Category Archives: spiritual

ො ✖

Saturday, 20240727 przxqgl

240727 cucumbers planted on Osiris' grave — 240727 cucumbers planted on Osiris’ grave

somebody, recently (i would say probably within the last 2 or 3 days, at most), left flowers on his grave… the only possibilities that ian and i could think of is 1) his father, which, considering his father, isn’t particularly likely, 2) some cousin or relative that ian and i don’t know about, which is somewhat more likely, but, considering the location (finn hill cemetery is in a REMOTE corner of central, western washington, not close to ANYBODY’S house, with the exception of — possibly — his grandparents’ house, but as his grandparents are also buried in the cemetery, not particularly likely), or 3) some random church-goer who regularly goes around to the cemeteries in the area and leaves flowers at random graves, to make it look like someone remembers these people… which, considering the remote, out-of-the-way location, we figure, is the most likely possibility.

and, now, there are cucumbers planted there, as well. see ya’, randy. 😉

tina chopp

� 纂

Friday, 20240726 przxqgl 2 Comments

ian and i are going to visit randy’s grave tomorrow. i plan on planting cucumbers, in the Tinite tradition, because randy, in his Osiris RaNebo persona, was one of the original high priests of the church of tina… although i am also aware that, in the Tinite tradition, planting cucumbers is to bring the dead back to life, and, of all the people i know who are dead, i’m pretty sure randy is happier being dead, so it’s more “in the Tinite tradition” than it is in the hope that it will, actually, bring randy back to life… in fact, in reality, i’m hoping that it DOESN’T bring him back to life, because, given the political and social climate these days, i’m going to bet that randy would NOT be pleased that he has been brought back to life.

nevertheless, i’m going to plant cucumbers on Osiris’ grave, because that’s what a Tinite would do. it doesn’t have to make sense.

little good luck charms, pictures, swastika, swastika rehabilitation day, swastikas

卍 SWA 卐 STI ࿕ KA ࿖ REAHBILI ࿗ TATION ࿘ DAY ࿌

Saturday, 20240629 przxqgl 2 Comments

today is Swastika Rehabilitation Day.

the word “swastika” comes from the sanskrit word “स्वस्तिक” (/svastika/) which means “little good luck charm”. the word “swastika” replaced the more common greek word “γαμμάδιον” (/gammadion/) — which means “four letter “G”s” — in the 19th century (≈ 1800s CE).

the swastika is one of human-kind’s oldest symbols. it has appeared on rock carvings dated to 10,000 years ago, approximately 8,000 BCE, in what is now ukraine, as a symbol of fertility and good auspices. the swastika has been used by every people-group on the planet (including the hebrew people) as a symbol of good luck, love, life, light, and auspiciousness of every kind, until approximately 90 years ago, when it was cöopted by nazis in the 1930s.

one of my favourite artists, ManWoman, said this:

Think of the most sacred thing in your life, think of the most precious thing in your life, and put the Swastika into that place. Put the Swastika into your heart. Put the Swastika on your altar. Put the Swastika on the image you use to represent god, love, peace, or the cosmos. Put the Swastika on the thing that makes you happy. You will BEGIN to see what the Swastika has meant to humans over this entire planet for all of our human history. For these places are exactly the places it occupied for thousands of years, until the second world war, when it fell victim to a chronic infection.

in the past 20 years, i have seen a great deal of improvement, overall, in the general attitude of the public, concerning use of the swastika, particularly if it is NOT depicted as the nastys do, (a black, right-facing symbol, rotated 45 degrees, on a white circle, with a red background), but, even so, i had a good, artist, friend of mine tell me, last weekend, that, in her opinion, any swastika was “evil”… apparently including the swastika that she, unknowingly, put on her own art-car, which, when i pointed it out to her, her immediate response was “that’s not a swastika”, even though it clearly WAS.

The Swastika takes many forms, but it's still a Swastika. The issue is not whether Hitler's Swastika is different from ours. The issue is that it is our Swastika, not Hitler's. — 211105 The Swastika takes many forms, but it’s still a Swastika.
The issue is not whether Hitler’s Swastika is different from ours.
The issue is that it is our Swastika, not Hitler’s.

here’s hoping that, in another 20 years, humanity will have gone back to the PROPER use of the swastika. ࿗

forward into the past, spiritual

forwards into the past???

Thursday, 20230810 przxqgl

so, i’ve been thinking about my spiritual experiences from the “early days” of my spiritual quest (i.e. 1978-1990), and i remembered visiting a man i knew as “father satchakrananda” in… oh, i guess it must have been 1981 or 1982… at the “raj-yoga math and retreat center” in deming. he was an older man, with a long grey beard, who wore a cassock, and had the brusque shortness of a person who had been in the business of teaching others who don’t want to (or can’t) learn, as i would come to recognise later, and his orthodox christian mass was topped off by handmade, crusty bread, real wine, and a dab of tiger balm on my ajña chakra, which was refreshingly unusual. his “monastery” consisted of, apparently, one female disciple, who looked totally overworked and underfed, who was silent, and jumped when father satchakrananda said so, but i didn’t get the chance to look around very much, since i was going with the PHBFH and her friend, bhakti, who was driving. at the time, i wasn’t really looking for reasons not to believe that these folks really had supernatural powers, and the “set and setting” was okay, for a short visit, so i wasn’t really impressed by this guy, because he insisted that he was “father”, NOT “swami”, and used christian jargon for everything, when i knew that what he was talking about was really hindu ideas — this was shortly before i started my own in-depth study of christianity — but nothing really struck me as unusual, apart from the sincerity of the mass.

but ~~then~~ — NOW, 40 years later — i looked him up on internet… and what i found was surprisingly unsettling, for as little as it was. the first link i found was the Raj-Yoga Math And Retreat page from encyclopedia.com, which looks as though it was either copied from some advertising or promotional material, or written by father satchakrananda, himself. it was on this page that i learned that he is referred to as “Yogi Father Satchakrananda Bodhisattvaguru”. 🙄

i was IMMEDIATELY reminded of my brother-in-law (the one who is married to my older-younger sister), who decided that he wanted me to refer to him as “paramahansa brahmavatar”… 🙄🙄🙄

another reason i think the information was copied was because of the misspelling of the “Nooksuck” River, near Deming, Washington… it’s spelled that way in every link i found relating to father satchakrananda, and it SHOULD BE spelled “Nooksack”… and the fact that he was “mystically initiated” in 1973 by swami sivananda who DIED 10 years earlier, is “IN NO WAY” suspiciously convenient, or an indication that he may be a phony… 😒 not to mention the fact that all of the “encyclopedia.com” “references” are books by “yogi father satchakrananda”… 🙄

for the record, i believe that anybody who has to put the fact that they are a “guru” or “avatar” or whatever, INTO THEIR NAME, and then INSIST that one call them by that name, is about as far away from being a REAL “guru” or “avatar” (or whatever) as you can possibly be, without outright denying that “gurus” or “avatars” (or whatever) even EXIST… and i REFUSE to satisfy their desires by referring to them with that appellation. it is egotistical, and wrong! 😠

and THEN i found a link to the Suspicious Berean, and his 2018 screed entitled “30 years ago: Yogi Satchakrananda underwhelms Edmonton… 🙄 it starts out promisingly enough, with a mention of a performance by peter popoff, the disgraced so-called “christian” televangelist whose “mystical powers” turned out to involve his wife on a CB channel and an un-announced ear-piece with which she directed the supposedly “divine” “words of knowledge” and “healings”… and he, too, repeats the “nooksuck” mis-spelling, which makes me wonder where HE got it from… but then he mentions self-proclaimed “christian” evangelist “cult experts”, dave hunt, and rabi maharaj, as having “excellent” resource material to counter father satchakrananda’s phony-ness, which strikes me as a ludicrous joke. if this guy thinks rabi maharaj and dave hunt are any LESS phony than father satchakrananda, then he’s not worth paying attention to in the slightest… 🙄

what astounds me is that EVERY SINGLE link that i rounded up for the “raj-yoga math and retreat” had, essentially, the same wording, down to the “nooksuck” mis-spelling, but, apart from that, i could find NO further information about father satchakrananda. i know he was the coordinator for the “northwest free university”, and taught yoga there in the late ’70s, but i couldn’t find any information on line about the northwest free university — even though i KNOW it existed, because i looked into attending classes there, at one point… ⁇⁇

enlightenment, spiritual

reference…

Thursday, 20230608 przxqgl

SPIRITUAL RANT

I WONDER IF THIS IS WHAT EVERYONE HAS BEEN LOOKING FOR…

i have to keep reminding myself that, in spite of depression and politics, there is still a higher purpose for life.

enlightenment, videos

bounded chaotic mixing

Saturday, 20230513 przxqgl

bounded chaotic mixing produces strange stability.

230502 bounded chaotic mixing produces strange stability

hindu, pictures

i guess that settles that…

Tuesday, 20230418 przxqgl

i guess i’m a hindu, now…

i guess there was some doubt, considering that i don’t believe in “god”, in the sense of the word recognised by most people… even other hindus… not to mention the fact that i was born in peoria, which is nowhere near the indus river, and “technically” to be a “hindu” means being born on the indian subcontinent, south of the indus river…

Hindus subscribe to a diversity of ideas on spirituality and traditions, but have no ecclesiastical order, no unquestionable religious authorities, no governing body, nor a single founding prophet; Hindus can choose to be polytheistic, pantheistic, monotheistic, monistic, agnostic, atheistic or humanist. Because of the wide range of traditions and ideas covered by the term Hinduism, arriving at a comprehensive definition is difficult. The religion “defies our desire to define and categorize it”. A Hindu may, by his or her choice, draw upon ideas of other Indian or non-Indian religious thought as a resource, follow or evolve his or her personal beliefs, and still identify as a Hindu.

but i got something in the mail, today, that proves, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that there is SOMETHING in me that recognises hinduism as the right spiritual path for me, and i didn’t realise it until i looked it up, when i got the object, this afternoon.

the object i got was a stone. specifically, it is a red “sonbhadara shila”, which, like the shivalingam is the stone that represents shiva, and the shaligram shila is the stone that represents visnu, the sonbhadara represents ganesha, and when it is combined with four other stones, which represent other deities, they become the object of worship for “panchayatana puja“, which was introduced by adi shankara as a way to stop people from fighting over which deity is supreme, but it is apparently a lot older than shankara…

but it’s just one stone, right? how could a hunk of rock make the determination for me that i am a hindu, beyond a shadow of a doubt?… i hear you ask…

the reason is because, without realising it, over the past 40+ years, i have been collecting interesting rocks and crystals, and, again, without realising it, i have now amassed ALL FIVE STONES… the red sonbhadara was the last of them! 😉

the stones, and their corresponding deities, are: shivalingam represents shiva, pyrite, or “swarnamukhi” (स्वर्णामुखी – “golden face”) represents shakti (parvati, devi, or ambika), sphatik or quartz crystal represents surya, shaligram represents visnu, and sonbhadara represents ganesha.

i’m only about 90% certain that the black stone is, in fact, a shaligram. it came, carved that way, as part of a lingam and yoni set that i purchased from india, a number of years ago, and the stone was immediately replaced with a different lingam… however, i learned (again, today) that sometimes shaligrama are carved into lingam-shapes, and the stone doesn’t really resemble a shivalingam, otherwise, however it DOES resemble a shaligram… and, technically, the sphatik is supposed to come from the vallam river in tamil nadu, and the pyrite is supposed to come from the swarnamukhi river in andhra pradesh, and i’m fairly sure that mine don’t, but, from my standpoint, quartz is quartz, and pyrite is pyrite, regardless of where it’s from.

so, i guess that means i’m a for-real hindu now. 😉

also, i got some new, obscure incense: silver oud and mysore sandal, made by <insert fanfare here> shroff channabasappa and company! the company i thought was out of business, but apparently is going… well, not as strong as they once were, but going, none the less… WOO! 👍

enlightenment, medication, mushrooms, quantity

i wonder if this is what everyone has been looking for…

Friday, 20230414 przxqgl

today i took 1g (= two 00 capsules) and went for a walk with rye (our oldest dog). while i was out, i experienced a couple of things i have never experienced before. the first was, about halfway through the walk, i decided that i really wanted to be at home, taking a nap, instead of floating around deep in the forest.

ordinarily, when i have taken mushrooms, the LAST thing on my mind is taking a nap…

so, instead of going forwards deeper into the forest, i went back, and on the way i felt, distinctly, a couple of times, like i have in the past, just prior to passing out… only i didn’t pass out (if i had passed out, it turned out that there was an older couple, with a couple of yappy dogs, that would have found me within a few minutes), but, instead, i experienced a distinct “raising up” and “seperation” of my consciousness, to a point a little behind, and about 5 feet above where my body was — i remember looking at the path ahead of me, which i had always thought was relatively level, and thinking that it looked a lot more down-hill than i remembered — and, because of the fact that i was walking with a dog, i experienced a distinctly odd sensation as my body walked along behind the dog, but i was not part of my body. i got the distinct impression that, as it were, my body was an “automaton” that i was, nominally, in control of, but “i” was not a part of that body.

i have read a fair amount about ego death, both positive and negative, but it has always been a lot more of a “view from the outside”, as i was never really certain what, ultimately, they were talking about. 😉

but this puts everything in an entirely new perspective: if “i” — who i think i am — is NOT my body, then what is it? who am “i”, if not my body? and if my body is not “myself”, then, apparently, regardless of what happens to my body, “i” will continue to exist… अहं ब्रह्मण्सि तत्त्वमसि — AHAM BRAHMANSI. TAT TVAM ASI — “I am God. That Thou Art.” 😉

it’s possible that i experienced nirvikalpa samadhi. ॐ🙏

the amusing part is that i have read stories of people taking higher and higher doses of psychedelics in their attempts to achieve this mythical “ego death”, but i seem to have done it with a controlled, 1 gram dose. 🤣

the whole experience lasted, maybe, 45 minutes… from the time i was crossing the creek, including meeting with the older couple. basically, until i got to my car, which brought me back into my body again. i want to go back there.

ॐ अरुणाछलिष्वरय नमः — AUM ARUNACHALESWARAYA NAMAH

and, i want to tell you, it was a REALLY interesting experience when the aforementioned older couple and their aforementioned yappy dogs came down the path… i — or rather, my body stood to the side and put a hand on my dog as they approached, with their yappy dogs getting yappier and more aggressive, to the point where they had to pick them up, and walked past me with snarling, snapping little curs (to which i, or rather “my body” said “don’t worry, i understand”), all the while “i” was high up in the air, behind my body, making it go through the motions and try not to appear as altered as i really was… 🤣

OM, pictures, printing stuff

the next phase of operation mindfuck

Tuesday, 20230131 przxqgl

they’re here.

now i have to (once again) pester the web designer into showing me how to make a product that has multiple purchase choices: one postcard, two postcards, three postcards, four postcards, five postcards, multiple 5-postcard packs… that sort of thing… he’s showed me how to do it once, with the jagannath pins that i had a few years ago, but they all sold out, and the item got deleted in one of my “clean up my web site” binges.

circus, depression, ketchup, mushrooms, OM, unicycle

in the humdrum

Sunday, 20221023 przxqgl

monday moe was in vegas. i got a whole bunch of spam, DIDN’T have my regular counselling appointment because of a misread calendar, two weeks ago, DIDN’T get my tires rotated in spite of waiting around for an hour while they DIDN’T rotate my tires… 😒 i’m still not totally sure what happened: i made an appointment, showed up before i was supposed to be there, told the guy that i had an appointment, which he confirmed, and then… i waited for an hour, went up to the counter to inquire when they were going to get to my car, and was told “within the hour”, but i had other places to be, so i had to bail and come back later in the week…

and i was already ripe for mushrooms… 😒

wednesday, the smoke from wildfires (i never bothered to find out where they were) was bad enough that both seattle and portland had the WORST air quality in the world — worse than singapore or hong kong. also, apparently, someone dumped, and burned, a human body just up the street from the trailhead to the back side of taylor mountain, where i walk a lot… where i saw the bear… 😒 moe came home. i picked up quill at the puppy-sitter’s place near lake desire at 8:30, and picked up moe at the airport at 9:30.

thursday i had my circus class, and on the way back home, driving down I5, the smoke was bad enough that i couldn’t see more than a mile or so in front of me. 😒 then got my tires rotated — for real, this time. i was in and out inside of 15 minutes. a guy i had never seen before, but who i assumed was one of the managers, said that he “knew all about” the fiasco on monday, and that they’d get to my car right away… and they did, which kind of surprised me…

friday i decided that i was not going to take as many mushrooms as i had planned, because, by that time, the smoke from the wildfires was really awful. we bought some inflatable halloween decorations — a unicorn skeleton, and two enormous, flashing eyeballs. when it got dark, it started raining, so, naturally, monique decided that was the time to put them out… and the eyeballs (which were my part of the deal) only had one set of tethers, which meant that i had to cut and singe nylon string, in the dark-and-rain…

saturday i actually took mushrooms. instead of four capsules, i only took two, but — as is seemingly fairly typical — all the “good stuff” had filtered to the bottom of the bag, which meant that two capsules was SIGNIFICANTLY more than the past couple of times i had taken four capsules… and it was raining REALLY HARD, so even if i wanted to go up to taylor mountain and risk being high on mushrooms in the vicinity of an actual murder investigation(!!), it was raining hard enough that there was standing water in our back yard, which usually indicates that the trails on taylor are flooded, as well.

it was weird not being able to walk around while tripping balls, as is my usual habit, but i got through it okay… although i REALLY need a beanbag chair, because the only “comfortable” chair in the house is directly in front of the TV set (because that’s where moe usually sits), and, while it is actually big enough for two of us, i REALLY DO NOT want to watch TV while high on mushrooms… so i sat for a couple of hours in the 2nd-most comfortable chair in the house, which is on the opposite end of the house, until i got done peaking, and then it was — more or less — life as usual, only “usual” included being high on mushrooms this time.

we had a karaoke party last night — about 10 people… including one of our next door neighbours, kelly, who i talked to fairly extensively regarding our respective weed crops this year… it still ASTOUNDS me that it is legal, and, while still not technically legal, i have a mental health professional RECOMMENDING that i take mushrooms… 😲

today was the last unicycle class of the session — a new session starts next sunday — and i think i may have gotten back to the point i was at the end of spring session, before “the summer from hell” (which is how i have been referring to the summer of 2022), during which i had very little time, and even less motivation, to practice unicycle.

i have a sousa band rehearsal on tuesday, a circus class on thursday, tracy and kelly (next door neighbours) are having a “costumes optional” halloween party on saturday, and halloween, proper, is on sunday. i have been making more Operation Mindfuck envelopes to be distributed to random people, while in costume, over the coming week.

swastikas

RT

Friday, 20220107 przxqgl

i’ve been playing around with illustrator (mac), photoshop (mac), frax (tablet), procreate (tablet), inkscape (mac/linux), and the GIMP (linux), for a few days, and this is the result. i’m thinking of making stickers out of it. i wanted to play around with making the QR code an integral part of the artwork, so that you don’t have to go to the QR link to appreciate the art, but if you do hit the link, you’ll get even more information.

enlightenment, hindu, pictures

blasphemy?

Tuesday, 20220104 przxqgl

okay, this is discounting the fact that gods only exist in the minds of those who worship them… this is a purely practical examination of the aspects of hindu gods, in particular… and to be precise, an examination of their clothing.

most depictions of deities are clothed. there are deities which are naked, and part of the devotion to these deities is dressing, undressing, and bathing them, but i’m talking about the deities that are depicted as clothed.

i wonder…

a depiction of the multiple arms of Kali Maa, in Goa

how is Kali Maa supposed to put on that shirt?

pictures, swastikas

also…

Friday, 20211105 przxqgl

Friendly Swastika dot Art

cannabis, pictures, The Holy Vegetable

HARVEST!

Tuesday, 20211019 przxqgl

starts under lights on 210502, harvested 211019, almost two pounds (estimate based on raw weight of the harvested plants), 171 days, 122 of which were outdoors…

… making this my first successful, mostly-outdoor grow. 😉

cannabis, pictures, The Holy Vegetable

yum! 🤤

Monday, 20211018 przxqgl

harvest tomorrow. 😉👍👍

pictures, sculpture, spiritual

😲

Saturday, 20210515 przxqgl

so, for some time now, i have wanted to make a reproduction of The Stele Of Revealing, and i got started the other day. but very quickly, i realised that, if i want to make it a “good enough” reproduction rather than a reproduction that would only look good if you didn’t look too closely, i would need to know the original dimensions, and have a reasonably accurate idea of what the heiroglyphs look like, and what the other artwork looks like, and i would, then, need to reduce them from their original size to the size that i ended up deciding i was going to make it — approximately a 40% reduction.

because i’m an artist, i know that, usually (in the absence of photocopiers, or proportional cameras), the tool used to make miniature reproductions is a proportional divider. i have used them before, know what they look like, and know that they can be very expensive. i didn’t want a really expensive one, but i also did not want something that somebody (most likely me) made out of plywood, because it wouldn’t be accurate enough, so i went to ebay, and discovered the exact tool i needed — from the picture, i deduced that it was, largely, the same tool i used in high school, when i was first learning about proportional dividers.

they arrived in the mail today. they are… um… not what i expected.

what arrived in the mail was a finely machined set of proportional dividers with sharpened tool steel points, and an engraved scale for both circles and lines. it is stamped “J.H.Weil & Co.” and it came in a velvet-lined case with antique gold writing on the outside that says U.S.C.E., which i take to mean U.S. Army Corps of Engineers… my impression is that, under normal circumstances, this could be as much as a $200 tool, but, because of the fact that it appears to be a vintage, military tool, it could be worth a lot more… this is a tool that is, pretty much GUARANTEED to be accurate to at least one thousandth of an inch… and it cost me less than $50!

so, i just wanted to give a shout out to Next Stage Vintage… they suprised the hell out of me! thank you! 😉👍

and i am going to use it to reduce The Stele Of Revealing… 😲

enlightenment, OM, videos

bounded chaotic mixing produces what?

Wednesday, 20210512 przxqgl

this is an example of bounded chaotic mixing producing strange stability:

210504 Carrey Creek, Taylor Mountain – Hobart, WA — although it’s not as high resolution as i would have liked… however, at almost 500mb, i couldn’t be too choosy.

this exact phenomenon is what people are talking about when they’re talking about God, in whatever form. 😉👍

okay, there is a mathematical theory (which is NOT what most people THINK is a theory) which says “bounded chaotic mixing produces strange stability”.

i have gotten in trouble with mathematicians for “taking this too liberally”, but it works, regardless of what they think.

the theory is that if you have an instance of bounded chaotic mixing — in this case, the “chaotic mixing” of H2O molecules, “bounded” by the banks of the stream, that if you take away that boundary, temporarily — say, for example, a waterfall — that the boundaries will, more or less, hold, until that chaotic mixing is forced into another boundary. in the case of a waterfall, “bounded chaotic mixing produces strange stability” is the reason why you can stand fairly close to the base of a waterfall, without getting wet, but eventually — and nobody can tell exactly when, but the probability increases the closer you get — you WILL get wet.

men will be familiar with this phenomenon when they pee… 😉

in the case of this video, the bounded chaotic mixing is violently changing course, and the strange stability is, just before it does so, there’s a place where, even when the video is slowed down, you can see a roundish, perfectly clear patch of water, that stays more or less in the same place… strange stability: nothing is keeping it there, no bubbles go through it, even though, everywhere around it, are bubbles and ripples…

and it is exactly the same phenomenon that people are talking about, when they talk about God.

somebody else says “god” did it. i say, bounded chaotic mixing produces strange stability.

when i say i believe that God both exists, and doesn’t exist, at the same time, creating no contradiction, this is what i am talking about.

fun with the post office, hybrid elephant, OM

EXEMPT! 😈

Monday, 20210503 przxqgl

as soon as i figure out how to list “1 postcard for $1.50 or 10 postcards for $10.00”, they’re going on the web site. 😈

ETA: they’re up! 😉👍

OM, pictures

operation mindfuck

Tuesday, 20210413 przxqgl

the latest OM card… i may send these out to Incense Of The Month Club members… 😉

geek stuff, tina chopp

The Books of Tina Chopp

Monday, 20200810 przxqgl

The Books of Tina Chopp 1.1 – The Book of Children

enlightenment, geek links

you’re probably wondering why i posted this…

Tuesday, 20200428 przxqgl

मनोबुद्ध्यहङ्कारचित्तानि नाहं
न च श्रोत्रजिह्वे न च घ्राणनेत्रे ।
न च व्योमभूमिः न तेजो न वायुः
चिदानन्दरूपः शिवोऽहं शिवोऽहम् ॥ १॥

The processors
Manas, buddhi, ahaṅkāra and chitta are the qualitative differentiation within the mind. They are used interchangeably based on context, and yet they are different.

Manas is the faculty of perception, the instrument by which the objects of senses affect the Atman. It is the faculty of thought, desire, imagination. Buddhi is the intellect, by which one discerns, comprehends. Ahaṅkāra is the sense of identity, that which creates ‘I-ness’, ego. Chittam is the one that observes, is aware. All these are the faculties that process what comes from outside.

I am none of these processors.

The instruments
Shrotra is the ear, the organ of hearing. Jihvā is tongue, the organ of tasting. Ghrāṅa is nose, the sense of smelling. And netra is eye, the sense of seeing.

I am none of these instruments.

The building blocks of matter
Vyoma is the space, the gap between the matter. It is the space between planetary bodies as well as the space around Earth, and even the space inside anything. It is also one of the five basic elements.

Bhūmi is the Earth, or the solid matter.

Tejas is the heat or light (both interconnected) like the fire or the Sun.

Vāyu is the wind, the circulating forces, not just on Earth but also inside our bodies, responsible for circulating whether nutrition or blood etc.

I am none of these building blocks of which the material world is made.

The faculties get the information using the senses about the outside world.

I am none of them.

I am pure bliss form of consciousness.
I am Shiva, I am Shiva.

— Practical Sanskrit

—–

it is Adi Shankara‘s birthday, and, if i can be said to “follow” a “religion”, it would probably be the one espoused by adi shankara.

the reason for this is that adi shankara spoke of a “god” which exists beyond what we experience as “good” or “evil”. this “god” is neither (or, possibly, both) “good” and/or “evil”… which is, pretty much, EXACTLY the kind of “god” i feel, which “operates” this plane of existence. this “god” both “exists” and “does not exist”, at the same time, creating no contradictions. this “god” is both “illogical” and “logical” at the same time, creating no contradictions…

and if you don’t understand this, you probably think i’m crazy.

so be it.

this sanskrit shloka, part of Nirvanashatkam is, pretty much, exactly what i believe about myself: i may have all these things holding me back; depression, anhedonia, a brain injury, etc., but those are relics of 60 years of living in this plane of existence. in spite of how “real” these things are, in spite of how “real” these things seem to be TO ME, they are NOT “who i am”, in the “real” sense of the word. i am beyond all this: i “really” exist in a realm where “good” and “evil” are two sides of the same coin… and that “coin” is worth less than a penny.

The World Wide Weird, tina chopp, weird

Tina Chopp is God! Praise Her OR DIE!!

Thursday, 20190815 przxqgl

Tina Chopp is God! Praise Her OR DIE!!*
June 6, 2019
by Paul Krugman
nytimes.com

Tina Chopp claims that she can “fix anything!” I don’t know about the results of any business big or small, but I certainly know about the results of electing a God.

Citizens of the United States were tired of political campaigns in which voters were supposed to make an informed choice, and come November they chose not to do so. Perhaps that was because political campaigns are often tedious, or because, in 2018, the choices were so severe, or perhaps, as I argued yesterday, because the traditional definition of democracy, which involves an informed choice by voters, had been rendered absurd by the rise of special-interest money in politics. Voters may understand politics in idiosyncratic ways, but they are not rational. They can’t know everything; the information they have is too incomplete and cluttered for anyone to take proper stock of the candidates.

But citizens have not been irrationally inert in general, either. There are times when an informed opinion is just as right as the next one, and there are times when an informed opinion is just as bad as the next one. It is sometimes not even possible to know the difference between them — in recent days, for example, a number of the #MeToo protesters spent all day in the public square, insisting that they knew a lot more than they seemed to, and finally decided that the house was haunted.

The election of a God enables one to ignore the matter altogether, and the designation of such a God, apparently, is self-explanatory. This should not be any kind of problem, because the Bible is faith. And faith does not need to be backed up by anything, and certainly not by objective knowledge, so Chopp can rewrite the Bible as she likes, just as she will rewrite your favorite movie, or your favorite TV show, as she wants, without a single backward glance toward theological detail.

People who mock the idea of electing a God often find themselves apologizing when, like Chopp, they refuse to back up the idea, insisting that a deity is just not necessary. (Especially when a deity so obviously favors Israel!) But it is necessary; this is not a joking matter, in my view. The natural condition of people is self-referential, and we not only judge other people’s quality, but we judge ourselves. Many of us would naturally opt for a God who is on our side.

And the sad truth is that Chopp and her kind seem to be, if not quite an entirely new threat, then a near-complete one. They have replaced democracy, which is now generally pretty awful (but which gives us some rare gains in some areas — civic organizing, campaigning, electoral infrastructure, resistance) with religion, which, while superficially attractive, is also pretty distasteful. Christianity, of course, has always been toxic, but churches even in countries with relatively strong traditions of democracy — Austria, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, Holland, Finland, Iceland, Iceland again — have been susceptible to corrupting tendencies. So too, it seems, has the idea of electing a God.

Some combination of middlebrow and educated parents will remain ready to do their children the honor of having them baptized into a god whose politics are unclear, and who tells her followers to “immediate action!” And if anyone even remotely similar surfaces, but even a relatively uneducated or educated churchgoer won’t mind telling an unbeliever to “please pray.” The fundamental question is this: Are we really serious about denying Chopp her God, or are we just sending a message to those who might — and the decline of political parties makes this more and more certain — become moderates by necessity?

