Thursday, November 28, 2013

Wow

there are things we think we know, things we expect to act and behave in a certain way, as an allegory I would like to use the ukulele. we expect certain things and not others, I expect spring to have sun and almost be in summer.. but  it isnt summer or even close down here in aoterea. It can only be described as  a season of change, which should not be confused with “ a time for a change” because we have been there and the time changed, since it was a time for  change and now after time time changed we here now. This is not unlike something i saw this morning, it was a fairly arbitrary video on fly fishing and how it changed certain peoples lives and all the general schmaltz about living for now and working to live and living to work. It did not make a bad video, or story but it did highlight a somewhat amusing story i heard yesterday about a couple from NZ who their whole lives decided they wanted to live on a barge in the UK. the lasted all of 2 months before they returned home, sometimes our dream might be having the dream, the reality is sometimes not what we seek, sometimes we seek the dream. This is going to be long and laboured, 226 words down and 1400 or so to go plus the deficit from the Previous day.

there are a whole series of photos below, each displaying something rather unique about wellington in the rain.

gallery3I am including this Photograph or rather collage first of the City Gallery and square outside of it which i know for the Giant sphere ufo~thingie~mabob that hangs there and gets hundreds if not thousands of photographs taken of it daily. and the weird pyramid .. no idea what they are there for, but they are there. there is almost no one out there in this huge square with its patterned brick paving. rather than not being what it seems it is what is and yet it is what it seems, i just have no idea of what it is as it seems like a huge sphere in the sky and a pyramid in the middle of nowhere and there is nothing more to it other than that. I must confess i did mess up the pics a little, the idea was there, but the execution let me down a little, I will have to do it again tog et rid of the out of focus pieces and replace them. this was a whole series of photos stitched together with Hugin. the parts make the whole, but the whole is not the sum of the parts, rather just a part of the sum of the lot. silly I know but i was standing next to the library and that is of course a place of semantics. I sometimes wonder about some of the books I have read, am reading, want to read, want to re-read and some of them especially get stuck in a limbo, the most current being a god of small things, what a fantastic book, with fantastic characters and textures of India, very different but similar in my mind to midnights children, and both of them suffer the same fate, they are unread and are both on my nightstand, waiting me to finish them. It is not as if i am unable to finish books, at the moment I have read a whole lot of softer  books about after things like flyfishing and beer making and bread and sociology,  the FlyFishing book, was fantastic, even though it had little or nothing to do with flyfishing, it had to do with a sense of place and sense of activity. I think fly fishing is a lot to do with a sense of  place and being and sense of something that is not tangible, once again my brain explodes into divergent thought patterns, I will lay down notes and links for you to go look your self, I have seen them; fly fishing book by derek Grzeleweski, the book is called trout diaries, the other thoughts have gone while focussing on this… I am sure they will come back. what was apparent to me from his book was the following:  he is Polish, i am nominally of Polish origins , he loves fishin, he loves his dog, he writes well enough and I enjoyed his book, strangely one of the flyfishing club members i went away with to the Rangitikei this past weekend thought the book was rubbish as it had little to do with the technical mastery of fly fishing, for me the mastery is one thing that adds to the value of flyfishing, being there, catching fish which relies on some skill, seeing fish, releasing fish (i prefer to .. don’t really like killing fish).When I catch fish in the sea with Bait i have a little less remorse, I have no idea why? Even when i catch salt water fish by fly i feel i have to release the fish, which is weird, but that is the way the fish falls or slips through my fingers.

I have so lost track, yes am tending to speak like, like my children now, it is pretty sweet as Winking smile 

I was still thinking about the books, and how we relate to books, and if i could read an e-book, strangely i don't think so.. even though i am a tech aware and tech savvy and use technology all day somehow a book remains a bound object, something that has tactile or haptic value attached to it, reference material can easily be seen on the web, but somehow the experience of having a large factor book with colour plates is rather amazing, especially large colour plates of hand illustrated images.. this is paradoxical? strangely when I read books of fiction or books or words, pages of words i prefer a smaller factor. Absolutely arbitrary, but it is what it is these are musings and ramblings, i write them, you chose to read them or not.

