC and the local redneck regimes just really are not all that enlightened and tolerant. Why would the LGBT folk stay in, or migrate to, where they’re really, really not wanted?

 Took a bit, but only a bit, to figure out a plausible reason.  Now, the reason I came to could get me seriously flamed by the above mentioned segments of society, kind of doubt they’d want to admit to it, but still it does make sense. Let me dare the dragon here and set down the foundation of my thought.

The Cat Gas* Conundrum

Something dawned on me today, one of those “how in the HELL did I overlook this one for so long?” kind of things.

I’ve been suspicious running into convinced for quite a few years now that a high percentage of political “advertising” is actually going to the American people in the form of subliminal inserts within other programming. Subliminal advertising really isn’t all that good for influencing a matter of thought, a matter of intellect, but it is well proven as a magnificent technique to influence matters emotional.  Hang a binding emotional hook on ten percent of a population and you own that country by way of the ballot box.

But where, what medium would be the most effective place to put such “advertisement” as it would be called? Every major media outlet would present major problems to such a campaign.  It could be done, but with major risk of exposure and with exposure total backlash against the client.  Where could it be done with a good exposure rate and minimal chances of the campaign being revealed for what it was?

Hello America...

If you can’t support 

Bernie Sanders

for President...

And make one last ditch desperation

attempt to fix the problems...

then please support

Donald Trump...

So we can fire it up in the driveway,

throw a brick on the gas pedal

and walk away planning on 

starting in on the rebuild

after lunch.

Crazy Clown Politics OR Dive Six over the top…

Oh yea, I hear the scream of the Dauntless dive bombers flying off the Big E standing on the dive brakes avenging their brothers from Torpedo Eight to win the Battle of Midway… I hear the pounding hooves of the Rohirim and the horns of Rohan echoing against the walls of Minas Tirith at the break of day, the terrible music of their battle fury unleashed against the orcs of Sauron… I hear, ah, what the hell. You get the picture.

What got leaked this time just may turn the tide against the Corporate Neo-Fascist. Go boys go, and if there's anything I can do to help just give a shout. Be an honor and a privilege to ride in your company.  

There is no road walked...

...that doesn't leave it's mark on us, body and soul.  It is easy to fall into if, and if only. If only I had, or if only they hadn't I'd be so much happier now. Beware such thoughts indulged for more than a passing glance, for they can only invite bitterness and regret into a life.  No one can reconstruct their life as a simulation to know such things with certainty.  Such simulations are beyond the scope of mortals, and where God could most likely take a real good guess even he would still be guessing to a degree so long as his children have the free will to choose the roads they'll travel.  If and if only are dangerous, they have a backbite and leave an aftertaste.

Gypsy Locket...

I met her in a locket an old crone gave to me

for helping get her little cat safely down a tree.

It must have been near six weeks before I looked to see

just what was in the bauble I earned by skinning knees.

I tripped the catch, drew a gasp, my heart lit like a flair

I knew I'd seen her somewhere, but tell me lord, just where? 

You wouldn’t think a man could lose a face like that to air.

It came the wonder owned my days, by night it was my care,

the image changed with every glance, simply quite unfair

the way she'd hold me with her eyes, pin me with that stare

demanding I should find her home and take her locket there.

It drove me mad, I swear it did, I drank and schemed and hid

yet every hour on the hour I had to flip that lid.

Soon enough I figured out it had to be a curse,

maybe she’s a voodoo queen,

or maybe something worse,

there simply is no telling what’s to find

hid in an old maid’s purse.

So back across the road I went a bit the worse for wear,

looking like a hobo child who’d never combed his hair

and sure enough there she was waiting in her chair.

I handed her the locket, said ma’am just what is this?

Ever since I opened it my life's gone all amiss.

She took it up by the chain, her eyes went very soft

as if she was about to cry for something she had lost.

"Lad," she said "now seven times I've give this to a man

and every one has brought it back to set it in my hand.

Every one has said the same, said it took his head,

said it clouded all his thoughts, put trouble in his bed.