Continue reading Tina Chopp is God! Praise Her OR DIE!! →

busking, pictures, swastikas

buskingniksub

Sunday, 20190512 przxqgl

when you hang around the pike place market enough, particularly if you don’t look exactly like pretty much everybody else, you will eventually end up having your photo taken by one of the multitude of street photographers who descend in droves on the market thinking that they will get “that shot” which will propell them into the realm of famous photographers like ansel adams or robert mapplethorpe. in this case, it was a chap called jon leach, who has been doing street photography for about 5 years — no clue what he did before that — and he took a photo of me that i like, because when you look at the whole, reduced photo, i look serious, almost frowning, but if you look at the photo up close, i’m actually smiling.

busking this week has been a mass of contradictions: yesterday, we played two sets, after having been displaced at 11:00 from the place where i had added us to the list at 8:00 because an amplified band (which is “banned from busking at the market”) was setting up to play in a “flower festival” which the market managers had neglected to tell us buskers about until we actually got there — and they posted a new notice regarding the closure in exactly the same place where the “get your new buskers’ permit” notice had been, so the people (including me) who signed up on the list didn’t notice it until it was too late… so we went up the alley, behind the iron stairs, and busked for an hour, took an hour break (because “the official rules” say you have to), and played most of a second set before we got fed up — in the middle of a song — and said fuck it.

the reason we got fed up is because there were probably 20 people, from people taking pictures with their cell phones all the way up to people who had professional camera equipment, taking our photos, which includes a sign in a very prominent, central location, which says, in large letters “TIP FOR PHOTOS”, but NOT TIPPING FOR PHOTOS! 😠🤬

seriously! some of these people came in pairs, one of them standing next to, or behind us, and the other person, with the camera, lining up the shot so that we were both in the frame, with the sign that says “TIP FOR PHOTOS” in the frame as well, and when they were done mugging for the camera, they just turned around and walked off as though we were plastic manequins… and not starving musicians who have a combined total of more than a century of experience playing music.

my understanding is that the problem is partially because of the cruise ship companies which offer fares that “include all gratuities”, and partially because of the common myth that buskers are paid by the market. both are WRONG!! and it make life particularly awful for folks that have to make their living busking when people act like buskers are free.

on the other end of the scale are days like today, when we played 3 sets and made almost $50 a piece, which works out to around $16 an hour… which is not outstanding, but it’s enough that it makes you want to come back out and try it again tomorrow.

and then there’s the pike place market foundation. back in the ’80s, when the market was being renovated for the first time, i bought an inscribed tile, which was originally placed outside of the athenian tavern…

i had a picture of it, at one time, but i can’t locate it currently. 😒

anyway, they had to replace the floor in front of the athenian, in the ’90s, because it was unstable, and they tore out the section of floor that had my tile in it, and replaced it with somebody else’s tile.

when i bought that tile, i was in the tech school, and the price of the tile was in lieu of half a week’s groceries, but when i asked the market foundation about it when i discovered it was missing, in 2016, their response was to say that if it was not there, then it was not going to be replaced, and my money meant nothing. they offered me a “market charm” to be installed in the new section of the market (which they hadn’t even built yet) as a replacement, to which i agreed.

but it was, apparently, never installed. yesterday, i asked the lady custodian of the market charm database to check, and she couldn’t find it. so i filled out another market charm request, and she said it should be installed this fall, and i can check at their database at PikeUp dot org. while i was at the market foundation booth, i also bought a “pig pin” which came with this interesting printed card:

i noticed a design detail on the card, which caused this conversation between me and the lady at the booth:
ME: this card has swastikas on it! cool!
Lady At The Booth: those aren’t swastikas.
ME: they’re swastikas, they’re just not what you expected to see when i said “swastika”… they’re not nazi swastikas, they’re ORIGINAL swastikas, from before the nazis got hold of it: they’re “little good luck charms”, which is what the word “swastika” means, in sanskrit.
Lady At The Booth: yeah, but they’re not swastikas, there’s another name for it.
ME: the german word for a swastika is “hakenkreuz”. the reason english-speaking people use the word “swastika” is because nobody could figure out how to say “hakenkreuz”.
Lady At The Booth: but there’s another name for them.
ME: the word “swastika” is a sanskrit word that means “little good luck charm”. it’s the perfect symbol to put on the pike place market “good luck token”, and most people probably wouldn’t even realise that it’s a swastika, because it’s not a nazi swastika. the swastika is one of the world’s oldest symbols, and it was around, as a symbol of good luck for, literally, thousands of years before the nazis got hold of it! it’s about time we started taking it back, and making it into a symbol of good luck again!
Lady At The Booth: really? cool! 😊

allegedly, they’re going to snail-mail me when the charm is installed, but they said they were going to install it in 2016, and they didn’t, so it remains to be seen what they’re really going to do.

enlightenment, jeezis, my music, rants, sex

Pat Robertson’s Weird Way of Doing Sex

Tuesday, 20190226 przxqgl

pat robertson should not be allowed to broadcast his hate on national television. it astounds me that he still has a platform… although it astounds me that people still go to church, so maybe i’m the crazy one here… although i would much rather be considered “crazy” than i would to convert to that sex-crazed mainiac’s way of thinking. seriously, i don’t understand why HOMOSEXUALS having sex the way they do threatens anybody, and certainly not to the depths of the fabric of society. the fact is, whether pat robertson likes it or not, people have been “doing sex” the “weird way” since long before pat robertson was around, and they’re not likely to go away just because pat robertson and his ilk somehow get a law passed. people like him would do well to pay attention when someone like, oh, i don’t know, Jesus Christ, maybe, says “And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?”

it makes me wonder about the beam in pat robertson’s eye, particularly since he seems to be obsessed with “weird” ways of having sex. it makes me think that he might not be getting enough, himself. 😒

Pat Robertson’s Weird Way of Doing Sex
by Rev. Dr. Guido Super DeLuxe, 190226
download here

pictures, tina chopp

The Trash Issue

Tuesday, 20190122 przxqgl

as i mentioned the other day, i found a whole pile of black and white negatives that are between 25 and 35 years old, quite a few of which were taken by my friend randy, for inclusion in an issue of Tina Magazine that never got published. we first started talking about “The Trash Issue” when we both were living in bellingham between 1990 and 1993. it gets sort of fuzzy after that, but my recollection is that randy moved away from bellingham in the middle of 1993 and took all of the writings for The Trash Issue with him.

i also have a picture of a whole pile of Tina literature that now, strangely, seems to be for sale at Alta-Glamour… in fact, i have narrowed it down to, either randy’s collection (which is more likely), or less likely it is jim’s collection… but, one collection or another, they somehow went from being in a photo that i took with my camera, with very few changes (none of the tracts, and the addition of The War On Drugs Issue, which is the reason i think it is randy’s… and if they have a ritual object, it is one of the bronze ones, because i have the silver one with the mystic emblems on the reverse side), some time between 1990 and 1993 to being for sale (at OUTRAGEOUS prices) at some rare bookseller, a fact which makes me angrier every time i think about it… 😠

but i digress…

anyway, i have a contact sheet which was marked up with indications of which pictures were to be used in The Trash Issue, and if i could think of some words to put with it, i would publish the posthumous Trash Issue on the church’s web site… because the internet was MADE for The Trash Issue.

karass, my music, tina chopp

Blob Lardstone

Saturday, 20190119 przxqgl

Blob Lardstone – 190119, by Ralph Ewggleigh

this is my interpretation of the introduction to a cassette by Bob Larson, a toxically obnoxious evangelical so-called “christian” radio preacher who bills himself as “the real exorcist”, with whom i have been interacting, on and off, for the better part of 40 years. he, too, is likely a member of my karass, because, despite my repeated attempts to get him out of my life, he keeps popping up, and i keep responding to him.

forward into the past, jim robertson, pictures, tina chopp

समाधि पीठ

Tuesday, 20190115 przxqgl 1 Comment

i found a whole pile of black and white negatives that are between 25 and 35 years old. possibly older, as i don’t have a great memory for these things, so i keep a list of when things happened. according to that list, the picture above was taken in 1991 or 1992. it was taken to honour the fact that i had just experienced sabikalpasamadhi (सविकल्पसमाधि) for the first (and only) time, on the banks of the skagit river.

i just got back from picking up 182 4″x6″ prints. there are a bunch of pictures of ezra, the PHBFH, randy, and ruth. there are a few pictures of other people, including me, and jim robertson.

there are also a lot of pictures for the legendary “Trash” issue of “Tina Magazine”, which was never published, as well as several pictures of the Tina literature which is now, suspiciously, for sale at Alta-Glamour.

now i gotta get started scanning them. 😉

jim robertson, tina chopp

more tina chopp

Thursday, 20190110 przxqgl

Alta-Glamour Inc. (Seattle, WA, U.S.A.) apparently has a whole pile of vintage Tina literature (which i do not have, which makes me kind of wonder exactly where they got it), including two by me, for vastly inflated prices… i wrote to the seller, saying that i was the original publisher of these items, and what did they think trying to sell my stuff for so much. their response was:

Our zine pricing often indicates the importance we ascribe to a certain item. People often look to our website to establish values of their collection items, and we want to demonstrate, through pricing, that we think these zines are culturally significant.

The price is therefore not necessarily what we can sell the item for, at least now. Our zines are priced to sell — in 15 years, when zines are even more significant and scarce representations of the creativity emanating into the world.

i guess i sort of understand where they’re coming from, but, as the original publisher of those items, i think it’s ridiculous to imagine that they’re ever going to get so much for them. especially as they make no effort whatsoever to acknowledge my work in all of this. i guess i would feel differently if they offered me a cut, and i would definitely feel differently if randy were alive… my guess is that randy would have already raised hell with them over the prices… but, then again, since their collection appears to include a ritual object, there’s an outside chance that they actually acquired them from randy’s father, after his death.

also, i am somewhat alarmed to learn that they have jim robertson’s publication mixed in, as though he was as prominent a Tinite as randy, ian or i. they say “A bullying joke gone too long, these guys are proto-alt-right trolls.” which indicates that they believe jim was connected with the Church of Tina, even though, by the time he published “A Snake!” he had been excommunicated for two years, primarily because of his hateful, politics-obsessed rantings, which is why his publication is “The Journal of the Last Rhythmic Tantrist Church of Tina Chopp (Heretic)”… can’t they tell that it’s an entirely different cult? 😒

tina chopp

oh my… TINA!!!

Thursday, 20190103 przxqgl

Abe Books seller Alta-Glamour has 4 copies of Tina Magazine for sale… FOR TWO HUNDRED FIFTY DOLLARS A PIECE!!!

🤯 🙄 🤣

on the other hand, if they actually think they can get that much for them, i may have a few other publications from that era that i would be willing to sell them. 😉

i am a terrorist, jeezis, pictures, spiritual

george

Wednesday, 20180905 przxqgl

i met george today.

i was getting gas in my car, and this tall, weedy, semi-suspicious looking guy came up to me and said “tell me about your bumper.”

inevitably, this means that he’s a “christian” who is offended by the message of my bumper sticker, which says JESUS IS A GATEWAY DRUG, but i feigned ignorance, partially because there was a HUGE line of people waiting behind me. but then he left no doubt, by pointing at it and reading it out loud. i responded by saying that it was a pretty simple message, and what more did he want to know.

so he started to say “i’m a christian, and…”, at which point i interrupted him, saying “i’m a christian, too”, at which point he asked me if i was jewish “because of your license plate” — i guess he hadn’t seen, or hadn’t been able to identify the huge picture of panchamukhi ganesha on the hood — but i said, no. i learned about jesus, and that gave me the opportunity to learn about all of the world’s religions, and i learned that they are all the same, and all point towards the same God.

at that point, i was done pumping gas, and, as i was taking the hose back to the pump, he said something that i didn’t hear, but it started with “no…” so i probably didn’t miss much…

then he handed me a card, and said “this is my web site”. so i handed him one of my own cards — the one that says “Bounded Chaotic Mixing Produces Strange Stability” — which he stood and stared at until i got in my car and drove off.

check out his web site… it’s hillariously “old school” (complete with dark-coloured background and rainbow-coloured font) and is, literally, “George’s Links To The World” in that, if it’s on internet, and george has read it and agrees with it, it’s on his site, somewhere. it’s not quite as single-focused as Time Cube, but it’s just as entertaining.

a few years ago, i was driving through south-of-seattle afternoon traffic, and i saw, on the car ahead of me, a bumper sticker that said “TRY JESUS”, and, immediately, i thought “that guy’s a ‘pusher'”.

then i thought about my own experiences with jesus, jeezis and “christians”, and i thought, if that guy is a “pusher”, then, in my experience, at least, jesus is a gateway drug: i learned about jesus, then i learned about other religions, then i learned that they are all the same… but my initial exposure to all of this was jesus.

thus, the bumper sticker.

i wish i hadn’t been so flustered, because i would have really liked to explain that to george. it is my impression that it would have blown his mind even more than it already was. 😈

enlightenment, political, politics

MA⸘G‽A

Thursday, 20180816 przxqgl

MAGA — or Make America Great Again — has become the rallying cry of the right wing, these days, but i have a few questions about whether america was that great to begin with, compared to other countries.

first, i have to consider how we determine what “great” actually means? how is america more “great” than france, or india, or estonia? what measures do we use to determine how “great” a country is, compared to another country, especially when there are countries that have more than a million citizens, and, at the same time, there are countries that have only a few thousand citizens. presumably, they’re not saying that a country is “more great” because it covers more of the surface of the earth, or that it has more occupants than another country.

it has always been my impression — and this was the case WAY before #drumpf was president — that a country is sort of like a football team, or a soccer team: you root for the people who are the closest to where you are. in the same way, barring any other difference, a person who was born in germany thinks that germany is the “greatest” country, and a person who was born in ethiopia thinks that ethiopia is the “greatest” country, regardless of ANYTHING ELSE that may be different about those two countries, compared to each other.

to continue, my impression has also been that, pretty much regardless of what the german, or ethiopian, may say about what the “greatest” country is, a person who was born in america would, very likely, disagree with them, which makes me wonder what a person from another planet — let’s say “jupiter”, for conversation’s sake — would think about these earthlings and their petty squabbles over whose piece of earth is “greater” than anywhere else on earth.

from a person from jupiter’s point of view, ALL places on earth probably have good points and bad points, some places on earth are probably more scenic than others, more crowds, or more serenity, but, from the point of view of someone from jupiter, they’re all just places on earth: nice places to visit, but why would anyone want to live somewhere other than jupiter?

forget “Make AMERICA Great Again”, lets “Make EARTH Great Again”! earth is the only planet we’ve got, and if we ruin it, we don’t have another planet upon which we can fall back…

but that brings up my next point: how can we say that earth is the greatest planet in the solar system? if ANY of the other planets weren’t there, or some other planet WAS there, life as we know it on earth would, very likely, be considerably different. and, of course, if the sun wasn’t there, or was in a different place, or a different size, life as we know it on earth may not have come into existence at all, in the first place. so how can we be so egotistical as to say that “earth is the greatest planet in the solar system”? all it would take would be for one thing to be slightly different, and the world that we know would be unrecognisable.

personally, my belief is that we would all do a lot better if we were to give up the notion that america ever has been “great”, if for no other reason than it would necessarily make every other place on earth “less great”.

america is the place where i was born, but i don’t hold some attraction to america that i don’t hold for every other place, even though i haven’t even been to those other places. for me, america is not, and never has been “great”, it just “is”… in the same way that jamaica or ethiopia or denmark just “is”. nowhere and nobody is “greater” than any other place or person, just as nowhere and nobody is “lesser” than any other place or person: they all have value.

the sooner we realise that, the more likely it is that we will be able to do away with #drumpf and his ilk.

spiritual, sufi

The Man Who Walked on Water

Wednesday, 20180627 przxqgl

A conventionally-minded dervish, from an austerely pious school, was walking one day along a river bank. He was absorbed in concentration upon moralistic and scholastic problems, for that was the form which Sufi teaching had taken in the community to which he belonged. He equated emotional religion with the search for ultimate Truth.

Suddenly his thoughts were interrupted by a loud shout: someone was repeating the dervish call. ‘There is no point in that,’ he said to himself, ‘because the man is mispronouncing the syllables. Instead of intoning YA HU, he is saying U YA HU.’

Then he realised that he had a duty, as a more careful student, to correct this unfortunate person, who might have had no opportunity of being rightly guided, and was therefore probably only doing his best to attune himself with the idea behind the sounds.

So he hired a boat and made his way to the island in midstream, from which the sound appeared to come.

Sitting in a reed hut, he found a man, dressed in a dervish robe, moving in time to his own repetition of the initiatory phrase. ‘My friend,’ said the first dervish, ‘you are mispronouncing the phrase. It is incumbent upon me to tell you this, because there is merit for him who gives and him who takes advise. This is the way you speak it.’ And he told him.

‘Thank you,’ said the other dervish, humbly.

The first dervish entered his boat again, full of satisfaction at having done a good deed. After all, it was said that a man who could repeat the sacred formula correctly could even walk upon the waves: something he had never seen, but always hoped — for some reason — to be able to achieve.

Now he could hear nothing from the reed hut, but he was sure that his lesson had been well taken.

Then he heard a faltering U YA as the second dervish started to repeat the phrase in his old way…

While the first dervish was thinking about this, reflecting upon the perversity of humanity and its persistence in error, he suddenly saw a strange sight. From the island the other dervish was coming towards him, walking on the surface of the water…

Amazed, he stopped rowing. The second dervish walked up to him and said: ‘Brother, I am sorry to trouble you, but I have to come out to ask you again the standard method of making the repetion you were telling me, because I find it difficult to remember it.’

Continue reading The Man Who Walked on Water →

articles, enlightenment, links

Enlightenment

Friday, 20180406 przxqgl

ENLIGHTENMENT
180406 by Om Swami

“How do I gain enlightenment?” someone said to me the other day. “Can you not grant me some deep experience? I want a radical change in my life.”

I get this asked frequently by many enthusiastic seekers. They are in search of a panacea, some mystical reality that will solve all their problems (spiritual and emotional) forever. While many aspirants understand the importance of persistence and individual effort, most others are looking for a quick fix. Here’s a beautiful quote by Adya Shanti that mirrors my own thoughts in ways more than one:

Many seekers do not take full responsibility for their own liberation, but wait for one big, final spiritual experience which will catapult them fully into it. It is this search for the final liberating experience which gives rise to a rampant form of spiritual consumerism in which seekers go from one teacher to another, shopping for enlightenment as if shopping for sweets in a candy store. This spiritual promiscuity is rapidly turning the search for enlightenment into a cult of experience seekers. And, while many people indeed have powerful experiences, in most cases these do not lead to the profound transformation of the individual, which is the expression of enlightenment.

One of the greatest misconceptions about enlightenment is that it will just happen. Not so. It has to be earned, it has to be lived. Sometimes I find it challenging to explain to seekers that true enlightenment is not a one-off special moment, but more a culmination of lifelong experiences and practices that result in the dawning of a great insight. I don’t blame them for thinking that by the magical touch of some guru or maybe by being struck by lightning, they will arrive at a moment of enlightenment. Partly because we have plenty of spiritual books out there that give that impression. Even I may have inadvertently conveyed the same by sharing one of my most defining spiritual experiences in my memoir. For that matter, Buddha’s enlightenment under the Bodhi tree is often construed as an isolated event of extraordinary significance. It was anything but that.

In comprehending and highlighting such experiences, we tend to overlook the tremendous amount of effort that goes in realizing that state. For a moment, think of enlightenment as winning the Nobel Prize. We can’t have it just by visiting other Nobel Laureates and we certainly can’t be awarded it just because we want it. After a lifetime of commitment to a cause or producing a phenomenal body of work, and assuming the circumstances are favorable, the committee might consider your nomination and grant you one. No doubt winning the Nobel Prize will bring about a change in your life and lifestyle to a degree, you will inspire more people and so on. But, beyond that, there’s not much. It’s not going to improve your relationships, it’s not going to fix your physical health etc. Those challenges will remain.

Without preparation and readiness, any spiritual experience is hardly transformational. And if an experience doesn’t trigger some kind of lasting transformation in you, however subtle, it holds little meaning ultimately. When you continue to walk the path sincerely, diligently, many learnings, lessons and experiences give you the wisdom to lead your life differently. Differently so in a manner that it’s more conducive to retaining a state of bliss. Having said that, even if you are enlightened, it doesn’t mean that you won’t experience pain or that you will always find joy in everything that goes on in your life.

R.K. Laxman (1921 – 2015), one of India’s most famous cartoonists ever, writes a lovely passage in his travelogue The Distorted Mirror.

People are curious about my profession and try to clear their doubts by putting all sorts of questions. Recently a lady asked me, “Do you do the drawings for your cartoons yourself?” I answered, “Yes, I do.” Then she questioned, “And the captions to the cartoons, do you write them too?” “Of course,” I said. And, finally, she asked, “The ideas for the cartoons, don’t say you think them up too?”

…

There is one [question] that is rather rarely asked but which makes me go into deep introspection. This is: “When you look around, does everything appear funny to you?”

A cartoonist does not lead a charmed life of perpetual fun out of the reach of the cares and worries that bedevil his fellow men. The fluctuating prices of onions affect me in the same way as they delight or outrage a primary schoolteacher. Likewise, taxes depress my spirit. Bores at the mike, and traffic jams drive me crazy. Surely a doctor does not always look at life in terms of coughs, colds, allergies and bronchial inflammations. A star of the silver screen, I am sure, has enough sense to know that beyond the range of the camera life does not continue to be full of idyllic scenes, sex, songs and ketchup-blood. Why, then, should a cartoonist see living caricatures and hear rib-tickling dialogue all around him? So I comfort myself with the self-assurance that my view of life is normally as banal as that of the next man in the queue for sugar or kerosene.

Enlightenment is something like that. It does not mean that you don’t feel the pain or remain eternally unaffected by everything that goes around you. All of that we must go through based on our karma, temperament and attitude towards life. The only thing that changes is that you grow into a more spiritual being, you become increasingly resilient and kind. What life hurls at you doesn’t change, how you catch it or dodge it, does. When it builds to a tipping point, you become kind of independent, very independent. Less worried about what the world thinks of you, how it perceives you and so on. In other words, you draw your own cartoons, write your own captions and, much to the fascination or disbelief of others, come up with the ideas too.

As the famous Zen saying goes, “Before enlightenment: chop wood, fetch water. After enlightenment: chop wood, fetch water.”

Being a jivan-mukta, a liberated soul, or an enlightened person does not relieve one of his/her duties. Self-realization is not, as Eknath Easwaran put it, a compensation for one’s good deeds. It is but simply an outlook towards life that you gain from experiential understanding. If you really wish to get a grip on the notion of enlightenment then look upon it as a way of life, a commitment to virtues, as a promise to carry yourself a certain way and leading your life in a manner that befits you.

Liberation is not plonking a glorious flag on top of Mount Everest, it is but a mindful and diligent journey meandering through many treks and hikes, stopping and camping along the way, meeting and greeting fellow travelers, absorbing the breathtaking views, appreciating the challenges, rejoicing in where you are already. All this while you remain inward focused but goal-oriented.

When you realize this, a better sense of wellbeing and happiness shrouds you. You understand that there are no dark moments, that you are already enlightened. You just need to live a certain way to experience it. Then you laugh at the discovery that how unnecessarily seriously you’ve been taking yourself. As Thích Nhất Hạnh said:

I laugh when I think how I once sought paradise as a realm outside of the world of birth. It is right in the world of birth and death that the miraculous truth is revealed. But this is not the laughter of someone who suddenly acquires a great fortune; neither is it the laughter of one who has won a victory. It is, rather, the laughter of one who; after having painfully searched for something for a long time, finds it one morning in the pocket of his coat.

A religious man called a monk and invited him to bless his new home. The monk politely turned down the request saying he’s busy.
“But, what are you doing?” the man insisted.
“Nothing.”
Thinking that the monk was perhaps not in a mood to visit that day, he let it be and phoned again the next day. “Can you come today to bless my home?”
“Sorry,” said the monk, “I’m busy.”
“Doing what?”
“I’m doing nothing,” replied the monk.
“But that was what you were doing yesterday!” said the man.
“Right,” the monk replied. “I’m not finished yet!”

Enlightenment too is an ongoing affair. No doubt, there can be a transformational moment that changes something in you forever. Living that change, however, is a matter of mindfulness and more. True enlightenment, that.

This is it. This life. It’s beautiful. Live it. Love it. For yourself, for others. Laugh it away. That’s all there is to know. Most of the rest, life can do without.

i am a terrorist, tina chopp

farcebook tina chopp seattle vintage

Sunday, 20180128 przxqgl

Farcebook Tina Chopp Seattle Vintage

fnord

¡Truck Fump!

Tuesday, 20170221 przxqgl

¡FRUCK TUMP!

OM, pictures, uncle al

ॐ ༀ ๛

Monday, 20161128 przxqgl

enlightenment, hindu

WTF?

Wednesday, 20161005 przxqgl

some back-story: a sheriff’s department in tenesee was arrogantly posting on farcebook about how they’ve gotten new stickers for their (publically owned) vehicles that say “IN GOD WE TRUST”. i wrote the following response to their boastful bragging.

my comment received several likes, and a number of supportive comments, despite the sheriff’s complaints, but, eventually, he deleted the entire thread, along with several other comments from other people.

i was somewhat taken aback, as it was my understanding that deletion of comments on a page that is intended to represent a governmental entity such as a sheriff was, at the very least, discouraged, and could potentially be taken as a blatant violation of the laws concerning such things.

so, i upped the ante, and left a review on their page:

after i left the review, i was promptly banned from leaving any comments on the henderson county sheriff’s department farcebook page… which means that i am immortalised on their page, and can’t do anything to change the settings, or respond to any comments.

at the same time, i left the review yesterday, and despite everything, i’ve still got four likes, which i consider to be pretty good, considering everything.

however, when people like Nathan N Angela Reeves posts an absolutely ignorant, idiotic comment, i can’t respond to how stupid they are… so i’m posting it here, because WTF?!?!?!? seriously…

We love God here and we also love Trump. Once he is elected, your voice will truly be less effective.

so… you think that, once #drumpf is elected, people like me will just vanish? you think that we’re going to just let drumpf and his ignorant, ass-backwards policies just run roughshod over the country without making any attempts to stop him. you think BLM is annoying now, just you wait… people like me are going to be making your life orders of magnitude more difficult, and that will just be the beginning.

You are a secular

where did you get that idea? certainly not from me, or anything i wrote… i disagree with you 100%, but the idea that my life is not governed by “anything other than what i want to do” is way out of line.

The bible “which you will not believe I’m sure”

what do you want to bet i know more about the bible than you do?

the bible also says “Not everyone who says to Me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ shall enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of My Father in heaven. Many will say to Me in that day, ‘Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in Your name, cast out demons in Your name, and done many wonders in Your name?’ And then I will declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from Me, you who practice lawlessness!’

I hope you’re right about “no God”

again, i wonder where you got the idea that i’m saying there’s no God… if you do your research, you’ll discover that i say BOTH that there is no God, and that God exists, at the same time, without contradiction, but i certainly never said that there is no God in any place where you have looked… did you actually read my comments, or did you just knee-jerk respond without even looking up?

I’m a preacher

i’ll just bet you are… i am too, and i guarantee you, i can preach circles around you, buddy… 😉

I’ve been called to the bed of 5-6 dying Atheist

oh, so now you know everything there is to know about every single atheist on the planet… do you realise how mind-bogglingly STUPID that sounds?

obviously, you don’t. 😕

and, once again, i never said anything about being an atheist. in fact, i said, very clearly, at the beginning of my post, that i am a hindu, which leads me to suspect that you don’t know the difference between hindus and atheists. i’m not sure how you got the impression that i am an atheist, but you’re entirely, 100% wrong.

You to sir, will call on the Name of Jesus as you slip into eternity.

fat chance. 😛

the actual review can be seen here.

hindu

श्रीभगवानुवाच

Thursday, 20160728 przxqgl 1 Comment

स्रेयान्स्वधर्मो विगुण: परधर्मात्स्वनुष्ठितात । स्वधर्मे निधनं स्रेय: परधर्मो भयावह: ।।

This is better, that one do his own task as he may, even though he fail, than to take tasks not his own, though they seem good. To die performing duty is no ill, but who seeks other roads shall wander still.

— Bhagavad Gita, 3.35

dualism, enlightenment, spiritual

spiritual rant

Sunday, 20160424 przxqgl

good or evil, black or white, up or down, in or out… it’s all dualism.

and dualism is fine for everyday living. some might say that dualism is essential for everyday living. but i’ve been discovering more and more, recently, that the dual state is not the way to advance much beyond the everyday world.

and why would anyone want to advance beyond the everyday world? in my case, i want to advance beyond the everyday because the everyday world is BORING when it is not, actively, out to make my life difficult.

and, ultimately, dualism isn’t real anyway. everybody from zarathustra to jesus to yoda says, essentially, that dualism is the second stage, and there is one above that transcends dualism. the problem is that there is so much about religion that is adversarial, to the non-believer, to different sects of believers, and to different religions. in that regard, religion is also dualistic in nature. the problem is that, when one accepts one religion and rejects all others, basically, one is saying that they are not quite as atheist as the people who are wholely atheist, and when one is entirely atheist in their thinking, there are a lot of “mysterious” things that happen, more-or-less regularly, which they are totally incapable of explaining. both leave me wanting something more.

what it comes down to is that these “pairs of opposites” (to use the hindu term) are both exactly the same thing. good isn’t the opposite of evil, good IS evil. black is not the opposite of white, black IS white. there are always two sides to every coin, but it is the same coin… you can’t separate heads from tails.

this extends to people, as well. there are not 7 billion people on this planet, there is 1 person with 7 billion different manifestations. that is why people like jesus said “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.” (Matt. 25.40)

we aren’t all different people, we are all the same person. it doesn’t matter that you perceive a difference, when you slight someone, you’re doing it to yourself… which, i suppose, is one of the reasons why it is customary to be polite to people, regardless of which people-group you’re talking about, rather than running rough-shod over anyone who happens to get in your way. it is also one of the reasons why we feel sad or angry when something bad happens to us: that part of me which is also a part of you, is grieving that we would choose to do that to ourselves.

it’s the definition of the word namasté that puts it all together for me: namasté — there is a part of me, and there is a part of you, where, when you are there, in you, and i am there, in me, we are one being with no differentiation. i salute that place.