Back to the series of photographs, once again, the Rain the Rain, almost like the sea the sea by Margret Atwood, but more or less emotional depending where you stand on these issues. The next series of photos are sorta something different to the one above, but a lot the same.

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Accidentally this photograph or sequence of 2 photographs captured something, not quite what i wanted but something surprising, the second photograph is almost without meaning on its own, the empty space, but when coupled to the previous photograph it suddenly fills the space with hope and answers. Our minds  play games with the empty spaces and the movement of the people in and out of spaces with the essence of their existence being moved to a memory of reality which was never  significant in any way, but now suddenly becomes more significant because there where there was nothing was previously filled with movement, all that remains is possibly the scent a few swirls a piece of paper a vibration on the door?

 

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these all show me the experience of the day that was with people and wind and rain swirling around meIMGP1746..

somehow once again I don’t seem to be able to transend the 1300 word limit again, It might well be that is the length and extent of the though process in my brain, that I am already thinking about the friday beer after work, thinking about the thanksgiving supper we are having at the Germericans, thinking about the weekend and all the things i have to do on the weekend. So much to do, so little time. But as we know now is the time, but part of that time should be nothing time where we can wait till that time passes and ingest that which is around us and what we are experiencing. the weather gets better, the wind whistles past the windows in my office building. from next week we will have to return to fragmentary pieces of communication again as i will be back at the coal face and turning coal into diamonds again.

a third of 1600 or so must be 4000

Some days are way harder than others, some days we wake up invigorated and ready to conquer the world, other days we struggle to get going or through the day. Some days we are stronger than a raging bull other days we feel like we have been trampled by a raging bull.

As a comment regarding moving away and changing, I suspect change is inevitable, to stay the same would be abnormal. Time changes everything, not always for the good and bad and if you throw in temporality, location and context who knows what will float to the surface or sink to the bottom of the milieu.

On a more cheerful note, please support the dude with his new blog, I  also think i may have found a counter foil for myself in Wellington. There is a nerd organisation in wellington called “nerd nite wellington” this is as quoted by them :”Welcome to nerd nite wellington: the first (and until recently, only!) Southern Hemisphere version of the rapidly-becoming-global geekery that is nerd nite.” – they can be found at http://wellington.nerdnite.com/

These may not really be my people, but nerds normally have quasi nerd friends like myself, we all need a good nerd or two to assist us with things. There is also a thought that to fix all problems we require a system programmer that hacks in at very low level code … to solve all problems? but as one of my programmer colleagues states, he may be alight myopic as he (my friend low level hacks to get some code to work on the ipad app he is busy with). while trolling through this I found  the League of pragmatic optimists, this is a fairly interesting construct.. I will have to look into this .. but more and more we get faced with the 1000’s of words that russel brand throws at us..  I cannot work out what he is, he speaks so fast, so much and intersperses a 1000 ideas at once, some i agree with others I think are loony, but i love his commitment to life and putting it out there and what he believes in.

A while back I speculated about how we were often, in certain circumstances and in others just a reflection and an aberration often relative to the surroundings, I never considered what happens when a mirror is taken out of a room? I know if the mirror is taken out of the room you no longer see the mirror and all you see is the emptiness  as the previously multifaceted and reflective surface that shone with colours and shapes and fragments of pieces of situations is now only an empty void, with little residual memory of the past other than the dents ands scratches and frame and background. It quickly gets filled with new images, but for long remains a silver shining surface. But what happens in the room where it previously adorned a surface or corner, depending on its shape it distorts and makes things appear closer, further the same or totally different, especially in the fading or flickering light of a fire. You have to at some point start questioning or poking this with a large stick saying .. stop with the euphemisms on top of euphemisms on top of reality on top of  euphemisms. Where does the light stop, where does it start, how long does a reflection linger, how fast it is replaced. How much changes when a mirror is taken from a room.

off to lunch come back, read this and thing WTF, get real talk about something a little more rational less eccentric, maybe the word i was thinking about yesterday or the day before was Divaricating, I am attaching a link to a key opf the divaricating shrubs of New zealand.. which is a little exiting for some people and mostly pretty frigin arbitrary for others. 

I link this photo off www.terain.net.nz, please go visit them if you find this interesting. But back to my previous point this is not to unlike my tangled beard. At the current rate of word loss, by the end of the month i will be down to a handful of words, which I suppose if they were carefully crafted by a wordsmith it would be fantastic, but in the current scenario I require a lot more words to say very little.