"I do not know how or why this locket has been cursed

always coming back to me the man turned for the worse

unless it was the gypsy man who crafted it for me

way back in the great world war of nineteen forty three.

"You see my love was shipping out, off for France he said

and I was total terrified that he’d come home quite dead.

The gypsy seemed to understand, said he'd use his best

spell of love to strengthen hearts then leave to God the rest

of what was to become of us to meet the mortal test.

"But fate conspired against me, they left by dark of night,

I didn't get to give my man love's token trinket bright

and now it seems I can't be free of gypsy magic's might

a kindly man installed in this to calm a poor girls' fright."

Twas just single moment, a flickering blink I'm sure

I saw her as she'd been back then, a sparkle of a girl

fertile as the fruited grove, a heart so hot and pure

to burn beneath a locket's lid these many years of world.

I took the locket from her hand, kissed a wrinkled brow

and all the years whirling blew into the mist somehow,

when the world leveled out she is as she is now.

And so I say to you my friend don't trust what's to be seen,

date her by appearance, proud breasted panther lean

moving like a dancing breeze across a rainbow sheen

She's ninety years of life and love…

                                    … inside those skin tight jeans.

*
*
*
For Charlie

It is a custom of my clan…

I don’t have a clan, not really, but if I did it would be a custom of that clan to be clean shaven in the springtime and only cut your hair in mourning.  Since my clan is imaginary I suppose I’m not really lying to anyone if I tell them that, right? 

Not like I really give a damn, it can’t be of much importance to anyone but me.  But I’ve found it a useful thing for myself to make it a point to greet the new spring with a naked face.  Somehow it feels like shedding all the hibernation dreams of winter and returning to reality.  At least for a little while, you have to do it for a little while, at least until you’ve used up last year’s razor blades.

Not that I’m all that fond of reality, I’m really not.  All an excessive focus on reality  generally does is make life boring if not depressing.  Reality is really all the justification needed for the time spent in fantasy, were it not for fantasy reality would be such a terribly mundane prison.  

If I had a clan it would most definitely be a custom of that clan for the men folk and the women folk to maintain a very deliberate separation and distance between each other on some subjects, enough of a veil between the genders that each might portray a focus of fascination to the other, a bridge and a portal between reality and fantasy as it were so that neither state ever achieve such dominance as to damage a life.  For that to work there simply has to be a bit of mystery in the mix.  Thank you for that understanding Ms. Alex, wise sweet woman thank you so very much. 

If I had a clan it would be a custom of that clan to every evening tell each other the most outrageously unbelievable lies possible to concoct from the deeds of the day so that entertainment would never become the domain of some isolated oligarchy of the unreal. Hollywood can’t begin to compete with the comedy value found in ordinary people trying to concoct a bullshit lie outrageous enough to compel their fellows to grin and call it for what it is. Egalitarian entertainment don’t you know, entertainment of the people by the people and for the people.   

If I had a clan… but I don’t.  But if I did somehow I suspect I’d find out Sam Clemens was a senior member of that clan and knew what he was talking about with the whole magnificent source thing.  It has to begin somewhere, and anyway

Sam and I are kindred souls

We see the world the same

And I like he am known to call

“GO SLOW, IT IS MARK TWAIN!”

The Palantir Gambit...

“… fed the despair of his heart until it overthrew his mind.”* 

So spoke Gandalf the White concerning the death of Denethor, Steward of Gondor. Desperate for tactical intelligence on the actions of Sauron the great enemy Denethor  had dared the palantir of Minis Anor, one of the seven seeing-stones of the King, and exposed himself to the thought of the dark lord who had possession of the palantir taken with the fall of Minis Ithil. 

Finding Denethor to great to be subdued immediately the dark lord more than allowed him he aided him in seeing the armies of Mordor mustering against his realm, allowed him the tactical advantage of this knowing that in time his strategy would prevail. Sauron’s dark perception proved accurate, in the most critical hour the deceptions of understanding Sauron had seeded bore foul fruit.  The ruler and defacto king of Sauron’s greatest enemy was stricken to suicidal madness by the sight of the very fleet bearing the rightful King returning to his aid leading not one but two armies to the defense of the city: one living and one dead.