ASIDE this would make a GREAT magic trick: you show the audience a big coin (a silver dollar, or something similar), show them that it has both a “heads” and a “tails”. you invite a volunteer to put their initials on the “heads” side of the coin. then you procede to “do your magic” and separate heads from tails. you show the audience the coin, with the volunteer’s initials on BOTH SIDES. you then show the audience an entirely different coin, which has two “tails” sides, and no initials. then, with a little more “magic” you put the heads and tails back together, and show the audience one coin, with the volunteer’s initials on one side and “tails” on the other. talk to joe about making this happen.

art projects, pictures, swastikas

then there’s this…

Saturday, 20160319 przxqgl

i think i may have found a way to market these online so that people will be able to get what they want without having it be a random selection chosen by me. it’s difficult, because no two buttons are exactly the same, but i discovered, quite by accident, that there are five different general categories that they fall into. i suppose, if i wanted to get really technical, i could separate them even further into a predominant colour, but i think that may be a bit more complex, because then it would be possible, theoretically, for someone to come up with a colour and category that doesn’t exist, and that would be embarrassing.

they are all swastikas: category 1 buttons have more of an abstract swastika, because you can’t actually see it, but if you can look beyond the borders of the button, you might be able to imagine where it would be. category 2 buttons are a little less abstract, but it’s still not a visible swastika, although it might be easier for some people to figure out where it is. category 3 buttons have at least one definite swastika. category 4 buttons have at least three definite swastikas, and category 5 buttons have EITHER no less than 6 swastikas, OR at least one swastika, and a significant area where there are no swastikas.

they’re all $1.00 or more a piece… i say “or more” because if people want to pay more for them, i won’t complain. 😉

islam, summer solstice

WTF?!!?

Sunday, 20150621 przxqgl

so, i’m at the fremont solstice festival, and i’m wandering around, and i wander past this security-guard/bouncer-type person who compliments me on my “shrine hat”. i say it’s called a “fez”, and that, technically, i would not be allowed to wear a “shrine hat”, because i am not a shriner, but i can wear a fez that doesn’t have the shrine regalia, and this particular fez has an image of Ganesha, the hindu God of Removing Obstacles. the guy said that he’s wearing a “muslim” fez in the image, so i took off the fez to see what he was talking about… the fez that ganesha is wearing in the image has an aumkara (the sanskrit letter “AUM”: ॐ) on it, which i told him. his response: yeah. muslim…

um… okay…

so i said, no, it’s hindu. it’s the sanskrit letter AUM. he says, no, it’s muslim. i disagree, and he says, have you done the research? i say yeah, and he says “well i’m muslim” to which i respond “and i’m hindu.”…

do american muslims really know that little about islam? if so, it makes me understand a little better why there are so many american “christians” who are worried about sharia law… 😕

and, as i was typing this into my phone this afternoon, i was standing next to the fremont studios, and there was a group of people standing about 10 feet away from me, and the guy that i could hear clearly was talking about a video with paul simon and chevy chase in it, and one of the other people said “who is paul simon?”…

WTF??? i can’t be that old… 😕

spiritual

“god”…

Friday, 20150320 przxqgl

i was listening to “pastor” david mitchell on the radio this evening, and what he had to say really angered me for a number of reasons.

he’s a predestinarian, and he believes that “god” made two different kinds of people: sheep and goats. sheep need a shepherd, and will go to heaven, but goats don’t, and won’t. goats are, basically, canon fodder. find a job that is too disgusting, degrading, dehumanising, or what-have-you for a sheep to do, and there’s a goat that is perfect for the job.

or, at least, that’s what “pastor” david mitchell would have you believe.

problem is, for “pastor” david mitchell, that the same “god” that created sheep also created goats, and, while sheep get to go to heaven, there are a lot more goats that end up going to hell… which isn’t very “fair” for a “god” that’s supposedly a loving being who would not that any should perish, but that all should come to everlasting life.

what it comes down to is that i’m a goat: regardless of how much “christians” like “pastor” david mitchell would try to convince me, i’m not interested in worshipping a “god” who made me a defective being whose fate is sealed from the beginning to suffer eternal torment. if i’m a goat, then it won’t do me any more damage to blaspheme the “holy spirit” or to say that Tina Chopp is God, because i’m going to hell, regardless…

on the other hand, if i were a sheep, i could blaspheme up one side and down the other, and then accept jeezis as my “saviour” and everything would be all right again.

which, i suppose, is why “pastor” david mitchell assumes that people don’t know whether they are sheep or goats, because even the goatiest goat could change their mind, some day, accept jeezis, and get a free pass to glory…

and how, according to “pastor” david mitchell, is one to determine whether one is a sheep or a goat? if you are “concerned” about your “salvation” then you are a sheep. if not, you are a goat. simple as that.

problem is, for “pastor” david mitchell again, people like me, who are concerned with what he calls “salvation”, but are not inclined to worship a “god” who can’t — or won’t — create all people to be “saved”… are not inclined to worship a “god” who creates sheep and goats, and says that the sheep are “saved” but the goats are “damned”…

if someone can come up with a “god” that doesn’t discriminate between his creations, who says that EVERYONE is welcome, leaving none out — including gays, athiests, hindus, muslims, tri-sexuals and hippopotami — because they don’t “believe” the right way… then i’ll take notice.

until then… watch out, because when i start talking about God, everybody’s going to run away, screaming and covering their ears. 👿

enlightenment, pictures, spiritual

200-year-old Mongolian mummy may still be alive

Monday, 20150202 przxqgl

200-year-old Dashi-Dorzho Itigilov This extraordinary picture shows the mummifed male body which is believed to be several centuries old. It was found at 6.30 pm 27 January 2015 in Songinokhairkhan province, reported Mongolia’s ‘Morning Newspaper’.

‘The mummified body sits in a lotus position, as if still meditating.

‘Experts that only had time to carry basic visual test say they believe the body can be about 200 years old’.

The report added: ‘So far there is no information as to where the body was found. The only details we learned was that it was covered with a cattle skin’.

It was not clear if it was the skin of a cow, horse, or camel, said the report. The mummy was delivered to Ulaanbataar National Centre of Forensic Expertise’.

Initial speculation is that the mummy could be a teacher of famous Lama Dashi-Dorzho Itigilov.

Dashi-Dorzho Itigilov, born in 1852, was a Buryat Buddhist Lama of the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, best known for the lifelike state of his body.

His remains were reported not to be subject to macroscopic decay.

— source

——

As police say lama found in lotus positon was destined for sale on black market, there are claims it was one step away from becoming a Buddha.

A mummified monk found in the lotus position in Mongolia is ‘not dead’ and is instead one stage away from becoming a real-life Buddha, it has been claimed.

Forensic examinations are under way on the amazing remains, which are believed to be around 200 years old, having been preserved in animal skin. But one expert has insisted the human relic is actually in ‘very deep meditation’ and in a rare and very special spiritual state known as ‘tukdam’.

Over the last 50 years there are said to have been 40 such cases in India involving meditating Tibetan monks.

Dr Barry Kerzin, a famous Buddhist monk and a physician to the Dalai Lama, said: ‘I had the privilege to take care of some meditators who were in a tukdam state.

‘If the person is able to remain in this state for more than three weeks – which rarely happens – his body gradually shrinks, and in the end all that remains from the person is his hair, nails, and clothes. Usually in this case, people who live next to the monk see a rainbow that glows in the sky for several days. This means that he has found a ‘rainbow body’. This is the highest state close to the state of Buddha’.

He added: ‘If the meditator can continue to stay in this meditative state, he can become a Buddha. Reaching such a high spiritual level the meditator will also help others, and all the people around will feel a deep sense of joy’.

Initial speculation is that the mummy could be a teacher of Lama Dashi-Dorzho Itigilov.

Born in 1852, Dashi-Dorzho Itigilov was a Buryat Buddhist Lama of the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, best known for the lifelike state of his body.

Ganhugiyn Purevbata, who is the founder and professor of the Mongolian Institute of Buddhist Art at Ulaanbaatar Buddhist University, said: ‘Lama is sitting in the lotus position vajra, the left hand is opened, and the right hand symbolizes of the preaching Sutra.

‘This is a sign that the Lama is not dead, but is in a very deep meditation according to the ancient tradition of Buddhist lamas’.

The mummified remains, which were covered in cattle skin, were found on January 27 in the Songinokhairkhan province of Mongolia.

However, there is more to the story and now police have revealed that the monk had been stolen from another part of the country and was about to be sold off.

An unnamed official said that it was taken from a cave in the Kobdsk region by a man who then hid it in his own home in Ulaanbaatar.

He had then been planning to sell it on the black market at a ‘very high price’, with local media claiming he wanted to take it over the Mongolian border. Police uncovered the plot and quickly arrested a 45-year-old, named only as Enhtor.

According to Article 18 of the Criminal Code of Mongolia smuggling items of cultural heritage are punishable with either a fine of up to 3 million roubles ($43,000) or between five and 12 years in prison. The monk is now being guarded at the National Centre of Forensic Expertise at Ulaanbaatar.

— source

aparajita, hybrid elephant, OM

elephant

Wednesday, 20141105 przxqgl

i got my annual enormous shipment of incense today, and turned around and got half of the shipment i received, ready to ship out again… it came from maspeth, new york, and is being shipped to minneapolis, minnesota, by way of seattle…

weird, but whatever works…

also, i got the latest Operation Mindfuck element today, which is a sticker that says “WARNING! This object does NOT exist!“. 👿 now i just have to figure out what to put it on… or, more acurately, what NOT to put it on… 👿

i shipped out a devotional statue to basel, switzerland, after going back and forth with the guy in email since saturday. first he didn’t read the we DO ship internationally, BUT…” page and then he took his time when it actually came to making the extra payment, but it all worked itself out in the end, and his statue shipped out today.

OM, pictures

✨✩ༀ✩✨ response!

Monday, 20141013 przxqgl

And More, bellingham, forward into the past, kenyth freeman, OM, pictures

nooze

Sunday, 20141012 przxqgl

i went to bellingham saturday, and came back today. there are a number of interesting developments that came about as a result:

apparently there is a “bullet shuttle” that runs from downtown bellingham to downtown seattle and back, that only costs $11… which means that there’s a good chance that i will be taking it to bellingham, and/or whitley will be taking it to seattle more regularly, for the purposes of, basically, getting And More back together. along the same lines, whitley and kamalla have offered to house my keyboards in their house, which means that when i go to bellingham, my keyboards will be set up and ready to go, and when i’m not there, other people will be playing them. the piano (which is missing three tines) has been packed up in a box and sitting behind the couch for about 7 years, and before that it was in a box in the hallway… i haven’t actually had it set up since we moved in to this house… so putting it to good use again is most desirable, and this seems like a prime opportunity.

while i was on my way to bellingham, yesterday, i took sort of a detour through mount vernon, so that i could go by the places i used to live. while i was in mount vernon, it started to rain, and then, quite suddenly, it started to rain so hard that, after slowing down, and slowing down, and turning my windshield wipers to their highest settings, i still could not see, and was forced to take refuge in a parking lot for about half an hour, until the rain let up. as i was pulling out of the parking lot, i saw a building across the street that was, literally, pouring water, tens of gallons a minute, from all of the downspouts… and the streets were flooded in several places, to the point where, when i had to drive through a flooded part, i was concerned because it was over the floorboards of my car… i haven’t seen it rain that much in that short a period of time more than once or twice before in my entire life.

kenyth, 17 August, 1973, age 39 the main reason i went to bellingham in the first place was that kenyth’s 80th birthday was last week, and i went to deliver a birthday present (Operation Mindfuck) on monday. while i was there, i heard that there was going to be a music jam (which is what they’re calling the stairway jam these days), and it was suggested that i come up for it, so i did. another thing that we discussed while i was there was the fact (in my opinion) that kenyth really needs a wikipedia page… a fact that is complicated by the fact that kenyth has kept absolutely ZERO archives of the work that he has done, class notes from classes he has taught, personal correspondence, and that sort of thing, and further complicated by the fact that, to be a wikipedia page that isn’t deleted immediately, a lot of the information posted has to be backed up by stuff that is publically available from internet, which, in this case, would be practically impossible in anything like a realistic way. the upshot is that i am going to help the community of people who want to see this happen, by registering a domain (how about http://KenythFreeman.dance/ or http://JosephPFaddlefum.name/ or something like that? 😉 ) and pointing that domain name towards a blog that i can set up, and then give to the people who actually know what content there is, and can organise it the way it’s supposed to be.

on my way back, today, i mostly took surface streets, and only hit the freeway once or twice. i was north of burlington on what i think was Highway 99, and i found the new location of “The Music Shoppe”, which was a place i worked a couple of times a VERY long time ago: the first time was right after i graduated from the tech school, and ended when i got fired for telling sam, the owner, that the “chemical tank” that he bought, ostensibly to “dip musical instruments”, was full of the chromic acid that he bought and then discovered he couldn’t use because it’s carcinogenic (and, generally, only used as a “bright dip” for brass instruments before they are buffed and refinished), and it was beginning to leak, because it wasn’t really a “chemical tank” but, rather, a stainless steel dairy tank with a bright brass stopper… and the chromic acid was dissolving the bright brass stopper, because, well… chromic acid dissolves brass… 😐

anyway, the second time, he actually subcontracted my musical instrument repair business to repair musical instruments for “The Music Shoppe”, and that ended when he refused to pay me for an instrument that i had fixed, that his customer had refused to pay for. basically i said that, until i got paid i wasn’t going to fix any more instruments for him. he said that he hadn’t paid me because his customer hadn’t paid him, and i pointed out that his customer was HIS customer, and that MY customer was him, but that didn’t seem to make any difference. they apparently moved from their shop in the fountain district in north bellingham, some time in the past, and they are, as of 1st november, moving in to burlington. i left Operation Mindfuck in the front door for them to find when they open up tomorrow. 👿

OM, pictures

(no nose or ears)

Image Friday, 20141003 przxqgl

OM, pictures

OM ✨✩ ༀ ✩✨ MOO

Image Thursday, 20141002 przxqgl

OM v.2.4

enlightenment, geek stuff

Master Foo and the Script Kiddie

Thursday, 20140925 przxqgl 1 Comment

Master Foo and the Script Kiddie

A stranger from the land of Woot came to Master Foo as he was eating the morning meal with his students.

“I hear y00 are very l33t,” he said. “Pl33z teach m3 all y00 know.”

Master Foo’s students looked at each other, confused by the stranger’s barbarous language. Master Foo just smiled and replied: “You wish to learn the Way of Unix?”

“I want to b3 a wizard hax0r,” the stranger replied, “and 0wn ever3one’s b0xen.”

“I do not teach that Way,” replied Master Foo.

The stranger grew agitated. “D00d, y00 r nothing but a p0ser,” he said. “If y00 n00 anything, y00 wud t33ch m3.”

“There is a path,” said Master Foo, “that might bring you to wisdom.” The master scribbled an IP address on a piece of paper. “Cracking this box should pose you little difficulty, as its guardians are incompetent. Return and tell me what you find.”

The stranger bowed and left. Master Foo finished his meal.

Days passed, then months. The stranger was forgotten.

Years later, the stranger from the land of Woot returned.

“Damn you!” he said, “I cracked that box, and it was easy like you said. But I got busted by the FBI and thrown in jail.”

“Good,” said Master Foo. “You are ready for the next lesson.” He scribbled an IP address on another piece of paper and handed it to the stranger.

“Are you crazy?” the stranger yelled. “After what I’ve been through, I’m never going to break into a computer again!”

Master Foo smiled. “Here,” he said, “is the beginning of wisdom.”

On hearing this, the stranger was enlightened.

OM, pictures

ॐੴૐ൴

Wednesday, 20140924 przxqgl

Antique Word Processor

house stuff, milestones, OM, pictures

ॐ ༀ ૐ ੴ

Wednesday, 20140910 przxqgl

the typewriter has been left in the capable hands of the guy who is either going to fix it and give it back to me, or take it and sell me another one at a discount… and, honestly, i hope he wants to take it and sell me another one at a discount, because he’s got an underwood manual typewriter that doesn’t require electricity, and that’s what i really want… if there’s no electricity, an electric typewriter is an expensive door stop, but a manual typewriter works anyway… 👿

almost finished, and it glows in the daylight as well…

666666 outside of bellevue, appropriately enough…

enlightenment, OM

ॐ AUM ༀ OM

Monday, 20140908 przxqgl

i manifested a typewriter that is mostly functional, but it doesn’t like to print on the envelopes, because of the ribbon, so i’m taking it to a guy, tomorrow, who thinks he may be able to get a fabric ribbon which will print on envelopes…

i’m surprised at how many people i have been meeting who seem to understand and/or relate with what i am doing, who have entirely mundane occupations… like the typewriter repair guy, or the artist who rendered my pixel graphic as vectors… i wouldn’t expect then to be anywhere close to understanding, and they not only understand, but are able to make suggestions as to how i can do things in a way that i hadn’t thought of immediately…

and the typewriter i manifested makes me chortle with evil glee… it’s a IBM correcting selectric II, the kind on which i learned to type, and i even have a “ball” for it, that is prestige pica 72… 👿

frank, i am a terrorist, important things to remember, OM, pictures

peek tures

Image Sunday, 20140831 przxqgl

this is the latest incarnation of Operation Mindfuck:

imagine you’re walking down the street in downtown seattle, pushing a baby carriage and probably thinking about going shopping at the pike place market. as you are crossing the street you encounter a strange guy going the other direction, who hands you this tiny envelope and then walks off…

THIS is Operation Mindfuck… 👿

within the next week or so, i AM going to manifest a typewriter, which i intend to use to write cryptic messages on the outside of the envelopes.

okay, this is probably supposed to say “crip”, but it’s my impression that it says “chirp”… woo… i’m really afraid of the illiterate gang-member-wannabe who imitates birds that lives in this remote “suburban” neighbourhood… woo… 😐

this is a picture of a sign. the sign is a picture of the front half of a car towing away the back half of the car, right?

thought so…

Ebeneezer Q. Squeezer The Second — The Apprentice Holy Snake

Frank Zappa enjoys a puddle of sunlight

operation mindfuck

Sunday, 20140817 przxqgl 1 Comment

140817 OM business card announcing Operation Mindfuck. in the grand old tradition of very weird and/or subversive lives of such luminaries as kerry thornley and greg hill, and with inspiration from people such as robert anton wilson, buckminster fuller and aleister crowley, i have undertaken to join the fray and started my very own attempt to jolt people out of their everyday existence in a way that — just maybe — might bring about some shred of enlightenment into their dull, padded minds.

for a while now, i have had this directory entitled “do this”, which contains ideas for future art projects. i combined an idea that i thought was particularly inspiring with an idea that had been sitting in my “do this” directory for a while and had some business cards made… and they have already been supremely effective!

yesterday, when i was taking my morning constitutional, i encountered a bevy of jehovah’s witnesses out canvassing the neighbourhood. there were at least two cars full of them, and they were hitting up the neighbours without remorse. as i was walking by, one of them came out from a neighbour’s front door (no doubt, after having been told in no uncertain terms to get off the person’s property), and handed me a pamphlet and asked if i had seen this. i took his pamphlet, and asked him if he was so insecure in his own belief that the only way he could feel justified in believing it is by convincing others to believe the way he does. he responded by pulling out his well-worn bible and saying “here’s why we do what we do…” to which i responded, pointing at the verse he was about to read, “it doesn’t matter”…

whereupon, i pulled out my cards that say “THERE IS NO ENEMY ANYWHERE” and handed one to him. he said no, and pulled away, but i put the card on the dashboard of his car, and it slid off, so he bent down to pick it up, and then i handed a card to an older guy who had come up, and was on the passenger side of the car, and then another card to a teenager — who was wearing a too-large suit and looked very uncomfortable — and then i walked away.

i got about half-a-block away, and looked back… and they weren’t there. both of the cars had packed up and split in the time that it took me to walk half a block…

and that was just from the “THERE IS NO ENEMY ANYWHERE” side… i hate to think what happened to their insulated, beige world when they turned the cards over and discovered that the bearer of this card is a genuine, authorised OHO… i imagine the teenager probably wouldn’t know who baphomet is, but there’s a good chance that the two older guys who got the cards will know…

tee hee hee… 👿

then, later on, i went to a snake suspenderz gig in georgetown, for a birthday party for a bunch of aging hipster/steampunk-wannabes, and passed out a few cards to them, as well. the birthday party people had a much more positive reaction to them.

pe(s)ts, tina chopp

w00t!!

Wednesday, 20140813 przxqgl

i am now the owner of a rosy boa constrictor named Ebeneezer Squeezer II… Praise The Holy Snake! 🙂

vedanta society

vedanta

Sunday, 20140608 przxqgl

i went to the vedanta society this morning, for the first time in a very long time indeed. swamiji’s talk was on the utility of being a fool, which is a talk that i am sure i have heard before, but it was probably before my injury, because i don’t remember exactly when. it is full of relevant quotes from everyone from socrates, who, after his wife poured a bucket of water on him during an argument, said “it is very common that after a blustering wind, you get rain” to swamiji, himself, who said “politicians are like toilets in your home: it’s impossible to get on without them, but they are difficult to keep clean and require frequent flushing”.

what i took away from it is that it is far easier, and far more fun to say that you know nothing than it is to claim to know it all, even if you do know it all… which nobody does, because knowledge is infinite.

ramakrishna said “i am the worst of the fools (nirakshara = unlettered), but i know akshara (the infinite)”.

the chapel is exactly as i remember it from years ago, down to the pattern in the brocade cover on the lectern… i suspect that even the fake flowers in the sconces on the walls are the same as they were 40 years ago. the guy who was greeting people at the front door chuckled and said that he hadn’t seen me in a while…

my recollection is that the last time i went to the vedanta society was shortly after my injury, when we were still living in renton… and before that was probably while we were living on beacon hill.

but as familiar as it was, and as nice as it was to be there, i wasn’t overwhelmed with a desire to be a part of that community, as i was 40 years ago. it was really good to hear swamiji speak — he hasn’t changed a bit, which is somewhat surprising considering how long it has been — but, after the talk he said “haven’t i seen you before?”… yeah, you’ve seen me before: i was a student of yours for 15 years, i asked you to officiate my wedding, and i’ve been coming here since the mid-’70s… i was just thinking about it this morning: i have been coming to the vedanta society since shortly after someone planted a bomb near the front door and tried to burn the place down. i started coming while they were still in the process of rebuilding. i’m not particularly surprised that he didn’t remember me, though, because he sees thousands of people in a month, and he interacts with them far more than he has with me for the past 20 years or so… and it is a 45 minute drive to get there now…

the way i feel now is that if i’m going to drive 45 minutes to go somewhere, i’m going to choose places that challenge me to learn new things, and, to be honest, i’ve heard all of swamiji’s talks several times over. it is nothing against swamiji, or the vedanta society, but if i’m gonna drive 45 minutes, that early in the morning, i would get a lot more out of it if i were going busking. 😎

enlightenment, links, the very big stupid

internal dissent

Saturday, 20131130 przxqgl

let me preface this by saying that I KNOW this kind of dissent is prevalent in every other religion on the planet, and that’s not stopping people from believing it (whatever “it” is) anyway, but it’s things like this that make me suspicious of ALL religions, and this one in particular.

and that’s also not to avoid the subject of “the really big” dissent, which is the difference between catholicism and protestantism, which far outweighs any other, relatively minor dissent that comes after it, but that also does nothing to negate the fact that these are two protestants who disagree with one another… one to the point of hanging up on an interviewer who has taken “the other side” of the argument, despite the fact that he really should be answering some of the questions the interviewer is asking.

if you haven’t figured it out by now, i’m talking about the feud that is brewing between hometown right-wing nut-job mark driscoll, and equally right-wing nut job, national “christian” broadcaster janet mefferd. i think it’s really instructive to see these two right-wing nut-jobs battle it out, to the point of one of them hanging up on the other one. quite apart from the fact that great peace have they which love thy law: and nothing shall offend them (psalm 119.165, hat tip to bruce gerencser for the reference) and mark driscoll definitely seems offended by janet mefferd’s line of inquiry, it’s not an athiest pointing out the fallacies of a “christian’s” argument, it’s two “christians” battling it out over who has the “right-er”, wrong position… 😐

as much as i hate to say it, i agree with janet mefferd this time. mark driscoll has some extreme soul searching to do, as well as quite a bit of going back over old publications to find the plagiarisms and footnoting them correctly… if nothing else.

and it makes me seriously wonder how anyone can take him seriously after this… i mean, my philosophy makes people think i’m out of my mind, and that’s okay with me. but mark driscoll preaching against plagiarism, while, at the same time, plagiarising, himself, follows what i believe in a technical sense, however, there are limits to how meaningless it can be, before it actually becomes meaningless… and it is my impression that mark driscoll crossed that line a while ago. any credibility that mark driscoll may have had disappeared a long, long time ago, and judging by how he responded to janet mefferd’s line of questioning, it’s not going to reappear again any time in the forseeable future.

enlightenment, rants

backwards masking

Tuesday, 20131105 przxqgl 1 Comment

i’ve been interested in the phenomenon of backwards masking ever since i first became aware of it, which was probably shortly after it was first reported in the late ’70s. it was incredible to me that people could be saying one thing, forwards, and, completely unconsciously, be saying a completely different thing, backwards. so, naturally, when i went to college and had access to a “professional” recording studio, with the ability to record things and play them backwards, i investigated this phenomena quite extensively. and, naturally, what i discovered is that 99% of the people who talk about “backwards masking” are completely full of shit and don’t know the first thing about the subjects in which they claim to be experts… or, for that matter, any other subject.

at this point, i would be thinking “big surprise”, but, at the time, i was still an impressionable 20-something, and was under the impression that these people “didn’t know” something on purpose, as though they were lying to the rest of us, or talking from ignorance. since then i have become aware that these people are just plain stupid, and no amount of “compassionate” education will sway them from their improbable course.

i started my “education” on the topic of backwards masking with a record (remember them?) called “Flee Pasts Ape Elf” by Orchid Spangiafora, in the late ’70s. at this point, i knew what i had heard on the news-media of the time, i.e. newspapers, radio and television, but when i was confronted with this album, it gave me a whole new perspective on what they were really talking about, and i started experimenting with my own sounds. one of my first finished examples was This Should Be A Love Song in 1979, which, among other thing, demonstrated that all speech didn’t have “ulterior motives” when played backwards. i then went into a period of examining language and developing an “alphabet” of symbols that i could use to transcribe what i heard backwards into a phonetic schema that i could then, recite forwards, record, and reverse, to make intelligible speech when played backwards, despite the fact that, when i was reciting it forwards, there was no hope of understanding what i was saying. i remember working the phrase “ritsbal yeh nawkus!” into a presentation that i was giving to my cross-cultural perspectives class, knowing full well that nobody in the class knew that i was really telling everyone to “suck on a lobster”.

i have, since, become aware of people like david oates of Reverse Speech and other people, like him, who claim that people unconsciously say things in reverse that they might never say, or even imagine, if they were saying them normally. it is my impression, having studied this phenomeonon since the mid-1970s, that people are far too stupid, forwards, to expect that, even subconsciously, they would be planning their speech to reveal the innermost secrets of their lives, in reverse, at the same time. a good example of that is the famous speech given by gary greenwald, in which he claims that Aleister Crowley was one of the most feared satanists of the 16th century. quite apart from everything else, aleister crowley would have been the first person to tell you that he was NOT a satanist, and he most definitely did NOT live in the 16th century — greenwald was only 400 years off, but who’s counting? with that level of obvious scholarship, why on earth would anyone believe that anything else he has to say is anywhere close to accurate?!? and yet, approximately 51% of americans currently believe the drivel he was spouting 25 years ago.

it is this sort of thing that convinces me that i am not human: i had to have been born somewhere else, and was kidnapped and adopted by my human parents and raised as human, because this sort of deliberate ignorance on the part of the majority of people, makes absolutely no sense to me at all.

dualism, enlightenment

TRIODE

Sunday, 20130818 przxqgl

TRIODE.TXT
————————————————————————-
a story of people[0xCF36] as told by shaman.Accumulator.Overflows(true)

In the beginning, there were too many numbers, and nobody could tell exactly what they were. Everybody was confused about what was big and what was small, because everything was kind of big, but also kind of small. Nobody knew anything for sure.

Someone wanted to know how much energy the people had, but no one could agree. One person said they had about 36.63 trillion joules, and another said maybe 36.64 trillion joules. Someone else wanted to know if this was a lot, but the people couldn’t agree about that either. Some said it must be a lot because it was more than 1 joule. Other people said it couldn’t be much because it was less than 100 vigintillion joules. They argued about it until Slide Rule Demon came and laughed at them. He owned all the land, because the people were clumsy and slow.

In these days, Sun had all the binary. He was in the sky during the day, and gone at night. Sun was either there or not there, and he was the only thing that could do this. Capacitor wondered about Sun, and asked the old vacuum tube, Grandmother Triode. She told him about 0 and 1, and how only Sun had these, so only he could be absolute.