To return to Russell Brand and then in a way Tim Minchin, they are both a form of anti celebrity. I cannot decide if that makes them better or actually way worse because they are preying on the likes of those who are not all that conformist? Both of the commit apparent social suicide by the things they do and say, yet they remain popular, even if for the nonthings they say, no not nonsense or nonscience, they actually do speak science, nonscience, nonsense, nothings and sense all at the same  time. It does put into question our ability as a society to self regulate. Our Gods are dead or Dying or in certain cases becoming stronger, but not in unison in separation and in conflict with one another. Thrown into all of this is a little scepticism. Now that I consider it further the one is crazy as batshit and the other is an aussie? More seriously I cannot decide if either of them can be taken seriously or not taken seriously?

ok so i forgot to post this yesterday .. goto go now and do the new  one soon

Tuesday, November 26, 2013

1600 words and the spitefull god

I realised today that the a god is a spiteful god, here, Today in godzOwn or as the rest of you know it Aotearoa, interestingly I never knew that it had been labelled such for almost a 100 years.. we learn something new every day. Last bit if trivia is that it can be attributed to Thomas Bracken through a Poem he wrote. Just writing this diveri-forms the thoughts in my brain. You may ask what diveriforming is, well it is a word i made up by combining the General term for certain plants here in NZ and in many other countries where the plants are seen as Diveriform, or having very knotted and messy hair not unlike dreadlocks or my hair if i don't keep it cut really short, or alternatively my beard. Back to the spiteful god, if Logic abides as above where we are in Gods own land and it is spring it is a frigin spitting and rainy spiteful spring day, which follows on a weekend that would toast your marshmallows? Key to multi-questioning103_1127 thing above drives me towards the question of HES and his book, his handwritten book done by his hand using his Mont Blanc pen? Has it started? How far along the way is this book? after listening to the podcast a few days back about Tom wolf, one point that struck me and reminded me about HES was the notion of handwriting a book, tom wolf choses to handwrite the book mainly because he cannot get spare parts for his typewriters. I suspect it has to do with some form of haptic feedback. you may question, why the sullen pic of me staring at the camera in apparent disdain? multiple reasons abound, one to show the wonderful spiteful vista behind me, partially obscuring the wonders that abound in that which is so quaintly called the inlet. Further in the distance is the Plimerton vista and marina where I often fish, deep in the foreground is the beard, which grants warmth and other social interactions. Interestingly as part of a my current social exercises I have noticed that a beard does change the way people look at you, and no (and yes the comma and the and) it does not hide you in society nor give you a facade to hide behind. In contrast it actually makes you more visible, I am not sure at what length it again begins to hide you. It is a strange thing a beard, it feels almost alien and not part of me, this is especially at its current length which is way longer than before., or maybe not as long as it was when I got married for example?

Thanks goodness, I managed to finish the space next to my beard and fill it with words, mostly meaningless words. On to the next thought for the day? I was attempting to brew at home last night in the week after work, one should not attempt to much in such a short time, this in between bottling the children’s home made ginger beer in between the pumkie’s book club meeting at home last night.  Id decided i would do a fruit~ish beer, but this all turned to proverbial pie.. the blender broker during me grinding the grains, i could not find a way to grind, half way through the mash, i then found the boysenberries were not boysenberries and were black currents.. Then i miscalculated the amounts needed for a good starting SG, then the temperature would not drop in the fermenter till the next morning.. what a mission. But we tossed the Yeast in this morning, lets hope it grows, I now have a few more days to work out what I can do for the secondary ferment and need to get a little more industrial in my attempts and methods in dealing with some of the technical challenges. I then remember we need to also supply a corn bread for our meeting with the pilgrims in the new land where we will give thanks for what we have. Oh and the other reason for the photo of me, is t avert my self consciousness's.