The suicide of Denethor at the height of the battle is just one of many, many scenes of high drama found in *JRR Tolkien’s masterwork “The Lord of the Rings” involving the wizard Gandalf.  Gandalf Istari revealed in the appendixes as the Mia of Yavanna, a spirit from the same order of creation as Sauron and most likely Sauron’s elder.  Gandalf the Gray resurrected into Gandalf the White, Tolkien’s faith made flesh.

More than simply high drama the tale of Denethor’s fate is as fine an example as I could find of one of the most critical dangers facing the modern world.  The palantir were  plot creations of a masterpiece of fiction but the functionality of the palantir are in this day and age of the sun all but ubiquitous.  You don’t have to be a King to own a smart phone that will show you the world as it is… or as it was... or as it might be. 

The question is of course are you, oh loyal sprinverizoatt subscriber and faithful pilgrim to the Temples of Google wise enough to understand that which you see?  Are you wise enough to understand that the forces of despair and corruption are in possession of just as many of those things as you are?  Are you perceptive enough to understand that the absolutely most effective lies are crafted from an absolutely accurate palette of facts?  Are you?

A prime example from this age of the sun of how such lies are worked concerns another wizard found in a masterwork of fiction, the modern wizard Albus Dumbledore who is headmaster of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry seen in the tales of Harry Potter.  

In what would appear (to a totally trivial surface investigation) to have been simply a comment answering a simple question posed in casual conversation on the social media site twatter  Dumbledore’s creator JK Rowling said she’d always thought of Albus as gay.  Ok, you wrote him, if you say so then that’s how it is.  Gandalf is a Mia, Dumbledore is gay.   Matters of trivial fact quite unrelated to the tales as told.

What is equally a matter of fact but hardly trivial is how JK assigning to her magnificent and noble character Dumbledore the humanizing affliction of psychiatric sterility has allowed the modern forces of despair and corruption to mount a campaign of truly Sauron subtle lies: the lie that any life supporting emotional intimacy between two males, men, must of necessity have shit on a dick in its’ history; the lie that sterility is a consequence of nobility, or worse that such sterility is the initiating event of nobility; the lie that those aspiring to such nobility should adopt psychologically initiated sterility as a prerequisite to achieving their ambition.  Sauron, known in the second age of the sun as Sauron the Deceiver by reason of his corruption-to-destruction of the kingdom of Numenor would fully appreciate their campaign, it is a weapon of exactly the same sort he used with great skill to the detriment of all the free peoples on many more than one occasion.

Of course, stick your tongue in your cheek and squint your left eye and it isn’t hard to see how JK Rowling might..  right… might maybe coulda’ been… employing a bit of subtle thought in her own right to protect her kingdom.  By declaring Albus Dumbledore as gay she damn sure sealed off any possibility of her vision of Harry’s world getting diluted by fan fiction detailing the exploits of Dumbledore’s children in their efforts against the deatheaters and the Dark Lord of their realm, the consummately evil and patricidal black wizard Voldemort.

Operational Occupational Happiness…

with a tip 'o the lid to the Beagle on the roof...

“You don’t want it to look like you did it yourself,” is what the lady said, speaking on the subject of the cover art that will be a potential readers first impression of a work.  I understood her point before she made it, of course.  Amateur effort in a professional environment rarely fares well.  But still, what she said itched and in places that had nothing to do with formally publishing a story.  After a week or two of communing with the itch the truth behind the event oh so slowly made itself known.

“You don’t want it to look like you did it yourself.”  Like you did it yourself.  Why is that a bad thing?  What if I myself graduated cum laude from some prestigious university with a degree in the very subject at hand?  Is it ok for me to do it myself  then?  Or is this a more complicated issue than just a matter of competence?  I’m not sure, I’m really not.

What I have come to be very certain of though is this:  the only real satisfaction I’ve ever known has come from doing it myself.  It is such total bullshit to buy something and then try and feel it as your own.  You know you didn’t build it, paint it, write it, you know all you did was buy it like some horny sailor buying a piece of ass because a forty eight hour liberty in a strange city just isn’t enough time to actually find yourself a lover.  The self deception of trying to feel something you bought as being your own just sets a sour aftertaste on the whole subject.