Capacitor thought to himself, “If I had 0 and 1, I could be absolute too.” He sneaked up to Sun’s house, and swallowed a big handful of 0. He started to feel sick, so he ran back to the earth as fast as he could. When Grandmother Triode saw what he had done, she scolded him. “Oh, Capacitor, that was very foolish. The 0 you have swallowed has fallen down inside you, and now your heart is gone.” Ever since that day, Capacitor has been unable to conduct electric current, because he is empty inside.

Insulator also tried to steal from Sun. He climbed up into the sky, and grabbed as much 1 as he could carry, but by the time he got back home, the 1 had gotten all over him and soaked into his body. “Oh, Insulator,” cried Grandmother Triode, “that was very foolish. The 1 has filled you up completely, and now you can’t carry anything.” That is why, even today, Insulator cannot transmit data. He is all solid, and nothing can get through.

Finally, Grandmother Triode decided to get 0 and 1 herself. She drank from the people’s energy until her cathode became very hot and started to glow. She climbed up to the house of Sun, and swallowed a big pile of 0. The 0 tried to empty her out, like it had done to Capacitor, but Grandmother Triode was filled with vacuum, so there was nothing to take away. Next she filled a big bag with 1 and placed it on her positive plate. Quickly she charged up her control grid as high as she could. The 1 could not make her solid, like it had done to Insulator because it was trapped on the plate by her strong electric field. “Ha,” laughed Grandmother Triode, “I have captured you both, and now you are mine.”

Sun had lost so much 0 and 1 that he no longer had enough to last all day. He had to start being partway there and partway not there. When he did this, the people called it “dusk” and “dawn”, and we have had them ever since.

Grandmother Triode shared her 0 and 1 with all the people, and because she was very wise, she declared that 1 should mean “all true” and 0 should mean “all false”. “Now,” she said, “we can be sure of things, and never be confused”. She also taught the people how to make any number they needed from just 0 and 1. The people looked at their energy again, and found that they had exactly 36,637,215,626,189 joules. Slide Rule Demon became angry, because he could not make numbers like this, but the people had become fast and strong. They chased him away, and Slide Rule Demon never came back.

Grandmother Triode had a daughter called Transistor Woman, and she taught the people logic, arithmetic, and everything else they needed to know. Soon the people owned all the land and were very happy.

————————————————————————-
END OF FILE

articles, enlightenment, links

The Egg

Monday, 20130729 przxqgl

The Egg
By Andy Weir

You were on your way home when you died.

It was a car accident. Nothing particularly remarkable, but fatal nonetheless. You left behind a wife and two children. It was a painless death. The EMTs tried their best to save you, but to no avail. Your body was so utterly shattered you were better off, trust me.

And that’s when you met me.

“What… what happened?” You asked. “Where am I?”

“You died,” I said, matter-of-factly. No point in mincing words.

“There was a… a truck and it was skidding…”

“Yup,” I said.

“I… I died?”

“Yup. But don’t feel bad about it. Everyone dies,” I said.

You looked around. There was nothingness. Just you and me. “What is this place?” You asked. “Is this the afterlife?”

“More or less,” I said.

“Are you god?” You asked.

“Yup,” I replied. “I’m God.”

“My kids… my wife,” you said.

“What about them?”

“Will they be all right?”

“That’s what I like to see,” I said. “You just died and your main concern is for your family. That’s good stuff right there.”

You looked at me with fascination. To you, I didn’t look like God. I just looked like some man. Or possibly a woman. Some vague authority figure, maybe. More of a grammar school teacher than the almighty.

“Don’t worry,” I said. “They’ll be fine. Your kids will remember you as perfect in every way. They didn’t have time to grow contempt for you. Your wife will cry on the outside, but will be secretly relieved. To be fair, your marriage was falling apart. If it’s any consolation, she’ll feel very guilty for feeling relieved.”

“Oh,” you said. “So what happens now? Do I go to heaven or hell or something?”

“Neither,” I said. “You’ll be reincarnated.”

“Ah,” you said. “So the Hindus were right,”

“All religions are right in their own way,” I said. “Walk with me.”

You followed along as we strode through the void. “Where are we going?”

“Nowhere in particular,” I said. “It’s just nice to walk while we talk.”

“So what’s the point, then?” You asked. “When I get reborn, I’ll just be a blank slate, right? A baby. So all my experiences and everything I did in this life won’t matter.”

“Not so!” I said. “You have within you all the knowledge and experiences of all your past lives. You just don’t remember them right now.”

I stopped walking and took you by the shoulders. “Your soul is more magnificent, beautiful, and gigantic than you can possibly imagine. A human mind can only contain a tiny fraction of what you are. It’s like sticking your finger in a glass of water to see if it’s hot or cold. You put a tiny part of yourself into the vessel, and when you bring it back out, you’ve gained all the experiences it had.

“You’ve been in a human for the last 48 years, so you haven’t stretched out yet and felt the rest of your immense consciousness. If we hung out here for long enough, you’d start remembering everything. But there’s no point to doing that between each life.”

“How many times have I been reincarnated, then?”

“Oh lots. Lots and lots. An in to lots of different lives.” I said. “This time around, you’ll be a Chinese peasant girl in 540 AD.”

“Wait, what?” You stammered. “You’re sending me back in time?”

“Well, I guess technically. Time, as you know it, only exists in your universe. Things are different where I come from.”

“Where you come from?” You said.

“Oh sure,” I explained “I come from somewhere. Somewhere else. And there are others like me. I know you’ll want to know what it’s like there, but honestly you wouldn’t understand.”

“Oh,” you said, a little let down. “But wait. If I get reincarnated to other places in time, I could have interacted with myself at some point.”

“Sure. Happens all the time. And with both lives only aware of their own lifespan you don’t even know it’s happening.”

“So what’s the point of it all?”

“Seriously?” I asked. “Seriously? You’re asking me for the meaning of life? Isn’t that a little stereotypical?”

“Well it’s a reasonable question,” you persisted.

I looked you in the eye. “The meaning of life, the reason I made this whole universe, is for you to mature.”

“You mean mankind? You want us to mature?”

“No, just you. I made this whole universe for you. With each new life you grow and mature and become a larger and greater intellect.”

“Just me? What about everyone else?”

“There is no one else,” I said. “In this universe, there’s just you and me.”

You stared blankly at me. “But all the people on earth…”

“All you. Different incarnations of you.”

“Wait. I’m everyone!?”

“Now you’re getting it,” I said, with a congratulatory slap on the back.

“I’m every human being who ever lived?”

“Or who will ever live, yes.”

“I’m Abraham Lincoln?”

“And you’re John Wilkes Booth, too,” I added.

“I’m Hitler?” You said, appalled.

“And you’re the millions he killed.”

“I’m Jesus?”

“And you’re everyone who followed him.”

You fell silent.

“Every time you victimized someone,” I said, “you were victimizing yourself. Every act of kindness you’ve done, you’ve done to yourself. Every happy and sad moment ever experienced by any human was, or will be, experienced by you.”

You thought for a long time.

“Why?” You asked me. “Why do all this?”

“Because someday, you will become like me. Because that’s what you are. You’re one of my kind. You’re my child.”

“Whoa,” you said, incredulous. “You mean I’m a god?”

“No. Not yet. You’re a fetus. You’re still growing. Once you’ve lived every human life throughout all time, you will have grown enough to be born.”

“So the whole universe,” you said, “it’s just…”

“An egg.” I answered. “Now it’s time for you to move on to your next life.”

And I sent you on your way.

enlightenment

okay, here’s the thing…

Tuesday, 20130702 przxqgl

i used to post a lot of political news and some commentary… i was obsessed with the news, and gulped it down in great quantities.

and what i discovered is that it stressed me out. things are going to be shitty all over regardless of whether i know about it or not, and the less i know about stuff, the less i care when shitty things happen…

and they WILL happen. whatever i do to stop them won’t make a damn bit of difference, because that’s just the world we live in. some days you get the bear, and some days the bear gets you.

so when i have the choice between reading about how the egyptian army is getting set to overthrow the egyptian president and watching a video of somebody using extremely detailed, plastic, miniature utensils and food to cook and assemble a complete bento box and more, i’m sorry to say that, these days, i’m a lot more inclined to watch the teensy plastic chef than i am to worry about what’s happening in egypt.

it may not be particularly socially conscious, but it’s what i have discovered does the best for my state of mind.

enlightenment, pictures

in the middle of now here

Saturday, 20130316 przxqgl

i went out for a walk today. it was the middle of now here. to give you an idea of how far out in the middle of now here we are, i submit this photo, without further comment:

it was during this walk that i learned what it is to hear the voice of God as the wind blowing through the grass.

many, many years ago, before my son was born, i discovered The Tree Of Being, a tree whose existence justifies the exitsence of everything else on the planet. at this point, i don’t remember exactly where it is, but it is on the west side of sehome hill, and i’d know it if i saw it. this was a very similar experience. as i sat, meditating, in the middle of now here, i heard the voice of God as the wind blew through the grass. all around me was the voice of God. i didn’t have to try to perceive it, because i was in the middle of it, and it was all around me. i would have had to try not to perceive it, and if i had, i would have failed, because it was the voice of God.

and it said, “I am Tina Chopp!” 😉

ETA: some of what i say is a lie. like aleister crowley, i have realised that if i don’t say that some of what i say is a lie, some day people may read what i have written and assume that it is all true. this is a warning to those people. don’t take some of what i say seriously, because it is a knowing falsehood.

enlightenment

i just noticed this…

Monday, 20121203 przxqgl

has anybody else noticed the similarity between WND and WMD? 😮

prvs

trolloween afterglow

Thursday, 20121101 przxqgl

that was, probably, one of the best trolloween celebrations i have ever attended… and i think it was primarily because of the fact that i wasn’t trying to do two things at once (i.e. playing in the band and being in charge of a vegetable sacrifice). not only that, but when i pulled up, yesterday — after having delivered our non-functional TV to the place where Bowling For Computers was taking place — the first person i ran into was a guy named michael, who was my assistant for the vegetable sacrifice! 😎

I HAVE NEVER BEEN IMPORTANT ENOUGH TO BE GIVEN AN ASSISTANT!!

121031 pumpkin by john cornicello
photo by john cornicello

of course, michael was multi-tasking (much like i would have been under circumstances like have existed in the past), and had a prominent rôle as one of the “clowns doing The Hustle“, later on in the performance, but his presence and help was much appreciated.

the vegetable sacrifice went off more-or-less as planned. it was a fair amount more chaotic than it has been in the past, despite the fact that macque didn’t have to coordinate the band into the mix. i was the 3rd performance in the show: the 1st performance went off without a hitch, and the 2nd performance, while a bit long and significantly confusing (at least from my point of view), went off without significant (i.e. “noticable from the audience”) glitches. between the performances, there was, apparently “somebody” (remedios rapoport? i know she was there…) singing the introductions in a pseudo-“Wagnerian-Opera” style, who, also, took a bit longer with the introduction than i would have liked.

and i forgot to mention that, under normal circumstances, the public would have been encouraged to join in the sacrifice with their own vegetables, but, so be it…

i read the last quarter of TBOT 11.1.1.1, ending with the phrase “and death to jocks”, whereupon i passed the paper that i was reading from to michael, and drew my sword.

in spite of all of the practice that i put in, when it came down to actually hacking into the pumpkin, the sword broke (the pommel broke off of the tang, just below the hilt) and i had to shove the pumpkin off of the stage to reveal the halloween candy, which, much as i suspected, was immediately pounced upon by a hoard of costumed, ravening pre-doodlehums. 😎

also, for the first time (i believe, ever) i managed to persuade hobbit to attend, and he ended up with the safety vest and radio that wouldn’t have shown if i wore them (because my cape would have covered them), and we all went to the red door for beer afterward.

i woke up this morning, extra early (7:30), and took moe’s car to les schwab, where they said they were going to fix the brakes, but when i got there, they told me that they can’t scan the ABS system unless the ABS warning light is on — despite the fact that, when they were talking with moe on the phone yesterday, they said that it wouldn’t be a problem, even if the ABS light wasn’t on — so they said they couldn’t fix anything and that i should take it to the dealer. 😐 so, while i was taking it to the dealer, i stopped to get coffee and discovered that my wallet was not in my vest, where it normally is, which, very quickly, put a damper on pretty much anything else i was planning on doing away from home today…

but despite all of the furor this morning, the afterglow from a successful vegetable sacrifice meant that the customer service people at les schwab didn’t have to deal with my rage over the fact that they said “there is nothing wrong with the car” when i know that there is…

i’ll catch up with them later. 👿

pictures, prvs, tina chopp

Public Ritual Vegetable Sacrifice for Trolloween!

Tuesday, 20121030 przxqgl

this is the first Public Ritual Vegetable Sacrifice i’ve held for a while, and because of the fact that it’s going to be part of the Trolloween celebration (the Fremont Troll was unveiled on halloween in 1990), it will be an abbreviated form of the ritual, in which the public will not be given the opportunity to sacrifice their own vegetables… until later…

i’m going to have to make sure to remember to mention that when i am doing the public reading, before the actual sacrifice… that’s a really good point…

this year i’m making a slight change in the sacrificial victim, as well. because of the fact that i am going to be sacrificing it with a sword, instead of the more regular gravity and ground, and because of the fact that i will be surrounded by people, i have actually filled the pumpkin with halloween candy, rather like a piñata, which i intend to spread as far as it will go. beforehand, i’m going to read a passage from The Book of Randy, which is Book 11 of the Books of Tina Chopp, in honour of Rev. Osiris Ranebo, although i doubt too many other people will recognise that fact.

they’re really desperate for people to help with crowd control – last year the parade included 150 to 200 members of the public, and the parade crosses two major thoroughfares, and according to the most recent email that was sent out, they’re still short 6 people. i tried to get ian interested, but he’s doing something else that involves a family that is staying at his house while they try to get into emergency housing.

THE PUBLIC IS ENCOURAGED TO ATTEND!

ETA: i just found a sermon that i delivered at a vegetable sacrifice in 2001 which i totally don’t remember giving at all… it’s too bad, too, because i would really like to remember having that dream… 😐

dead people, pictures, swastikas

not quite dead yet, but…

Thursday, 20121025 przxqgl

ManWoman by Mark Berry
photo by Mark Berry

Last news about Manwoman

Sorry to say that my dad, ManWoman, is not faring well. He has a kind of cancer that causes his bone marrow to cease making blood. The technical name is Refractory Anemia with Excess Blasts. In short, without new blood, it is impossible to breath, fight infections, or clot and stop bleeding.

He had been receiving transfusions of blood and platelets, but there is no cure for this kind of cancer. Not chemo therapy. Not bone marrow transplant, because he is old and weak. In any case, ManWoman does not wish to endure weeks of traumatic medical treatment, when the potential time gained is so very small.

ManWoman has made the decision to pass peacefully — and with Dignity — in the comfort of his own home, surrounded by family and friends. No further transfusions or treatments will be made — except medication for the rather intense pain. When the blood cells from his last transfusion are gone, well… The clock is ticking. There is no exact prediction how much time is left. One day or a few days — probably. A week or two — maybe. Months — not very likely.

I wish there was better news, but there isn’t. It will be a sad day when he passes, but he has left the world an enormous and inspired body of work. He will not be forgotten by those who love him. We will always carry a piece of him in our hearts.

~ Ivan Cat

articles, dualism, i am a terrorist, links

Peace Be Upon You

Friday, 20120914 przxqgl

Peace Be Upon You
Internet videos will insult your religion. Ignore them.

By William Saletan, Sept. 14, 2012

Dear Muslims, Christians, Hindus, and Jews,

You’re living in the age of the Internet. Your religion will be mocked, and the mockery will find its way to you. Get over it.

If you don’t, what’s happening this week will happen again and again. A couple of idiots with a video camera and an Internet connection will trigger riots across the globe. They’ll bait you into killing one another.

Stop it. Stop following their script.

Today, fury, violence, and bloodshed are consuming the Muslim world. Why? Because a bank fraud artist in California offered people $75 a day to come to his house and act out scenes that ostensibly had nothing to do with Islam. Then he replaced the audio, putting words in the actors’ mouths, and stitched together the scenes to make an absurdly bad movie ridiculing the Prophet Mohammed. He put out flyers to promote the movie. Nobody — literally nobody — came to watch it.

He posted a 14-minute video excerpt of the movie on YouTube, but hardly anyone noticed. Then, a week ago, an anti-Muslim activist in Virginia reposted the video with an Arabic translation and sent the link to activists and journalists in Egypt. An Egyptian TV show aired part of the video. An Egyptian politician denounced it. Clerics sounded the alarm. Through Facebook and Twitter, protesters were mobilized to descend on the U.S. embassy in Cairo. The uprising spread. The U.S. ambassador to Libya has been killed, and violence has engulfed other countries.

When the protests broke out, the guy who made the movie claimed to be an Israeli Jew funded by other Jews. That turned out be a lie. Now he says he’s a Coptic Christian, even though Coptic Christian leaders in Egypt and the United States despise the movie and want nothing to do with him. Another guy who helped make the movie claims to be a Buddhist. The movie was made in the United States, yet Sudanese mobs have attacked British and German embassies. Some Egyptians targeted the Dutch embassy, mistakenly thinking the Netherlands was behind the movie. Everyone’s looking for a group to blame and attack.

The men behind the movie said it would expose Islam as a violent religion. Now they’re pointing to the riots as proof. Muslims are "pre-programmed" to rage and kill, says the movie’s promoter. "Islam is a cancer," says the director. According to the distributor, "The violence that it caused in Egypt is further evidence of how violent the religion and people are and it is evidence that everything in the film is factual."

Congratulations, rioters. You followed the script perfectly. You did the propagandists’ work for them.

And the provocations won’t end here. Laws and censors won’t protect you from them. Liberal democracies allow freedom of expression. Our leaders and people condemn garbage like this video, but we don’t censor it. Even if we did, the diffusion of media technology makes suppression impossible. The director of this movie was forbidden, under his bank-fraud probation rules, from using computers or the Internet without approval. That didn’t stop him. Nor did it stop the Arabic-language distributor from reposting the video and disseminating it abroad.

Online propaganda is speech. But it’s also part of the global rise of lethal empowerment. It’s easier than ever to kill people. In Muslim countries, mass murderers favor bombs. In the United States, they prefer guns. In Japan, they’ve tried sarin nerve gas. The Oklahoma City bomber used fertilizer. The Sept. 11 hijackers used box cutters and passenger planes. Then came the letters filled with anthrax.

Derision is that much harder to control. The spread of digital technology and Internet bandwidth makes it possible to reach every corner of the globe almost instantly with homemade video defaming any faith tradition. It can become an incendiary weapon. But it has a weakness: It depends on you. You’re the detonator. If you don’t cooperate, the bomb doesn’t explode.

This isn’t just a Muslim problem, though that’s been the pattern lately. On YouTube, you can find videos insulting every religion on the planet: Jews, Christians, Hindus, Catholics, Mormons, Buddhists, and more. Some clips are ironic. Others are simply disgusting. Many were posted to bait one group into fighting another. The baiters are indiscriminate. The promoter of the Mohammed movie founded a group that also protests at Mormon temples.

The hatred and bloodshed will go on until you stop taking the bait. Mockery of your prophet on a computer with an Internet address somewhere in the world can no longer be your master. Nor can the puppet clerics who tell you to respond with violence. Lay down your stones and your anger. Go home and pray. God is too great to be troubled by the insults of fools. Follow Him.

articles, enlightenment, i am a terrorist, links

interesting…

Tuesday, 20120904 przxqgl 2 Comments

10 Signs That You’re Fully Awake – this is an article that is intended to be read from a political point of view, but, with very little change, it can also be read from a spiritual point of view and have exactly the same meaning… while i doubt that the people who wrote it were considering a spiritual point of view when they were writing it, it is rather unusual that it can be read that way and have it mean exactly the same thing.

so, “what kind of world do you want to live in?”

Continue reading interesting… →

articles, dualism, i am a terrorist, links

The wrong side absolutely must not win on November 6

Wednesday, 20120822 przxqgl

The wrong side absolutely must not win
By: A. Barton Hinkle
August 19, 2012

The past several weeks have made one thing crystal-clear: Our country faces unmitigated disaster if the Other Side wins.

No reasonably intelligent person can deny this. All you have to do is look at the way the Other Side has been running its campaign. Instead of focusing on the big issues that are important to the American People, it has fired a relentlessly negative barrage of distortions, misrepresentations and flat-out lies.

Just look at the Other Side’s latest commercial, which take a perfectly reasonable statement by the candidate for My Side completely out of context to make it seem as if he is saying something nefarious. This just shows you how desperate the Other Side is and how willing it is to mislead the American People.

The Other Side also has been hammering away at My Side to release certain documents that have nothing to do with anything, and making all sorts of outrageous accusations about what might be in them. Meanwhile, the Other Side has stonewalled perfectly reasonable requests to release its own documents that would expose some very embarrassing details if anybody ever found out what was in them. This just shows you what a bunch of hypocrites they are.

Naturally, the media won’t report any of this. Major newspapers and cable networks jump all over anything they think will make My Side Look bad. Yet they completely ignore critically important and incredibly relevant information that would be devastating to The Other Side if it could ever be verified.

I will admit the candidates for My Side do make occasional blunders. These usually happen at the end of exhausting 19-hour days and are perfectly understandable. Our leaders are only human, after all. Nevertheless, the Other Side inevitably makes a big fat deal out of these trivial gaffes, while completely ignoring its own candidates’ incredibly thoughtless and stupid remarks — remarks that reveal the Other Side’s true nature, which is genuinely frightening.

My Side has produced a visionary program that will get the economy moving, put the American People back to work, strengthen national security, return fiscal integrity to Washington, and restore our standing in the international community. What does the Other Side have to offer? Nothing but the same old disproven, discredited policies that got us into our current mess in the first place.

Don’t take my word for it, though. I recently read about an analysis by an independent, nonpartisan organization that supports My Side. It proves beyond the shadow of a doubt that everything I have been saying about the Other Side was true all along. Of course, the Other Side refuses to acknowledge any of this. It is too busy cranking out so-called studies by so-called experts who are actually nothing but partisan hacks. This just shows you that the Other Side lives in its own little echo chamber and refuses to listen to anyone who has not already drunk its Kool-Aid.

Let’s face it: The Other Side is held hostage by a radical, failed ideology. I have been doing some research on the Internet, and I have learned this ideology was developed by a very obscure but nonetheless profoundly influential writer with a strange-sounding name who enjoyed brief celebrity several decades ago. If you look carefully, you can trace nearly all the Other Side’s policies for the past half-century back to the writings of this one person.

To be sure, the Other Side also has been influenced by its powerful supporters. These include a reclusive billionaire who has funded a number of organizations far outside the political mainstream; several politicians who have said outrageous things over the years; and an alarmingly large number of completely clueless ordinary Americans who are being used as tools and don’t even know it.

These people are really pathetic, too. The other day I saw a YouTube video in which My Side sent an investigator and a cameraman to a rally being held by the Other Side, where the investigator proceeded to ask some real zingers. It was hilarious! First off, the people at the rally wore T-shirts with all kinds of lame messages that they actually thought were really clever. Plus, many of the people who were interviewed were overweight, sweaty, flushed and generally not very attractive. But what was really funny was how stupid they were. There is no way anyone could watch that video and not come away convinced the people on My Side are smarter, and that My Side is therefore right about everything.

Besides, it’s clear that the people on the Other Side are driven by mindless anger — unlike My Side, which is filled with passionate idealism and righteous indignation. That indignation, I hasten to add, is entirely justified. I have read several articles in publications that support My Side that expose what a truly dangerous group the Other Side is, and how thoroughly committed it is to imposing its radical, failed agenda on the rest of us.

That is why I believe 2012 is, without a doubt, the defining election of our lifetime. The difference between My Side and the Other Side could not be greater. That is why it absolutely must win on November 6.

bizarre, fun with the post office, tina chopp

uh oh…

Tuesday, 20120814 przxqgl

And More – Do We Give A Shit? – listen to this music while reading this post. 8)

so i went to check The Church of Tina Chopp‘s mailbox today, and i got this, extremely curious letter, which is very difficult to read:

L.J.M. Steijn
Juliana van StolBergstraat 30
2805 CN Gouda
The Netherlands

CHURCH OF TINA CHOPP
P.O. Box 1864
Milton
WA 98354
USA

Gouda, 2 Augustus 2012

Dear Sir/Madam,

At 19 Januar 2010 I have wrote you a letter
And i have seen on Internet, the site: PRZXqGl.HYBRiDElEPHANT.
COM, my letter was on it.
I don’t have never give permission to insert it on Internet.
I also won’t it to see my letter on Internet.

Because I am a Christian and I don’t stay any longer after the pur-
port of this letter, and I reject it.
Sexuality is a holy thing, and is only permit between married couples.

Therefore, I will ask you; please remove my letter from Internet,
and destroy my letter they I have send YOU, at 19 Januar 2010,

Thank you very much in advance.
Sincerely,

Leo Steijn

😮

ordinarily, i would remove the letter and say no more about it, but this guy is, either, really crazy, or has just converted to “christianity” and doesn’t want is “sin” to be known. if he is really crazy, then i don’t have a problem with posting his insanity online, especially since it was addressed to me, and regardless of whether or not he gives permission for it to be posted on internet, i have no problem with it. if he just converted to “christianity” and is trying to cover up his previous indiscretions, then i feel i have an obligation to post it, just to show the “christians” that they are just as “sinful” as everyone else, regardless of how “holy” they may now feel…

and either way, i think it’s really amusing that he would randomly send me snailmail almost three years ago, and just be taking offense at what i did with it now, almost three years later. it reminds me very much of Morena Cobbs‘ lame attempt to get her name removed from internet…

not to mention the fact that, apparently, leo steijn also sent mail to The Church of Moo (apparently the voice behind the usenet newsgroup alt.cows.moo.moo.moo), AND The Church of Virus. apparently, at one point, leo steijn was in search of bizarre churches, but now he has apparently decided that “christianity” is the only one, and all of those other “bizarre” churches have to be condemned… sorry, it doesn’t work that way… 😐

enlightenment

dualism

Friday, 20120629 przxqgl

the fundamental basic for most people is dualism: the concept of light/dark, up/down, good/bad, male/female, and so forth. it is what is visible, obvious, and logical to even the most uneducated person.

but dualism can only get you so far. if you realise that God exists beyond the distinctions of dualism, it becomes a lot easier to understand why miracles, or disasters happen: because, to God, it doesn’t matter whether what Xe is giving us is good or bad, to God, it’s all experience.

i’ve seen a couple of news articles within the past couple of days that really exemplify the way people are stuck on duality recently: news articles in which the “answer to all their problems” involved people seeing beyond duality, which, of course, nobody realised. i thought about bookmarking them a couple of days ago, in preparation for writing this post, but i didn’t, and now they’re lost. so it goes.

it just makes me think of how much i am like the guy in When The Waters Changed, except that, at least so far, i am not interested in drinking any of the new water. i’m perfectly satisfied with people thinking i am a madman, because i know The Truth.

swastikas

‘World Swastika Rehabilitation Day’ is June 23

Saturday, 20120623 przxqgl

swastika shatkona

Swastika Day

Raelians have invited Buddhists, Hindus and the numerous spiritual groups who use the swastika as their spiritual symbol to stand up and show their support for the third annual Swastika Rehabilitation Day, to be held June 23 in cities around the world.

The swastika has been a symbol of peace and good luck in many Eastern religions and can be found on religious monuments and scriptures on every continent. It is also part of the spiritual symbol of the Raelian Movement.

Rael, the Movement’s spiritual leader, has explained the recurrent presence of the swastika as the symbol of the advanced scientists who created all forms of life on Earth and guided humanity with the teachings of peace and love that are at the origin of all religions.

“The swastika is one of the best traces left by those who created us, and the attempt to bury it as a symbol of violence and hatred only gives credit to the horrible Nazi ideology,” said Thomas Kaenzig, coordinator of World Swastika Rehabilitation Day. “Demystifying the original meaning of this beautiful symbol is the only solution,” he explained. “We can’t accept the fact that the swastika is still being hijacked, just as Christians wouldn’t accept that the Christian cross was used to represent the ideology of the Ku Klux Klan. Images of swastikas within synagogues and various other ancient sites in Israel have also helped people of Jewish origin to recognize the importance of this rehabilitation day.”

Kaenzig said it’s time to educate the public and rehabilitate what Raelians consider to be the most important symbol for humanity. He added that this year’s world demonstration will include flying large swastika banners in the skies of several U.S. cities and presenting street swastika animations in Karlsruhe, Germany, and in Tel Aviv, Israel.

diwali swastika flower rangoli

enlightenment, uncle al

Thursday, 20120322 przxqgl

i’ve been puzzling myself with this for some time now, and i thought i would put what i’ve figured out so far into actual words that i can see and attempt to appreciate…

i’ve wondered for some time about my tendency to be a believing athiest. in other words, i don’t believe God exists, but i believe God exists, if you know what i mean. i believe that God exists, and God talks to me constantly, prodding me to investigate further, or guiding me away from things that might distract. and i believe that the very same God who talks to me, talks to everyone else, as well, whether they know it or not… but at the same time, because of the fact that i can’t prove, and, honestly, have no interest in proving that God exists, i have to say, and i can, honestly, say that God doesn’t exist.

it’s interesting, because by saying that God both does, and doesn’t exist, at the same time, would frequently get people committed to the loony bin… but my impression is that to say God exists without also saying that God doesn’t exist exhibits an incomplete understanding of God which is typical of “christians” and other nefarious doodlehums who want to control other people for profit, and other entertainment. a good example of that is glen, who refuses to talk to me – with the exception of ordering new business cards every few months – because i continually responded to his jeezis arguments with counter-arguments that didn’t make any sense from his point of view.

it all goes back to that chapter of Liber CCC – The Book of Lies called The Looby, which says:

Only loobies find excellence in these words.

