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-questioning 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.

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.

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.

Sometimes 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 eventhough 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.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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 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?

and the words stopped,

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 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 Actually 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?

 

 

 

 

 

 

The secret life of medieval cats

I was looking for something on heracleion, which by the way is an amazing story. I then happened accross this slightly more quirky yet interesting story about cat footprints on an old medieval book from the 14th century from Dubrovnik.

But at the same time we rush headlong into the unknown, some with changes like powerful metal horses, emblazoned with strange skins they ride, others stand still paralyzed with fear, others drift along as if on a gondola sliding down the stream of life, others again barrelling headlong  into the unknown.  And I stand here on foreign shores uncertain today of which way, moving from knowing to not knowing in moments.

But as we know it is weekend, and it is time mirth and merriment for many, for me who knows what the future will hold. I will wait and see what the weather will do, will the weather be as the weather gods have foretold or wrong again as they miss~told us last weekend? It is the End of winter and we are in the middle of the sea on a very big island..

And as we no man is an Island..

Back to the Medievil books again, I saw the most amazing thing they scan the pages of these old books with a densitometer, and from the amount of dust and grime deposited on a page they determine how often the books were read relative to others, interestingly one of the books had been read significantly more than others. This book was seen to offer assistance and help during the bubonic plague. On a similar vein it was very interesting, I listened to a Podcast from ABC on (New telescope launched in remote Western Australia. The sweaty t-shirt test for selecting a mate. DNA used to identify ancient plagues. Plaque reveals ancient human diets. Vatican award for stem cell research. The Science Show goes to hell. )

It was a surprisingly good podcast albeit that it is Australians who did it, no this is not aspersion, just a subtle stab at some friends who have wondered across the ditch, surprisingly there are some good Australians out there I found the piece on being able to work out exactly what disease exactly people died off.. This also delved into a whole lot of other pieces where DNA have been scraped and collected from various archaeological digs.

As time passes and i wait, i keep realising there are whole lot of books/authors i want to read and in soem cases re-read, pretty damn tricky getting time for all of this reading in between everything else. what is your quintessential list of books that should be re-read or read and why?

and then also thanks to Aivkara for this amazing Link, it is totally amazing …

“…the mistake is a part of it, it is poetry…and for that you need a bad camera.”
     -Miroslav Tichý

what an interesting story, not unlike this blog he was not famous at all and only a handful of people saw his work..

Then for my piece of afternoon free advertising:

LEMMELKAFFE Many of you have probably heard of the Swedish coffee brand Lemmelkaffe. With its roots in the North takes aim at a slightly alternative coffee culture and going hard against the upcoming barista trend prevailing in sweden all cities. Lemmelkaffe is the world's first mörkrpstade boiled coffee and best enjoyed, according to them, over an open fire. Ingemar Backman, Frontsidefly and Glesbygd'n are some of the coffee brand's ambassadors. Surf to www.Lemmelkaffe.com to read more.

and we know because it is Friday it is almost another bread day,  an we know like the bells, we cannot live without our weekly bread, O yeah I shall not walk through the valley of Alpacha and deer doe’s with no bread beneath my raincoat in my Rucksack, for I shall not want no more than a slice of the daily bread and a sip of the golden or red nectar.  I will wonder down green hills and dales through hills with Big trees, my wheels are a spinning, my head loses direction I cannot say which way is home. My new day brings a new dawn, maybe this year I will see the persied’s maybe this year I will stand in shallow waters and watch the silver beast upon the end of the slender filament and willowy stick, It feels a lot like I am trying to fill the space next to this photo, Yes you are right, I might just have to put in another picture here or there.

and in a peaceful moment I discover some tunes within a beat, which are amazing and appeal to my sense of the insane, I cannot say i can categorise Warsaw village band? I cannot say i know what genre they are? And i cannot truly say what nationality I am any more?  there are times I imagine I may be African, at other times I might be German or Polish at Other times I have other heritages, and now i have no identity other than an ever changing speech rhythm and accent, But i can be assured that for the bulk of the time I walk alone, almost Like Caine

Master Po: If a man dwells on the past, then he robs the present. But if a man ignores the past, he may rob the future. The seeds of our destiny are nurtured by the roots of our past.

Caine: I seek not to know the answers, but to understand the questions.

It is strange what we remember about the past, how some things torture us, things we cannot change even if we wanted to. I suspect it is key to then move on and gather as much as we can from those moments, move on, with them in mind. It brings me back to phylogenetic inertia, we are in some ways bound to our past and our past created our future and future moulds our experience of the past in our minds.