Continuing on with the subject of Happiness Defined? If Happiness sailed as a fleet one of the battlewagons broadside to the foe is an unshakeable belief backed up by rational self assessment that what you did today was better than what you did yesterday and that tomorrow will be better still.  Doing it yourself, no matter what it is you’re doing,  is the only way you can have such a faith.  Of all things Happiness is a Do It Yourself operation.  No one else can do it for you, you can’t buy it out of the box and bolt it up and expect it to run.  In total contradiction of the damned by any decent God operatives of the advertising industry it just doesn’t work that way.  Sorry guys, the first pile of bullshit I’m not buying is that Happiness is a saleable commodity. It’s not.  You have to do it  yourself. 

Have I ever built myself a case of Happiness?  Almost but not quite, and getting closer everyday.  It’s the getting closer part that feels good.

Punctuation be damned…

Ok, not really, punctuation is a good thing.  But I heard a tidbit drift across the other night down at the diner that involved punctuation, at least one element of it, and it’s been slowly foaming in the back of my thoughts ever since.  The humble semi-colon apparently has been drafted to have a brand new meaning.  Apparently some well meaning folk have designated it the new symbol for those involved in some manner with the subject of mental illness.  Hmmm… ok, if you say so.

The choice of the semi-colon is actually a bit interesting considered against its’ grammatical usage. A semi-colon is one of the trickier of the punctuations to use correctly.  As I understand it (and lord knows I’m no grammar Nazi so it’s entirely possible my understanding is incomplete) a full colon is used to indicate the start a listing of related things or ideas within the sentence that share some commonality defined by the section before the colon appeared.  When the list is of objects or simpler well understood ideas the more common comma is most often seen used for a delimiter to break up a list into its’ component items, but when the list is of new thoughts or new ideas spun off from the definition the semi-colon comes into play.   Most generally the list definition added to any section defined by the semi-colon would stand on its’ own as a full and complete sentence.  The humble and in these latter days seldom used (beyond the inevitable emoticon ;-) semi-colon allowed writers of days gone by to build very complex sentences reflecting very complex ideas, veritable eco-systems of related thought.  Where there are semi-colons there is usually a great deal of thought or, failing deep and deliberate thought, a very limited understanding of the subject at hand.

Perhaps it is the very complexity the semi-colon enables that got it chosen as a small and unobtrusive tattoo symbol for those who define themselves to the world in skin and ink.  Fair enough, I’ve no grief with someone for choosing to wear such a symbol be it as fair warning to the world or to indicate their life stands in support of someone so afflicted.  Not a bad thing, not at all.  Still though for myself I think I’ll stay with me old favorite the triple dot ellipse… the evolving thought, continued.

If your soul were fully writ

Upon your naked skin

Tell me Pilgrim, if you can,

What alphabet it’s in?

GFA^3

To Big for a Comment Block…

*chuckle* Ah, my oh so liberal friend… bullshit. 

Technology encompasses a very great deal more than just Boolean electronics.  Pollution was understood (not admitted to formally of course but well understood) before FM radio became common much less the digital realms.  The meteorologists were worried about their statistics in the sixties, they just weren’t saying much, the line hadn’t wiggled that much.  I’d say Star Trek should get credit for blowing the whistle on global warming, it was Star Trek introduced the term “planetology” into the vocabulary and with the term the first genuine scientists to adopt that mode of thought.

Twenty five to Life on a thumbdrive…

It dawned on me today I’ve been involved with the personal computer for twenty five years now.  No parole.  From a 286 at 16mghz and a whopping 40meg of storage to this thing, considered obsolescent now running somewhere in the 2gigahz range with a terabyte of drive.  From DOS4 to XP (I suppose I’ll have to upgrade soon, but why?  For what I do it won’t make a fardling fart’s worth of difference).  Quite a run, really.  Model T to Mazerati in a quarter of a century.  WoooHooo.