It is thinkable that A is not-A; to reverse this is but to revert to the normal.

Yet by forcing the brain to accept propositions of which one set is absurdity, the other truism, a new function of brain is established.

Vague and mysterious and all indefinite are the contents of this new consciousness; yet they are somehow vital. By use they become luminous.

Unreason becomes Experience.

This lifts the leaden-footed Soul to the Experience of THAT of which Reason is the blasphemy.

But without that Experience these words are the Lies of a Looby.

Yet a Looby to thee, and a Booby to me, a Balassius Ruby to GOD, may be!

it has taken me years to understand what uncle al was talking about, and more years to actually realise, in my own body, the experience he is referring to when he talks about “a new function of brain”… but he is right that THAT, after all, is what one experiences when one undertakes “to accept propositions of which one set is absurdity, the other truism”, which is EXACTLY what i am doing when i say that i believe that God both exists, and does not exist, at the same time… WITHOUT CONTRADICTION.

as rational and realistic as i have come to be over the years, i can still say, with pride, that i am a crazy mystic that belongs in a loony bin, because that’s exactly what i am.

bizarre, enlightenment, forward into the past

here’s a bizarre tale…

Monday, 20120227 przxqgl 2 Comments

a long time ago, before cell phones, internet tubes, and the evil koch brothers…

during the mid-1980s, i had been living in a rooming house on capitol hill, whose landlord was a young guy whose father actually owned the house, and he was “gaining job experience” by being the live-in landlord. i really didn’t know him that well, but he was very lax in keeping up the house: he did nothing about the windows which were leaking water when it rained, he did nothing to fix the central heating of the house, which meant that the upper floors (including where i lived) had no heat at all, he wasn’t too concerned about the fact that i regularly bought my own food, but had nowhere separate to store it, and if i left it in the “common areas” it would get eaten by the other housemates (including himself), even if it was clearly marked… when he refused to address any of these issues, i went to the city housing authority, who informed me that he didn’t have a permit to have a rooming house, and it was in a residential area that didn’t allow rooming houses, so the housing authority came in and shut the guy down, which meant that i had to find another place to live, fast.

i looked at an apartment on ~~terry~~ belmont and east union (terry and east union was where i lived in the mid-1990s), where it appeared that they were in the process of completely remodeling the place. as it turned out, the apartment had been inhabited by an old lady, and her cats, who had lived there for 50 years… but nobody knew she had cats, until she was out shopping one day, and had a heart attack (or something like that) and was taken to the hospital, where she died. she apparently didn’t have any relatives, and she had paid her rent in advance, so nobody bothered to access her apartment until several months (like “more than six”) later, at which point they discovered what used to be the cats, which had clawed open the refrigerator and eaten the food that they could before dying of starvation… which resulted in a BIG mess, which they were in the process of cleaning up when i came around to look at the place.

at that point, i really didn’t care who used to live in the apartment, or their cats. i was just interested in getting out of the rooming house before something (or someone) blew up, so i said that i was moving in whether they were done cleaning up or not. it turned out that they did a pretty good job of cleaning up everything except the refrigerator. while it was “clean”, it had a smell like rotten death, and the only thing i could find that would successfully mask the smell was pine-sol, which, of course, made everything that i kept in my refrigerator taste of pine-sol… believe me, it was WAY better than tasting of rotten death.

anyway, about a week or so after i moved in, i had this really weird dream, where this little old lady was ranting and fussing about because there was some unknown person in her apartment, and she couldn’t find any of her cats. i had the same dream for a couple of weeks, with minor variations in the plot and the cast, until i consciously realised that this was the old lady who used to live in my apartment… at which point, the next time i had the dream, i told the old lady that i was the person in her apartment, and she could hang around as long as she left me alone. after that, i started noticing that somebody was calling my name from the kitchen when i was in the living room… or someone was opening latched cupboards or slamming the bathroom door, when i was in the kitchen… friends of mine commented on these bizarre phenomena on a regular basis. even when whe wasn’t making her presence physically known, i could tell she was around, because everything would smell of pine-sol, instead of incense or cannabis…

at some point, i found a piece of cardboard with the words “ADOPT A GHOST” on it – i think it was on a pizza box, but i can’t be sure – which i still have.

eventually, after about 2 years, i moved out, and back to bellingham… and the ghost came with me. she would call my name from the kitchen of the new house i lived in, and open the closed cabinets, but it seemed like she was fading away. probably a year later, i didn’t notice these things happening any longer. my guess is that she moved on.

at this point in my life, i would say that, quite apart from my being enlightened, my belief system falls somewhere between athiest and esoteric shivaite (with hints of buddhism, judaism, and unorthodox christianity thrown in for good measure), and i’m not sure i would believe a story like that if it hadn’t happened to me… for that matter, i’m not sure i would believe a story like that in spite of the fact that it happened to me… i guess i may just be waiting for someone to tell me that i’m crazy, so that i can tell them “i know, i know…” 😐

hindu

it’s not an option…

Wednesday, 20120208 przxqgl

सर्वे भवन्तु सुखिनः सर्वे सन्तु निरामयाः ।
सर्वे भद्राणि पश्यन्तु मा कश्चिद्दुःखभाग्भवेत् ॥

sarve bhavantu sukhinaH, sarve santu nirAmayAH |
sarve bhadrANi pashyantu, mA kashchid_duHkha-bhAg-bhavet ||

All are ordered to be happy, be healthy, see good;
may no one have a share in sorrow.

aparajita, art projects, pictures, swastikas

what have i been doing the past few weeks?

Tuesday, 20120103 przxqgl 2 Comments

120103 hobo nickel after the panto ended for 2011 (it starts again on saturday, and runs for two weeks. get yer tickets now ’cause they’re selling out fast!) i got started making some hobo nickels. they’re not classic hobo nickels, of course, but they’re in a similar vein… and, hey… they’re only a nickel… and, as long as you don’t try to use the result as “currency”, they’re perfectly legal. 8) i broke most of my jewelers’ saw blades on the first couple of them, getting the technique right and re-adjusting my fingers. i went out to tacoma screw, to get more jewelers’ saw blades, and they didn’t know what i was talking about. i went to rockler, and they had them, but i’m not sure they’re the right ones, because they say they’re only for wood… and they’re 28 teeth per inch, and i’m pretty sure that the ones i need are more like 35 to 50 teeth per inch… i’m pretty sure that if i made the trip to hardwick’s, in seattle, that i’d be able to walk in and say i needed extra-fine jewelers’ saw-blades and they’d point me towards a bin of ’em… i went in there one time, and i said i was looking for a vice, and the guy asked me if i had considered smoking… 😉 i made nickels like this A LOT, between 1986 (when i got out of the tech school, and realised that i could make them) until 1994, when i started having to limit my workshop space because of where i was living. they just kind of faded into past memory, and were only re-realised a few weeks ago.

i put in the order for another 20 dozen aparajita on the 15th. i still haven’t heard anything, but they are making the incense to order (SQUEEEEE!!!) so i’m not being as paranoid about it… i’m still being paranoid (after all, it’s sort of a natural state of existence for me), just not as much. i’m probably going to email again on friday if i still haven’t heard anything by then.

120103 swastika coin i got this good-luck token in the mail the other day. it’s a little bit bigger than a US quarter, or a little smaller than a US half-dollar. i didn’t remember where it came from, at first, and because of the fact that i bid on it at ebay, it didn’t come from anybody i knew, or from an address with which i was familiar, which was pretty exciting, until i remembered where it came from.

after having gone to meet her, i figured out where the lady who knew who i am knows me from: she knows me because i am associated with Howlin’ Hobbit… although she was really disappointed when i didn’t drive up in my elaborately-painted art-car she was just as happy to take a picture of me wearing my hippy-hat

we spent christmas eve driving: we got up around 5:00 or so, and drove to salem, oregon, then we drove north and stopped just south of portland, then we drove into portland and visited a couple of different places before heading back, around 7:30 pm… by the time we got home, i had had about as much driving as i could stand for a while, so i spent most of the rest of xmas at home, being a hermit-crab. we took our annual trip to double-bluff off-leash dog-park on new-years’ day, and got there just as a polar-bear swim was getting over, which was kind of odd, because normally we are the only ones there on new years, and this year there were huge crowds of people, and music blaring… and an ambulance…

art projects, i am a terrorist, pictures, swastikas

swastika t-shirt

Wednesday, 20111207 przxqgl

i’m causing trouble again…

people generally (in this area, at least) don’t seem to mind me wearing or displaying swastikas as long as they’re not obviously “hakenkreuz” related (i.e. they’re “different” colours than were used by the not-zees), but my new shirt will challenge those preconceived notions about colour somehow being related to meaning…

maybe i ought to make some flash cards that say things like BLUE and YELLOW
to illustrate my point even further for those who still don’t get it (and i’m positive that there will be a few of them)…

pictures, tina chopp, trolloween

FINALLY!

Tuesday, 20111101 przxqgl

now i can post a picture of my halloween costume without the possibility of anyone recognising me… trolloween costume (otherwise known as Rev. Guido S. DeLuxe, High Priest of The Church of Tina Chopp) unfortunately, there wasn’t any public ritual vegetable sacrifice, but i’m quite positive that there was private vegetable sacrifice… 😉

enlightenment, hybrid elephant, rants

not so random rant about the shit box

Friday, 20111007 przxqgl

the other day i was “confronted” by a customer (it’s sort of difficult to say that it was a “confrontation” in the normal sense of the word, because the entire interaction took place over email, but bear with me, because it was a confrontation) concerning the fact that, along with the religious items and incense i carry, “there is a product called a ‘shit box‘”. he was concerned that i am causing my customers offense, and he demanded that it be renamed or removed at once. when i told this customer that i didn’t have the power to rename the “shit box” he accused me of “writing an essay” about it, when, actually, i wrote three or four very terse statements. this is the “essay” that he accused me of writing.

thanks for the advice, buddy, but i don’t do business that way, and here’s the reason why.

St. Francis of Assisi said “when the devil says to you again, ‘You are damned,’ you answer him confidently, ‘Open your mouth and I will shit in it!'” and Yunmen Wenyan said, basically, “The Buddha is a dried shit-stick.” if such illuminated personages as St. Francis and Ummon used the word “shit”, then it’s apparently okay for me to use the word. not only that, but jesus said “that which cometh out of the mouth, this defileth a man” and if saying the word “shit” defiled a person, then St. Francis would not have said it.

at the same time, i am quite familiar with people who are pretty well defiled, despite the fact that nothing but bible scripture spews out of their mouths: people like jerry falwell and james dobson and robert schuller and harold camping and creflo dollar and benny hinn and jim bakker and peter popoff and bob larson and…

on the other hand, if it is automatically assumed that anything with the exact combination of letters “S”, “H”, “I”, “T” defiles a person, then, automatically, that makes referring to shittim wood (a common feature of the old testament book of exodus) something that a “christian” would not want to recite, for fear of “the word”…

and that doesn’t even take into account those people for whom english is a foreign language, and to whom the letters “S”, “H”, “I”, “T” are meaningless and something else is used in its place… which includes, by the way, both St. Francis and Ummon…

further, if people are going to be offended by the “shit box” what would they have me call it? Eco-Friendly, Portable Toilet is an accurate description, but it doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue the way “shit box” does, and calling it an “eco-friendly, portable toilet” won’t really help you when you need to go, and you’re in a tent, asking for it in the pitch darkness of the middle of the night…

not only that, but i didn’t actually name it myself, anyway. that honour goes to the people at The Brown Corporation and i wouldn’t presume to rename something simply because a person like one of these tells me to to do so… even if i did have the power to do so…

WHICH I DON’T!!

finally, i am a weird duck. i don’t do things for the same reasons that most other people do them, and that includes being in business. i am in business PRIMARILY to give thanks to Ganesha, and then to provide quality products and servies to my customers… and i do that in spite the fact that i use language differently than most people, and that i am not offended when someone says “shit”. if a person is offended by the fact that i carry the “shit box“, there’s nothing i can do about it, and if they’re so offended that they choose to buy their incense or devotional statues somewhere else, there’s nothing i can do about that, either… and, to be honest, i would rather that they go somewhere else anyway, because their uptight, holier-than-thou attitude is just going to piss me off.

The language and concepts contained herein are guaranteed not to cause eternal torment in the place where the guy with the horns and pointed stick conducts his business.
— Frank Zappa

rants, tina chopp, web design

also…

Wednesday, 20110720 przxqgl

i found out what is wanted with BSSB web site… it turns out that she likes the “fold-up navigation menus” and wants them on the BSSB site… and, when the BSSB site has enough content to permit “fold-up navigation menus”, that’s what she’ll get. of course, i’m in charge of web design… the actual content has to be someone else’s responsibility…

otherwise the site may well end up looking like The Church of Tina Chopp… 8)

enlightenment

Bounded Chaotic Mixing Produces Strange Stability

Friday, 20110610 przxqgl

Bounded Chaotic Mixing Produces Strange Stability

i had the opportunity to wander for several hours down by the puyallup river this afternoon, and i made one of those kind of discoveries that you would expect from time to time, from enlightened people. like most discoveries, it wasn’t really a discovery so much as it was putting familiar things together in a way that makes ultimate sense — and it produced a feeling that i probably should have thought of it a lot earlier than i did, because one of the “familiar things” that was put together was the phrase “Bounded Chaotic Mixing Produces Strange Stability”.

this phrase probably has a very specific meaning to physical scientists, and it is from that, that i have taken the phrase and “expanded” on it. fundamentally, “Bounded Chaotic Mixing Produces Strange Stability” refers to the way atoms combine and interact with one another, in very much the same way as water going over a waterfall: “Bounded Chaotic Mixing” is the water, in a riverbed; it is “bounded” by the riverbed, but the individual water molecules have the freedom to move wherever they want, within those boundaries. when it goes over a waterfall, the “mixing” gets decidedly more “chaotic”. “Strange Stability”, once the water has gone over the waterfall, it is “stable” in that most of it falls more or less in the same place, most of the time, but it is “strange” because, occasionally, some of the water falls in a place that is dramatically different from the majority of the water: you can be standing right next to a waterfall, and not get wet most of the time… but occasionally, and you can’t predict precisely when, you will get wet.

this is a phenomenon that i have known about for most of my life, i learned that the phenomenon could be summarised by the phrase “Bounded Chaotic Mixing Produces Strange Stability” about 20 years ago, and for the past 10 years or so, i have been noticing that “Bounded Chaotic Mixing Produces Strange Stability” can be used to describe a lot of things that happen in life, but while i was watching the river ripple, this afternoon, i realised that “Bounded Chaotic Mixing Produces Strange Stability” is what people are talking about when they talk about “The Meaning Of Life” — “Bounded Chaotic Mixing Produces Strange Stability” is THE reason, whether you’re talking about why your car broke down today, or why you and your next-door neighbour don’t get along, or whether you’re talking about the evolution of human beings from single-celled life.

“Bounded Chaotic Mixing Produces Strange Stability” is, for all intents and purposes, “God”… and this is coming from an enlightened person, so it carries more weight than it would otherwise.

rants, tina chopp, videos

xtranormal

Wednesday, 20110601 przxqgl

if the video doesn’t load

so a while ago i got the idea to make animations that were reciting the books of tina chopp…

i actually went so far as to create the first 6 cantos of the book of children… before xtranormal changed how things are done… i had to buy “xtranormal points” in december, so that i could finish an unfinished animation. but now it turns out that i will make no more animations at xtranormal after i run out of “points”, because they have now made it so that you have to pay to make animations.

previously, they had a few scenarios that were free, and you had to pay to make more elaborate movies – which was just fine with me – but now you have to “pay” what they’re calling “xtranormal points” in order to make any animations. it would be fine if you were able to accumulate these “xtranormal points” in less offensive ways than “convincing your friends to sign up” and that sort of thing, but they’ve actually got a way to “buy xtranormal points” with actual money, and that goes against my grain…

especially when they originally offered the service for free… 😐

not only that, but i guess they assume that people don’t really care what their animated characters look like, because they now have a bunch of “new” characters, like “chuchus” and “luchadors” and “dummies” and “presidents” and “historical figures” and “fútbol” that are very definitely not appropriate vehicles for the dissemination of profound spiritual knowledge… or something like that…

in any event, i will not be using xtranormal in the future, unless they change things again. i’m not ruling anything out, but i don’t want to have to pay for things like this.

i suppose that if i had thought about it a little bit, i could have anticipated this, but it’s still anoying. 😐

swastikas

swastikas where you least expected ’em

Monday, 20110411 przxqgl

enlightenment

Friday, 20110408 przxqgl

Ma-tsu (709-788) was a disciple of Hui-neng, the Sixth Patriarch and author of The Platform Sutra, and was awakened when Hui-neng asked him why he meditated. To become a Buddha, responded Ma-tsu. At this Hui-neng began to polish a brick with a stone, and when asked what he was doing, replied, making a mirror. How can you make a mirror from a brick, asked Ma-tsu. How can meditation make a Buddha, replied Hui-neng. With this, Ma-tsu was enlightened.

spam, tina chopp

um… what the fuck?!?

Monday, 20110214 przxqgl 2 Comments

i came across this link in my alerts this morning… the graphics are hotlinked directly from some other site, all of the other links are “internal” (i.e. they link to other pages at simpleplanrock4eva dot com), it doesn’t make any sense…

my guess is that it’s somehow connected to spam, and probably not in a good way, but… what the fuck?!?

bizarre, brain injury, enlightenment

i’ve got this problem…

Sunday, 20110206 przxqgl

one of the blogs i subscribe to is The News Biscuit, which is sort of like The Onion, only from britain. i’ve even got it classified in my RSS reader as “humour”, so there’s no doubt about the origin of such articles…

the problem is that twice in one week, now, the news biscuit has printed an article that i read all the way through before i realised that it was from the news biscuit. they’re apparently good enough at imitating legitimate news sources that, while i found the subject of both of the articles to be somewhat bizarre, neither of the articles seemed entirely out of the question, especially considering how bizarre society has become over the past 50 years or so.

the first one, on wednesday, was Environmentalists to withdraw protection for ‘Rubbish Animals’, and then there was Ancient lump of coal saved from arson attack to be displayed in museum today.

i think i need to start paying more attention… 🙂

enlightenment, uncle al

also…

Friday, 20110121 przxqgl

i had some maintenance to do on my flickr account, and when i logged out, i was delivered to the front page of Yahoo!

i don’t know for sure that they’re tracking what kind of news stories i read, especially when i’m not logged in, but i think that, when i’m not logged in, they don’t really care – plus i’m paranoid enough that i register every cookie from every web site i visit, and i know for a fact that i don’t have a tracking cookie from yahoo or any of its affiliates…

which makes my experience all the more telling. with all the furor and hoopla that’s going on in the world, the FIRST link that showed up at yahoo was about increased speculation that barack obama dyes his hair… 😐

i guess that’s a drawback of being enlightened: you see where people really need to be taught, and those are the exactly the same times you are effectively prevented from teaching. as uncle al said, it is no good trying to teach people who need to be taught.

rants, tina chopp

the book of children

Friday, 20101231 przxqgl

since geico made their xtranormal commercial, things have changed: apparently the characters and sets that used to be free are no longer free, which includes the character and the set in chapter 6. i don’t know if this is because they have introduced new free characters, or if it is because they changed their business model (which they didn’t tell me about). one way or the other, i had to spend actual money to get this published, and if i’m going to have to spend more money to get future books published, i’m probably not going to do so… fortunately i made hi-res downloads of all the books…

tina chopp

The Book of Children, chapter 5

Friday, 20101119 przxqgl 1 Comment

The Book of Children, chapter 5, cantos 1 and 2

#fezfriday, tina chopp

progress… sort of…

Friday, 20101112 przxqgl

The Book of Children, chapter 4, cantos 1 through 5. this time, if the embed doesn’t work, your only option is xtranormal, because for some reason it has stopped uploading to my youtube channel… 😐

ETA: i’ve wangled around a way to upload the video to youtube, but it’s still giving me weird, intermittent, “unknown error” problems…

also, i almost forgot, today is #fezfriday and i forgot to post my fez picture, so…

tina chopp

The Book of Children, canto 3

Tuesday, 20101109 przxqgl

The Books of Tina Chopp, book 1, canto 3, chapter 1, verses 1 through 6. as before, if the embed doesn’t work, you can also view it at YouTube or XtraNormal.

bizarre, brain injury, cannabis, corruption, drugs, fnord, i am a terrorist, music, spam, technology

another week closer to the eschaton…

Monday, 20101108 przxqgl

i woke up this morning, and checked my email. i had 4,856 new messages, all with the same subject line, which included the word “MLM”… please stop sending me these messages. they’re not accomplishing what you think they are, they’re really annoying, and i’m about to block your country’s IP addresses because of it. there are better ways of doing… whatever it is that you’re expecting to be able to do by sending out 4,856 spam email messages… 😐

A piece of their mind – they share thoughts… in spite of the fact that they have two sets of eyes, one can “read” what the other is seeing, without actually seeing it… The Fascinating Story of the Twins Who Share Brains, Thoughts, and Senses has more, including a video… fascinating!

The Return of the Stoned Ape – smart people do more drugs because of evolution. now it all makes sense… 😀 and, while we’re at it, Smart people SLEEP LATE as well… so there!

and now, to more mundane topics…

Fnord 33 Conspiracy Theories That Turned Out To Be True – fnord fnord fnord fnord fnord fnord fnord fnord fnord fnord fnord fnord fnord fnord fnord fnord fnord fnord fnord fnord fnord fnord fnord fnord fnord fnord fnord fnord. beware, the paranoids are watching you. fnord fnord fnord fnord fnord fnord fnord fnord fnord fnord fnord fnord.

The Information Super-Sewer: Will the Internet be Hijacked by Corporate Interests – funding a civilization through advertising is like trying to get nutrition by connecting a tube from one’s anus to one’s mouth. also Final nail in coffin for Net neutrality? – all 95 house and senate candidates who pledged support for net neutrality lost their races. what does this mean? it means that your unlimited, uncensored, unthrottled and open internet service will be going away as soon as the major corporations that now own internet are going to get to decide how much to charge you for how much access… which means that it won’t be too long before internet will be exactly like television, unless you can afford to make it better.

A Modest Proposal to Republicans: How to Trim the Budget – hint: it’s something that a republican would never think of…

Chomsky: US-led Afghan war, criminal – to date there is no evidence that al-qaeda has carried out the 9/11 attacks, and still we use that as justification to make war on a people who have their own problems.

The Surprising History of Copyright and The Promise of a Post-Copyright World – copyright was never primarily about paying artists for their work, and trying to make it about that now is obfuscating the real reason, which is to make the distributors as much money as possible. copying is not theft, piracy, or anything else illegal, and the sooner we toss the current copyright law fiasco and start over again, the better.

Minnesota Mom Hit With $1.5 Million Fine for Downloading 24 Songs – copying IS NOT theft! (my new mantra).

Bankruptcy of U.S. is ‘Mathematical Certainty,’ Says Former CEO of Nation’s 10th Largest Bank – yep… the end is coming, and it’s not looking like it’s going to be particularly pretty when it gets here.

Voters Approve Sharia Law Ban – meanwhile, fear, insanity and unreasoned reactionism comes to oklahoma, whether they like it or not… oh well, there are always 49 other states… 😐 meanwhile, it appears that Oklahoma Voters May Have Accidentally Voted Against Ten Commandments, Too – that’s what they get for being stupid and making nonsensical laws without thinking them through.

Details on PayPal’s Site Outage – they have been doing okay, despite the bad things that i continue to hear about them, but they apparently went down for anywhere from two to twenty four hours, depending on where you are, and so far they’ve not released any information other than to say “something broke. it’s fixed now, and we’re sorry.”

Google calls bug bounty hunters to YouTube, Blogger – $3,133.70 a bug seems like a lot, and i seriously doubt that their actual testers get paid anything like that. what this is, really, is an attempt by google to have volunteer “testers” hammer on their technology without having to pay them for doing so. then, when a “tester” discovers something, google can claim that they found it, pay the “tester” a minimal, one time fee and never mention the “tester” to anyone ever again… everybody’s happy, at least temporarily, and the big corporation profits at the expense of the american drone, who doesn’t notice because he’s too busy telling all of his friends how 733T he is… you can’t make a living on it, but it’s the american dream come true… 😐

Seagate squirts out rectal cleaning spray – no shit… 🙂

A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words: President Obama Visits Chicago and a Homeless Man Begs Him for Alms – no further comment needed.

Marijuana Legalization: Not If, But When – agreed, it’s just a matter of time, but it’s going to have to be the entire country, or it’s not going to work… and whether or not the entire country legalises it through a revolution or through a civil election still remains to be seen.

New Mother’s (False) Positive Drug Test Leads to Baby’s Removal… Poppy-Seed Bagel the Culprit – the only way to solve problems like this is to legalise all drugs, but if proposition 19 is any indication, even when we’re winning, we’re really losing… and while we’re at it, No reason for pot prohibition – when are we going to get the idea that the war on drugs is a collosal failure? not for the next couple of years, at this rate… 😐

not only that, but A molecular link between the active component of marijuana and Alzheimer’s disease pathology – the active ingredient in cannabis, delta-9-tetrahydracannabinol (THC), competitively inhibits the enzyme acetylcholinesterase (AChE), the key pathological marker of alzheimer’s disease. are we ready to legalise it yet?

Cargo plane bomb plot: passengers to face ‘ludicrous security measures’ – now that we have successfully prevented another terrorist plot from even reaching the country, of course, the logical response is to put more stringent measures in place to insure that innocent citizens are harrassed, poked, prodded, scanned and examined in new and unusual ways, to make sure that the terrorists don’t win again… oh, and by the way, Yemeni mail bombs suspect ‘had identity stolen’ – so we really don’t have any clearer an idea who did it then we did a week ago… swell…

For the First Time, the TSA Meets Resistance – they’re now searching your “crotchal” area, and they really want to get you to use the ~~“Dick-Measuring Device”~~ back-scatter imaging device, so be warned…

Pollution in China – this is why stuff is cheap in america. remember that the next time you buy something.

Obama may let CIA run more ‘hunter-killer’ teams roam abroad – this is premeditated murder and i question what the real intent is…

Why I don’t vote – W? T? F? i can understand a multitude of reasons for not participating in the farce of elections these days, but basing your abstinence in voting on 1 timothy 2.12 is far beyond anything that i could possibly figure out…

McDonald’s furious after San Francisco bans Happy Meals – apparently they didn’t get the memo…

Ram Dass Has a Son! – DNA tests confirm it, and ram dass is okay with it, so it doesn’t look like it’s going to cause a major uproar (like it has with other “spiritual” teachers), but it also is pretty much not what you would expect…

divali, pictures

Subh Deepavali

Thursday, 20101104 przxqgl

asato maa sadgamaya
tamaso maa jyotirgamaya
mṛtyormaa amṛtam gamaya

Lead me from ignorance to enlightenment.
Lead me from darkness to light.
Lead me from death to immortality.
— Bṛhadaranyakaupanishad, 1.3.28

tina chopp

Wednesday, 20101103 przxqgl

as before, if the embed doesn’t work, you can also see it at XtraNormal or YouTube.

this is fun. i’m going to have to re-do the third canto, though. for some reason, it’s still “shooting this video” in spite of the fact that it’s been 12 hours since i sent it to “production”…

tina chopp

tee hee…

Monday, 20101101 przxqgl

if the embed doesn’t work, you can try YouTube or XtraNormal which should work just fine. this was a proof of concept project. because of the fact that it came out so well (i only had to adjust one word, because of “mispronounciation” of the word “LIVE” which can be pronounced either /liv/ or /laiv/ and there’s no way to distinguish between the two), there will doubtless be more like it in the near future. now you are one step closer to having your own Vegetable Sacrifice ceremonies of your own, without any knowledge of The Books of Tina Chopp! 🙂

oh, yeah… the URI for the correct book is http://www.ebeneezer.net/doctrine/tbot/1/1.html… somehow the one on XtraNormal got duplicated, and i don’t want to go back and fix it.

enlightenment, important things to remember, shameless self promotion, spiritual

aha! … ‽ … !!

Monday, 20100913 przxqgl 2 Comments

the unauthorised “authorisation dialogue” dialogue went away. i didn’t change anything locally (i did use NoScript to automatically block flash, but that was after i noticed that it was gone), or on the blog, which means that somebody must have noticed that something was wrong at the twitter end of things.

i’m not exactly sure how to approach this subject, but since i already have the reputation of being a little weird, i’ll start with an explanation of where i’m coming from:

POINT 1) for some time now, i’ve been under the distinct impression that my view of “reality” differs pretty significantly from just about everyone else’s view of reality. the most recent example of that is this public display, sponsored by a musem in california, which contained a tapestry house from a hindu family, that contained a swastika. the museum got complaints from the general public, so they posted a sign that basically said “this is an ancient hindu symbol, not the relatively recent nazi symbol that everyone seems to think it is, and we’re not going to remove it, thank you”, and even went so far as to get the local rabbi to say that he didn’t object to it, because it was a hindu symbol, and not a nazi symbol, but the museum continued to get complaints from people who were probably not even born when the swastika was actually used as a nazi symbol, and the museum finally caved in and removed the tapestry. when i pointed this out to a friend, he said “people are dumb”, but i think it’s more than that. philip k. dick said “reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” and that’s the kind of shift in reality that i am seeing here: i “believe” that reality is one way, most of the rest of the world “believes” that reality is something completely different, and people who i would expect to not only know the difference, but who are supposedly expert in teaching dumb people how to be smart, actually go along with the “dumb” people and remove something that is decidedly not nazi, simply because these “dumb” people thought it was.

what⁈⁉

but it goes back a lot further than that. i pretty regularly find myself totally at a loss to determine why someone who was faced with an eminently apparent and logical choice to do one thing, deliberately and blatantly chose to do the exact opposite, and was cheered by society for doing so.