I was rather enthralled yesterday, I came across a  Google meetup with some photographers about inspiration and what drives it and what to do in lulls, amongst them was  Lotus Carrol  of I am Lotus fame. It is interesting to see the person in “virtual flesh after following them on flickr for a couple or more years seeing how they developed from something on the edge of obscurity to a mega social media success? One of the interesting things was how each of them had similar yet quite different drivers for their inspiration and each of them did have some overlap. One of the drivers in the most successful people was to do what they wanted, and the others were driven a lot more by perfection and their search for perfection, and in certain cases it was a drive for expression. A lot seems to depend on what you take photos of and why you take them? I suspect a lot depends on what you aim with your photography or your art, is it an expression or is it a capitalistic venture, each of them has different biases.

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sometimes I stare up at the clouds and they look so plain at other times they look fantastical,strange same place similar clouds, more or less colour and scale.

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we cant really know how we will feel the next day, unless we make the effort to be that person to have that outlook and be happy and smell the rain in the clouds, hear the birds chirping above the roar of the icy sub Antarctic gale blowing and chilling you to the bone, it can either stop you there and then in your steps and cut you down as if it were a scythe or it can inflate you with crystalline clarity.. bla bla sometimes the lyrical can run away a little. but there you go, be positive don’t see the crap in it, well that is what i try to tell my self I may be fooling myself but I try. there always seems to be some colour in the grey.. well some days.

IMGP1667Sometimes you see life zooming past you, today is the beginning of the year, soon it is Christmas, but it continues and changes and life runs at a million miles an hour, nothing we do can stop it soon it will be the end of the year and not long after that it will be a new year again. The seasons are more  apparent here and IMGP1663eventhough they blend into one long season of discontent and weather at least it lets you know that there are forces way greater than you all around you at every turn.

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Maybe we would all feel better if we had a flower like the little prince? I have a few in my garden, but they are being eaten by the snails? I wonder do you think the Little prince had to worry about snails? I am not sure,but i do love clouds, and Tiete Winking smile had to throw that in, recently I was listening to some Tim Minchin clips on youtube, and amongst them he ahs a song where he is rather serious and intersperses this with man i love Boobs.. this reminded me of a friend who had a similar Mantra in south africa in our old life. I then question sometimes if Tim Minchin is as he seems? Is he erudite and clever or is it a cleverly constructed dialogue? Either way I enjoy the outcome of some of his diatribes and rants, somehow the word fountain is slowly drying up today? i have my doubts if I will reach the allocated number of words before i have to rush off again to the next meeting at a customer?

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and the words stopped,

Monday, November 25, 2013

Quick before the sun sets…

i had a realisation again, you must say WTF, do you go from one realisation to another Smile No seriously amongst the moments of blank emptiness on the train and general day I was considering a few things.. One most pertinent was me, yes i was wondering about me, and niggling at the back of my brain was the realisation of the silent promise to try and blog every day for a month, to get back in the flow of things. But where to start, primarily a “friend” or at least a person I know on Facebook who also immigrated and that i had sorta know in ZA, who is also male and also around my age/or me around his age, both of us being massively in our middle years. This brought me to consider how we and others react the changing of time and how we see our lives slip like grains of sand falling between our fingers and how each of us reacts differently, I suppose not unlike the way I have always been am prone to hideous bouts of depression, which i now know when then they arrive and know how to dispel them. this Bifurcates my thoughts into 2 distinct streams; one being do yourself a favour and watch hideous kinky it is a movie with  Kate winslet which is fantastic and what is so uber cool are the naked scenes of her show a normal person, intermingled with a crazy as story behind it all; the second arm of the bifurcation is this other person who at this stage should be called Bob. bob is a nice dude, albeit a bit extreme.. but the real point being i see on Facebook he now has a new fiancĂ©, I did not even know he was divorced? This is of course only symptomatic of society and how we live and interact with others, no SLATS not Systematics, that is something totally different. But on the second topic which is way more exiting to me that the prior I now belong to an group/like group or what the .. on Facebook for Coleopterists.. Boy i miss the exiting world of big, small and all things wonderful. I think that will simply Segway me into the next topic, which is what i have done over the last little while, One would imagine that sometimes I am manic, yes that I am.. But i have realised that is what and who and why I exist and what drives me forward every day, the need to see, do, understand and learn more and go and see and catch fishes and watch little brown beetles pollinating lupines on the river bank of the Rangitikei river at dusk (the photos are from the fishing trip i just did with the old dudes of the fishing club). Now  after that a small photo essay with some of the things done and undone.
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one of the few pics i took on the Rangitikei trip, I do need (want(would like a small robust portable camera to take with me)) , for interest these are a pest these lupins, they are a ruderal and make a super impressive show.  You can smell them from a long way away. all in all this was a moderately successful exercise, I came away with a fair number offish, I disappointed my self in a lack of focus at times and at others way to much focus, but all in all it was fantastic trip with the oldies.