POINT 2) ever since i first started learning about spirituality, i’ve heard one basic message from every single bona fide spiritual teacher i’ve ever met (there are a number of scam artists who people think are spiritual teachers that don’t teach this message, and they’re not the ones i’m talking about), which is that you don’t “pretend” to to something, you don’t “try” to do something. it’s like yoda said: you either do, or do not. there is no “try”. you don’t “pretend” to be an artist, or an engineer, or a truck driver: you either are, or you’re not. in the same way, you don’t “pretend” to be enlightened: you either are, or you’re not. and (a very important point to remember) nobody can say conclusively whether a person is, or is not enlightened: they generally have to rely on what the person claims for themselves. my experience, in general, is that you don’t often get people going around saying that they’re enlightened, and in general, i would be extremely suspicious of anybody who was doing so (so don’t expect me to make a big thing out of this), but you have to start somewhere, and this as good a time as any (rabbi hillel said that).

POINT 3) for a long time (upwards of 35 years now) i have been learning a lot about spirituality and have developed what i believe to be a unique path. i’m not interested in finding other people who agree with me spiritually, much as i’m not particularly interested in what people think of me when i walk into home depot wearing a kilt, a pink long sleeve shirt, and a fez (and, believe me, there were definitely some eyes cast askance in my direction when it happened, but at the time i was totally oblivious to everything except the project that i was working on). i’m firmly convinced that the path i have discovered is exactly the right path for me, in spite of the fact that, when it comes to explaining that path, many have come to the conclusion that i am totally crazy. i don’t let opinions like that dissuade me from pursuing that path, however, and so far (again, for me) i haven’t been wrong.

POINT 4) i experienced what i can only describe as a “shaktipat” moment (specifically, तीव्रमध्यशक्तिपात tīvra-madhya-śaktipāta) while i was driving in the car this afternoon. i was thinking about the fact that my perception of “reality” appears to be so skewed and i realised that either there is something “wrong” with society, or something “wrong” with me. as i find no compelling reason to think i’m crazy, seeing as how my perceptions tend to be more “what people should do” than what they, themselves, do, i was forced to this conclusion:

i get the distinct impression that i am “enlightened”.

this was such a profound revelation to me that, in spite of the fact that, during the time when i was experiencing shaktipat, traffic in my lane (and only my lane) suddenly went from 65 miles per hour to a dead stop in two seconds, and the guy behind me layed on his horn when we didn’t move forwards quickly enough to suit him, i was really enjoying myself, turned up the radio (which was playing classical music) and laughed out loud.

WHAT DOES THIS MEAN?

there is a famous zen saying, which goes: before enlightenment, chop wood and carry water. after enlightenment, chop wood and carry water.

what i take this to mean is, that it doesn’t matter whether or not you have enlightenment. you get no special powers or priveledges from being enlightened: it is a purely spiritual experience, and can only be appreciated on a spiritual level. anything having to do with my body, or my physical surroundings will not be affected by my enlightenment in the least, and very likely nobody else will notice…

but the way i perceive “reality” will be drastically altered forever.

instead of wondering why society is so screwed up, and why i’m so different, i have an entirely different view: one where it’s okay for people to do screwed up things that don’t affect me, because people are going to do screwed up things whether i am here or not. of course, i will do my part to make sure that people don’t do screwed up things, and to help people see the screwed-up-ness of what they have been doing, if they ask, but if they don’t, i won’t worry about it.

you don’t have to be a monk to be enlightened: Shyama Charan Lahiri was an enlightened householder, and one of his main messages was that anyone could become enlightened. i feel it is quite an honour to follow in the footsteps of Lahiri Mahasaya, which i have been doing for 25 years…

my impression, based on the behaviour of people i suspect to be enlightened, i would guess that i will develop ways to “trick” people into doing things that i know will be more beneficial to them than the things they were going to do, but my guess is that it will take a while and i’ll probably face abject failure more than once before i get the knack of it.

i’ll probably get frustrated and angry about injustice, but i got frustrated and angry before i was enlightened: before enlightenment, chop wood and carry water. after enlightenment, chop wood and carry water. nothing has changed on the physical level.

other than that, i don’t know how being enlightened will affect me, because i have never been enlightened before. if anything interesting comes up, i’ll be sure to clue you in. 8)

frustration, ganesha, ganesha the car, music

dreek

Friday, 20100820 przxqgl

i bought some 1shot clear coat for the hood of my car. it works okay on the black – it does cause it to bleed this interesting brownish red colour, but i can clean that up pretty quickly. on the other hand, when i apply the clear coat to the gold ink, it smears – even totally dry ink – and it takes long enough to clean up that i won’t be able to clear coat the car, at least not before tomorrow, when i have a show in everett for which i’m being paid $100.

i’ve been playing around with a stencil design based on Śrītattvanidhi, but the stencils i have designed so far are too big for the media i have, and while i know that larger media exists, i still haven’t found a source for it. it’s coming really close to the end of the “create an art car in the open with no garage” season really quickly, and i haven’t got more than the hood finished on the car, which is a perennial source of frustration for me. hopefully the newly expanded workshop space will facilitate my attempts to make this a reality.

Renaldo & The Loaf – Hambu Hodo

forward into the past, important things to remember, spiritual

Tuesday, 20100803 przxqgl

from my sketchbook

the only way we can worship anything other than God is when we worship something that is a result of some occurance outside of our bodies. we are created in the image of God and we are given life by God and God dwells within us. when we worship something that is not within oujr own bodies, we worship the creation and not the creator. when we worship something within our bodies that is a direct result of occurances outside of our bodies, we worship our creation, but not God’s creation. our creation has been called the “ego” – that part of our personality that is a direct result of society. it is that part of our personality that wants us to think that we created ourselves. it is that which is spoken of in Isaiah 47.10 “for thou hast trusted in thy wickedness: Thou hast said none seeth me. Thy wisdom and thy knowledge, it hath perverted thee; and thou hast said in thine heart, I am, and none else beside me.”

the ego is that part of our mind that “thinks” and “knows” from learning, and is ignorant of reality outside of itsself. the God that lives within us is that part of our personality and thinks and knows from intuition or inspiration. its true source is cosmic learning, the accumulated experiences of the creator, which lives in all of us at the same time. this is what is spoken of in Philippians 2.5-6 “let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus: Who, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God.” the “mind” spoken of is the mind of the cosmic creator. Jesus, himself, didn’t have a personality of “Jesus,” because he was totally the Personality of the Divine Creator – so much so that he had the abilities of the Creator as well. John 5.30 “I receive not honor from men.” if we worship Jesus, we worship the body, and not the Mind of the Creator which lives within the body. this is the meaning of the crucifixion: Jesus’ body was just a vehicle for the mind of God, which lives forever, with or without a body. as Jesus said: “Behold, the Kingdom of God is within you.” (Luke 17.21)

bizarre, gulf oil spill, i am a terrorist, imaginary pooperty, jeezis, links, rants, swastikas

colour me frustrated… again…

Monday, 20100802 przxqgl

Incoming BP CEO: Time for ‘scaleback’ in cleanup – ⸘⸘⸘WHAT‽‽‽ maybe in his dreams… 😐

Swastika no longer viewed as Nazi symbol – reading just the headline, one would be inclined to think that the movement to Save the Swastika might be having some effect in enlightening people who think that (卐 ≡ nazi), but when one actually reads the article, it would seem that the Anti-Defamation League is probably more aptly named the “Anti-Swastika League” because, while they’ve admitted that the swastika isn’t just a nazi symbol, they’re still of the mistaken opinion that it’s a “more generalised symbol of hate”, which is also incorrect, as any hindu will tell you. hindus and buddhists, and, for that matter, jews, should express their outrage about this (here is the letter i wrote them, if you need some encouragement or an example): it’s racist and against the very principles they stand for, for the ADL to say that the holy symbols of another religion are a “generalised symbol of hate” without qualification!

and while i’m on the subject, i feel really sorry for the lack of intelectual development displayed in Culture Served Raw – A Universal Symbol of Hate – remember, we’re talking about TEN THOUSAND years of history as a symbol of good, compared to 90 years as a symbol of evil. not only that, but the blogger in question won’t even approve any comments that don’t agree with his preconcieved notion of how evil the swastika has been, and is completely ignoring the fact that it’s only been a relatively short time that it has been anything but a symbol of good. one thing i learned very early, is that the only way to change history is to remember it differently. it’s clear that this blogger is doing exactly that, and i feel sorry for them. Swastika, a “Universal” symbol of hate? – “I understand the aversion toward the swastika in the West but to say it is universally a symbol of hate could create more intolerance, not less.”

Researcher demonstrates ATM “jackpotting” at Black Hat Conference – a number of years ago, when i was working as a software tester, one of the projects i worked on was for Triton Systems, testing a little gadget that supposedly was able to do standard ATM functions from your desktop, with the aid of your computer. they actually gave me one of their little desktop gadgets to fool around with (unfortunately, they didn’t give me any actual money to go with it… cheapskates…), and i found a number of ways to crack their proposed software and make the gadget do all sorts of things that it wasn’t supposed to do. my understanding at the time was that they used essentially the same software for their stand-alone ATMs that they used for the desktop gadgets, and ever since then i’ve wondered whether or not it was possible to do the same things on their stand-alone ATMs. apparently it is.

Collecting rainwater now illegal in many states as Big Government claims ownership over our water – it’s illegal to collect rainwater in washington? i’ll have to look into that… and if it is, get a rain barrel or two… 8)

President Wyclef? – gawd help the haitians… they’ve already suffered enough…

A priest in eastern Europe has been accused of drowning a baby boy as he baptised him. – death by superstition? i thought that had been eliminated from our society years ago… 😐

jeez, first it’s uganda wanting to kill gays, and now a Kenyan gets 14 years for sex with donkey; blames devil – something must be wrong with that whole region of the world…

U.S. Copyright Group ‘Steal’ Competitor’s Website – another blatant case of the pot calling the kettle black…

Seattle’s Aerial Transport Lifestyle System – it’s the future… right?

and, last, but certainly not least, The Blue God of Judaism – a blog by Rabbi Robert dos Santos Teixeira, LCSW, that will examine the similarities between YHWH and Siva. maybe he’ll address my question concerning the ancient biblical patriarch worshipping a sivalingam…

Continue reading colour me frustrated… again… →

i am a terrorist, rants, swastikas, the very big stupid

okay, now i’m getting really fed up here…

Friday, 20100730 przxqgl

卐卍卐卍卐卍卐卍卐卍卐卍卐卍卐卍卐卍卐卍卐卍卐卍卐卍卐卍卐卍卐卍卐卍卐卍卐卍卐卍卐卍卐卍

the jewish anti-defemation league has declared that the swastika is a generalised symbol of hate. okay, that’s all well and good, the swastika not only represents naziism and so-called “white supremacy”, but it also represents Ganesha, the Lord of Removing Obstacles, and less than 100 years ago, and for 10,000 years prior to that, the swastika was a symbol of love, peace, good luck and auspiciousness for EVERY CULTURE, AND EVERY PEOPLE ON THE PLANET INCLUDING THE HEBREW PEOPLE!

let’s put that in perspective, okay? if we use this image to represent 100 years – – this is how long the swastika has been a symbol of love, peace, good luck and auspiciousness:

religious adherants pie chart and this is how long the swastika has been a symbol of nazi and so called “white supremacy”:

is that something that a normal person should consider reasonable: that a symbol with 10,000 years of history as a symbol of love, peace, good luck and auspiciousness should “magically” be transformed into a symbol of hate, because of less than 100 years of recent history?

the cross, originally a symbol of death, has been “magically” transformed into the symbol that represents the religion with the largest number of adherents in the world, and that took less than two thousand years. the swastika is FIVE TIMES older than that, with a history to match, and yet it has taken less than one hundred years to “magically” transform it into a symbol of hatred. no matter how hard i try, i can’t seem to figure out exactly how that works.

not only that, but according to Adherents dot com, hindus and buddhists, for whom the swastika is still a holy symbol, in spite of the nazi-obsessed west, account for 20% of the world’s population, whereas judaism accounts for less than ¼%…

something is definitely wrong here. i don’t discount the fact that the jews have had a rough time of it in the past, but when a fraction of a percent of the population can state, with authority, that the swastika is a “generalised symbol of hate” and the 20% of the population who hold the swastika as a symbol of holiness can’t do anything about it, something is definitely wrong…

卐卍卐卍卐卍卐卍卐卍卐卍卐卍卐卍卐卍卐卍卐卍卐卍卐卍卐卍卐卍卐卍卐卍卐卍卐卍卐卍卐卍卐卍

i am a terrorist, swastikas

卐

Thursday, 20100513 przxqgl

so there has been a great deal of kerfuffle over the past few years concerning this building, the Coronado Naval Amphibious Base, and the navy’s $600,000 waste of taxpayer’s money to “disguise” the shape of the building so that nobody will notice that it’s shaped like a swastika.

the fact that this artificial body of water has, apparently, been missed, even though it is bigger, and probably more deliberately shaped like a swastika, is astounding to me…

although the fact that it is in china probably helps matters a little bit…

articles, bizarre, hindu, important things to remember

Indian gentleman makes ass of Professor P.Z. Meyers

Thursday, 20100429 przxqgl

some of this story suffers from being written by a person (or people) whose native language is not english, but still, there’s enough scientific and journalistic integrity to make me severely wonder what ol’ P.Z. would make of it:

ETA: apparently he would do it differently… oh well, i guess i couldn’t have expected a lot more.

Miracle man survives without food for 70 years

Ahmedabad, Apr 26: Survival of a Hindu ascetic, claimed to be not taking food or water and not passing stool or urine for over 70 years, has baffled the medical fraternity and now defence experts are studying about the miracle man to emulate the practice for soldiers¹.

Experts of Defence Institute of Physiology and Allied Sciences (DIPAS), in collaboration with the doctors of the city-based Sterling Hospital, have launched an observational study of the 81-year-old Prahladbhai Jani alias ‘Mataji’², who is living in a cave in the temple town of Ambaji in Gujarat’s Banaskantha district.

The round the clock study from April 22 to May 7 will cover all aspects of physiology and biochemistry. The saint is kept in isolation at a special ward in the hospital and even mediapersons were kept out of bounds.

Talking to mediapersons at the hospital, Dr Sudhir Shah, a neurologist, and Dr Ila Wazgan of DIPAS said the main aim of the project is to study how a human being can survive without consuming food or water and not passing stool or urine for so long.

Dr Shah, who had conducted a similar study on the saint in 2003, said ‘There are incidents of prolonged fastings in our country. But they have been taking some water. In the case of Jani, he is not taking any food or water. What is medically more important and baffling is the fact that he is not passing stool or urine’.

The saint has informed the doctors that he has rare ‘Kundalini’ power (serpentine energy), a Yogic feat.³

Explaining the rationale behind the study, Dr Wazgan said ”If we can find out the reason or unveil the mystery behind Mr Jani’s survival without food and water, the study may help in working out strategies in managing calamaty-struck people, soldiers deployed at extremely hostile terrains like high altitude mountains and places with the scarcity of water and food”.

Considering the interest taken by DIPAS, some new parameters have been added to the study, Dr Shah said.

An interesting fact ascertained by doctors is that Mr Jani’s brain is as efficient as that of a 25-year old young man though he is aged 81. There are no signs of aging. Even today he can climb a seven storey building without any exhaustion, said Dr Shah.

The saint has shown evidences of formation of urine, which seems to be reabsorbed from his bladder wall. However, at present the medicos do not have any scientific explanation for the same but help of senior scientists and medical personnel of the country is being taken for the same.

A series of investigations are being carried out on Mr Jani according to a pre-determined protocol and additional tests are carried out as per suggestions of the team.

”If everything is ok with Jani, the study on his condition will continue for ten or 15 days. The defence wing wants to understand what is the structure of Mr Jani’s body, what is special about it, because of which he can survive normally. Whether the same can be replicated in other’s body, is the main question. If the answer is yes, it could be useful for soldiers and astrologers’⁴, added Dr Wazgan.

As per the details provided by Mr Jani’s followers, at the age of seven years, he left home in search of spiritual unfoldment. At the age of eleven years he was blessed by a goddess. He claims that since that blessing, he has gained his sustenance from nectar that filters down through a hole in his palate⁵, and has not passed urine or stools since then.

Mr Jani had explained to his followers, ”I get the elixir of life from the hole in my palate, which enables me to go without food and water”. Almost daily Mr Jani enters a state of Samadhi characterised by extreme bliss and enormous light and strength. He says that he has never experienced medical problems. He says that he did not speak for a period of forty-five years.

A Video of Prahladbhai Jani is also available, for those of you who might be skeptical.

1: the problem is that for soldiers to actually achieve the state that Mr. Jani has achieved, they would have to give up being soldiers.

2: the name “mataji” means “respected mother”… ?

3: Obsolete A specialised skill or profession. trust Indian journalists to use obsolete English…

4: “and astrologers“… ??

5: i learned about this while i was going through the preparation for my 2nd Kriya initiation, but i didn’t give it much thought at the time…

ganesha the car, pictures, swastikas

yeah, i know… i’m asking for it…

Wednesday, 20100421 przxqgl 1 Comment

the design that i blotted out yesterday was definitely wrong, and i’m really glad i listened to my gut and did it, because it was the right thing to do. the picture to the right is the new plan – although it’s going to be sanskrit writing, and not a blue background (which was put there with a computer, to gauge dimensions) – and i’m already more than aware of the fact that people are going to ask me, and harrass me, and that sort of thing, about the swastika on my car, perhaps even more than with the previous car.

but, see, the problem is that when i look at that plan, i get this gooey feeling right here <taps chest>, that i get when i look at my wife, which is an indication that i have created ART and not just art… and this is just the hood of the car! i can hardly wait to see what the rest of it is going to look like. 🙂

articles, i am a terrorist, links, rants, spiritual, the very big stupid

snep

Sunday, 20100418 przxqgl

Regarding "christianity" and the Virginia Governor’s reason for declaring Confederate History Month

7,500 Online Shoppers Unknowingly Sold Their Souls – this is what happens when users fail to read the TOC. i find it interesting and educational to realise that in the commercial world there are two significant industries that refer to their customers as “users”: computer software manufacturers, and drug dealers. perhaps this is one of the reasons why.

Dead man elected mayor of Tennessee town – why is it that all i can think of is that line from the Tom Waits song What’s he Building?, “I heard he has an ex-wife in someplace called ‘Mayor’s Income, Tennessee’.”

finally, i have read in two different blogs about the croatian girl who fell into a coma, and when she awoke, she could no longer speak croatian, her native language, but she could speak fluent german, a language that she was just beginning to learn when she fell into a coma. i find this an interesting paralell to my opera, which sprung to life in all of its complex glory when i lost what passes for normal consciousness as a result of my injury. stories like this have far reaching implications that involve just about every part of my life, and is one of the primary reasons why, in spite of the fact that i agree with him more often than not, i still think that p.z. meyers and his ilk are sadly mistaken when they conclusively state that “god” doesn’t exist. it may not be the old man with the beard that oversees all from his abode in the clouds, but Something that doesn’t exist wouldn’t be able to cause miracles like that.

Continue reading snep →

blasphemy, i am a terrorist, spiritual

the difference between God and “normal”

Friday, 20100219 przxqgl

my raîson d’étre has caused some difficulties for some people who have very strongly held opinions: i would say that they’re strongly “christian” people in general, but i’d very likely be wrong. and i’ve been thinking, once again, about how i am more drawn to people like radical athiest skeptic evolutionist p.z. myers than i am to spiritual teachers or groups in general, in spite of the fact that i am a lot more spiritual than most people realise. i attribute this to the way that i think – my raîson d’étre – which, admittedly, doesn’t make a lot of sense to people. basically, the way i think, it is perfectly normal for me to say that A is exactly equal to not-A, in every way, despite the fact that “normal” people would say that A can’t be equal to not-A because not-A is the opposite of A. the easiest way i have to describe this difference is an aphorism i learned when i was in the seminary, which is that the opposite of a “small t truth” is a falsehood, but the opposite of a “big T Truth” is another “big T Truth”.

in the same way, when i think about God, i think about It (here is the reason for that pronoun) existing in spite of the FACT that God doesn’t exist.

i know that God exists, despite whatever proof p.z. myers and his cohorts may drag up. if they were to pull something out of their pocket and show it to me that would conclusively prove that God doesn’t exist, i would still KNOW that God exists. i know that God both exists, and doesn’t exist, because if It were to only exist, or only not exist, then It wouldn’t have the necessary attributes to be God. “if you ‘know’ something, you are confident because of familiar experience or clear perception of the veracity of a particular fact (regardless, i might add, of whether other people agree with you or not), whereas if you ‘believe’ something, you are taking someone else’s word that it is true, having not experienced it for yourself.” i know that God exists, because i have personally experienced Its presence. and, no, i can’t describe what It was like: it is impossible to describe that which is indescribable. you either have to experience It for yourself, or you’ll never know what i’m talking about. if you have experienced Its presence, you know exactly what i’m talking about.

that’s the only difference.

at the same time, i find myself agreeing with the rationalist p.z. myers a lot more than with dinesh d’sousa or bob larson, although i get irritated with all of them more or less equally, because i see where all of them are wrong about what they believe (i.e. “taking someone else’s word”) because they all have not personally experienced God’s presence. i don’t think that makes them less human beings than people who have experienced God’s presence, it just makes them “different”…

and i, the “different” one, am completely normal! 8)

as i have said to people before, if you have a problem with the way i think, you are cordially invited to think of me as that guy with the hole in his skull who believes things that aren’t logical. you won’t be the first, you won’t be the last, and i don’t care.

articles, big brother, bizarre, blasphemy, crazy people, doggles, jeezis, links, moe, rants, spiritual

link dump ? for a change

Thursday, 20100121 przxqgl

now that i’m finished frantically trying to put out a raging forest fire with a watering sprinkler (for the moment, anyway), i’ve got the time to post a whole bunch of things that i’ve been reading recently, that make me go everything from “hmmm” to “AARGH! *#%&!!?!”…

first up, in the “AARGH! *#%&!!?!” category, Religious Tefillin Prompts Scare On Plane – the way i see it, a 17-year-old jewish kid was putting on his tefillin (“phylacteries“, for the uninitiated) in preparation for morning prayer, while at the same time, one of the flight attendents, who thought he was a terrorist, diverted the plane, where he was met by ~~clown~~ homeland security and a bomb squad. there’s so many levels of stupid here… my mind boggles… 😐

continuing to boggle my mind, in more ways than one, Slime mold validates efficiency of Tokyo rail network – more evidence (as if we needed it, which apparently we do) that the creationists are wrong… in more ways than one.

which brings me to the fact the following symbol, a full colon followed by a dash::–is called “dog’s bollocks” by typographers (much in the same way that the name for the symbol that represents “the artist formerly known as ‘Prince'” is called “bruce” by typographers: they’ve got to have something brief to call it), according to the Oxford English Dictionary. the interesting part is when someone delves into The Secret History of Typography in the Oxford English Dictionary… it just goes to prove that you can read the dictionary and find vulgar, 60-year-old emoticons. the only thing remaining is to see how long it will be before the L33T kiddies figure it out and start using it themselves…

there’s a rare (she’s been spending all of her free time studying these days) post from moe, about her new birthday present – yes, another dog. we are now, once again, officially a four-dog family. and the new one is obsessed with staring at the cats, in order to try to get them to move… it’s really funny… or frustrating, depending on whether or not lucy’s been at home all day.

and finally, this evening, Man Stuck In No-Man’s Land – a story from right around here… and it’s from the onion. it’s good to see the onion doesn’t ignore the little people… 🙂

Continue reading link dump ? for a change →

brain injury, depression, ganesha the car, host services, swastikas

i’ve been having a difficult time the past few days… and, also 卍卐 ☹

Wednesday, 20100106 przxqgl

i’ve been having a difficult time the past few days: the process of switching host providers again has gone pretty normally, with the normal SNAFUs which have been more or less worked out over the past four days. there is still the matter of getting my clients to update their nameservers to my nameservers(!!) (i finally figured out how to create ns1 and ns2.hybridelephant.com, which means that now, when i sell host services myself, i don’t have to give my clients the nameservers that belong to my host provider) which should happen soon, but it’s a little difficult to get other people to do something, even when it is important.

also, as an extra added bonus, as a part of switching host providers, my email has been down for a week, and i’m going to have to enter the 50 addresses on the mailing list by hand (once liz has reset her nameservers) so that it will work, because the new host service provider had “never restored a mailing list before” and didn’t know how to do it.

as i posted previously, somebody grafittied Ganesha The Car. i wrote about it in I, Anonymous, and, after an encouraging start, the conversation turned into the “why are you trying to reclaim the nazi symbol?” rant from people who are much more adept at pushing the buttons of a newbie than i am, and it went downhill from there. the day after it was grafittied, i took it in for a check-up, because the “check engine” idiot-light had gone from its normal “on all the time” to flashing, and i wanted to find out what changed. yesterday, i got the call from the repair shop. they said they had found out what was wrong – burned valves on the 3rd cylinder – and they said that it would probably need a new engine before it will pass emissions inspection the next time. 🙁

on the other hand, there have been some good things as well. i have been watching craigslist recently, and bought some swastika jewelry that i found there, which was decidedly not nazi jewelry. one is an american-made gold swastika hatpin with a diamond in the center. it came along with a whole bunch of other hatpins, and the lady wanted $25 for the lot, which i happily paid. the other is a silver native american swastika pin with a card that dates it to around 1907. the guy that was selling it wanted $25 for it and a nazi flag. i told him i was interested in the native american swastika, but i didn’t want anything to do with nazi stuff and he agreed. i took both pieces for an “appraisal” today (the guy said, and i agreed, that what i had didn’t warrant a “real” appraisal, which would have cost $50 per piece) and found out that the silver pin has a “niche market” collectible value of around $100, and the gold and diamond pin – 18 to 20 carat gold, and a 3-point diamond, by itself – is probably worth $150.

also, i bought a number of buddhist swastikas from a place in singapore, out of which i’m going to make jewelry.

and the fact that Ganesha The Car is dying isn’t as bad as it seems. it runs the same as it has been for the past few years, and there’s nothing really wrong with it other than it only runs on 3 cylinders. i’ve been thinking for some time about taking the class they offer at south seattle community college, where if you provide your own car they waive the $400 class fee and you get to participate in converting your car to an entirely electric vehicle. also, tom at the repair shop said that he could probably round up a rebuilt engine that has a 1 or 2 year warranty that would give Ganesha another 5 years or so. and if none of those turn out to be an option, jack (the guy i bought Ganesha from, who is moe’s employer’s father-in-law) has been turned on to watch auto auctions for another cheap car that will be turned into another art car.

and, on top of everything else, they took off the grafitti while they had it at the shop, and didn’t charge me for it. 🙂

ganesha the car, i am a terrorist, rants, swastikas

this is the state of ermerika, not iran…

Tuesday, 20091222 przxqgl 2 Comments

i was accosted at the coffee stand down the hill from my house today. as i was conversing with the barista (who burned my mocha, again) this incredibly fat woman (really, she was wider than she was tall. i don’t know how she was walking) came up and said “you have a swastika on your car!”

Incredibly Fat Woman: you have a swastika on your car!

me: yes, i have a swastika on my car.

IFW: that’s offensive, my husband is black.

me: i’m sorry you feel that way, but the swastika and the shatkona, the six pointed star design you see on the roof, is a symbol of Ganesha, the Hindu God of Removing Obstacles, and has been for ten thousand years! the nazi symbol you’re thinking of hasn’t even been around for 100 years…

IFW: i don’t know where you think you are, but this is the state of ermerika, not iran…

me: yes, and in America we have the freedom to worship the way we want, and display symbols that may be offensive to others. this is my way of getting back at the nazis who abused the swastika, by blatantly using it as a symbol of peace and goodwill.

IFW: … 😡

me: (as i’m driving away) how can a symbol be guilty for the acts of a madman?

i suppose i shouldn’t be surprised by things like this any longer, but this really affects me on a very deep level. what she said, "this is the state of ermerika, not iran", as though America is not "The Land of The Free", but instead the land of the intolerant bigots who refuse to accept the chance that there might be someone who thinks differently than they do… i’m tempted to go back and see if i can make friends with this woman and her husband, just to show them that the swastika is not to be feared… but i fear that if i show my face (or my car) around that particular coffee stand again, that i’ll probably be killed…

merry xmas… 😐

articles, i am a terrorist, important things to remember, links, rants, swastikas

are you smarter than a fifth grader?

Thursday, 20091217 przxqgl 2 Comments

this is another "advantage" to having a google alert for the term "swastika": i got up this morning and discovered a whole bunch of new articles, which included the following honeys.

College prof: Christian crosses like swastikas – Student: ‘I felt humiliated and that my spirituality was being demeaned’ – oh, boo hoo, you’re “not allowed” to make your religious emblem in a class where my religious emblem is banned as a matter of course, regardless of what you believe it means. now, maybe, you get the idea of what it must be like to have a religious symbol discriminated against because of stupidity!!

along the same lines, there is STILL IN PURSUIT OF THE DREAM, which is the story of writer who was originally scheduled to read from her book at a public library, and was then un-invited, because some person – not associated with the library – discovered that her book contained the images of “werewolves, vampires, and the swastika”. she invokes ray bradbury’s Farenheit 451, and i would tend to agree with her. this is definitely censorship based on an image in a book, and nothing less.

especially when you consider that high school students are being taught this stuff. there really should be no reason, apart from america’s bizarre aversion to the swastika, why people should raise anywhere near as much of a fuss about it.

HOW CAN A SYMBOL BE GUILTY FOR THE ACTS OF A MADMAN?!?

but the one that really got to me, the one that makes me believe that we may actually have hope for a saner, less swastika-obsessed future, is the letter to the editor regarding an incident in which "I 卍 OBAMA" was carved into a massachusetts golf course last weekend, which was written by A SIXTH GRADER entitled Swastika predates use by Nazis. if a sixth grader has the requisite knowledge to correct a newspaper article, what does that say about the person who wrote that article? i’ll answer that, so that there will be no doubt in your mind what i am striving for here: it says that the person who wrote the article is either uneducated, or deliberately trying to pull the wool over our eyes. either way, it doesn’t say much about their integrity. we deserve better than that from our public news sources, and if it takes a sixth grader to set the record straight, then it’s time we took a closer look at who we are allowing to report our news.

the more you obsess about nazis and swastikas, the longer it will be until we disassociate nazis and swastikas! the way to get over the nazi thing is to have it be okay for people to use the 卍 symbol, and the 卐 symbol in ways that are not connected with nazis! it’s exactly the same thing your mother tells you after you skin your knee as a kid: the more you think about it, the longer it will be until it goes away. if the general world consensus is that we sould continue to think about nazis every time someone says 卐, then there are a lot of hindus, buddhists, native americans – and jews – who are going to be out a significant amount of their cultural history.

for more swastika pleasure, i invite you to peruse Sun Wheel – The Ancient Swastika and start thinking about something other than nazis for a change…

thanks.

Continue reading are you smarter than a fifth grader? →

links, rants, swastikas

here’s some ideas for xmas gifts…

Wednesday, 20091216 przxqgl

Buy swastika online in India – this is what i get for having a google alert for the term “swastika”… why are people on this side of the globe so convinced that the swastika is anything other than a symbol of peace? i know that there was this whole thing with the nazis, but that was almost a hundred years ago, and i think it’s high time we should start thinking of other things.

corruption, depression, hindu, i am a terrorist, important things to remember, jeezis, links, rants, the very big stupid, winter solstice, x-mas

the war on xmas

Tuesday, 20091215 przxqgl 1 Comment

the closer we get to xmas, the more i am feeling like a jew at a nazi rally, and i am aware of the irony of such a statement a lot more accutely than those of you who may be shocked at the reference.

what i would really like, is to magically transport myself to somewhere where they don’t celebrate xmas for the month of december – and possibly the months of november and january as well – just to get away from the hype that is going on. the commercialism and the politics of the holiday are really starting to get to me, and i still have 10 days until it’s over for another year.

it’s not that i don’t celebrate xmas, and it’s not even that i don’t believe in the “christ” and “god” that are behind the current incarnation of the holiday so much (although that’s another part of the story). what is really disturbing to me is the combination of not being able to turn on the television or the radio without hearing either commercials for products that i know won’t work (like Windows 7), or seeing news reports of people complaining because the greeter at walmart said something, or didn’t say something that was offensive to them… or not… 😐

i was brought up in a family that celebrated the commercial aspects of xmas. we didn’t even have a regular church service that we went to that was on a day other than sunday, and the church services that we went to all the time were pretty ecuminical and inclusive of traditions and cultures that were not specifically “christian”, so when i grew up and learned that some people believed that xmas was for stuff other than getting loads of toys and candy, i didn’t quite understand, but i didn’t really notice that much when the checker at the grocery store wished me a “merry xmas”. as i developed more of a relationship with sanatanadharma (which is what “hinduism” is really called) i started noticing the discontinuity a lot more: the “peace on earth and good will toward men” compared to the war, hunger and poverty that exist in the world, the constant fighting between catholics and protestants, the constant fighting between the christians and the non-christians, and the growing furor over “the war on xmas” came much more to the forefront, and i find it quite distressing.

things like the reference to a woman who compared santa to a swastika take on a meaning that is not immediately obvious to people who believe the swastika is an evil symbol, for example. i can see how santa is a lot like a swastika, and i wouldn’t mind seeing both of them in more common usage, but if there’s going to be an uproar over whether or not to have a swastika in a public display, then there certainly should be just as much uproar over whether or not to have a public holiday that celebrates santa – even if santa is not the "reason for the season".

and, for that matter, if you think about it a little more than most "christians" have, jeezis himself is not the “reason for the season” either. people celebrated the winter solstice for a long time before jeezis showed up, and it’s really only been within the past 200 to 500 years that we’ve had anything at all like what is currently celebrated as xmas, so all of those "war on xmas" fanatics really don’t have a leg to stand on in the first place. but in general, i think that the hindus and jews and buddhists and muslims and animists and even athiests have gone out of their way to accommodate all of the fanatics who insist that they are to be greeted with the phrase "merry xmas" instead of the more ecuminical "happy holidays" in fact, the only reason we have been as accommodating as we have been is because the "christians" are a majority of our population and if we weren’t so willing to give up what we believe in order to make peace, most "christians" wouldn’t have the slightest problem killing us!

what would jesus do, indeed?

i keep feeling like i am totally alone in a society of people who would have no problem killing me if they happened to find out that i don’t believe the way they do, but at the same time, i feel compelled to inform these ignoramuses that they aren’t the only ones on the planet, and that other people – people who believe differently than they do – have just as much right to exist as they do, and what jesus would really do is get along with everyone… which is supposed to be "The Christmas Message" anyway.

flying spaghetti monster, i am a terrorist, links

i am a terrorist

Monday, 20091207 przxqgl

Need to Sneak Across the Border "Safely?" – there’s an app for that…

Japanese man ‘marries’ computer game character – if the guy is allowed to marry a computer game character, then why aren’t two actual people who happen to be of the same sex marry, huh?

also, One Hundred Percent EDIBLE Googly Eyes! with which to make, what else, chriFSMas treats! you can guess what i’ll be doing later on… 8)

Continue reading i am a terrorist →

pictures, siva

jewelry penis

Sunday, 20091115 przxqgl 2 Comments

mahasivalingam with gauri shankar i ran out of purple beads. fortunately i know of two bead stores near where i live that are likely to have them. i really like the softflex wire that i bought recently, although the “medium” size won’t fit through a lot of the precious and semi-precious beads that i like working with. the fact that it crimps instead of me having to try to tie it tightly means that i produce jewelry that doesn’t have to stretch before i can sell it. i rebuilt my sivalingam necklace, which broke last year and i’ve been waiting until i had some more reliable way of rebuilding it before i rebuilt it. i added a gauri shankar, which makes it look even more like a penis — which, of course, is what it’s supposed to be anyway, but i find it very amusing that it would look as much like a penis as it does. i’m just waiting for some “christian” to ask me what it is.

banda gozona, brain injury, fremont sunday market, gripes, swastikas, the very big stupid

heiney

Monday, 20090504 przxqgl

i did something to my back within the past three days that is causing me enormous pain when i stand or sit… currently i am under the influence of ibuprophen, which diminishes it from enormous pain to a nagging reminder, but at the same time, i think that loading, unloading and re-loading hybrid elephant at the FSM yesterday, and then unloading it again at home this afternoon was no help at all. at this point, i can hope that it goes away or fixes itself soon, because any further medical intervention is more than i can afford.

i made $70 at the FSM. not my best day, but not my worst, either. the next time i know i can go will be in three weeks, because i have a banda gozona gig (in mt. vernon?) in two weeks. also, since i redesigned the site, hybrid elephant has shot to the #1 position when you search for swastika button, which is especially cool since the #2 position is currently occupied by a white supremacist… 8) furthermore, i now occupy position #2 when you search for finest incense in the world, which is exactly what i was hoping would happen!

ned had to cancel, because he’s sick, and his son goes to one of the schools shut down by ~~swine flu~~ H1N1 (pronounced “heiney”). he says that he and his wife and kid have been sick for about a week, and while he doesn’t think he’s got H1N1, the fact that his kid goes to stevenson means that he doesn’t want to take any chances. another school that was shut down due to the overblown H1N1 scare is woodmont, where i went to first through third grade.

flying spaghetti monster, fremont sunday market, hybrid elephant, important things to remember, incense, swastikas

diary of a tired agarbatthiwallah

Sunday, 20090118 przxqgl

FSM today. it was actually a pretty good day. it started out at 5:30 with dog breakfasts in the car, but i discovered that the FSM offers a $5 discount for early membership renewal, and they were offering 2-for-1-for-$30 spaces – to encourage vendors to brave the cold, damp, limited-daylight early-january freeze – even though i could only use one space anyway, instead of making -$5, i actually came out ahead $10 today (which means that i made $75, if my convoluted math is confusing you). not only that but i had the priveledge of explaining the real meaning of the swastika to three different people, i had one guy from tibet express utter amazement when i told him that despite the fact that i know an awful lot about it, i have never actually been to india, i learned teegan’s name (finally), and i gave her some incense, and i brought tears of joy to a person’s eyes when i said that, in my opinion, Jesus and Ganesha are the same thing. i took the doggies with me, and they went for a walk up and down the canal after the market was over, and they’re asleep(!) at this point. i’m probably going to feed the cats, grab a bite (and not much more than that) and go to bed myself… i forgot how dreadfully early 5:30 in the morning is. 8P

all in all, i would say that it was an entirely positive and uplifting day. i need more days like this.

bizarre, corruption, existential negation, geek links, i am a terrorist, malfunctioning computers, rants, tina chopp

interesting/amusing/annoying

Saturday, 20090110 przxqgl

so in restoring the Church of Tina, i discovered that, for some (obvious now, but then it was a) mysterious reason, the entire site worked the way it was supposed to, except for this page, which is part of the church of tina’s elaborate disclaimer. instead of getting the page, i was getting a “403 – Forbidden” error (similar to the much more common “404 – File Not Found” error, which you have undoubtedly seen before). i didn’t remember it being forbidden before, and so i renamed the file, and re-uploaded it in an attempt to straighten out the problem, but it was still showing up as forbidden. then i looked at the page with my linux terminal and discovered that the reason why it wasn’t working was because the permissions had been reset to 600 – which means the owner of the file (presumably me) can read and modify the file, but if you’re not me, then you can’t even see the file. when i reset the permissions to 644 (i can modify the file, and everyone else can read it), it reappeared on the web site like magic – no more 403 error!

except for the fact that I would not have reset the permissions so that nobody could see it, and the only people who administrative permissions on the file (which would supercede my permissions) are the host providers – drizzle!

i don’t know this for sure, and i can guarantee that if they did do something strange like change the permissions on the file without telling me, that they wouldn’t admit to it, but i would bet that the subject of the file in question contacted drizzle and complained, and drizzle arbitrarily changed the permissions on the file in order to get her to shut up and go away.

they were sneaky enough to not just delete the file (because then i would know that they had been up to no good), but they did something to the file that wouldn’t be perceived by someone who is using windoesn’t, and only perceived by someone using mac or *ix by looking at it with the terminal, which nobody uses these days…

goddamn drizzle anyway… i can’t wait to get another ISP… 8P

depression, i am a terrorist, links, malfunctioning computers, rants, the very big stupid, tina chopp

DRIZZLE!!!!

Friday, 20090109 przxqgl

here is yet another reason why drizzle.com is not going to be my ISP much longer: they assumed that when i requested a change of host providers for hybridelephant.com, they automatically assumed that it also meant cancelling my internet service – which was wrong, and i took care of it last week. what i didn’t realise is that they also cancelled The Church of Tina Chopp, resulting in an interruption of service for several days. it’s on its way to being fixed at this point (i still have to wait the requisite 24 to 48 hours for the DNS changes to propagate), but that is yet another reason to get away from them as quickly as possible.

i should have listened more carefully when i was told last march that drizzle was incompetent. now it’s come back to bite me in the ass… 8/

ganesha the car, hindu, hybrid elephant, links, shameless self promotion

Ganesha!

Monday, 20090105 przxqgl

Ganesha The Car – Paving the way to better traffic

bizarre, blasphemy, depression, i am a terrorist, important things to remember, links, new year, rants, spiritual

new years’ rant

Wednesday, 20081231 przxqgl

okay, over at Unreasonable Faith there’s a discussion going on which started out with the guy giving believers “your chance to convince us atheists there is a God. Pitch your best case for why we should believe in a deity”. i normally agree with atheists a lot more than i do with “christians”, but i couldn’t resist, especially since mine is a somewhat unique position (which i will explain more fully in a minute) to which few, if any, other people subscribe – which is just fine with me.

although, as i said, i tend to agree with athiests a lot more than i do with most “believers”, ultimately, i am a “believer” myself, and everything that i have experienced to this day only drives home to me that my way of thinking is the correct one for me, if for no other person. i know that a God exists, and that He (for lack of a better term) has three defining characteristics: the God that i worship is infinite, unchanging and eternal. ultimately, the God in Whom i beleve can be described as existing beyond “normal logic” because of the fact that in order to meet the criteria of being infinite, unchanging and eternal, God would have to be able to do what seem to us like impossible things, for example being in multiple places at the same time, or being both right and wrong, or both black and white, at the same time, without having to worry about whether or not one thing conflicts with the other. if what you call “god” is unable to exhibit these three qualities then, to me you are not referring to the God that i know to exist.

i realise that this puts me in the category of “mystics” (some might say “crazy people”, i’ll deal with them in a minute) who say that God exists beyond normal understanding, and without some sort of “mystical experience” you’ll never understand what i am talking about, but i’m not the only one to believe this way, and from what i’ve been able to see, the ones who believed the way i do had significant hardships, but were a great deal happier overall than people who went along with the herd, whether athiest or “christian”.

i look at my life as depicted in this story, called When the Waters Changed

Once upon a time, Khidr, the Teacher of Moses, called upon mankind with a warning. At a certain date, he said, all the water in the world which had not been specially horded, would disappear. It would then be renewed, with different water which, when consumed, would drive men mad.

Only one man listened to the meaning of this advice. He collected water and went to a secure place where he stored it, and waited for the water to change its character.

On the appointed date, the streams stopped running, the wells went dry, and the man who had listened, seeing this happening, went to his retreat and drank his preserved water.

When he saw, from his security, the waterfalls again beginning to flow, this man descended among the other sons of men. He found that they were thinking and talking in an entirely different way from before; yet they seemed to have no memory of having changed, or being warned that it would happen. When he tried to talk to them, he realised that they thought that he was mad, and they showed hostility or compassion, not understanding.

At first he drank none of the new water, but went back to his concealment, to draw on his supplies, every day. Finally, however, he took the decision to drink the new water because he could not bear the loneliness of living, behaving and thinking in a different way from everyone else. He drank the new water, and became like the rest. Then he forgot all about his own store of special water, and his fellows began to look upon him as a madman who had miraculously been restored to sanity.

eventually, i’ll run out of my special store of water, and be forced to drink the water everyone else is drinking. then, presumably, i will give up thinking like a crazy person and start thinking like everyone else.

if that happens, please kill me.

happy new year.

bizarre, blasphemy, hindu, i am a terrorist, important things to remember, jeezis, links, rants, the very big stupid

VALIDATION!

Tuesday, 20081125 przxqgl

if i needed more, here is yet more confirmation that hinduism is correct path for me, regardless of what the “christians” have to say about it: i emailed Rev. Evan Cockshaw, who is the genius behind "There Probably Is" and asked him why he hasn’t posted my "testimony” yet", and guess what?

he ignored me. of course…

it seems pretty typical for “christians” to ignore someone if they’re not immediately willing to accept the dreck they’re swimming in. on the other hand, as i’ve said before, the hindu teachers i have met – even the bogus ones – have taken delight in answering questions that would appear to be blasphemous to the normal “christian” mind. and even the bogus hindu teachers i’ve experienced are more entertaining than about 99% of the “christians” i have experienced.

also Societies worse off ‘when they have God on their side’

Continue reading VALIDATION! →

ganesha the car, shameless self promotion, swastikas

oh, also…

Wednesday, 20081119 przxqgl

i have "parked" Ganesha The Car in Jay Leno’s Garage. of course i’m expecting that he will not post it because of the swastika, but…

flying spaghetti monster, fremont sunday market, links

FSM!

Sunday, 20081116 przxqgl 2 Comments

okay, this morning i got up and went to the fremont sunday market. it didn’t seem like a particularly outrageous day, and i was a little confused when 4:00 came around and everybody started packing up. i knew that during the winter they moved up the closing time from 5:00 to 4:00, but i didn’t realise that they had already done it – last week, of course, when i wasn’t there… but as i was packing up, someone came by and bought a small box of Ten Pyo, someone else bought a box of hakubai, and a guy came all the way from bellingham to buy 10 krishna musk, which added $70 to my total. it turns out that, all told, i made $180 – my best day ever at the FSM!

fremont sunday market, ganesha the car, hybrid elephant, i am a terrorist, incense, pictures, swastikas

incense nazi

Monday, 20080929 przxqgl 2 Comments

Blessed are they who can laugh at themselves, for they shall never cease to be amused.

i bought a swastika at the FSM yesterday, and despite my feelings about nazis’ stealing the swastika away from what it truly means, i find it kind of amusing that i can now make jokes about how i am an “incense nazi”… but, at the same time, i also appreciate that if i am able to make jokes about being an incense nazi, the important part is that it’s not about other people, and it’s obviously a joke, whereas most commentary surrounding nazis and swastikas definitely is not considered to be very funny.

also i made $99 at the FSM yesterday, which is one sixth of the repairs that i had to make on ganesha the car over the weekend. only five more days like that to go…

flying spaghetti monster, fremont sunday market, ganesha the car, hybrid elephant, ocf, philharmonic, players, summer solstice

busy busy busy

Wednesday, 20080618 przxqgl

i went to the fremont sunday market last sunday, and made $97, plus i got three orders for incense and one for a sivalingam necklace, as well, which was enough to finish paying off the button machine that i’ve been paying on for about a month now, so i got a new toy – a one inch button machine, which i have been dreaming about owning for close to 20 years, if not more. unfortunately, my colour printer has decided to quit working, so i’ve got to figure out what to do about that (the most obvious choice is to go to rePC and purchase another one, but there are other options as well).

cinderella rehearsals are in full swing, twice a week. we’ve only got 5 more rehearsals (one is tonight) before the oregon country fair. i plan on going down on wednesday and coming back monday.

the solstice parade and art car blowout are this weekend. i’ve still got to wash my car and it would be nice if i could figure out a way to play CDs in my car, because my ipod died, and i recently got a recording of a guy reciting Sri Ganapati Sahasranaamavalih (which is playing now) which would be really cool to play around Ganesha The Car.

And More, big brother, corruption, drugs, hybrid elephant, i am a terrorist, links, malfunctioning computers, rants, siva, the very big stupid, videos, workshop

umph

Wednesday, 20080604 przxqgl

i’ve got a tenor sax to work on. pictures as soon as they’re taken.

i’ve also got 600MB of And More music to work on, but that’s probably going to happen after i get a good start on the tenor sax, and i’ll have to clear off my keyboard, which is probably going to take an hour or so, since i just cleared off my workbench and most of the stuff has gone into the place where, if i cleared off my keyboard i’d put stuff, so there’s bound to be a certain amount of shuffling stuff, and finding new places to put stuff, and even a certain amount of throwing stuff away (gasp) before any of that happens.

so, what you get until there’s more artwork to look at and listen to is a link dump.

Worshipping Shivling at Home and Energisation of Rudrakhshas need to be reformatted and uploaded to ? ??? ?????

Page2RSS – i get the impression that this is sort of like FeedBurner, except that it works with any web page.

Sign up to be a part of Spencer Tunick’s upcoming art installations. there’s one in vienna, and one in ireland.

The Bongo Project – a project to see if it is possible to communicate with TCP/IP using bongo drums… it is… at 2 bps. remember the 14K modem days? remember 2400 baud modems? this makes even a 2400 bps modem look blindingly fast.

ever hear of Fusarium oxysporum, otherwise known as panama disease? there’s a good chance that you’re going to hear about it eventually, because the CIA has been using it as a way to control (which is to say, eliminate) the coca plants in south america… unfortunately, what they’ve succeeded in doing is wiping out bananas, instead. and this isn’t the first time! the banana that i grew up with, apparently, is banana 2.0, based on the vietnamese cavendish banana, which took over from the “Gros Michel” (“Fat Mike”) banana, a bigger and more creamy version, which was the world’s most popular fruit until the 1950s, when it, too, became extinct due to Fusarium oxysporum infestation. the whole sordid story is over at metafilter.

The Drug Test Consultant dot com – drug tests are a violation of our constitutional right to privacy and protection from self-incrimination (first and fourth ammendments to the U.S. constitution), they are no more than 75% accurate most of the time, and we’re currently in a war against drugs, while at the same time many states (like washington) have legalised medical cannabis. but this company has a franchise to sell people (for $10,000!!!) who are interested in getting started in the business of providing drug testing services to employers. if there was a more apt occasion for me to use the very big stupid category, i don’t know what it would be… 8/

A Kinder, Gentler Torture and America’s Democratic Collapse are reasons why, in spite of the fact that american society is founded on the idea that all men are created equal, it’s definitely not the case any longer… which sort of explains why the drug test consultant dot com folks aren’t so worried about whether or not their products are a violation of our constitutional rights. at the same time, they’re both very good reasons to flee the country while you still can.

articles, flying spaghetti monster, fnord, fremont sunday market, hybrid elephant, links, philharmonic, pictures, players

FSM

Sunday, 20080601 przxqgl

FSM today – i’m still quite amused by the similarity between the FSM and the FSM. as far as i can tell, it was completely coincidental, which of course, makes me thing that the Flying Spaghetti Monster has touched my life with his noodly appendage. i made $76 and paid for a space in two weeks.

i had a lot of people ask me about nag champa today, and, of course, i didn’t bring any this time. it’s actually kind of funny, because someone up the row from me (i suspect it was the tibetan booth) was selling the exact nag champa that i don’t carry, because it’s really poor quality incense – you can, literally, go down to your corner gas station and buy “Satya Sai Baba Nag Champa” in the blue box… let ’em carry it. it just means that i don’t have to carry it! also one lady asked about three roses, so i should probably bring that next time, as well. also, i had several people ask me what my FNORD bumper sticker meant… what does FNORD mean, anyway… i’ve been giving them a marginally straight answer having to do with worshippers of the greek goddess eris, but i’m not sure if that’s entirely correct, and i’m not sure that they really want to hear the real answer anyway.

the people across the street and down two or three booths from me make the most amazing garments… ~~it’s difficult to describe, so i’ll let this picture, and their web site describe it for me~~ it’s a hakama, but it’s built with the functionality of a utilikilt.

cinderella rehearsals start tomorrow – for the fremont philharmonic – they’ve actually been going on for a couple of months for the players. it’s a little more than five weeks until OCF this year, and we don’t have all the music and we’re just starting rehearsals… it’s gonna be another OCF performance: full of sound and fury and signifying nothing. also, stuart says we have to learn The Hustle for the ballroom scene, but a long time ago, when the hustle was a “popular” song, i made a solemn vow never to learn the hustle, and i’m not sure i want to break tradition at this late date. besides… <shudder> it’s the hustle… eeewww!

Yoga leads to possession by devils? – i’m tired of these people who don’t know anything about yoga proclaiming unquestionably that it leads to dire and evil consequences… i wonder how many people hear this guy ranting without the first clue what he’s talking about, and because of the fact that he’s “Father Jeremy Davies, exorcist for the leader of Catholics in the UK” will accept what he says without question… also, i wonder about how many such people there are compared to how many hindus in the world…

Prostitution reform has little effect and Masturbate-a-thon are for the “christians” who are getting ready to berate me because of the previous comment.

Cat turns into woman in Port Harcourt, Nigeria – let me see if i’ve got this straight: three cats were crossing the road, when they were struck by a vehicle. one of them escaped uninjured, one of them was beaten to death, and one of them turned into a woman, who is being held by police at a hospital where they’re treating the injuries that she sustained while in the form of a cat… right?

Japanese man discovers woman living in his closet – what more is to be said? except why do unemployed people in japan get to have cell phones?

Continue reading FSM →

art projects, blasphemy, ganesha the car, i am a terrorist, links, swastikas

ignorant savages!

Friday, 20080425 przxqgl 1 Comment

Ganesha The Car has been kicked out of another parade – only this time it was early enough that i didn’t actually drive to the parade. it still irritates me that people can be so outrageously ignorant.

i sent the following description to the 4th of july parade coordinator in everett

a 1996 mazda protege with a prayer consisting of the first 100 names of the
1008 names of Ganesha, the Hindu God of Removing Obstacles, written in
sanskrit all over the outside, and a Ganesha Yantra on the roof. in sanskrit,
the name of the prayer is “Sri Ganapatisahasranaamavalih” which means
the “1008 names of Ganesha”

photos and a more complete description can be seen at
http://www.hybridelephant.com/ganesha.html

NOTE: PLEASE LOOK AT THE PHOTOS AND DESCRIPTION ON THE WEB SITE CAREFULLY.

the car has two swastikas on the back corner panels, and a swastika on the roof.

IN CONTEXT, THESE SHOULD NOT BE INTERPRETED AS SYMBOLS OF NAZI HATRED!

the swastika and the six-pointed star (commonly called by its jewish
name, “magen dawid” or the “star of david”) in combination, are ancient
symbols of Ganesha, and represent good luck, peace and love. the combination
bears a similar meaning to the “taijitu” or “tao symbol” from china.

the swastika and the six-pointed star have meant good luck, peace and love for
at least 5000 years, and they still mean it to this day, despite the people
that claim the swastika means nazis. IT DOESN’T, THEY’RE WRONG!

it is because of ignorant people less than 90 years ago that the swastika has
come to mean anything other than good luck, peace and love.

this car is, among other things, my way to reclaim the swastika from those
ignorant few who have turned it into a symbol of hatred, and return it to its
original, beneficial meaning. IT WORKS!

i have postcards, the back of which contain an explanation of why the swastika
is not what most american people erroneously think it is, which i am willing
to hand out to people at the parade, but i have also been kicked out of
parades in the past, because of people who refused to understand, and i would
like to avoid that if possible.

this is the response that i got from them:

Thank you for your quick response. I appreciate your detailed
description and respect your views. However, we are unable to fund your
participation in our parade due to the sensitive and controversial
nature of some of the symbols on your car. I am very sorry and wish you
the best of luck in the future.

Sincerely,

Laura Baird – [email protected]

the response came back quickly enough that i get the impression they didn’t even look at the web site, and they certainly didn’t have time to look at the photos… 8/

articles, bizarre, cannabis, corruption, existential negation, hindu, i am a terrorist, jeezis, links, moe, moisture festival, multiple appendages, philharmonic, rants, sex, the very big stupid

moisture musings

Thursday, 20080403 przxqgl 2 Comments

the 5th annual moisture festival is into it’s second week of performances, most of which feature the fremont philharmonic. we’re getting more into playing “other peoples'” music more, which is a good idea, i think. we’re also becoming “the” band for a number of performers like godfrey daniels, which is amusing since apart from the moisture festival, we’ve never performed with him as godfrey daniels. it’s much more mellow and laid-back backstage this year, but i think that part of that is because i am not responsible for the programs this year.

these are some of the links i’ve been perusing in the mean time:

Archbishop of Canterbury attacks Creationism – it’s getting pretty obvious that something is wrong with intelligent design when someone like the archbishop of canturbury comes down on the side of the evolutionists…

Hybrid embryos created in Britain – speaking of “intelligent” design…

Two-headed baby hailed as divine – and here’s how india deals with it. (NOTE: i am discounting the fact that this was published on 1 april by knowing that they don’t have april fools day in india. i may be wrong.)

Faeces hint at first Americans – new evidence further negates any “young earth” intelligent design explanations that i have heard…

Pregnant man tells Oprah: It’s a miracle – now this is something i’ve been reading about for a couple of weeks, and it is one of those rare instances when my wife and i disagree. i think it’s perfectly natural for a transgender man to want to have children, but my wife thinks… i’m not sure what she thinks. it’s “unnatural” or something is my guess. maybe she thinks the kid will grow up confused or something. but my point is that kids already grow up confused with “normal” parents, and both my wife and i are fine examples of that. if a kid has even an outside chance of having a relatively normal life, parents should be able to be parents without regard to what their genitals look like, and if, as in this case, the man is already pregnant they should be able to get medical care without having to go through nine doctors! my son is an excellent example of how someone with screwed up parents can have a much more “normal” life than either of their parents had.

The Hypocrisy Gospel: Get Rich for Jesus? – ever wonder why the religious conservatives adore the prosperity gospel so much?

finally,

Battle over Pot Possession in Alaska Is Back in the Courts – prohibitionists, once again, make some sort of lame excuse to overturn alaska’s legal home use of cannabis. they’re going to lose, of course, because their excuse is lame (“it’s not your father’s marijuana”, reefer-madness propaganda), but it’s got a lot of people upset in both camps.

Continue reading moisture musings →

existential negation, i am a terrorist, islam, rants, the very big stupid, videos

what i’ve been saying all along!

Wednesday, 20080402 przxqgl 2 Comments

articles, big brother, bizarre, blasphemy, brain injury, corruption, jeezis, pictures, siva

link dump

Friday, 20080328 przxqgl

Watch out, you’re being watched – The unsettling thing about living in a surveillance society isn’t just that you’re being watched. It’s that you have no idea.

NSA releases new version of Linux software – let me see if i’ve got this straight: a version of one of the most secure operating systems in existence, being offered by the most paranoid geeks the government can find, right? i’m not sure whether i would trust this or not…

Sex Offender Running for Mayor in Texas – if “christians” can run, why not sex offenders? they may even be the same people.

Rules of Moopsball – the precursor to calvinball, it involves three hundred and twenty-four people, and takes three days.

Lord Arunachala – Lord Siva said: “What cannot be acquired without great pains – the true import of Vedanta (Self-realization) – can be attained by anyone who looks at (this hill) from where it is visible or even mentally thinks of it from afar.”