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On being South African and being in another country, but again the debate is still out if i ever was south African or not? difficult question, and no I still don't have an answer about the question posed yesterday, and no i don't think i will have one tomorrow. But i do think that I am happier here, but sadder in the same breath. It is beyond a paradox within a paradox. I do think that the one element that the blogger from last week left out was that if you immigrate and you have friends with you it is awesome, but if you don't it is generally Kak and you need to re-evolve your self and reasons for living and slowly wash the reflection of the others you left behind off your mirror, even though they will always be part of you on the inside and who you really are, their context is spread thinly over these massive distances. It does not mean I do not miss them and what they meant/mean in my life, it just means I had to cut those sinews and let the muscles r-attach again, it is as if i was reborn again to a new world. It is beyond strange to be the stranger in the strangest land. But the solace you get is that there are many of us here, not just south Africans but all types and kinds. Many souties, and it is almost time for our strays and waifs Christmas party as hosted by the non Christians for the mostly non Christians.. this is of course the heathen land. But i return to my comments on Lara Africa, she is awesome, i made a comment on her blog and she responded and does so on all her comments and her poetry is pretty awesome, she seems like she would be an interesting person to meet in real life.  This is way to much sentimentalism, and i suspect i am nearing my required number of words pushed to virtual paper for the day, you must know i am sacrificing coffee this morning to get these words in.. yes sideways.
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this is really a nothing pic of me at the station this morning, trying to be more like a celebrity, I gather we need to be more aware of ourselves and do selfies all the time showing our people what we are doing, here i was sitting at the station KAK early in the morning and waiting for the train and for my people who never came, because although i was waiting for the train to Pretoria it never came. a tear welled up in side as I think of the briel sisters sitting on the train to Pretoria, but yea no i shall fear not because my phone and my internet shall comfort me with my brewing book as i wait, neigh pause on the journey of life at this insignificant station on the track of life.. OMG what a crock of shite flows through these fingers?
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this is still so far from done, it has taken so long ……and it turned out to be more difficult than i imagined, there are certain things we can do and other things we cannot do, i suspect it is key to attempt mostly things you can do and then some that you cannot really do, this is one of them. It is a challenge. A good challenge, none the less we should move towards the light, oh crap is that the train. stupid joke sorry. But at times i do think we get into such a routine and do not remember who we are and who we want to be and why we did what we did to get where we are and why? we should also remember all of the things we complained about and wanted and want to change about ourselves and start changing them, day by day, word by word, less and less spelling mistakes by the day. We cannot change some things, as they are like the sun in the sky and blue and the grey and the white of the clouds and the wind and the rain. things are what they are. This item is attempting o change the fabric of reality by creating something that isn't, something that is not a part of me, but is something i see and experience from outside that i borrow from others. There are so many that are, i am not, but i respect those that are and this is a homage to them.

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this is a picture of many levels, one being proof that it is possible to do something with some planning and determination. To most of you this is just a fish on someone else's extremity. But it represents a number of things. It is proof that we can change, proof that we can follow a recipe, proof that we have commitment, proof that we need determination, proof that we can visualise and be what we want to be and do what we set out. Yes this is just a fish, but rather a fish after work in the afternoon sun, than a backside on the couch watching crap TV. But as a diametrically opposite yet almost as appealing alternative a bum on the couch fondling a home brewed beer or mead.. now there is some thing which is also right. We need to set goals, we need to achieve things albeit small and fantastical.
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Lest not forget about the bread which is life, which comes from the beer.

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here we have the grans living for the beer, the birth of the germination signals the birth of the beer within a while, you will have to wait and see where this goes, for those not following on other streams, these were some wheat, barley and spelt grains that were germinated and malted and then toasted and roasted in the oven for the beer with frit, unlike the wine dying on the vine, the beer growing in the bowl, somehow can see why Jim Morrison struggled and chose the wine dying on the vine. John Barley Corn just doesn't have the same ring to it, maybe i would have to turn to something a little more agricultural like Jethro Tull, lest not forget which disambiguation you chose, both are agricultural at best. Which reminds me that maybe i need to spotify a little agricultural music today. IMAG3669_1_1I leave you with this.. today I managed a meager 1670 odd words or so, self indulgent words none the less, but words they are and they are going towards my monthly total.

Sunday, November 24, 2013

Shaken but not stirred (and the social experiment that failed, but is in fact a success

what is in a title, not to much, but what is apparent is that I have been significantly neglecting (i would prefer to use the word Neglectant.. but it appears that form is not commonly accepted.. don't get me started on that). But more important to impart that which is part of that which has past and is or isn't part of the present but does not pertain to present participles, WTF.. only half a sentence and I am off the rails already.

To return to the current idiom which is my life and the current view there upon and those people places and things that intercept it, not to unlike a Venn diagram in a child or adults webpage or notebook or facebook wall. And yes I know there was a divergence into more linear writing, but alas this is something of the past for a moment, as to much time has past and there are to many words trapped within,

to skip forward to the current, leaving out a whole lot fo the past for the moment time being,  not to be uninterrupted by this wondrous piece i saw today by Tim Minchen, not because it was new, but because it was what i Saw today.

I return to my tales of woe and disappointment of the reality of the life we live in, sounding a little like a Genesis song. a while back I proposed something to my General Facebookerati. This was aiming to try and Humanise my interactions with the people on my facebook account. This attempt was to get all(some/as many as i could) the people on my profile to send me a real letter which contained some printed photographs of themselves, their abode, some old photographs and a hand written piece of text, this was to then form part of an art work to be part of an exhibition that I am planning to do. I suspect it will be a very small piece of art Smile then subsequently one of my Facebookerati then indicated that he would only send me something if sent it to him first and i was the point of change in the universe rather than the change coming from without to change the way we interact with those around us. I must admit I considered this as an option.. I will fulfil his request, which btw I have been very tardy with.. Which for I must apologise.

Actually I Apologise

But actually back to the current, i did consider a whole lot of things over the last while, amongst them are a whole span of things.

Time to Recap, what has passed since last entry in my online version of my life, i started with project BW (which will be released shortly online, this is a top secret project and needs to be kept under wraps for the interim. I have made an IPA and bottled in Recycled bottles (part of the Family recycle, reuse, repurpose campaign). I have replanted veggies a whole lot of times, almost the last time. I have mated more barley, wheat and dinkel for the next beer project. I have started with the first , or second or actually a few down the line, sculptures made out of drift wood and other pieces of flotsam from the beach.. taken its time.. it should be hanging somewhere soon. a large number of breads have passed from one end to the other of the process chain and to many others to mention.. oh other than the large Kahawai on fly .. which took some time to eventualise.

To intersperse current with future and past, unlike the chronological flow of life and reality which in no way mix, current future and past experiences.

To return to the proposal by the unnamed, facebookerati  and that I should  be the one to first send a letter to everyone, which then pre-supposes that I have all their addresses. which then points to the obvious dilemma that i do not which points to the fact that either they are not really my friends as per his other post on the span of our friendships which should be smaller and the other dilemma being that i would have to obtain these, and then of course the other issue is If i sent a letter to all my facebookerati (~300 ish people this would be financially fairly significant, but is this the cost of friendship?). I am not really trying to solve this in the short term. The other more pertinent question is more in the lines of  what the end goal is rather than method, or is the method the actual goal.  I must admit I cannot give a comment on that at this stage as I am not really sure?

It does bring me to a parallel concept though, which is moving to a subscription based model rather than a scatter gun approach? I was considering a form of bulletin rather than general random facebook posts which seem to have gotten broken recently, where the latest incarnation has changed the posting behaviour. That is before it was possible to anticipate how something would be seen and by who, where now facebook has significantly changed some of its algorithms. I saw that i was no longer seeing certain updates in my feed.. and others must be experiencing things similarly.  some years back I saw someone who had a weekly/daily journal style bb posting that was emailed to all the subscribers. this was not to different from the old style newsgroup bulletins, other than the fact that this was a html document with imbedded images. 