Does the Human Brain Possess Potential “Super Powers”? – related

Researchers Play Tune Recorded Before Edison – For more than a century, since he captured the spoken words “Mary had a little lamb” on a sheet of tinfoil, Thomas Edison has been considered the father of recorded sound. But researchers say they have unearthed a recording of the human voice, made by a little-known Frenchman, that predates Edison’s invention of the phonograph by nearly two decades.

Lying for Jesus? – Richard Dawkins expounds on the recent fracas with PZ Meyers being expelled from Expelled.

Bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthurnuk – and eleven other reasons why english is my native language.

Gay Black Jewish Klansmen for Tolerance and Understanding

Continue reading link dump →

articles, bizarre, corruption, crazy people, existential negation, links, spiritual, the very big stupid

grump!

Monday, 20080324 przxqgl

okay, i’ve about had it with the “Athiest 1 – Magick 0” posts that i have been seeing around for the last couple of weeks, in regard to the ~~athiest~~ rationalist who challenged a “tantrik magician” to kill him on television. it’s wrong thinking from the start, and here are some of the reasons why.

by the way, with the exception of the first, all of these reasons assume a hypothetical person who is able to kill the rationalist by using “magic” powers without actually touching him in any way. whether such a person really exists or not is a subject for another discussion at some other time.

1: because of the fact that this took place on television, there’s a good chance that the station that broadcast it was legally liable if anybody died on their set, regardless of how they died. the probability is extremely high that both the rationalist and the “tantrik magician” knew this, even before accepting an appearance on the show. this was not a challenge, it was an entertainment event, and it was known ahead of time, exactly what the outcome would be.

2: the (hypothetical) person who actually has the power to kill the rationalist isn’t the person who is going to be widely known as a “tantrik magician”. such a person avoids fame, would not actively seek out the spotlight, and, when in the spotlight, would demonstrate that anyone could do the things that they do, and/or to give thanks to God (or whatever you may call it) for the abilities that are being ascribed to them. however, especially if they are widely known, such a person would also be very careful about the words that are used to describe them. any words – such as “tantrik magician” – that imply that their powers are in some way “super natural” will be avoided at all costs, and any violation of this would be swiftly and sternly dealt with.

in fact, just from knowing this much, i can tell you with absolute certainty that the “tantrik magician” failed to kill the rationalist, knowing no further information. by the way, if you haven’t already read the article, the “tantrik magician” – big suprise – failed to kill the rationalist.

3: the rationalist, in accepting a challenge from a “tantrik magician”, knew from the start that he would fail, so this wasn’t really a “challenge” at all. such people don’t know a real saint when they see one, because of their mindset that tells them that such people don’t exist. a real saint could perform any miracle, with as much documentation anybody could ask for, and such a person would find some way to prove that they didn’t actually do it.

4: the (hypothetical) person who actually has the power to kill the rationalist will not respond to challenges to “prove” their powers. such a person would consider the whole subject of responding to a challenge superficial, pointless, and actually deterimental to the actual reason why are on earth.

5: perhaps the most important point of all is that the (hypothetical) person who actually has the power to kill the rationalist will be known as a person of peace, and would never kill another conscious being for capricious reasons or to prove a point. this, if no other reason, is why all challenges like this will be met with silence from the people who could actually do it.

Continue reading grump! →

hybrid elephant, links, moe, pe(s)ts, pictures, PRFM, spiritual

woof

Sunday, 20080323 przxqgl

Happy Easter, Purim, Narouz, Eid Milad an Nabi, Small Holi and Magha Puja!

also, happy day-after-the-Punk Rock Flea Market. it was a good one. i made $85, and i actually sold a Ganesha murti, which was the goal that i set for determining whether or not to attend the next one. i still have to unload the car, but i’m still sitting around in my bathrobe at 12:00 in the afternoon, so i don’t think it’s gonna happen soon.

one of moe‘s friends spent the night last night, because it was easier than driving an extra 2 hours from her place to get to a herding trial that both she and moe were going to yesterday and today. unfortunately, that meant that her two herding dogs also spent the night, and what with our own herding dog, and the herding dog that belongs to her that moe is taking care of because she’s pregnant (lucy), that meant about a hundred dogs, most of whom spent their time trying to herd the cats, trying to stare down the cats, and/or barking with that sharp, high-pitched, irritatingly insistant bark that herding dogs have. fortunately they also had the idea of getting take-out from Naan N’ Curry – renton’s other outstanding indian restaurant (the other one being Pabla’s), so after stuffing myself with lamb jalfrazi and chicken pakoras, i retreated to the bedroom and read the sacred magic of abramelin the mage while moe did her doggie thing in the living room. moe and her friend got up at some ungodly hour this morning and went to the 2nd day of their herding trial, and, hopefully, i won’t have to deal with that many dogs again until lucy has her puppies in about a month.

links, mahasivaratri, siva

Mahasivaratri!

Wednesday, 20080305 przxqgl

Mahasivaratri is March 5 or March 6, 2008 – Happy Mahasivaratri everyone!

‘Arise, awake!’ is Shivaratri’s message.
By Sri Sri Ravishankar

Shivaratri is the day of Lord Shiva. Shiva is the lord of meditation and therefore the lord of awakening. Shiva Tatva means to be awakened. Shivaratri is thus an occasion to awaken one’s self from all sorts of slumber.

The night of the rebel God Shivaratri is not a night to be slept over. One should try and be up through the night. It signifies being aware of everything you have and being grateful about it. Be grateful for the happiness which leads to growth, and also for sadness which gives a depth to life. This is the right way of observing Shivaratri.

For the pious, the following method of Shiva worship is advisable – sit down in lotus posture, do some Pranayam to stabilize your breath, then indulge in Dhyana, followed by chanting of “Om Namah Shivay”. It is the greatest mantra and the devout should drown himself in its Kirtan.

Shivaratri worship leads to fulfillment of a devotee’s wishes. There are certain days and time frames in a year that enhance one’s mental and spiritual faculties. In such times, whatever one wishes, materializes. Shivaratri is one such day. All this is very scientific.

Going to temples on this day is OK but you should remember that Shiva is everywhere. The meaning of Kailasa is celebration. So where there is happiness and celebration, Shiva is present. Whether in Sanyasa or Sansara, you can’t escape Shiva. Feeling his presence all the time is the essence of Shivaratri. That is the real Sanyasa.

No worship is complete without offering something to the deity. Shiva is a very simple lord, he is innocent – bholanath. One just needs to offer bel-patra to him. But in this simplicity is a deep message. Bel-patra offerings signify the surrender of all three aspects of one’s nature – Tamas, Rajas and Sattva. You have to surrender the positives and negatives of your life to Shiva and become carefree! The greatest offering is your self.

To offer one’s self is the key to happiness in life. Afterall, why do you get sad? It is mainly because you are not able to achieve something in life. At such times you should surrender everything to the all knowing God. The greatest power is in surrender to the divine. It’s like a drop owning the ocean. If a drop remains separate, it will perish. But when it becomes the ocean, it is eternal!

SHIV WORSHIP
Mahashivratri

flying spaghetti monster, fremont sunday market, hybrid elephant

fremont sunday market

Monday, 20080303 przxqgl

i took Hybrid Elephant to Fremont Sunday Market yesterday, for the first time since january of last year, when, if memory serves me correctly (which it doesn’t with a regularity that i find extremely alarming), i made on the order of $35 for a 9½ hour shift when i went a year ago. yesterday was substantially better – i made $110 – and good enough that i’m seriously thinking about going back a lot sooner than a year from now. i had at least 5 people ask me if i was going to be back next week (i wasn’t sure, but i might be) and one lady that wandered under my canopy, looked around, looked at me, and said "The incense guy!" and ran off, only to come back about 2 minutes later and spend around $40.

so, yeah… i think i’ll probably be back fairly soon. i actually made enough money to buy a membership in the fremont sunday market, which means that i’ll get an assigned booth space that will be reserved for me every week, whether i’m there or not. i’m going to have to get some sandbags for the canopy legs, however, because i spent most of the day trying to prevent the canopy from flying away whenever the wind blew in the right direction.

however, nobody showed up who read about it here (except maybe john and kim, who didn’t say that they read about it here). i know that there are several people in the seattle area who read this blog regularly, but at the same time, because of the fact that nobody said that they had read about me going to the FSM on internet, that meant that i didn’t have to figure out what to do if they had: i was thinking about 20% off your incense purchase, or something like that. oh well…

i just realised that the Fremont Sunday Market has the same abbreviation as the Flying Spaghetti Monster… and knowing john and candace as i do, they probably meant it that way… 8) it makes me wonder how well pirate fish, or flying spaghetti monster fish for your car would sell at the FSM… and nobody else had them… 8) and it would be a really good thing to include along with the “christian” booth and the scientology booth… 8D

oh, also if you want a free TrafficGauge, all you have to do is answer a few questions for the Puget Sound Congestion Information Survey at the university of washington. i’ve already been making very good use of mine… 8)

cannabis, corruption, i am a terrorist, imaginary pooperty, links, spiritual, the very big stupid, tina chopp, torture

Black Light Trap

Friday, 20080215 przxqgl 1 Comment

one step closer to having my ipod be able to play .FLAC and .OGG files, as well as .MP3s.

is it just me, or is this country getting more and more dysfunctional on a daily basis?

Feds admit waterboarding illegal

John McCain Sells His Soul: Backs Off on Torture Ban

U.S. Soldiers Kill Unarmed Iraqis and Afghanis

Bush Won’t Let Facts Stand in the Way of Regime Change in Iran

Surveillance Editorial Roundup

Detention camps at undisclosed locations in the US? Rule by Fear or Rule by Law?

but there are some good things… precious few of them, but here are some that are worth mentioning:

The Air Car -Coming Your Way

Supporting Research into the Therapeutic Role of Marijuana

Legal herb for Rastas?

ACLU, Rick Steves launch marijuana campaign – i played music for a party given by rick steves last year… 8)

articles, bizarre, blasphemy, brain injury, cannabis, corruption, depression, fnord, i am a terrorist, jeezis, links, the very big stupid, torture

happy valentines day lupercalia

Thursday, 20080214 przxqgl 2 Comments

Christian Right’s Emerging Deadly Worldview: Kill Muslims to Purify the Earth – eminentize the eschaton! more jeezis horseshit.

Latest Anti-Pot Quack Science: ‘Marijuana Makes Your Teeth Fall Out’ – more anti-cannabis horseshit

Scientists breed world’s first mentally ill mouse – schizophrenic mice… just what the world needs… 8/

Continue reading happy ~~valentines day~~ lupercalia →

articles, cannabis, i am a terrorist, links, tina chopp

hope?

Tuesday, 20080212 przxqgl

Making Pot Legal: We Can Do It — Here’s How

Continue reading hope? →

articles, bizarre, drugs, i am a terrorist, links, rants, tina chopp, videos

weird

Saturday, 20080209 przxqgl

Few From Obama’s Youth Remember His Drug Use – a couple of things strike me about this article. first, my high school girlfriend went to occidental starting in 1979. i wonder if she knew barry obama. the other thing that strikes me is that it really wasn’t that long ago that bill clinton came under intense scrutiny over whether or not the fact that he “didn’t inhale” made him enough of a druggie to impeach him. it’s astounding enough that a black man has a possibility of becoming president, but a black man who lets it be publically known that he did inhale. and yet cannabis is still illegal. i really wonder about people… 8/

Continue reading weird →

articles, big brother, bizarre, corruption, hindu, i am a terrorist, islam, links, rants, the very big stupid, torture

The Chrome Plated Megaphone of Destiny

Thursday, 20080207 przxqgl

Speakers at Academy Said to Make False Claims – lemme see if i got this straight: three born muslim, converted to “christianity” middle-eastern men with “western” citizenship, who say that they have been involved with terrorist acts in the past, but are now “reformed”, get to travel around the country, including the US Air Force Academy, talking about their experiences… <yeah, that’s likely… 8/ >

If Mukasey Won’t Investigate Federal Crimes, He Should Resign – related links here, here and here.

Wikipedia ruled by ‘Lord of the Universe’ – hindus no longer have to worry about mahesh prasad varma so much, but there are still charlatans out there, and they own more than you think.

Continue reading The Chrome Plated Megaphone of Destiny →

cannabis, i am a terrorist, links, tina chopp

The Holy Vegetable

Monday, 20080204 przxqgl

Willie Nelson gives up smoking pot?

NOT!

bizarre, flying spaghetti monster, fnord, videos

The Flying Spaghetti Monster has been sighted alive

Monday, 20080204 przxqgl

jeezis hasn’t.

too bad for the creationists…

bizarre, chaos at work, fnord, hybrid elephant, printing stuff, rants

another victory against wage slavery!

Sunday, 20080203 przxqgl

well, i’m back from troy’s with 500 business cards for NBAC, and now i know all the juicy details about why troy quit MMP. apparently there have been substantial changes happening that i didn’t know about. bart is now “general manager”, which means that instead of being back in the press room, being useful, he’s now up front, surfing the net and goofing off. bart says that he’s going to “do something” about the fact that numerous jobs have been going on the press without being spell checked and okayed by the customer (i actually used to have a proof stamp, that had to be initialled by the customer before i would put jobs on the “to-be-printed” pile – that stamp disappeared shortly after my injury [i suspect carl was behind it], and when i got out of the hospital, nobody knew where it was). troy was tired of taking flak for it, and complained to bart, but bart was apparently too busy surfing the net and goofing off to do anything about it once he left the press room. finally, one of the new (sales)girls came back and read troy the riot act for printing a job that hadn’t been proofread, and he told her to eat shit and die. when mike told troy to apologise to her, troy told mike to eat shit and die, and walked out.

good for him. it wasn’t enough that he was working from 3:00 am because of where he lives, and it wasn’t enough that he was only making $17 an hour when the industry standard for a press operator with his experience is more like $30 an hour, he shouldn’t have to put up with taking the blame for doing stuff that wasn’t his fault to begin with. of course this means that now bart will either be forced back into the press room, or he will have to hire a new, presumably competent press operator who is willing to work for $17 an hour.

also, apparently, mike is under the impression that quark xpress has been purchased by microsoft. i don’t know where he got that idea from, but it was probably from sharon, who is doing my job now, and who hates quark, despite the fact that it is consistently more reliable than adobe.

articles, corruption, i am a terrorist, islam, links

8/

Saturday, 20080202 przxqgl

Guantánamo Decision Rebuffs Government

Welcome to America … You’re Under Arrest

Continue reading 8/ →

articles, cannabis, links, tina chopp

good news?

Wednesday, 20080130 przxqgl

Medical Marijuana Vending Machines Take Root in LA: Turn On, Tune In, Enter Your Pin Number

Continue reading good news? →

as, bizarre, brain injury, corruption, depression, fnord, ptsd

great… 8b

Saturday, 20080126 przxqgl 2 Comments

i just received a letter from DSHS/DVR – the Department of Social and Health Services, Division of Vocational Rehabilitation. they are in receipt of my request for vocational services (it’s about time! i applied almost 5 years ago, and this is the first i’ve heard from them except for a notice telling me that i was on the waiting list.) and have scheduled an appointment for me on "Monday, 2/12/2008 at 10:00 am."

i wonder if this is a test, to discover whether or not i am aware of the fact that neither the 12th of february, nor the 2nd of december, if you’re being european, come on a monday this year… strangely enough, they’re both tuesdays…

if it is a test, i wonder how i should respond…

i am a terrorist, pictures, swastikas

causing trouble again?

Friday, 20080118 przxqgl

i bought two of ’em…

articles, blasphemy, evolution, pastafarianism

whale noodles

Saturday, 20071222 przxqgl

Whale ‘missing link’ discovered

Polk Needled, Noodled In Evolution Flap

Continue reading whale noodles →

blasphemy, ganesha the car, hindu, jeezis, swastikas

EMINENTISE THE ESCHATON!

Thursday, 20071108 przxqgl 2 Comments

the most recent response i got from the national 2008 art car calendar lady said this:

Ganesha has 1008 names? WOW!

Jesus has a lot, but not that many.

if i had known she was a “christian” and was going to make jeezis a part of the conversation, i wouldn’t have even bothered submitting my car in the first place… 8/

grumph… 8/

bssb, dreams, ganesha the car, philharmonic, swastikas

random bits of this and that

Wednesday, 20071107 przxqgl

last night was the Sousa Bash, in honour of John Phillip Sousa‘s 153rd birthday, and, coincidentally, it was also Antoine-Joseph Sax‘s 193rd birthday. it went well, in spite of the fact that the west seattle bridge was closed for 3 hours, immediately prior to our concert, which made everybody, including a significant portion of the band, late. it was held at Kenyon Hall (formerly “Hokum” Hall), which, despite the fact that i actually lived in west seattle for a year or so, and have driven past it so many times i have lost count, i have never heard of it. it’s a good thing i know were it is now, however, as we apparently have the hall scheduled for the next 2 tuesdays in a row for recording.

it also makes me interested in talking to lou (the proprietor) about scheduling the fremont philharmonic there at some point…

<weird dream>
i was in this hotel in a big city somewhere, lots of glass, modern architecture, doing something, when these three guys with automatic weapons came in and started screaming and spraying bullets everywhere. fortunately i was off to the side, so i wasn’t a direct target, but also the shots that i did take were, apparently, fairly low velocity, and they were buckshot about the size of a dust-speck, so they stung, but they didn’t actually injure me – it was frightening, none the less, and everybody was cringing and trying to convince the guys to let them go. somehow i managed to find my way to an elaborate laundry chute which lead to the basement, but the guys were not letting anyone escape that way – despite the fact that there were three or more people that jumped down the chute that i saw. when i was getting ready to jump, one of the guys waved a gun in my direction and told me to stay put, so i didn’t jump, but i continued to work my way towards the exit, and i eventually managed to escape into the parking garage. at this point, i realised that moe had been there as well, but instead of going back for her, or notifying the police or something like that, i decided to get out of town by the most direct means possible and not tell anybody about the fact that this hotel was being held up, or that my wife was in danger. towards the end of the dream, when i was going out of town, it vaguely resembled 5th ave., in downtown seattle, except the buildings were all different, and if it was 5th ave. then the hotel that i was coming from would have been approximately where the westlake mall is, except that it was backwards, and a hotel instead of a mall.
</weird dream>

i also got another email from the 2008 art car calendar people, indicating some vague interest in knowing more about the swastika, and the meaning of my car, which, on the surface, sounds like i may have made an impression on them. i’m not holding my breath, however, because one of the questions they asked was answered in plain, clear language, in the blurb i sent them about the car originally, which makes me wonder if they even bothered to read the blurb in the first place, or they just had a knee-jerk reaction to the swastika.

bizarre, corruption, ganesha the car, rants, swastikas, the very big stupid

i have a swastika on my art car… get used to it!

Tuesday, 20071106 przxqgl 3 Comments

so i submitted pictures of my art car to the national 2008 Art Car Calendar.

this was the response they sent me:

Hi,

You have a beautiful car, but I do have a problem with the swatstika on top.

Yes, I know that I am ignorant and narrow minded, but the image is embedded in my brain as an evil symbol of hate.

Next year if you would allow me to cover it up or replace it with another symbol, then I would feel more comfortable to have it in the calendar.

I truly apologize if I have offended you in any way, but that is my opinion and I publish the calendar.

Thank you for submitting your car for the calendar.

so this was the response i sent back:

if people like you continue to be in positions where they can determine what other people see, then the swastika will never regain that which it had for everyone, for literally thousands of years before anybody ever heard of the nazis. if that happens, it will be a sad day for humanity.

one of the reasons why i put a swastika on my car is to show people that it had another, entirely opposite meaning from the one people like you have put upon it in the past 85 years.

you may not cover or alter the artwork on my car. to do so would be a misrepresentation of what i meant for my art car, and i will not permit you to do so.

i am offended, but i will get over it. however, you should examine your prejudices again in a year or so and see if they haven’t changed, because if they haven’t, then it is possible that you have offended The Remover of Obstacles, and i can’t speak for Him.

i am a terrorist, important things to remember, islam, links

it’s here

Friday, 20071012 przxqgl

the letter i mentioned yesterday has been released. it’s 29 pages and its official web site is here:

A Common Word

articles, corruption, hindu, links, pictures, rants, swastikas, the very big stupid

more unwarranted swastika paranoia… 8/

Friday, 20070928 przxqgl

U.S. Navy to spend money on masking swastika snafu
September 27, 2007

A U.S. Naval base that appears in the shape of a swastika when seen from above will receive a US$600,000 make-over after sparking concerns from Jewish groups.

“It doesn’t make any sense that a building on government property would be built in the shape of one of the most hated symbols in human history,” Morris Casuto, the Anti-Defamation League’s Regional Director in San Diego, told CNN.

Barracks at the Naval Amphibious Base in Coronado, Calif. were built as four L-shaped buildings, four decades ago.

But it wasn’t until online satellite imaging tools such as Google Earth made pictures from above readily accessible that the shape sparked controversy.

Morris Casuto, Jewish Anti-Defamation League’s Regional Director in San Diego

The swastika, a symbol forever tied to Nazi Germany, is visible to anyone with access to the Internet.

The Navy has said the barracks, used by the Seabees, were constructed in the late 1960s and were not intended to resemble the Nazi symbol.

Casuto readily admits that it was likely an oversight when the complex was built, but says that doesn’t make it right.

After nine months of conversation with the ADL, the Navy has decided to spend US$600,000 on landscaping and architectural changes that would obscure the swastika shape from the air.

“The Navy came to realize that this is a symbol that thousands of people died to defeat and it was inappropriate to have that shape on a military base,” Casuto told Reuters on Wednesday.

Richard Rider, a member of the San Diego Tax Fighters, said spending money on cosmetic changes to military bases is wasteful.

“Should we spend $600,000 on landscaping and cosmetic changes or should we buy three heavily armored humvees for our forces in Iraq?” he told ABC. “Don’t go to the American taxpayer and say we’d rather spend your money on flowerpots and sidewalks than fighting vehicles for our men.”

But the whole debate has flown over the head of John Mock, the architect who designed the buildings, who told CNN last year there was no malicious intent.

“It’s four L-shaped buildings — looking from the ground, the air — it still is,” he said.

The ADL is fighting the appearance of another immense swastika, this one carved into a cornfield in rural New Jersey.

“At a time when Jews around the world and in New Jersey are celebrating the High Holidays, we are confronted with this ugly symbol of hatred against Jews,” said Etzion Neuer, ADL New Jersey Regional Director.

According to the ADL, it’s the third time a swastika has been cut into a New Jersey county cornfield.

from the book “Gentle Swastika – Reclaiming The Innocence” by ManWoman:

Webster’s New American Dictionary (1959) gives this definition for Swastika: “An ancient Jewish religious symbol…”

From the second century BC to the end of the first century AD, a secret, monastic brotherhood of Jews called the Essenes lived in Palestine. Living communally and shunning public life, this hermetic group stressed purity and profound spiritual seeking. The swastika to them was a sacred sign representing the Wheel of Eternal Life. It symbolized the inner movement of the soul which leads through death to resurrection.

Jesus of Nazareth is said to have been trained in his mystical path by the Essene brotherhood, who are probably the authors of the Dead Sea Scrolls…

There are associations with the swastika in Hebrew Qabalah, a Jewish mystical teaching. “Aleph” (א) is composed of two “Yodin” (י) and a cross-bar, which is a “Vau” (ו). It represents the World Above separated from the World Below by the Vital Force…

Aleph is symbolic of the primal motion of the Great Breath, the action of the creative center. This may be the source of the swastika as a Jewish religious sign. Some Qabalistic diagrams of the Sepiroth Wheel show a ten-legged swastika-like symbol portraying the manifestation of Primordial or Heavenly Man (Sephiroth) from the Infinite (En Soph)…

The Jewish Defense Leage and the B’Nai Brith Society have been trying to stamp out swastikas, even ones in Chinese shops…

The Jews of the world need to know that there is a gentle swastika, and that they are connected to it by their deepest religious philosophies. Only time can heal the wounds left by Hitler, time and the truth — and that is my purpose in writing this book. Have I chosen an impossible task? I don’t think so.

What do I want from Jews? I want them to realize that the swastika has a life separate and distinct from the nazis.

articles, corruption, hindu, links, pictures, rants, swastikas, the very big stupid

this is so fucking irrational… 8/

Thursday, 20070927 przxqgl

Swastika building embarrasses US Navy
September 28, 2007

The US Navy will spend thousands to camouflage a California barracks resembling a Nazi swastika after the embarrassing shape was revealed on the internet.

Navy officials said they became aware the barracks looked like a swastika from the air shortly after its 1967 groundbreaking — and had decided not to do anything.

According to The New York Times the resemblance went unnoticed by the public for decades until it was spotted in aerial views on the internet.

The Navy now plans to spend $682,000 on “camouflage” landscaping and rooftop adjustments to hide any aerial view of the San Diego barracks, known as Naval Base Coronado.

“You have to realise back in the 1960s we did not have the internet,” base spokeswoman Angelic Dolan said. “We don’t want to offend anyone, and we don’t want to be associated with the symbol.”

Ms Dolan said when officials first noticed the swastika look there was “no reason to redo the buildings because they were in use”.

But an anti-bigotry group based in San Diego is not impressed.

Regional director of the Anti-Defamation League, Morris Casuto, said: “We told the Navy this was an incredibly inappropriate shape for a structure on a military installation.”

He said his group “never ascribed evil intent to the structure’s design” and praised the Navy for recognising the problem and “doing the right thing”.

The naval spokeswoman said the barracks were in a no-fly zone that was off limits to commercial airlines, so most people would not see the offending building from the air.

Navy to mask Coronado’s swastika-shaped barracks
Ground level isn’t a problem but aerial views of the Coronado site spark outrage.
September 26, 2007
By Tony Perry

CORONADO, Calif., — The U.S. Navy has decided to spend as much as $600,000 for landscaping and architectural modifications to obscure the fact that one its building complexes looks like a swastika from the air.

The four L-shaped buildings, constructed in the late 1960s, are part of the amphibious base at Coronado and serve as barracks for Seabees.

From the ground and from inside nearby buildings, the controversial shape cannot be seen. Nor are there any civilian or military landing patterns that provide such a view to airline passengers.

But once people began looking at satellite images from Google Earth, they started commenting about on blogs and websites about how much the buildings resembled the symbol used by the Nazis.

When contacted by a Missouri-based radio talk-show host last year, Navy officials gave no indication they would make changes.

But early this year, the issue was quietly taken up by Morris Casuto, the Anti-Defamation League’s regional director in San Diego, and U.S. Rep. Susan Davis (D-San Diego).

As a result, in the fiscal year that begins Oct. 1, the Navy has budgeted up to $600,000 for changes in walkways, “camouflage” landscaping and rooftop photovoltaic cells.

The goal is to mask the shape. “We don’t want to be associated with something as symbolic and hateful as a swastika,” said Scott Sutherland, deputy public affairs officer for Navy Region Southwest, the command that is responsible for maintaining buildings on local bases.

The collection of L-shaped buildings is at the corner of Tulagi and Bougainville roads, named after World War II battles.

Navy officials say the shape of the buildings, designed by local architect John Mock, was not noted until after the groundbreaking in 1967 — and since it was not visible from the ground, a decision was made not to make any changes.

It is unclear who first noticed the shape on Google Earth. But one of the first and loudest advocates demanding a change was Dave vonKleist, host of a Missouri-based radio-talk show, The Power Hour, and a website, www.thepowerhour.com.

In spring 2006, he began writing military officials, including then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, calling for action.

That August, he received a response from officials in Coronado, who made no promise to take action and said, “The Navy intends to continue the use of the buildings as long as they remain adequate for the needs of the service.”

In December, the now-defunct San Diego Jewish Times wrote about the buildings and the controversy.

Soon Casuto and Davis got involved.

Casuto began an on-and-off dialogue with the chief of staff to Rear Adm. Len Hering, commander of Region Southwest. He said that several members of the Jewish community had complained to him.

“I don’t ascribe any intentionally evil motives to this,” Casuto said, referring to the design. “It just happened. The Navy has been very good about recognizing the problem. The issue is over.”

Davis, who is Jewish, is also pleased with the Navy’s decision.

During a discussion with military officials on other issues, Davis had mentioned the Coronado buildings and suggested that rooftop photovoltaic arrays might help change the overhead look. The base gets 3% of its power from solar energy and has been looking to increase that percentage.

Reached in Versailles, Mo., vonKleist, the talk-show host, said he was ecstatic.

“I’m concerned about symbolism,” he said. “This is not the type of message America needs to be sending to the world.”

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what about hindu anti-defamation? the swastika is a sacred symbol to hindus, and by “camouflaging” it, they are doing a disservice to people (like me) who are trying to reclaim the swastika from people who think that it only means nazi.

let me make it very clear: the swastika has been around for thousands of years and it has only been within the last 100 years that it has meant anything other than good luck, peace and love! even the jews used the swastika as a sacred symbol: the Universal Jewish Encyclopedia says “The swastika appears on various articles excavated in Palestine, on ancient synagogues in Galilee and Syria, and on the Jewish catacombs at the Villa Torlonia in Rome.” there are swastikas that decorate the floor of ancient synagogues in tel hum (capernaum). from the Universal Jewish Encyclopedia, again: “In modern times, anti-Semites have given the swastika a baleful significance by adopting it as their symbol; their claim that it is of “Aryan” origin is absurd.” the fact that the US navy is “camouflaging” their swastika-shaped building is an indication that they are buying into the common myth that it means something else.

i understand that it is a common myth, but that doesn’t make it any more right for our government to “disguise” a building that has been in existance since the 1960s, and it is offensive to me that they would disguise it solely because somebody found a satellite photo of it on internet.

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Genesis 35.14