Possibly the old could become the new again? It might just all be a hoax..

On a totally different note i was listening to a podcast from philoosophos (philosophybites), which is very cool in small doses. this one in particular was an interview with tom wolf on his new novel and the death of civilized western civilization due to the death of God, and yes i am paraphrasing significantly.. go listen if you are really interested SmileActually after searching for the link in mediaMonkey, i realise with an element of mirth that this actually comes from uncommonknowledge (you may ask WTF is that?)

it is a podcast on the following topics : “Uncommon Knowledge is a production of the Hoover Institution, a public-policy research center devoted to the advanced study of politics, economics, and political economy — both domestic and foreign — as well as international affairs. Topics on Uncommon Knowledge range from the legalization of drugs to affirmative action to war to taxes to censorship on the Internet. Uncommon Knowledge is hosted by Hoover fellow Peter M. Robinson.”

we all learn something over here…the actual Podcasts discusses this : “ Tom Wolfe discusses the ideas and inspirations for Back to Blood, a story of decadence and the new America. In the book, Wolfe paints a story of a decaying culture enduring constant uncertainty. Heroes are spurned and abused, and values are dissolving; yet the message seems to be to stick with the good values.“

It was way more interesting that you could imagine, granted i was on the train, had time to kill, but nonetheless it has inspired me to listen to a few more of these podcasts.

But more pertinently what are we listening to now? Little cow

interesting, who knows i may listen to them again, or maybe not?

so where does this leave us in terms of the initial discussion? I am not sure? I am not sure of my level of commitment though?

this is bound to change and get resolved within the day or the week or longer, but in general the response to my social exercise is piss poor.  If we overanalyse this all we can come to a number of conclusions?  It is possible that I am over intellectualising this? Or not, it is in fact the state of society or the state of non society.

 

but before i forget, i red an article by a blogger that was posted on fb, which of course has been cycling through my brain. This has cycled extensively through my brain without returning a definitive answer to this poser?  I am sure if i had not immigrated I would feel totally differently about it? I wonder if I would feel more or less for or against this article? now there inadvertently through the course of the words flowing from my fingers i have increased the complexity n fold. I had read about this before and had read about other similar experiences, from others in the expats returning back home, but i do have to respond by saying that this is not as simple as it seems, and living in a grey high rise could not be fun, but on a similar track what if it was not in a high rise you find yourself, but a super peaceful and amazingly beautiful place .. how does that stretch your brain muscles?  there can be no replacing of friends, unfortunately. But I suspect once you have crossed the bridge to far, you can no longer return or that pillar of salt will be washed away with the angels tear drops. It is sad, but by moving and changing your perspective you have altered reality for ever and can never return things back to the way they were, either good or bad.  In many ways this doesn't answer or even elucidate or illuminate that piece or my response to it? It may take me long and in the end It might be a single yes or no or even a twenty page diatribe, nothing in life is necessarily in balance, just because Newtonian physics implies that there is always an equal on opposite force,does not mean we understand the implications of one flap of a butterflies wings and how something so simple can have profoundly insanely complicated  effect on our lives and that of others. To us there was a massive upheaval which has changed our fabric, to others we were just another lot of irritating rats fleeing a ship, to others they could not understand, others herald you in, others watch you in dismay, happiness, hope , others getting ready to follow.  There is no answer that is the problem…

well in a way I cannot complete this blog entry by today, and if i were to put in the drafts folder it could be weeks, neigh months before it is re-edited and actually posted, so you will have to live with this as it is..

 

I don’t feel to bad, after reading the previously mentioned blog, it turns out she (the author) writes professionally .. I don’t.  and as a postscript, i am not convinced .. maybe by then i will have an answer, in truth I can be sure I am more convinced by this

 

oh and the point to the Tom wolf piece for me is that he set himself a target of n words a day, his was in the region of a 1000 words, I think i have surpassed that, so i should be happy. You the reader i imagine are saying, WTF.. inconclusive and just when we thought he would tie it all up and together he/she it stops .. Well this is just rambling, this is not a treatise, maybe tomorrow i will try to continue on from where i left off?

i hope to? i mean to, maybe by then i will decide how the social experiment will play out, maybe i will also give some insights into the other new adventures i am having? But that s tomorrows dilemma?